Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 8B, Session
chair: Margarita Winkel (University of Leiden)
Brenda Danet (Emerita, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yale University)
Writing, especially the writing of waka, 31-syllable poems, was an important aspect of everyday life in the Heian court. Courtiers cultivated a fine calligraphic hand, wrote letters to lovers and friends, shared spontaneously composed poems interpersonally in real time, prepared poems for contests, and captured personal experience in private monologic poems. This paper examines everyday writing practice and writing implements in Heian times not in art-historical terms, but through the lens of an ethnographer of communication, interested in the history and functions of writing and in its materiality. I argue that students of Japanese art and literature tend to idealize these practices. The paper asks: how did Heian courtiers write so much and so often, given the many logistic obstacles they faced? What were these logistic obstacles? What writing implements did they use? What difficulties might arise when courtiers wanted to write when away from home-e.g., while visiting at a shrine or while traveling? What solutions and improvisations did they invent to overcome these obstacles? Is there evidence, for instance, for the beginnings of portable writing equipment? On what materials did they write when scarce paper was not available? This analysis aspires to reconstruct everyday writing practice in the Heian court via evidence from texts such as poetic diaries (The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, etc.) and The Tale of Genji; depictions in visual art (early scrolls); and surviving material appurtenances of writing stored in the Shoso-in and elsewhere.
Daniela Tan (Ostasiatisches Seminar, University of Zürich)
The recent discussion about globalization and new cultural phenomena is directly linked to the trend of localization, which is seen as a search for identity in local culture and ritual. The work of the Japanese writer Oba Minako can be seen as an early statement to this subject. Using her texts as source, this study tries to trace up the complicated processes of finding one's place in a world of multiple identities: in the native culture of Alaska Indians, in the small world of the oversea Japanese and the Russian immigrants of the rural village community, and last but not least the question of gendered identities. Besides the inspiring aspects of this multicultural environment, Oba writes about experiencing one's own foreignness as an immigrant and as a woman. Questioning her own state of being within these predefined settings, she feels attracted by the stories and the art objects of the native population of Alaska, which seem to reflect a different coexistence of nature and human beings. Her interest in native culture leads her to adapt their tales and intertwine them with her own storytelling.