Old Seeds in New Soil: Constructing Shinto Space and Place Outside of Japan
Shinto is popularly imagined as a ritual tradition coterminous with Japanese ethnicity, culture, and geography. Historically hailed as a “divine realm/nation” (*shinkoku*), the Japanese archipelago is home to a sacred landscape of shrines, mountains, forests, rivers, and seas inhabited by deities called *kami*. Where and how then does Shinto ritual take place outside of Japan? Based on ethnographic research among global Shinto communities, this talk examines approaches to the reterritorialization of Shinto, particularly in North America. Ugoretz analyzes how global Shinto communities’ production/construction of ritual space and place reinscribe traditional definitions of the religion as well as notions of Japaneseness, establishing a hierarchy that often privileges “Japanized” spaces. However, recent developments
concerning environmentalism and digital technology suggest emergent universalist orientations toward Shinto space.
Kaitlyn Ugoretz is Lecturer and Associate Editor for Publications at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (Nagoya, Japan) and finishing her PhD in EALCS at UCSB. She is an anthropologist of religion studying the globalization
of Shinto, digital technology, and media. Ugoretz is also the host of the award-winning educational YouTube channel, *Eat Pray Anime*.
Organized by Fabio Rambelli. Supported by the UCSB Department of Religious Studies and UCSB Shinto Studies Chair.
