Dancing Toward Democracy— publics and multiculturalism

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Taking the side of cultural essentialists, one could argue that a strong public sphere, particularly in the current global world system, would simply erase cultural differences, and moot any claim of authentic multiculturalism. Why talk about cultural differences while the public sphere promotes global cultural uniformity? In answer to this argument, I would again return to Kyoto.

A public community like that of the Higashi-kujo Madang—where traditional cultural practices have been subjected to internal critiques that make them a part of the community's reflexively organized repertoire of cultural articulations—provides us with an alternative form of community, one where still-unique cultural practices are actively promoted but also actively critiqued internally.

It is this internal dialogic that opens up the community without surrendering its own unique logic and practices. In the process, these practices and their logics are stripped of their legacies of exclusion and inequality. This means that some “traditional” practices may not be preserved¹. What is abandoned are those practices that do not survive this internal reflexive critique. What remains are cultural contents that serve the entire community, and that the community can use to both articulate its uniqueness and its place in the larger public sphere.

One might be tempted to say that a public community is a relatively weak social group, in that it does not, and will not, rely upon some essentializing narrative that is above critique, from which it can build an exclusive right of membership. It lacks the rigid identity boundary that other, traditional, communities spend so much effort maintaining. In fact its membership will be more of a voluntary association, even where membership is predicated, in part, on a well-defined claim of heritage.

“Koreanness” means many things in Kyoto. Within the Higashi-kujo community this no longer connotes an essential blood-tie to Korean ancestry, although many individuals in the community can make this claim. It is the public desire to be “Korean” in Kyoto where this desire seems so improbable, that marks this community and its counter-public event.

Strong communities

Take a final look at the climax of the first Higashi-kujo Madang. Remember that the participants are all volunteers, and that the dance is spontaneous, although it realizes one of the goals of the event. This climactic reversal of the disciplinary space of the Japanese public schoolyard by a group of people who live literally on the margins of Kyoto shows the strength that a public community can have. Nothing like this had happened in Kyoto in as many years as people could remember. And if the event had been suppressed after this one performance, it would still have achieved its goal. For here we can see how The festival performs what it proposes. It is through these moments of performance that a public community builds, and reflexively knows its strength.

I would submit that the Higashi-kujo Madang community, and public communities in general, are not weakened by their voluntary membership. They are strong enough to not make any boundary claim for membership, strong enough to welcome internal critiques, strong enough to open up to competing articulations, and strong enough to add its own cultural content and an additional critical apparatus to the public sphere. But again, the question would arise, is this still a “community” or has it become something else, say, a social movement?

Take a final look at this spectacle production, which in its own way exhibits the pinnacle of modern mass spectacle, and of communal terror. Here uniform obedience, and rigid conformity is used to show the strength of “the community” in order to further intimidate its own population and others. But strength here is a simple equation of armed might and enforced discipline. Such a group remains strong only as long as discipline can be enforced. And like a pyramid scheme, it promotes the interests of insiders by demoting the lives of others, a strategy that slowly uses up the resources of potential alterity. There is no possibility for enclusion in this community. [Nazi Gathering]

Something of both, I would say, returning to the moments that define the community's practices. There is a moment when it celebrates its becoming a community, the moment of ENclusion. This is the time when it most resembles a traditionalist community. At this moment the group may front the same historical, ethnic practices as other, traditionalist communities. It may thus resemble a tradition-bounded group. However, by including strangers, it avoids the exclusionary logic of traditional communities. And in the next moment, when it opens up to an internal dialogic, when it creates the ground for inclusivity within the public sphere, it becomes something like a social movement.

Hundreds of hours of meetings, rehearsals, and conversations are all a part of producing the Higashi-kujo Madang. Before and after the event the conduct of these meetings and the performance of the festival is open to a variety of critiques. The potential for novelty is always present, and changes in the madang geki and other elements of the event are made until the last day.
Photo by author

These twin moments are managed internally by passing the traditional practices through ongoing internal critiques, and also by evaluating these critiques not from the perspective of traditional authority, but rather by applying notions of equality either directly from the public sphere² or out of an experience of exclusion from the public sphere.

The combination of these two moments give a public community the cultural coherence of a traditionalist community and also democratic legitimacy within a public sphere. The place for ethnicity within the public sphere finds added legitimacy when ethnic communities choose to add this second moment of reflexive critique. In part this is so because it enables all individuals in the community to speak out, instead of reserving this right for a delegated few. And in part this is so because the resulting internal discourse has already become a “public” discussion within the group, and is now focused on concerns that are relevant to the wider public. The lessons that the group acquires from the public sphere are advanced through this internal discourse and so become lessons of value to the public sphere. The student, often by painful necessity—the lack of justice teaches a harsh lesson—outpaces its tutor. The problem then becomes that of teaching the tutor to listen. And here is where festival performance becomes a tool, a tactic for reversing the lessons of exclusion.

The call for diversity within the public sphere is at once an opening to multiple voices and a demand for reflexive democratic processes that extend from the state to communities to the family. Through their own internal democratic struggles, public communities legitimize their collective voice within the public sphere.

something to say

Through their call for the respect of heterogeneity (ishitsusei) as a fundamental aspect of human rights, the Higashi-kujo Madang community opens a counter-public critique of Kyoto's (and Japan's) exclusively “Japanese” public sphere. Out of their experience of social, political, economic, and cultural exclusion from lifescapes in Kyoto, they have acquired a keen sense about practices that create exclusion while professing equality. The lessons they learned from the public sphere were lessons about what not to do when forming their own community. I would say that they learned these lessons very well, and the resulting Higashi-kujo Madang event and community is a civics lesson from the margin, a lesson of real value to other communities in Kyoto, Japan and elsewhere.

There remains a question that is large in the context of this work: why did the community organize itself around a festival? And how did the festival create the space of the community? Above, I mentioned that Habermas’s solution for the “degradation” of the public sphere was impaired by his inadequate (actually, it was more outdated) linguistics. So too, current theories of the consequences of modernity require a more adequate model of public spaces and public events and the expressive practices that put these two together in time and space on the street.

The practices and the lessons of Higashi-kujo are not only performing what they propose, and creating new expressive openings and counter memories for this neighborhood, they are useful in reflecting on how democracy requires its own performances. The above ex-position, like its festival object, is only the beginning of a longer, multi-site study of festivals in public—a topic from which cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, and cultural studies would all benefit.

¹ For if the preservation of a community's cultural practices is also an alibi for maintaining gender or other inequalities, then the stage is set for a confrontation between a strong public sphere and the interests of those in the community served by the maintenance of these inequalities.

²This brings up the larger problem of a bourgeois public sphere. What people learn from this type of public sphere are logics of fairness and equality that may be critiqued as exclusionary. The most visible example is gender inequality.