Over 52 days this spring, Eric Anderson covered a lot of ground — literally.
During his recent sabbatical from 鶹Ƶ, Anderson traveled to Japan and visited hundreds of Shinto shrines, walking an average of nine miles every day.
“That was a lot to pack into that period of time but I wanted to visit and learn about a lot of these shrines that are most important to the Japanese people,” he said. “Shrines that those who are Shintoist try to go to at least once during their life.”
Anderson designed his sabbatical to take a deep dive into Japanese culture, religious practices, history and more, gaining insights that he’s incorporating into the anthropology courses he teaches so students can benefit from his personal observations and experiences.
But his nearly two months in Japan are just the most recent way in which Anderson has participated in field work or other in-depth work to ensure his courses remain fresh and relevant for YVC students — and perhaps provide some inspiration.
“Like most of our students at YVC, I am first-generation and got my start at a community college,” Anderson said. “If I can travel widely as a way of learning about people and places, so can they. Traveling is life-long learning.”
ABOVE: YVC Anthroplogy Instructor Eric Anderson, right, works on his meditation practice at the Myoshin-Ji temple complex in Kyoto during his sabbatical. TOP: Anderson at a shrine at Fushimi Inari-Taisha in Kyoto, accessed via a two-kilometer mountain path through thousands of torii gates to pay respects to Inari, the kami spirit of rice, sake and prosperity.
Bringing the world into the classroom
A sabbatical that Anderson took 27 years ago, a decade after he came to YVC, continues to inform his teaching today. He spent a year in Australia focused on learning how the continent’s aboriginal people view land, and to this day he centers his course around an ethnography on aborigines and how they arrived and progressively inhabited the entire continent.
“Talking about aboriginal rock art with students becomes something different when you can reference what a Bininj elder told you about their meaning,” Anderson said. “I can also talk about hunting and gathering in the first person having done so with Jawoyn men and women who taught me how to throw an atlatl and a non-returning boomerang and which ant species make for tasty snacks.”
Before taking that sabbatical, Anderson felt uncertain about his future in higher education.
“I was really in this mindset that I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” he said. “Having time off to really explore my field pretty much saved my teaching career. I came back energized. And I can still do it at least in part because I’m doing things in the summer to stay fresh and engaged.”
Anderson’s wife Chandra also earned her degree in anthropology and does work in the field, so the two of them have spent most of their summers pursuing their anthropology-related interests in places as different as Bali in Indonesia and Newfoundland off Canada’s Atlantic coast.
"An anthropologist without recent experiences navigating a different culture is potentially a boring one ... these experiences energize me and help to make my love of the material transparent."
— Eric Anderson, anthropology instructor
Six years ago, the Andersons returned to Australia with their then 17-year-old daughter, returning to some of the sacred sites and communities they had previously visited and visiting other archaeological and paleoanthropological sites for the first time.
And in the summer of 2023, Anderson spent five weeks on the other side of the world, exploring Ireland.
“We did a fair amount of hiking and going to see abbeys, cathedrals and castles in glorious states of ruin and various Viking settlements, but were most interested in prehistoric sites,” Anderson said. Among those were Knocknarea Cairn, consisting of 40,000 tons of stone that has never been excavated but is believed to cover a tomb housing the legendary Irish warrior and mother god Queen Maeve, and Newgrange, a site older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt that is the largest and finest passage tomb in Ireland.
Among other things, Anderson, a recipient of YVC’s Robert M. Leadon Excellence in Teaching Award, has taken what he learned at those and other sites in Ireland to talk to his students about how anthropologists make inferences about belief systems based on archaeological evidence.
“I do think an anthropologist without recent experiences navigating a different culture is potentially a boring one and that these experiences energize me and help to make my love of the material transparent,” he said.
Eric Anderson purifies himself before entering the Yaegaki Shrine in Matsue, believed to be the location of the first wedding in Japan between the kami spirits Susanoo and Inata-hime. People visit the shrine to look for En-musubi, the divine matchmaking force believed to bind people together.
Exploring Japan
The idea of visiting Japan and studying Shintoism first developed when Anderson was struggling to come up with examples of animism — the belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence — that would resonate with students.
“Then I just asked them if anybody had watched any of the Hayao Miyazaki films like ‘Spirited Away’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ and a bunch of hands shot up,” Anderson said. “I started talking about animism in relation to those films and the students got really interested in it.”
Seeing how engaged his students became in the topic, combined with his own long-standing fascination with Shintoism and Buddhism as religious forms, Anderson’s vision for a sabbatical proposal began to take shape.
“One of my favorite things just for intellectual stimulation and to lecture on is to talk to students about how there’s this notion that religions are fully formed and all these ideas come down as one coherent whole,” Anderson said. “Whereas all religions actually have really long, complicated histories and Shintoism and Buddhism are good examples of that.”
“One of the things I want to have students know is that you can go to these places. That the world is open to them and I don’t think anything else competes with travel in terms of opening your eyes.”
— Eric Anderson
Anderson spent most of his sabbatical exploring the central part of Honshu, Japan’s largest and most populous island.
He planned visits to many of Shintoism’s most important shrines, such as , one of Japan’s oldest and the place where, once a year, all the several million kami (deities or spirits venerated in the Shinto religion) are believed to gather.
Yet in the course of his extensive walks, Anderson happened across others that he had never heard of.
While exploring Kyoto, for example, he came across the , an oddly-shaped rock with a hole in the middle believed to house a kami with the power to either end a bad relationship or start a good one.
“You have all these young women that were lined up in a really long line and there’s a hold down at the base that you can barely pass though,” Anderson said. “If you want to secure a relationship with someone then you pass through it one direction, and you write down on a piece of paper what your wishes are and stick it to the rock and so this big rock is completely covered in these wishes.”
Or, for those looking to end a relationship, they go through the shrine in the opposite direction.
“Whether they really thought this was happening because of a kami, they’re engaging in the ritual,” Anderson said.
Eric and Chandra Anderson in front of the famed Floating Torii on the island of Miyajama at low tide. Built in 1148, the Floating Torii serves as the gateway to the Itsukushima-Jinja shrine.
While most Japanese don’t consider themselves particularly religious, he noted there’s been a recent resurgence in interest among the nation’s younger people in visiting shrines and participating in traditional rituals. One day while doing a hike to a series of several temples and shrines, Anderson and wife kept encountering a group of six young women and eventually struck up a conversation with them while waiting for a train at the end of the hike.
“Basically, what they do for their vacations is they visit different shrines and pray at them,” he said. “With young people, maybe it’s wanting some spirituality in their life or maybe it’s just a hobby or they think these shrines are pretty but it’s really interesting to see that development.”
One of the final and most meaningful experiences of his sabbatical was a home stay with a Shinto priest, or oshi, who maintains Fuijisan Sengen shrine at the base of Mount Fuji, the traditional starting point for those climbing the mountain.
“The house we stayed in is 450 years old and the oshi is the 19th generation of his family to maintain this shrine,” Anderson said. “Before going up the mountain, people come to the shrine to worship and honor the kami believed to inhabit Mount Fuji.”
While there used to be many more shrines in the area, many have shut down. Yet the oshi at Fuijisan Sengen has persisted.
“He’s still doing it in a traditional way, which was wonderful to experience,” he said. “There are so many things that go into restoring these shrines so there a great need for people, like the oshi I stayed with, who have these skills but there are fewer and fewer of them. So if you’re worried about cultural preservation that’s a significant issue.”
Eric and Chandra Anderson, left, pose for a photo with a 19th generation oshi (Shinto priest) and his wife, with whom they did a homestay. The house, built 450 years ago, is offered by the oshi for Fuji-ko, pilgrims to Mt. Fuji, to pray and participate in rituals of purification.
Anderson said he’ll always treasure the opportunity to have tea with the oshi and ask questions about his work maintaining the shrine — and its future.
“He’s got one son and he’s made it clear to his son that he doesn’t have to do this,” Anderson said. “But he’s also like, I sure hope he does, because they want the tradition of this shrine to continue.”
Anderson plans to bring what he learned about Shintoism and Buddhism while in Japan into two of the anthropology courses he teaches.
“Both for the Survey of Anthropology class and for the class we cover religion and culture, so for those two-and-a-half week sections I’m going to be using a whole bunch of fresh examples from my sabbatical,” he said.
Ultimately, he hopes his own enthusiasm for learning and appreciating different cultures will rub off on his students.
“I didn’t grow up with parents who took me places, I just looked at National Geographic magazine and said ‘I want to go to those places’,” Anderson said. “One of the things I want to have students know is that you can go to these places. That the world is open to them and I don’t think anything else competes with travel in terms of opening your eyes.”
Story by Dustin Wunderlich, director of community relations. Photos provided by Eric Anderson.