 Hello and welcome to the first JRC event that is a hybrid entertainment, so to speak. So we have actually more people online as people in the room, maybe signs of times to come. But I'm very happy that you're here. It really is very different, you know, to have a live audience to have this kind of focus and attention, especially when you are facing two ghosts in the room because neither of us are technically here. Tatsuma Pado and our speaker is actually leaving for Japan tomorrow and was supposed to be in Japan since January, and I'm also not entirely here. I'm supposed to be in Paris, but don't tell anyone that. It's a ghosty kind of event and probably will come to the question of presence and spirits and the way that the one maps onto the other in the talk tonight. Tatsuma Pado and our speaker is of course known to many of us. He's a lecturer in East Asian religions at the University College Cork, and he's been closely linked to us for many years. He's been a Newton fellow here and he's also a fellow of the JRC. It is a PhD at Gafoskari in Venice and has worked widely on Japanese religions on semiotics on and is working at the moment on a semiotic theory of pilgrimage, and this is the work that he will present to us tonight under the title walking the sutra in Katsuragi Japan, a semiotic theory of pilgrimage. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm very honored to be here back to source today, and I would like to thank Fabio Gigi, chair or JRC, and Lucia Dolce, who is not here today, chair of CSJR for having invited me. I would like to start from the notion of pilgrimage as a method. Michael Tossig, in his thought provoking book, The Magic of the State, concerning the construction and circulation of political power through death in its encounters in spirit possession, concludes his analysis by explicitly invoking the idea of pilgrimage as method in anthropology. He sees pilgrimage as analogous to translation. Translation between home and shrine, profane and sacred, official and unofficial voices. Pilgrimage provides a model of meditation, allowing us to witness the presence of the other end quote. Tossig comes to the conclusion that anthropologists are also pilgrims, since they engage in an act of transposition between different domains, the world of their readers and the ethnographic other. Although we could criticize Tossig's notion of pilgrimage as a journey across pre-existing profane and sacred domains, his idea of pilgrimage as method based on a principle of translation that connects and transposes rather than divides is quite intriguing. His step to Walter Benjamin's ideas concerning the task of the translator is here rather evident. According to Tossig, making sense of ethnographic experience does not just consist in transmitting information and data collected in the field. It requires ethnographers first and foremost to translate their data into another language, that of anthropological discourse by producing in such discourse the echo of the original. This task involves evoking the presence of the ethnographic subjects encountering the field and their own way of being in the world. As Benjamin puts it quote, a real translation is transparent. It does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language as thought reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully end quote. As we will see, the notion of meaning is what my underlie this specific connection between ethnography translation and pilgrimage. On the one hand, the idea that meaning can only be grasped through some form of translation is quite old in anthropology and social sciences. Already in myth and meaning, Claude Levi-Strauss had extended the notion of translation to include that of signification itself, when he stated quote to mean means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language and quote. Therefore, toss six idea also shared by Assad, Hanks, and others, for example, various the Castro. And to this, I like to add a wonderful article by Phil Swift just published on how a journal of ethnographic theory. The idea that anthropologists should think about their own task in terms of explanation as translation is more encompassing than one would expect, because, as Semiticians say, meaning or better signification is itself an act of translation. What we have to explain something is in fact to translate it or paraphrase it into other words, languages, and media. Pygms can also be considered as translators in so far as they to make sense of their own life and experience through an ongoing work of translation, as will be clear from the ethnographic case I will present below later. The relation between pilgrimage and the problem of meaning does not end with the notion of translation. One of the definitions of meaning provided in Semiotics, especially in the works of Semiticians from the Perry School, like Argyr Dacier-Gremas, Paolo Fabri, Eric Landowski, and Jacques Fontanil, is expressed to the term sense. In contrast to the English term meaning, etymologically related to the old Saxon manian or to heavy mind, the word sense derives via the French sounds from the Latin sensus that is perceiving, going in a certain direction, and finding out, confront Italian sensus. Both are radically transformed during the enlightenment through the English expression common sense, referring to some rational assumption or study good judgment about the world. Sense still evokes the link to both perception, see letting sensus comunis, and the idea of direction, movement and orientation. In other words, sense expresses the phenomenological quality of meaning through its link to perception, feeling and direction as oriented intentionality. Before its articulation as a signification, and thus, before we start to explain it, translate it, or interpret it. Before, next to the idea of meaning as translation or signification, we also have the idea of meaning as oriented intentionality or sense, and these two conceptions are intertwined as two dimensions of the same phenomenon in a constant interplay. This second definition of meaning as sense also seems to correspond to another important aspect of pilgrimage, not mentioned by Tossig, which is precisely its quality of perceiving, going in a certain direction and finding out. Over the last two decades, the topic of movement and mobility has indeed captured increasing attention in the anthropology of pilgrimage. This development has been accompanied by a reorientation of pilgrimage research towards large scale issues such as globalization, travel and tourism, the politics of memory and heritage, media, migration, and the economic marketplace, especially since the publication of a very influential book by Ian Reader, pilgrimage in the marketplace. However, given the centrality of mobility in pilgrimage, we also need a careful theorization of this notion, as indicated by Coleman and Eid during their discussion of four different dimensions of movement, movement as performative, as embodied, as a semantic and metaphoric action. I would like here to suggest that besides these possible dimensions, pilgrimage is first of all an oriented action that is never isolated and independent, whatever the stress or emphasis might be. Even when the journey is valued more than the destination, as documented in the case of the Camino of San James by Fray, for example, pilgrimage follows a certain direction and course where every movement is inserted in a change in chains of actions and passions. Every movement exists in view of an action to be performed as aware, or following an action occurred somewhere else, and such actions are effectively modulated and qualified by semiotic modalities, namely volitions, obligations, abilities and knowledge. As Sheryl Mattingly has pointed out, action too demands that we plot, and quote, we act because we intend to get something done, to begin something which we hope will lead us along a desirable route, end quote. We tend to create sense out of situations by constantly reorganizing our narratives according to new or pre-existing plans. In pilgrimage, such plotting activity involves desirable targets, forms of subjectivity that pilgrims emotionally identify with, sources of legitimation they evoke, and finally interpretations and evaluations of the actions performed. In order to understand the quality of movement, we need in other words a theory of action. So in this presentation, I will offer my contribution to an outline of this theory through a semiotic analysis of pilgrimage. Movement will be explored by an analysis of different spheres of action played out by pilgrims, places, institutions, deities, and other entities involved. What semioticians call actants, or dynamic positions carried out by human and non-human actors. We will see the emergence and mutual interaction in pilgrimage of at least four different actants or spheres of action, targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators. Although these roles will be further multiplied according to the circumstances. I hope that through a translation and semiotic mapping of pilgrims experience, we will be in the position of better describing what I have called the sense of pilgrimage, namely the qualified movement and oriented intentionality of pilgrimage as a social practice, by tracing its articulation of values and flow of meanings. As a specific case study, I will focus on my ethnographical search concerning a Shugen revivalist community of ascetic practice in Japan, the Tsukasa Kōrei group, affiliated to the Shingon Esoteric Buddhist temple Temporinji on Mount Kongô, which I have been studying since 2008. This group of ascetics is connected to the current revival of a pre-modern mountain pilgrimage route, the 28 Lotus Sutra Mounts in Katsuragi, Nijuhashiko Kyōzuka. I could study the efforts to revitalize this pilgrimage route over the years by conducted interviews and participant observation during ritual performances. Pilgrimages, communal gatherings, and celebratory events, business meetings, as well as cleaning activities at their main temple. This long-term ethnographic engagement with the revivalist group has provided an opportunity to reflect on Toscik's idea of pilgrimage as a method. Coincidentally, the semantic trail suggested by the term methodology itself may pave the way to our reflections on the sense or orientation of pilgrimage. If we follow its etymology from meta or hodos method with the Greek term hodos signifying path, journey, or itinerary, we can define methodology as a discourse, logos, over meta, the itinerary itself, hodos, the targets of action. It's about half past one p.m. in a very hot day at the end of August when, after having walked for more than four hours throughout woods and steep paths on the Katsuragi Mountains, I line up with a group of 12 ascetics I have been following in order to perform a ritual in front of a giant rock in the middle of a clearing. The rock is about four or five meters in diameter, a marked place where, until the Meiji period, stood a large temple called Isidera, or rock temple. One part of a complex of seven diamond temple lodgings, Kongo Shichibo, located at the foot of Mount Kongo within a range of two kilometers. On the rock, the crest of the Katsuragi family is still visible, and at the same time, a descendant of this very family, the Buddhist Reverend Katsuragi Koryu, is there with us, leading the group of ascetics. Coming from an ancient aristocratic family, which has been running the temple in G, the main temple on top of the mountain, at least since the 14th century, Koryu decided in 2005 to emulate his grandfather, Katsuragi Mitsugu, in a renewed effort to resurrect the pre-born and pigments tradition of the sutra mounds of the 28th Lodges of Katsuragi. He did so by funding a group of lay ascetics called Tsukasako, which is part of a larger Shugem mountain ascetic revivalist trend that started after the Second World War. Literally meaning the way to master acquire ascetic powers may be described as a Japanese form of mountain asceticism, which, according to current views, started being established around the late 13th century in major sacred mountain areas, combining Buddhist esoteric, Taoist, and shamanic elements with the worship of Kami, the local deities. Yes, from the slide. This Shugem pilgrimage route was abolished in 1868 and 1872 by the Meiji government precisely because of its syncreti Shinto Buddhist character, strongly condemned by the modern nationalistic state Shinto, the official state ideology of the imperial system in the Meiji period. The pilgrimage follows an ancient route across a mountain range for more than a hundred kilometers, where the 28 chapters of the prominent Mahayana Buddhist scripture, Lotus Sutra, were allegedly buried in 28 different stations or sutra mounds by the founder of the movement, the semi-legendary ascetic Enno Gyoja, thought to have lived in the late 7th century. So what the ascetics were actually worshipping during that very hot August afternoon was not the giant rock standing in the middle of the clearing, but the chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra called Jofu Kei Bosatsu Bong, chapter Bodhisattva Sadapa Ribbutta, supposedly buried deep under the rock. One of the narratives that contemporary ascetics often mentioned when discussing the origin of the pilgrimage route is the Shozang Engi, late 12th century, which states, the ritual procedure of the mentions under the steps walked by Enno Gyoja, there are 69,384 characters, etc. So these narratives, first written down in medieval times to enhance the role of the Katsuragi mountains as places of asceticism and to attract funding from other religious institutions and aristocratic families, are continuously brought back to memory today, both orally and through a reenactment of the mythical funder's ritual actions. Furthermore, this specific passage establishes a precise correspondence between the number of Chinese characters contained in the Lotus Sutra, 69,384, and the number of steps that Enno Gyoja undertook to complete the pilgrimage. In other words, in this case, the written text translates into the mountain, and the mountain becomes a spatial text, not to be read, but to be walked by the ascetics, following the steps of their legendary founder. This may be considered an example of intersemiotic translation. Defined by Roman Jacobson as translation from one semiotic system to another, from the written language of the Sutra to a semiotics of the natural world, namely the special landscape of the mountains. According to Jacobson, while interlingual translation would concern rewarding and meta-linguistic operations within the same verbal language, and interlingual translation would characterize translation proper from one verbal language to another. Intersemiotic translation is, quote, an interpretation of verbal science by means of science of non-verbal sign systems. For example, it says from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting, end quote. Space, too, could be considered as one of such semiotic systems, that is, a spatial language. But we could also conceive the natural world itself as a vast place for the elaboration and practice of multiple semiotic systems that produce the significations of different kinds. Grimas and Cortes distinguish such significations in signifying points of view, that is, the way in which specific human and non-human collectives, traditional behavior of human and non-human actors, to be analyzed, they say, as discourses of the natural world. Grimas are thus here also intersemiotic translators. And by using the term translation, I wish to emphasize that the content of the verbal text of the sutra is not read in the mountain. It is rather walked and perceived to the landscape's phenomenological and sensible qualities. In other words, the sutra is experienced through the mediation of the mountain's natural elements and the perceiving body of the practitioner who walks through it. In the same way, as we do not read but rather watch the translation of a book into a movie, semiotic systems are perceived and interpreted in ways that are not necessarily the same as written texts. Therefore, in order to interpret the landscape as a translation of the lot of sutra, ascetics need to learn how to walk it through the performance of rituals, chanting of mantras, fasting, and other bodily techniques. By performing such ascetic practices, pilgrims gradually learn to master their thoughts, bodies, effective dispositions, kimochi, and causes of action. And they do it in interaction with the material environment. With local kamigots and Buddhist deities who inhabit the landscape. And with the sutra mounts, where the 28 chapters of the lot of sutra are worshipped as physical relics, shari, and living presence of the Buddha. So what we have been approaching so far is the problem of describing a certain sphere of action. One that both pilgrims and institutions are closely involved in portion, cherishing, worshipping, but also constructing, promoting, and inventing. I will call this sphere the targets of action. In other words, what are the aims and purposes towards which pilgrims orientate themselves. The sutra mounts are an example of such focal points of action. As material spots on the mountain landscape towards which the ascetics walk and stop in order to pray, they become objects of value. That is objects actively constructed by pilgrims on which they may invest their values, prayers, and emotional dispositions. As one of the practitioners once told me, quote, it is by praying that the place becomes important, as I said today. It does not matter that the place is exactly the authentic one. What matters is the disposition to pray, Ogamu Kimochi. It is the actual recitation of prayers that makes the place significant, end quote. The term Kimochi, feeling affective disposition, is often used by ascetics in Katsuragi, not only in relation to places of worship and the right attitude or ritual stance they should keep, but also concerning the effect that the act of praying has on their own bodies and minds. Shinryu, before getting recently retired, used to work in a local coffee bean roasting factory, alternating ascetic activity in weekends with his work as company employee during the week. When asked about reasons that motivated him to participate in the pilgrimage, he affirmed that by performing ascetic practice at the pilgrimage sites, he could change his feelings or state of mind, Kimochi o Kirikaeru. He further explained to me that because he had to face at work many hardships, negatively affecting his own emotional disposition, it was through this ascetic practice that he could renovate his state of mind or emotional well-being. Such an emotional renewal can thus be understood as a care of the self, in Fukultian terms, where the self and Kimochi become the target of an action reflexively or reoriented towards the practitioner. However, the target of action can also be something other than the self, coinciding with different places along the pilgrimage route. For instance, even on that Sunday afternoon at the end of August 2017, before praying in front of the Sutramond, we cleaned up the place from weeds and twigs which had completely covered the area around that giant rock, thus making the access more difficult. In a similar way, pilgrims could also orientate their actions towards the forest, making sure that paths were kept open, and signaling with ribbons the itineraries to choose in order not to get lost. Whatever the target of action might be, the self or the environment, it always needs constant care and attention. Next section is on the subjects of action. During the ritual performed nowadays at 28 sutramonds, Katsuragi ascetics chant a series of mantras and sutra, accompanied by the rhythmic shaking of shakuja. Short Buddhist stuff provided with six metal rings on top, which you see in the image. The whole ceremony, lasting for about eight minutes, is temporarily marked by the sound of horagai conch shells at the beginning and at the end. The prayer offered is the Heart Wisdom Sutra, Hanyashinyo, rhythmic intensification, use of tools and positions in place, in space, play a crucial role during the ritual when the practitioner faces the mound where the lotus sutra chapter is located. We must then interrogate a different sphere of action arising in connection to the first one. How do participants become subjects of action? In other words, who is carrying out this particular type of movement we call pilgrimage? Who are the actors involved? And how do they emerge? Forms of ritual apprenticeship become very important here because ascetics are constant learners who construct themselves as ascetic subjects through practice. Besides the pilgrimage to the 28 sutra mounds, they organize once a month a smaller training session called monthly gathering, tsukichika. In which, over half a day, they visit 15 spots located on different sites of Mount Kongo, performing rituals without the leader, and taking turns in heading the procession. During this session, mistakes and oversights are not uncommon among less experienced practitioners. These mistakes are pointed out by other ascetics who supervise the others. While trying to remember long mantras, performing ritual gestures, mudra, and leading the rest of the group through the woods, sometimes taking the wrong path, practitioners make continuous adjustments according to the situation. Such situated ritual apprenticeship within the group constitutes a means to gradually become part of a collective identity, the ascetic community. By learning through their bodies, meaning to carry in Japanese. And this learning process associated with the pilgrimage continues even in the daily life of the practitioners at home or at their workplaces. When he's not climbed in the mountains as a pilgrim, Koyo usually walks as a truck driver. He has been doing the same job for 27 years. As he explained to me, during his long drives across the highways all over Japan, he often recites sutras and mantras by heart. At the beginning, he found this was a good way to learn the prayers and magical formulas. But then he realized that through this practice, he became more focused on his driving and also coped better, Nuri Kireru, with a hard work. He considered this practice outside the pilgrimage as the continuation of the mental and bodily training. Mental and bodily use the shinshin, the term shinshin mind body, experienced during the pilgrimage. For Koyo, and for many other participants, ascetic practice Shugyo continues in their everyday life. Again, translating values, including ethical values like helping each other, as another practitioner pointed out, from pilgrimage to their family or work environment. However, places and sutra mounts may also become subjects during the ritual interaction. Values invested on the sutra chapters, in fact, enable the semiotic construction of sutra mounts, not as inert things, but as bodies. The lot of sutra itself provides justification for this interpretation by stating, quote, Whatever place a role of this scripture may occupy in all those places, one is to erect a stupa or seven jewels. Within it, there is already a whole body of the dust come one that is the Buddha himself. And quote, in this and other passages, the lot of sutra presents itself as the corporal relic of the Buddha. It is striking that in well documented Buddhist practices across Asia, relics and religious icons have been envisaged for centuries in a clear non representational and immanentist move as the concrete material presence of the Buddha's body on Earth, rather than as a symbols or representations of the sacred. A similar devotional attitude is shared by ascetic practitioners in Katsuragi, who ritually engage with the sutra mounts in the same inter subjective way in which they perform prayers chance and mantra powerful ritual formulas in front of other Buddhist icons sources of action. In the summer of 2014, I was sitting at the table of a busy restaurant in Canada in Osaka prefecture. The output of the temple and his elder assistant were sitting next to me. And in front of me, a young man wearing glasses was taking notes on the ongoing conversation. Next to him. To elderly people were taking part in the dinner. The young man and these two older people were representatives of the Nankai private transport company active in southern Osaka prefecture. They had been invited at a meeting over dinner as often happens in Japan when people need to discuss business in order to negotiate a deal with the group of ascetics. As Mont Congo was one of the destinations connected to the Nankai bus service, the religious group was asking the transport company to organize a special coach for pilgrims with discounted fairs and sutra chanting played on board. The agreement was eventually not stipulated. But my presence at the dinner was framed as a sort of academic authority. In order to show how a foreign researcher from Europe had been traveling all the way from London to southern Osaka to study the group of pilgrims. Yet, my role in the negotiations was certainly a minor one. My position being evoked from time to time when the pilgrims asked me to confirm historical details about Katsuragi pilgrimage. This episode reveals the importance of a third sphere, which we may call the sources of action. So, what is the starting point of pilgrimage as oriented movement? What are the motivations? Who are the actors triggering this process? What forms of authority are evoked? And who are the stakeholders? The third sphere may include a wide range of different actors from religious leaders and institutions to two telluridates and mythical ancestors, such as the legendary figure of the ascetic and no Georgia who funded the practice and whose steps the sugar and ascetics claim to follow during the pilgrimage. Even my presence, as explained in example above, could be sometimes be used as a means of legitimation for the pilgrimage. However, although I was involved as a source of academic authority, this did not mean that I was able to exercise any power on the group. Quite the contrary. Whenever I was called in front of other external people during meetings with other secular or religious institutions, during public lectures and local libraries and so on, it was me who was acted upon by the group of members. Such an inversion of the source of agency brings us to question the traditional role of the analyst as a neutral observer of social phenomena. Blowing any supposed separation betweenemic and ethnic dimensions. Most of the time, my ethnographic subjects were in fact the ones observing me, the ones who maybe do things by giving me different hierarchical roles in the context of the pilgrimage practice. This was thus sometimes defined as an ascetic apprentice, sometimes as a pilgrim, sometimes as an academic legitimation, sometimes as a cleaner at the temple. In other words, on several occasions, the pilgrims themselves became the very source of my actions. They were the ones who motivated or triggered my actions precisely by giving me a certain role within the group. But in order to get deeper into questions of power and authority, we need to describe one last sphere of action, the evaluation of action. So while considering this last sphere of action which I call evaluation, we need to ask. The process through which pilgrimage is interpreted, judged or reflected upon. This question emerged spontaneously when I discovered that with the banishment of the Katharagi pilgrimage in modern times, memory about the exact location of the sutra chapters had been partly lost. This created a conflict of interpretations when different competing groups emerged after the Second World War, each claiming to have found the original pilgrimage trail. The fact is that these mountains had been the site for sutra burial since ancient times, and they are thus disseminated by mounds which might become potential candidates for pilgrimage stations. There are therefore three possible sutra mounds for the 21st station and multiple alternatives for the lodge number two, three, four, six and 27. If the sutra has been translated into a special landscape, this has also produced a conflict over its correct interpretation between different revivalist groups and their leaders who claim to have discovered the right sutra mounds. Sometimes this has also generated disagreements within the group itself. Because some of the practitioners who wished to include different or multiple spots into the pilgrimage then left the community. While at the same time, the leader tried to re-establish his hierarchical position through his own interpretation of the spatial texts. All translations involve to a certain extent a negotiation of power and knowledge through an adaptation of cultural values. Translations may thus become potential sites of conflict. Such conflicts may arise from different disagreements over, for example, the more acceptable interpretations, the right to authorize or impose certain interpretive practices, and over the act of translation itself, which may not be accepted by a certain community. The disputes concerning the correct location of the lot of sutra chapters in Katsuragi, which significantly focus on the correct translation of this special text, thus show that different evaluators can sanction or interpret the actions related to pilgrimage in different ways. Such a diversity of interpretations could eventually generate conflicting understandings of pilgrimage practice, some of which may try to impose themselves, therefore challenging other religious authorities. The evaluation of action thus becomes a process through which the leaderships and hierarchies are confirmed or disputed, ritual behaviors are justified or challenged, and communities of pilgrims are constituted or broken apart, translating the bodily experience. There's another crucial dimension of pilgrimage that we have not discussed yet, and which once again brings into play the relation between researcher and ethnographic subjects. The role played by the victims, which I followed during my participant observation, seeks to radically reconfigure everyday life thanks to the intubation of the body. Long walks through difficult and scarcely frequented mountain trails, often fasting or with minimum supplies, while donning the white clothes and equipment of Yamabushi aesthetics. Exhausted in night vigils and extended hours spent while singing mantras and Buddhist chants. First on all deals by fire, walking barefoot on embers, hivatari, with flames reaching up to the knees, etc. All these activities constitute the aesthetic core of this specific pilgrimage practice, and they are part of a path of apprenticeship towards the construction of new selves and new worlds. To what extent can ethnographers describe and translate these modes of experience so deeply seated within their own body when participating in these kinds of practices. Iroquo Ran has pointed out that the suspension of everyday bodily values and rhythms occurring in religious discourse, for example, the inversion of day and night time, fasting, sexual abstinence, variations abstinence, variations of temperature may be used to enact processes of resignification and production of new symbolic discourses. The body and its sensory equipment then appear as I quote a marvelous apparatus for transforming sensations into symbols and quote. It is through such networks of symbols that religious individuals constitute themselves as new subjects. Referring to religious traditions he defines as mystic Iroquo Ran in interestingly suggests that physiological and perceptive modifications may also bring about a symbolic reconstruction of the time and space experienced by practitioners. A new subject would emerge from such a discourse, a subject characterized by new role in society and in the universe of values through processes we might define as somatic or more precisely aesthetic that is rooted in perception. In order to clarify this point I will draw on a specific ethnographic episode. During our long pilgrimage walks inside the forests across the Katharagi mountain range, it often happened that after few hours of jorning through close present trees, we would find ourselves in an open space. Here we will usually have a short rest. Sometimes we would find a small shrine or study in front of which practitioners would pray together. Some other times, however, a wonderful view of the valley, the abundant vegetation of the nearby peaks or mountain cherry blossoms could also unexpectedly open below us. On such occasions, we used to stop and contemplate the landscape together, certainly exhausted and short of breath, but not short of admiration for the spectacular nature surrounding us from every side. The long mountain chain running almost seamlessly from the Wakayama coast in the southwest up north to Osaka and other prefectures is characterized by low slopes, rounded tops, thick vegetation, frequent water courses, small waterfalls and considerable fauna, birds, wild boars, bedges, weasels, rabbits, snakes, foxes, squirrels, etc. On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2017, after a difficult climb, when our energies were about to fade out, we finally reached a natural spring. Following the leaders' instructions, we used our token, small black caps worn on the forehead, embodying the five wisdoms of the Cosmic Buddha Daenichi Naurai, soaked with sweat dripping from our foreheads, to quench our thirsts with fresh water which was generously gushing out from the side of the mountain. After drinking, we all agreed that it really seemed the most delicious water we had ever tasted. Rarely had I drunk such fresh and clean water, capable of swiftly providing strength and relief. We fully gathered the water with our bare hands, pouring it on our hands, filling our bottles, while a strange sense of excitement started to affect all participants. One of the ascetics noticed that the energizing effect of the spring could be related to the mineral salts of our sweat that drinking from the token we had indeed mixed with the water. However, this remark did not diminish the euphoric mood of that moment, which once returned to the city, we did not hesitate to recall and comment upon while sipping a pint of beer to celebrate the completion of the pilgrimage. At that point, the religious leader of the group explained that the sensation we felt could only arise after the long climb, a mode of ascetic practice that naturally led us to perceive differently and to fully appreciate the beauty of the mountain. Such an aesthetic experience of a community produced by the sensible pleasure we felt, the taste of water and the landscape view disclosed an entire semiotics of perception, in which effective qualities perceived as imminent in the world act on subjects through the mediation of the body. But this could only happen after a somatic and social process of learning had occurred, consisting of intense apprenticeship and ascetic practice, recalling the words of Remas from his book The L'imperfection, both the smell of carnation and the smell of rose are certainly at once recognizable as metonymies of the carnation rose. With regard to their mode of formation, they are not different from the visual gestaltine led by someone who knows a bit about flowers. Yet, hidden under these original designations, perfume, the harmonies must unveil their coalescences and correspondences and to dreadful exalting fascinations, guided subject toward new significations produced by intimate and absorbing conjunction with the circuit, carnation and spiritual. Therefore, figuration is not a simple ornament of things. It is a screen of appearance whose virtue consists in disclosing itself, letting others glimpse at itself as a possibility of father sense, thanks to or because of its imperfection. The subject's temperament hence regains the immanence of the sensible. End quote. The water, its taste and the landscape perceived by the ascetics. Then, while appearing as a recognizable gestaltine of the world, that is as an identifiable figures. They simultaneously presented themselves as imperfect figures, that is open figures that are filled with father, aesthetic and affective meanings arising precisely during the process of perception. It is for this reason that the water, its taste and the landscape could manifest themselves to the trained ascetics as elements which opened up further possibilities of signification. For example, disclose its refreshing property, its ability to generate pleasure and energizing effects. It produced a collective esthesis, an intersubjectively shared way of perceiving and feeling, thus presenting itself as much more than mere water. In the group that could thus notice the shift that occurred when these figures disclose themselves. That is, when they presented themselves as more than mere objects, revealing their nuanced properties and affecting the way and affecting the perceivers in various ways, to the point of inverting the niche relationship between subject and object altogether. In this process, defined by Grimas as aesthetic apprehension, such as the tick, when time seems to stop, the world over helps humans, merging with them. The influence of Merloponte, quoted by Grimas, is here rather evident, especially if we think about Merloponte's notion of intentional transgression in science, the last book published by Merloponte was still alive. This notion precisely refers to the process through which the ordinary relation we have with objects is reversed, and the latter ones are given the status of subjects. This concept is further elaborated in Merloponte's post-most work, The Visible and the Invisible, in which, when describing the chiasma and intertwining relation between body and word, a relation that he calls flesh of the word, the philosopher even states that, quote, the very voice of the things, the waves and the forests can itself be conceived as the language of a word that speaks to us. So, the somatic and sensible dimension of doing ethnography within a community of ascetic pilgrims made us potentially lead to a radical reversal of bodily values and rhythms of the ethnographers who gradually learned to experience different ways of conceiving both the words and themselves. Such an analysis highlights the role played by the body in the construction of subjectivities and how bodily limits and potentialities may be constantly pushed forward in ascetic pilgrimages. In light of these considerations, we have examined a particular example of semiotic reconfiguration of times, spaces and actors through ascetic practice on the Katsuragi mountains, triggered by somatic perception and affectivity. We have seen, in fact, how the taste of water, intersubjectively shared by me and other practitioners during the ascetic practice through a collective form of estasis, produced an actantial inversion of the relation between subjects and objects, its ascetics and the natural world. Figures started to disclose themselves, opening up further possibilities of signification arising from the process of perception. This was by no means the only possible way of conceiving the mountain and its environment, since this entity, the mountain, rather appears as a multi-layered semiotics of the natural world, produced by multiple enunciations, including ritual, mythological, historical, hikers and tourist enunciations. However, this form of experience, which occurred during ascetic pilgrimage, reminded all participants of the need to translate that is to make sense of our differential relations with the mountain itself, a non-human actor whose sensory interaction with us was so powerful on death and other occasions as to renew both our bodily strength and our perception of the world. The bodily experience of pilgrimage, chanting, attending night visions, fasting, walking on fire, deeply reconfigures the practitioner's world to the construction of new values and forms of subjectivity based on an adjustment and reciprocal transformation between them and the environment. It was this process of adjustment to the ascetic dimension of this particular pilgrimage practice that forced me to reconcile the limits of my own bodily resilience and endurance. Without obviously arguing that such an ascetic dimension would be necessarily shared by other pilgrimages' activities, and in fact, this is not the case, as many forms of this practice do not actually involve much physical labor. We should, however, not underestimate the role played by sensory and somatic experience while researching pilgrimage. Because of the overwhelming somatic component in my own fieldwork, I started focusing on my own body as a living experiential laboratory of Semiotic analysis for an understanding of pilgrimage and ethnographic practice in general. What I've tried to describe here in Semiotic terms is therefore the process of learning triggered by my own encounter with human and unhuman demographic subjects, including the active role played by the natural environment. This process of apprenticeship unfolded through a series of translations situated at the micro-physical level of experience in the small adjustments through which I explored a particular form of life related to the ascetic pilgrim. These adjustments had the effect of considerably reducing the significance given to a form of subjectivity conceived a priori as a human. The ascetic pilgrim, in fact, renounces the self or, more precisely, he or she actually discovers that the self is a multitude, a network that connects rather than divides humans, gods, places and discourses of the natural world. Conclusion. Mapping the flow. I was told here to combine two methodological approaches, ethnography and Semiotics, in order to describe a certain dynamics of action emerging in pilgrimage. Rather than looking at pilgrimage as a single course of action, I preferred to approach it as a set of complex networks and hierarchies involving various spheres of action. Following the Paris School Semiotic approach, human actors. These spheres are respectively called the targets, subjects, sources and evaluators of action, and we have seen how at every level, all the four actants have been connecting and interacting with each other, forming different networks and hierarchical positions. I started my discussion by referring to TOSIC's ideal pilgrimage as method. A method based on the principle of translation as signification, according to which anthropologists too may be considered traveling pilgrims, translating and making sense of the ethnographic other. By examining the close connection between translation, the practice of pilgrimage, and the notion of sense as perceiving going in a certain direction and finding out, I explored the possibility of investigating pilgrimage from a semiotic point of view. By adopting such a perspective, I then examined this mode of practice we call pilgrimage as a process of translation, involving body, space, materiality, sacred scriptures and effective dispositions of pilgrims. In the past, Semiotics emerged here as a theory of action connected to patient's body materiality, a theory based on actional spheres defining desirable targets of pilgrimage action, forms of subjectivity, sources of authority and evaluators who interpret the actions performed. I explored these actional spheres, targets, subjects, sources and evaluators of pilgrimage in terms of dynamic positions of actants. These positions are taken up by human-on-human actors, namely pilgrims, places, institutions, deities and other entities, in order to translate and articulate signification, the oriented and perceptual flow of meaning, sense of pilgrimage. By exploring the actional spheres concerning targets, subjects, sources and evaluators of pilgrimage, we were able to see how pilgrims translate a sutra into a landscape through ascetic practice. But we also managed to analyze the role of ethnographers as translators who make sense of the flow of pilgrimage through participant observation. They are immersed in different practices which involve a bodily experience of the environment, while learning how to perceive a Semiotics of the natural world. To conclude, my aim was to use a Semiotics in order to map the articulations but also the flows of meanings and values collected through my ethnography. The Semiotics idea of pilgrimage as method, method, thus became useful in order to cast light on the key role played by translation in both pilgrimage and ethnographic work. As ethnographers, we try to make sense of the pilgrimage to catch its oriented flow of meanings by translating it into an analytical discourse. We try, as Grimas argued, to put sense in the conditions of signifying, that is to articulate the movement of meaning by translating it, thus moving from sense to signification. But pilgrims to translate and articulate the sense of practice. They do it incessantly. In my ethnographic case, they constantly translate the Buddhist scripture into a landscape by means of their ascetic practice. But they also translate the ascetic values they learned and acquired in the mountains into their everyday lives, at home and at work in the private and public sphere. I suppose that both of us, researchers and ascetics, will do our best to keep on translating. So far as the flows of sense and pilgrimage will keep on moving, posing new challenging questions to us. Thank you very much.