Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 4A, Panel (continuation)
Panel organiser: Rupert Cox (Manchester University )
Edwina Palmer (School of Languages and Cultures, University of Canterbury)
This paper will aim to trace the ritual significance of balls, beads, jewels and boulders (all called tama) in Japan from Jomon (Neolithic) times, through sympathetic magic with their homonym for 'spirit' or 'soul' (tama[shii]). Beads are associated with shamanic practices in many parts of the world, and Japan was clearly no exception. It has been suggested that of the three items of the Imperial Regalia-mirror, sword and jewel, the mirror and sword as symbols of kingship originated in the north of the Asian continent and entered Japan along with metal-working technology during the Yayoi Period (ca. 500 B.C. - A.D. 250). The 'jewel', actually a bead, appears to have ritual significance from much earlier than this in Japan. That of the Imperial Regalia is probably a magatama, or comma-shaped bead, which is peculiar to Japan. The present paper explores some practices associated with it, through the archaeological record and through references in Japanese myths I suggest Southeast Asian roots for this artefact and its associated beliefs. The association of spiritual and magical powers with balls, etc, persisted in folktales until the modern era, and has re-emerged in the present in some recent Japanese animated cartoons.
James-Henry Holland (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York)
This paper investigates the ways that narratives and “memories” of tea objects are used to create communities of shared knowledge among elite practitioners of tea.
For a beginning student of the tea ceremony, it is understood as a performing art, full of detailed etiquette. For elite practitioners, however, each tea gathering is thought of as a compelling puzzle which requires focused attention on the works of art used to prepare and serve the tea, such as the iron kettle or tea bowl. The host assembles the utensils in terms of the allusive references that each piece can convey, and often ties these allusions into an overarching theme for the gathering. Each allusion is designed for the particular individuals who will attend. The guests, accordingly, apply various kinds of knowledge to discern the unspoken pattern. The allusions I call “public” can be understood by anyone with enough learning and creativity. Those I call “private” or “personal” refer to shared stories of the host and the individual guest, and are often opaque to other guests. Host and guest co-create meaning by what they choose to foreground, recognize, and discuss in relation to the allusions. In this paper, I will describe the types of allusions typically created by a host, how material objects become invested with multiple layers of meaning, and how the charisma of these remembered symbols makes and maintains community. In many ways, the tea world is an interesting case study for considering the literature on cultural memory, including ritualized exchange, commodification of memory, and biography of the thing. I hope to use these tools to open tea studies in productive ways.
James E. Nickum, Tokyo Jogakkan College
Drawing primarily upon my personal observations as a resident for two years (2001 – 2003) and archival information, together with a limited number of interviews with long-term residents, I explore Honmoku as a suburban palimpsest. Honmoku is administratively a part of Yokohama’s Naka Ward but in part because of its isolated geographical conditions has always been a sort of suburban periphery of the city, just off of the map. As such it has undergone a number of dramatic erasures and reconstructions, some of them shared with the core (colonial namings, the Kanto earthquake, the saturation bombing in spring 1945) and others more specific to its near-peripheral status (recreational area, Sankeien, US military housing, enclosure of the shore and displacement of aquaculture to serve a globalized economy, and more recent redevelopment under modernist redevelopment). While this work is grounded in the ethnographic particularities of what is (and no longer is) in this particular site now, it is clear that Honmoku provides both a window into Japan’s modern history and a possible base for comparison with cultural landscape studies and the politics of memory elsewhere, especially in contemporary Germany.