Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 1, Panel
Panel organiser: Rupert Cox (University of Manchester )
This panel investigates some of the ways in which the past is preserved, represented and consumed in Japan; analysing in particular the roles of oral testimonies, material forms and visual and acoustic media in socially constructed historical narratives.
Rosemarie Bernard ( School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan)
In 'The Future of Nostalgia', Svetlana Boym categorizes modes of nostalgia and their ways of memory-making as either reflexive (such as nostalgia associated with personal experience) or as un-reflexive (such as nostalgia associated with nationalistic memory). In her model, these are few or no spaces in which these two kinds of nostalgia might intersect. In this paper I will explore the workings of nostalgia at Ise Jingu's periodic rites of renewal, as the ceremonies are mediated by television. The Shikinen Sengu rites constitute an elaborate ritual process that has been managed by priesthoods since the 7th century AD, that has been documented carefully--as well as protected by secrecy---, and that has been subjected to institutional nostalgic waves of purification since the 19th century. With the advent of television in the 1950s begins the possibility of bringing a critical, democratizing eye towards Ise Jingu and its ceremonies; yet the televised programming about Ise seldom achieves that in productions both un- reflexive and filled with Nihonjinron narrative. One of the questions I wish to raise is how any kind of reflexive nostalgia is possible in a place like Ise Jingu, given its conservatism. With due attention to the political economy of these issues, I will suggest that reflexive nostalgia, alongside non- reflexive nostalgia, does occupy an important place within the religious bureaucracy of Ise and its management of the ritual system. But I also show that complex nostalgias and modes of memory-making within the priesthood, ironically, do not translate into reflexivity in television programming by NHK and other 'democratizing forces' known as 'the media'. This may raise several questions for those interested in ritual and in Japan, among which are the following: how forgetting and nostalgic memory-making are especially complex and rich when one is dealing with ritual, even of the highly structured Shinto kind; and also how a stale sort of linearity in 'the media', in Japan and other places, despite the potential of television or the internet, for example, to exploit virtual reference, makes for representations that are devoid of imagination, metaphor and, hence, reflexive nostalgia.
Lisa Kuly (Cornell University)
This paper is a study of the use of ritual as a device to produce regional memory in the Hanamatsuri festival of Aichi Prefecture. The paper is based on ethnographic field research by the author (including detailed visual materials) in January 2001 and again in December 2002-January 2003, a careful reading of the scant but extant ethnographic records generated by Japanese folklorists, and the primary texts associated with the festival. The Hanamatsuri is a complex, multi-layered ritual associated with the end of the year, the New Year, and the revitalization of the world. It is also very much a festival that simultaneously constructs regional identity through a careful manipulation of the elements of the festival. Mapping the local onto the national is a significant concern that has been generated out of this festival. The most noted ethnographer of the festival, Hayakawa Kōtarō (1889 –1956) is the main proponent of this creation of regional identity, skillfully shaping the cultural memory of the local constituents through his ethnographic exploration of the festival. Significantly, Kōtarō grew up in the region where the festival is performed, thus he aggressively attempts to control how his community views the festival and how it is seen by outsiders. At its most basic level, this paper explores how the annual ritual of the Hanamatsuri can be read as a text for understanding the manipulation of regional memory, with a focus on how local identity is grafted onto national identity. In a larger sense, this paper participates in the academic inquiry in Japanese religious studies into how ritual and popular religion contribute to the construction of cultural memory.Arne Røkkum (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
In a shamanically inspired ambience of oral discourse of the South Ryukyus, the human subject is conceived of as responsive to two kinds of out-of-body of impulses: (a) those originating in a this world of sunka – “of today” – and (b) those originating in a that world of nunka – “of yesterday.” Priestesses (of bush shrines and Origin Houses) are bearers of material relics of the past and officiants of year-cycle ritual. They address the sunka by restraining their sexuality, diet, and ritual cuisine to such an extent that they can make the reproductive energies of the past a matter of the present. The mostly female shamans, by contrast, carry out life-crisis ritual for individual clients, and they address the nunka by using meat sacrifices as exchange mediums. They purge places and objects of lingering, disembodied human sentiment. Any moment, in this outlook, can leave a person in a lapse between the progressive – the life giving forces of sunka – and the regressive – the pull by the dead, the forces of nunka. The ritual task carried out by the shamans is one of reversing the sunka-nunka interface. They punctuate time by punctuating sentiment, and the paper describes this as one way of indexicalizing a difference between present and past.