Routes, Landscape and Heritage Seminar
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
(ZRC SAZU), Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 31rd 2016
Organisers: Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, ZRC SAZU (Slovenia) and Yamaguchi
Prefectural University (Japan)
Organisation committee: Nataša Gregorič Bon (ZRC SAZU) and Tinka Delakorda Kawashima(Yamaguchi Prefectural University)
People’s life-course can be seen to run along winding routes, unfolding through myriad stories, at thesame time generating landscapes. Landscapes are thus active processes related to movements andnon-movements to/from/in/through them. They are both, ‘medium for’ and ‘background of’ people’s
dwelling as well as their agency. Landscapes are laden with stories about past lives, present
experiences and future becoming. People not only use landscapes, they also talk about — and fashion— them with memories in such a way that these landscapes fashion people too. Various modes ofmovements as well as non-movements leave material traces, which due to present-day legal local andglobal discourses are often integrated as part of heritage making. This seminar seeks to explore theinterrelation between routes, landscapes and heritage from a variety of perspectives. It aims toaddress various modes of peoples’ movements, such as walking, migrating, journeying, or going on apilgrimage, critically probing the ways in which these movements engender landscape and produce
heritage. The focus of this seminar will fall on the production of heritage, its meaning, effects onparticular landscapes and related affects, and, by extension, it also aims to address the impact ofheritagisation and tourist industry on the public image of pilgrimage, routes, sacred places, andlandscape.

PROGRAMME
Seminar venue: Geographical Museum, ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, 1000 Ljubljana
stWednesday, 31 August 2016
9.00 - 9.15
Nataša Gregorič Bon (ZRC SAZU), Tinka Delakorda Kawashima (Yamaguchi Prefectural University)
Welcome and Opening Remarks
9.15-10.15
Session 1: Movement, Landscape and Heritage
John Eade (University of Roehampton/University of Toronto)
Lecture: Moving, Crossing and Dwelling in the Context of Place Pilgrimage
10.15 – 10.30
Coffee break
10.30 – 12.00
Nataša Rogelja (ZRC SAZU) and Špela Ledinek Lozej (ZRC SAZU, University of Udine)
Walks through the Multi-layered Landscape of Šavrinka's Istria: Eggs, Books, Backpacks and Stony
Paths
Mario Katić (University of Zadar)
Pilgrimage and Heritage of Bosnian Croats
Martina Bofulin (ZRC SAZU)
Building Memorials for a Friend or a Foe? Heritage-making, Migration and Tourism amid China –Japan Conflict12.00 – 13.30
Lunch
13.30 – 14.30
Session 2: Religion, Tourism and Heritage
Ian Reader (University of Manchester)Lecture: Religion, Tourism and the Emotional Landscape of Heritage in a Secular(ising) Age: Placing
Japan in a Global Context
14.30 – 14.45
Coffee break
14.45 – 16.15
Eriko Kawanishi (Osaka Butsuryo University)
Creating and Contesting the ‘Sacred’ Site: In the Case of the White Spring in Glastonbury, England
Maja Veselič (University of Ljubljana)
Local Disaster Heritage, National Resilience Lessons: Tohoku Disaster Tours at the Intersection ofMemorialization, Pedagogy and Tourism
Tinka Delakorda Kawashima (Yamaguchi Prefectural University)
From Hidden Christians to Sacred Landscape: Reframing Christian Heritage in Japan
19.00
Dinner

ABSTRACTS
LecturesMoving, Crossing and Dwelling in the context of Place Pilgrimage
John Eade (University of Roehampton/ University of Toronto)
Pilgrimage vividly demonstrates the ways in which people move through and cross both space andtime. The process of dwelling must also be taken into consideration since people often establish
homely places at what many visitors consider to be ‘sacred places’ and may be encouraged by
officials, shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs to ‘feel at home’ there. Similar processes ofdomestication can occur during people’s travels to and from these places.
Since the early 1990s research on ‘place pilgrimage’ has been growing rapidly around theworld. The diversity of empirical studies has been accompanied by lively theoretical debates. With
regard to landscape and heritage, recent explorations have encouraged a focus on ‘lived religion’,bodily practices and emotional engagement with other people, places and material objects rather
than traditional preoccupations with text and discourse.
The processes of moving, crossing and dwelling have been productively analysed in theAnglophone academic worlds through hydraulic models of flow and spatial metaphors of landscape.
However, it is clear that other models are needed to understand the role played by power inconstraining mobility and hardening boundaries. Furthermore, the influence of binary categorisation
has failed to do justice to the complexity of the processes involved. Attempts to establish clear
boundaries around the concept of pilgrim and pilgrimage, for example, fail to grapple with theambiguities, messiness and relationships between such key categories as pilgrim, tourist, sacred andsecular, culture and nature.
A non-reductive multi-scalar approach is needed, therefore, whether this refers tolandscapes, bodily movement through those landscapes or the economic and political processes
which play a vital role in the development of pilgrimage. Such an approach would lead to a more
holistic, relational and dynamic (rather than totalising) framework to understand the complexity anddiversity of what we have chosen to group under the category of pilgrimage.
Religion, Tourism and the Emotional Landscape of Heritage in a Secular(ising) Age: Placing Japan ina Global Context
Ian Reader (University of Manchester)
On August 8th 2016 the four prefectural governors of Shikoku submitted an application to theCultural Affairs Agency of the Japanese government, asking it to nominate the Shikoku pilgrimage(Shikoku henro) as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This followed a previous unsuccessful application in2008. The applications and the publicity campaigns used to promote the Shikoku pilgrimage inmodern times (both by the pilgrimage temples and tourist and secular authorities) have relied heavily
on images of tradition and nostalgia, and the affirmation of what I previously (Reader 2005) describedas the 'emotional landscape' pilgrimage. The factors behind these applications relate directly to wider
questions in the study of pilgrimage, tourism, landscape and heritage. They also raise questions about
how we might think about the idea of religion and religious practices in a modern secular(ising) agesomething particularly important in Japan, where both legal and constitutional restrictions and awidespread awareness (among religious institutions) that religious practices and institutions arefacing a period of decline.
The Shikoku case is but one of a number of examples in which religious institutions andpractices have become increasingly involved in tourism and heritage (and 'heritage-isation') practices
in recent years. I will discuss these developing links by drawing on several other Japanese examples,
as well as by paying attention to some of the images created (e.g., in media and publicity
representations of pilgrimage sites and their settings), that contribute to the 'emotional landscape' ofpilgrimage and intensify its heritage and tourism-related dimensions. I will expand this discussion
beyond Japan to draw also on examples from elsewhere- e.g., Santiago de Compostela and otherexamples in Europe, and various similar developments in India - to examine further the moderninterrelationship of pilgrimage, religion, tourism and heritage in global contexts. In so doing I will end
with some comments about what this implies for the ways we conceptualise religion in a modern
world in which secularising forces appear to be increasingly influential in the contemporary dynamicsof pilgrimage.

Paper presentations
Walks through the Multi-layered Landscape of Šavrinka's Istria: Eggs, Books, Backpacks and Stony
Paths
Nataša Rogelja (ZRC SAZU) and Špela Ledinek Lozej (ZRC SAZU, University of Udine)
Istria, a peninsula in the Adriatic, has always been a place through which many roads have passed andwhere boundaries have constantly changed. This paper takes up a concrete route and discusses itfrom three different angles: as a trade route connecting rural Istria with Trieste and used in the 20thcentury by women traders called Šavrinkas; as Šavrinkas’ routes as transposed into a work ofliterature; and as an ethnographic route, specifically the track that we ourselves traversed anddocumented. For this piece of research we used qualitative methodological approaches: biographicalapproach, reading and analysing fiction, interviewing the writer and walking along a trade route.
Using different examples of the same route we discuss the interrelation between routes, narratives
and walking. We argue that the need to talk, write, walk and remember these routes reveals a
constant struggle between borders and routes in Istria, where routes are a subversion in relation toborders, national narratives and main roads.
Pilgrimage and Heritage of Bosnian Croats
Mario Katić (University of Zadar)
In Bosnia and Herzegovina heritage is becoming a political category, and the destruction,
reconstruction and contestation over heritage sites is a process involving the antagonistic relations
between the three major ethno-religio-national groups in the country. With this in mind I want toconsider the relationship existing between Bosnian Croat pilgrimages and the religious, cultural andhistorical heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It seems that contemporary pilgrimage places ofBosnian Croats are becoming labelled and framed by different forms of heritage. I connect thisprocess with the fact that all three constitutive natio-religious communities of Bosnia andHerzegovina are trying to legitimize their claim over B&H using material and tangible remnants of themedieval Bosnian kingdom - historical, cultural and religious heritage. In this lecture I will focus on
three examples: (1) pilgrimage to St John`s church in the village of Podmilačje near Jajce, (2) militarypilgrimage to medieval royal city of Bobovac, and (3) pilgrimage to the grave of Diva Grabovčeva nearRama.
Building Memorials for a Friend or a Foe? Tourism and -Migration amid China – Japan Conflict
Martina Bofulin (ZRC SAZU)This paper addresses the process of heritage making in a context characterized by complex histories
of forced and voluntary mobility in a form of colonization, migration, pilgrimage and tourism. It
focuses on the events concerning local memorial site in a small county in northern Chinese province
Heilongjiang, which was in the beginning of the 20th century colonized by Japanese. After Japanese
capitulation in 1945 most of the colonizers were left behind by fleeing Japanese army and many diedof hunger, cold or in mass suicides, the rest, mostly women and children, were adopted or married byChinese. The unique development of Sino-Japanese relations since 1970’s allowed for theestablishment of China – Japan Friendship Garden in the county that commemorated past events insymbolized the process of reconciliation between the two countries. However, with the shifting of
geopolitical climate this memorial garden swiftly turned into “contentious heritage”, which led to its
partial destruction. By tracing the evolution of this memorial site I wish to highlight the process ofheritage making not only as relational and temporal, but also as an active force shaping local, nationaland international politics.
Local Disaster Heritage, National Resilience Lessons: Tohoku Disaster Tours at the Intersection ofMemorialization, Pedagogy and Tourism
Maja Veselič (University of Ljubljana)
As a region historically prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, Tohoku (Northeast Japan) is interspersedwith material and narrative traces that serve as reminders of previous disasters as well as cautions forthe future ones. In the aftermath of the great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, the massive deathtoll, enormous infrastructural damage and rupture of communal life have often been interpreted,both locally and nationally, as failure to heed old warnings, while at the same time the comportment

of survivors and the outpour of volunteers have been praised as the demonstration of resilience oflocal inhabitants or the embodiment of the Japanese spirit of perseverance. This paper explores a
new memorial spatial practice that arose in the aftermath of the 2011 disasters, i.e. that ofstorytellers, who are relating the disaster experience of local communities, now primarily to visitors
outside the immediately affected villages, towns and cities. I focus on those storytelling strategies
that take shape as walking or bus tours of the devastated areas, taking in single neighbourhoods orstretching over several localities. I examine what kind of places/landscapes, relationships andidentities are produced through these movement-encounters, attempting to tease out the complex
interplay of sacralisation and commodification of disaster areas, and the key mediating role ofdisaster preparedness pedagogy in these processes.
Creating and Contesting the ‘Sacred’ Site - In the Case of the White Spring in Glastonbury, England
Eriko Kawanishi (Osaka Butsuryo University)
The White Spring in Glastonbury gives different meanings to different groups of people. Some Pagans
regard this spring as the masculine energy place, but other Pagans regard it as water temple, whichcelebrate Brigit. Pagans’ discourses are contested, but both of them regard the place as sacred andeasily cooperated together to be against the non-alternative locals who think of the spring as just areservoir. My presentation is about the multi-stratified structure and the reasons behind.
From Hidden Christians to Sacred Landscape: Reframing Christian Heritage in Japan
Tinka Delakorda Kawashima (Yamaguchi Prefectural University)
This paper focuses on two significant movements in the heritagisation process of the Churches andChristian related sites in Nagasaki; (1) the invention of ‘Nagasaki pilgrimage’ in collaboration between
the Japanese Tourism Federation and the Catholic Archdiocese in Nagasaki, and (2) the nomination
process of Christian heritage as the ‘cultural landscape’ by the Japanese Bureau of Cultural Affairs.
Based on fieldwork research, I show constraints on the part of the Church in launching pilgrimage toattract the non-believing majority (e.g. lack of competent guides), as opposed to a relative autonomyof the Japanese Bureau of Cultural Affairs in incorporating the Christian heritage into UNESCO
category of cultural landscape to appeal to expanding market of ‘spiritual tourists’.