Participatory Filmmaking Among Contemporary Shugendō Practitioners: Representing an Esoteric Tradition in an Accessible Documentary Film
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the late 1970s rising interrelated interests in Japanese mountain asceticism, Esoteric Buddhism and “New Age” spirituality and healing were spurred by oil shocks and concerns about the fragility of human and ecological health during a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. When the bubble economy burst in the 1990s, certain individuals shifted focus to inner rather than outer wealth and to greater quality of life over income. They found a growing body of print, audio-visual and on-line media produced by charismatic Shugendō priests Tanaka Riten and Tateishi Kōshō, who condensed and abbreviated traditional ascetic mountain initiation rituals of Shugendō (literally “The Way of Acquiring Power”). They adapted these practices to suit the needs and work schedules of busy urban lay participants. In 2007 filmmaker Jean-Marc Abela and I traveled to Yoshino and Shingu (south of Kyoto) to create a participatory documentary film, Shugendō Now. By disseminating research about the experiences of Shugendō priests and lay practitioners in an accessible documentary and Ph.D. thesis, we have sought to contribute to a new understanding of how a mountain ascetic tradition is being creatively reinvented in the 21st Century. Bringing a camera and professional filmmaker into the field and seeking direction and feedback from research co-participants enabled unanticipated discoveries and my most productive and collaborative fieldwork experiences to date.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".