Abstract:

We tend to think of mountain climbing as either a form of religious faith or recreation. That one (mountain worship) embodies tradition, piety, and cultural identity, while the other (mountaineering) belongs to modernity, secularism, and transnationalism. Yet this grouping rests on a shaky foundation of binaries—traditional/modern, religion/sport, sacred/secular—that oversimplify our relationship to the mountains and broader natural world. In fact, modern mountaineering was central to new ways of thinking about the self, the natural world, and spirituality that intersected these categories. Taking the case of Japan, this talk explores the formation of these ideas at the turn of the twentieth century—an era when foreign residents, especially British, began climbing mountains around the world, including Japan. A few of them eventually partnered with an ambitious cohort of Japanese mountaineers, the latter of whom pioneered their own routes, established the Japanese Alpine Club (1905), and launched a triannual journal (Sangaku) that published ruminations on the meaning and value of the sport. While commonly thought of as a purely secular endeavor, this talk sketches out that formative period of mountaineering through the lens of critical religious studies, while exploring a larger question: why do we continue to seek out mountains and other natural settings in our own lives?

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