| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s13e02
Thursday, October 15, 2026, 18:00~19:30 (CET, UTC +1h)

| Location | 

| Platform & Link |

| Abstract |

Notions of purity and pollution occupy a central place in Shinto thought and ritual practice. However, far from being immutable, these categories provide versatile symbolic resources that can be mobilised for diverse ends. Through them, boundaries are drawn, misfortunes explained and managed, and social distinctions articulated. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in western Japan, this lecture examines how ideas of purity and pollution are alive and entangled with gender, social hierarchies, and ritual authority at one of Japan’s major Shinto shrines and its community.

To shed light on these issues, I begin by outlining how purity and impurity are conceived and managed in contemporary Shinto. I then analyse two matsuri (religious festivals) from the same shrine, as contrasting case studies, to show how Shinto notions of purity are enacted as spatiotemporal and gendered forms of social ordering. These two case studies pose a puzzle: at one of Japan’s most important Shinto shrines, one matsuri has recently accommodated the ritual participation of a female priest, while another continues to strictly enforce the prohibition on women’s participation. Interlocutors commonly explain this exclusion through two related idioms: the physical dangers of the festival and the potential for ritual defilement associated particularly with menstrual blood. Rather than treating these explanations simply as survivals of traditional pollution beliefs, I ask what women’s ritual exclusion actually accomplishes within the social context to which the ritual belongs.

Tracing how ritual restrictions are justified and enforced in a Japanese community, I show how matsuri function not only as forms of worship and communal techniques for managing misfortune, but also as powerful social statements and instruments. In particular, I argue that pollution and ritual exclusion are used to articulate and (re)produce social distinctions and hierarchies while allowing local men to lay claim to special social roles and to a privileged relationship with the home. I therefore approach ideas of purity and pollution not merely as remnants of the past or a system of religious classification, but as live symbolic and practical resources through which gendered authority, hierarchy, and social relationships are enacted, publicly asserted, and reproduced.

| Speaker Bio |

Guilherme Figueiredo is a doctoral research student at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. His current doctoral research focuses on contemporary Shinto and ritual practice and how ritual form is related to various aspects of the fabric of social life. He is also interested in broader ideas of religiosity, secularism, and how traditional religious institutions and practices are changing and adapting to modern and post-industrialised contexts. He has conducted fieldwork in Dazaifu Tenmangū (Fukuoka Prefecture), a major Shinto shrine in Japan. In the past, Guilherme has worked on philosophical and theoretical aspects of anthropology and the social sciences, a topic he is still devoted to and that informs his current research. Drawing mainly on three philosophical traditions (pragmatism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology), he has published on the issues of intercultural interpretation, the role of ‘ethnocentrism’ in anthropological practice, objectivity, and relativism.

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s13/#e02.