Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 7B, Session
chair: Joy Hendry (Oxford Brookes University)
Simon Kaner (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures)
The archaeological record of settlement in the prehistoric Japanese archipelago provides an unparalleled dataset for understanding how non-literate societies expressed a sense of temporality through their material culture. Extensive broad scale excavations allow the detailed reconstruction of the occupational histories of buildings, settlements and landscapes. The recent "boom" in Jomon archaeology in particular has also seen a new relationship between contemporary populations in Japan and what are now widely regarded as their prehistoric "ancestors". This paper will explore how this relationship is being constructed, and how this new sense of affinity with the distant past is being developed and influenced by the need for a renewed sense of historical identity. Examples will be presented including Jomon settlements and historical parks.
Andrew D. Brydon (Manchester University)
The transaction in contemporary artworks and aesthetic ideas between Japan and the UK has a history as old as the avant-garde movement itself and the associated claim of an autonomous aesthetic. This paper aims to address the influence of not only those who create and select works of art but also those essential "cultural brokers" who negotiate the fine line between Japanese and Global Art. Central to the paper is the claim that any piece of work can at once be considered authentically Japanese whilst also being part of an autonomous aesthetic - a claim which appears to present a contradiction. British art spaces, which claim to be operating in a global field of cultural production, still demand a degree of "Japaneseness" of the work, similarly, organizations such as The Japan Foundation offer exhibitions of "Japanese Art" whilst claiming to be a valid voice in the autonomous aesthetic. Traditional debates attempting to account for this seeming inconsistency fall broadly into two camps; those which evaporate it in discussions of globalization and those which erase it in rhetoric of post-modernity. In both cases, however, the relationships struck between the social actors involved are subsumed in the grand theoretical rhetoric of aesthetics or deconstruction. Using an ethnographic approach I aim to illustrate the construction of contemporary Japanese visual arts through the anthropological understanding of gifting reciprocities used as a means of negotiating the identities of individuals, institutions and culture; an approach which resists the contradiction when understood from a Japanese perspective.
Leonor Leiria (Oxford Brookes University)
This paper aims to develop how different temporal experiences in Europe and in Japan may influence methods of conservation, challenging the natural ageing of objects in an attempt to create tangible forms of memory. I will illustrate the subject with examples of Namban lacquerware that become a token of cross-cultural encounters between European and Japanese during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. This issue will be developed in three main vectors: First, I will begin by addressing the question: what is worth of memory? Then, following Gell's assumption of a single time that can be experienced "(.) in many different cultural and ethnographic contexts, and can be understood with the aid of many different analytical frame works" (Gell 1992:315), I will examine how traces left on the materiality of objects during different stages of their life-span influence forms of transmission and ways of perception of Namban lacquerware according to their contexts. Second, taking back to the point that the past is unreachable and based on Connerton's notion of collective memory (Connerton 1989), I will seek to further our understanding on the ways Namban lacquerware have been recalled in collective memories. Furthermore, examples will be given on how remembrance have been storing over time. Third, I will provide an overview of forms of destruction of material evidences through iconoclasm as a way to erase undesirable memories, by developing Forty's suggestion, "(.) how one might start to think about the relationship between material objects and collective forgetting" (Forty 2003:2). Finally, the way intercultural past events are materialized in the form of revivalisms or, in attempting to create permanent memorials will be considered.