There are some words in this work that deserve extra attention. These are sometimes Japanese words and other times technical terms that are used in a manner consonant with their usual meanings, but perhaps with some added attention to how these meanings are assembled. A few are new words that the author hopes will add value to how social scientists describe social action. The reader will normally encounter each word’s description as a link from the main ethnographic text, and then return (using their browser’s “BACK” button) to the ethnographic text. There is a navigation bar on the bottom of the descriptions that allow the reader to wander directly from word to wordwithout returning to the main text.
“Atarimae” is a word with two related meanings: the first is “proper; right; just; fair... reasonable, natural...deserved, merited, due” (Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary). The second meaning is “common; ordinary; average; normal; usual (ibid).” Atarimae literally means “in front of the hit.” It is something so usual, so normal, so proper that it is absolutely
a priori. Atarimae describes those aspects of everyday life that are so expectable that they need no attention: it describes all of the aspects of everyday life that are a part of the undesigned mode of (Goffman’s)
Umwelt.
Something that must be said right off: There is no such thing as a “
burakumin.”
“‘Japan is now a highly educated and fairly “intelligent” society, much more so than America, where intelligence on the average is still very low. In America, there are many Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.’”
1986, Nakasone Yasuhiro,
then Prime Minister of Japan.
quoted in Coates 1990,p1
The term “
buraku” in Japan marks a place, a neighborhood, a district that is set outside of the remainder of Japanese places, neighborhoods and districts. The term “
min” or “
minzoku” means “people” or “race.” (“
Minzokugaku” is the term used for “ethnology,” and “
minzoku kokka” is the term for “nation-state”—and so essentializing “nation” as a racially determined group). To apply the term “
min” to the place “
buraku” is to already accept that the stigma of the place can be located as well within the bodies of the people who dwell there. It calls into being a “race” of people defined by
buraku residence. It connects a history of spatial segregation to the bodies of current residents of these segregated spaces. As I will be discussing how this connection between space and bodies was made, I will not begin by asserting this nominally.
This preamble to a description of places that are called
buraku (or
toshoku buraku) in Japan shifts the primary focus from the western notion of stigma, which is always first attached to bodies, and only then by their presence to spaces (e.g., ghettos). But I do not, by this, wish to suggest that the bodies of persons who have been forced to dwell in
buraku areas are not also intimately affected by this circumstance. And there is an entire essentialist discourse that naturalizes the historical and current reasons for separation of people from the “general” population of an equally essentialized Japanese “race.”
The discourse surrounding the term “
buraku” starts with the idea of physical separation as its primary cause. The people who were resettled in these separate places are also
made different by their history of separation. And now it is this difference that gives their continued separation added legitimacy in the imaginations of those who continue to make this distinction.
The term “
buraku” is a designation that once meant simply a “hamlet,” a generally applicable term for a small-scale residential unit, widely used throughout Japan before the Tokugawa (1603-1868) period. Today
buraku refers mainly to those “hamlets” where shunned, stigmatized individuals and their families were put, that is, they were either directly sentenced to dwell there by an official order, or migrated there as the only available destination when they were pushed out of other circumstances. Over hundreds of years, families in Japan’s
buraku neighborhoods have been serving the punishment of their ancestor’s original crimes—sometimes this was the crime of coming in from the outside, from Tohoku, say, other times it was something more local, an indiscretion severe enough to force the family from their locale through a process of
murahachibu (shunning).
Buraku are those far-away places that “bad people,” or people who simply looked or acted different (congenital physical or mental disorders marked persons in this way) found themselves banished to. But they were not far away, but close by, where all could watch the ongoing depravation that their residential “sentence” produced.
Histories of confinement
The wedding of the Japanese Crown Prince in 1993 renewed the discourse on the purity of the imperial heritage and with this the concomitant discourse on the impurity of the heritage of “others,” most directly (although never mentioned in the press) the latter includes Japanese persons living in buraku areas. This photo, reproduced from the program of the 4th Higashiyama
buraku liberation meeting, was used to illustrate the intimate connection between these logics of hereditary exclusion.
To start to understand Kyoto’s
buraku, you have to begin with a history of institutional control over space. The notion of law enforcement and punishment in Tokugawa (1603-1868) Japan includes several practices, the logics of which can be still traced in current practices, working either directly in modern society (such as the Imperial Household), or through their supposed reversal but continued marking (such as equal rights measures for women and Japanese living in
buraku areas) as significant features where the discourse is silenced, but the practice is active.
The social ecology of outcasting, and of marking marginal persons in pre-modern Japan created a class/caste economy that out-grouped those who could not muster the wherewithal to keep up with the marketplace. The penalties of falling behind one's neighbors were truly extreme. More than any other condition, this yawning gulf between those who have some socio-economic stability and those sinking into the oblivion of
hinin status produced the desire for middle-class status in Japan. The sentence of this out-grouping punishment was designed to run in perpetuity, an expression of the implied longevity of social contracts which still carries great weight in Kyoto.
The fact also that the
buraku were not remote islands, but rather, sub-urban prison-hamlets, made their inhabitants (
hinin (outcaste)) visible signs of the downside of social bad-behavior. Their poverty and the jobs they were allowed to do (cleaning up everybody’s shit, and tanning and working leather, disposing of dead bodies) added an ongoing stigma to their ancestor’s “original sin,” now long forgotten.
And their social isolation and collective guilt over time fed rumors that these were a different kind of people. I have heard this difference expressed as a difference in the consistency of their blood, for example, (which, I was told, was believed by some to be “thicker” than that of “Japanese” people).
Of course, the move to a representation of the Japanese government as a democratic state in the 19th century, made official discrimination dangerous to announce, although lists of each and every
buraku address in the nation have long been available to companies and investigators, and Japan’s formal residence registration requirements (one of many pre-occupation regulations that have never been eased) makes it impossible for a family to simply move away from the
buraku and forget the past. No one, it seems, is really willing to forget, even though the government makes a point of expressing its desire to bring equality to all its citizens.
After 1910 when Koreans began to enter Western Japan in large numbers, many of them were housed not in company dormitories (with the rest of the workers), but in boarding houses in
buraku areas. And so the history of the buraku and that of resident-Koreans have, in Higashi-kujo, coalesced into a collective predicament. In terms of their cultural geography, Koreans living in Higashi-kujo burakus find themselves twice removed: being of an alien nationality and living in a highly marked, stigmatized neighborhood. And so, in Kyoto, and elsewhere in this region of Japan, Japanese and Koreans living in and near
buraku areas find common complaints about social discrimination and lifestyle problems.
The more recent history of
buraku politics and social movements has been summarized by Neary (1989) and Noguchi (1990). Ongoing efforts by
buraku organizations in Kyoto
1 (e.g., Buraku Liberation Research, Higashiyama Executive Committee,
burakumondai o kangaerukai [Meeting to Consider the Buraku Problem]# 4, 1994) and elsewhere highlight the fact that, despite official silence over their situation, the fundamental circumstances that have long characterized their out-caste condition have not been addressed.
Many of these practices are spatial in their effects, and they include relationships between neighbors as well as those between individuals and the state. For example, social control— formally managed for three centuries, mostly informal since 1945—in Japan has long been based on the practice of assigning individuals to groups which could then be held jointly responsible (and liable for punishment) for the actions of any one member. The resulting “cooperation” and “trust” between members of these groups, aspects of local social life that are often showcased as representative of harmonious life becomes cruelly ironic, as both cooperation and trust, in the usual sense of these terms, require voluntary participation. And this, in turn, requires a space for voluntary non-participation. Looking at individuals with no choice but to “cooperate,” in the groups they are connected to, and with constant surveillance as a hedge on “trust,” it is difficult to measure the possibility that, under circumstances where voluntary association (and disassociation) were possible, one might still find cooperation and trust, despite Fukuyama’s (1995) simplistic pronouncement of Japan as a “high-trust” society.
During the Tokugawa
bakufu, five-person groups
2 (
gonin gumi) (
ibid, 6) linked neighbors to each other as potential informants (one could only save one's own neck by individually and preemptively prompting an official investigation of a suspected infraction) and as a group that was officially complicit in any infraction of the rules. Surveillance become the duty every person against their neighbors, and out-grouping became a tactic for mutual protection. Preemptive ostracism (
murahachibu) of troublesome neighbors was probably safer than any later confession to authorities, who were still in a position to administer group punishment (
renza).
It is the arbitrary imposition of group culpability that lends terror to this exercise of power. And this terror, reflected by the group in its own internal policing, remains a shadow feature of modern neighborhood organizations (
chounaikai). Before WWII these were also organized as “
tonarigumi” [neighbor groups] five household units (every house is connected to the two across the street and the neighbors on either side) that served a self-surveilling function much like the earlier Tokugawa
gonin gumi, but with added emphasis on the control of expressions in regard to official, national doctrine
3.
“
Kumi resemble the wartime
tonarigumi, the neighbor groups that were banned under the Occupation in 1947 because they were seen as fundamentally undemocratic and tainted by their intimate links to wartime mobilization and social control. Though residents of Miyamoto-cho sometimes refer to
kumi as
tonarigumi, the
kumi of today have none of the powers of coercion and control exercised by the wartime
tonarigumi, such as collective responsibility for members’ behavior, control over the distribution of foodstuffs and other basic necessities of life, and formal statutory links to the state apparatus
(Bestor 1989, 170) .”
Counter-doctrinaire expressions could be dangerous to the entire group, and neighbors were charged with monitoring such matters. While legal guilt and punishment is no longer meted out
en masse to neighbors or family, the relationships that neighborhood organizations manage retain an informally obligatory (rather than voluntary) force. And the city uses these organizations to broadcast its own version of how the city is managing its affairs. The
chounaikai are still responsible to see that official notices are read by every household, and that other information (on public health, say, or about cultural resources) has reached each family. While urbanization has removed the economic threat of shunning (most people live at some distance from their job site), social relationships in the neighborhood can become strained, and bad feelings can persist for many years.
The use of shunning (
murahachibu) to punish—with the aim of driving out—a difficult neighbor before they might attract official notice (or for other reasons), gave local village organizations their own means of control. For losing one's official residence meant that the entire family would become homeless (
mushuku) and potentially assigned (a process known as
hinin teka) to outcaste (
hinin) status and thus liable to be “sentenced” to reside in a specified hinin village (
buraku), or some other confined locale. This change in status was not confined to the person or generation that first occasioned the original ostracism, but extended in perpetuity.
The result of expulsion from, or lack of integration into established residential groups was a status known as
hinin. Even earlier than the Tokugawa era in Japan, there were persons and groups who were so out-casted. The reasons given for this practice are many and their margins fuzzy. Neary (1989) notes that an occupational
4 stigma (based on Buddhist notions of defilement) surrounding the handling of bodies or excrement of animals or humans was one feature of these areas.
Other groups, such as those who had been captured during conquests of outlying regions, or itinerant entertainers, filled a marginal zone of quasi outcaste status. But it was only when the land itself was measured and its tenure noted that the means of escaping this stigma became problematic. It was through the controls placed on residence and movement across the land that those who had no could were trapped by their lack of property.
Hinin were also workers in the penal system, from guarding prisoners to disposing of their beheaded corpses. And beggers, who were required to register during Tokugawa times (De Vos, 26), filled a liminal stage between
ryoumin (good people) and
senmin (lowly people).
The spatial availability of
buraku as receptacles of those who had lost their residences through shunning or through economic reversals in the early decades of the agricultural market economy facilitated the production of such homeless people, by removing them from the locales they formerly occupied. These
burakus, many of which are still maintained through a combination of official inattention, bureaucratic marking, and (unofficial) social stigma, are the spatial outcome of the confluence of economic inequality under early capitalism and social/political controls levied directly or by proxy by the Tokugawa
bakufu government.
Reaching again into the tool box of anthropology, I would like to bring up a notion that has had broad application in this field: the idea of “domestication.” Victor Turner (1969, 42) turned to “domestication” to describe the use of symbols during rituals to render safe what were formerly dangerous emotions among the Ndembu; while Susan Sontag (1966) noted that modernity seems to verge between two impulses: surrender to the exotic, and the domestication of the unknown, of the exotic, mostly by science.
Marcus and Fischer's (1986) comments on anthropology as cultural critique bring up an inverse notion: that of defamiliarization, of making exotic what had previously or elsewhere been domesticated. In his 1987 article on cricket in contemporary India, Arjun Appadurai commented on how cricket, one of the “hardest” of British cultural forms, has been domesticated within India. And we cannot overlook the literature on gender and the domestication of women.
In other fields, Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 13) accuse the Oedipal impulse (at the service of society) of domesticating our very desires. Finally, Zygmont Bauman (1990) warns us that the domestication of space by the nation replaces the means that individuals and local communities formerly domesticated their own neighborhoods--making us incapable of telling friend from enemy--and thus ultimately failing as a mode of domestication.
The national space, Bauman notes, is too large a place to be familiar, and so we all live in unfamiliar surroundings that resist our attempts at local appropriation. No longer given the authority to domesticate our own locales, we are now subject to larger (in space and time) processes of market-state domestication. We are, ourselves, domesticated along with the places where we stroll and eat, work and play.
Robert Sack brings a related term “homogenization” to his discussion of national memorial spaces:
“The multifunctional character of some memorials makes them less than sacred. Even among nationally recognized memorials, there is no hierarchy of importance, as there would normally be among sacred places in an organized religion. And what power are these places supposed to possess? Certainly not the power of miracles or even of eliciting the truth (which was attributed to even minor Chinese city temples as late as the nineteenth century). This does not mean that such memorials do not work. They do evince shared and often strong sentiments in the form of common memories. But mostly they work by thinning out the meaning of the events and the place so that they can be shared quickly by a modern, heterogeneous society. People visit them not only to remember but to quickly and vicariously experience adventures of the past. In this sense, national memorials are more like generic tourist attractions and theme parks than they are like shrines and sacred places.
Eviscerating the power of the sacred is part of the general modern tendency to thin out culture and homogenize modern places. This tendency is supported by several modern conditions. One is that the use of the public, objective, geometrical meaning of space makes it difficult to convey the specific and emotional contents of place and thus tends naturally to emphasize their generic qualities. The same holds true of the scientific perspective. Another modern condition is the trend toward a global economy and culture, which seems to require that places all over the world contain similar or functionally related activities and that geographical differences or variations that interfere with these interactions be reduced. After all, if we live in a global village, then we must feel at home anywhere, and the simplest way of making us comfortable is to remove the strange and the unexpected. The thinning out and homogenizing of culture can be expected as a consequence of yet another important condition—modern mass communication, especially television. (Sack 1992, 95-96)”
This removal of “the strange and the unexpected” has another consequence: a coding of those things that are removed from the bourgeois public sphere as things that are irredeemably strange and unexpectable. The criminalization of recreational drug use is a widespread example of this, as are the various modes of homophobia.
I will use the term “domestication” in two main senses: the first is the hegemonic reading: a domesticated space is a place under paternalist control. A place that services its owners. The second meaning is that of “familiarity”-- the other space now joins the household, losing any exotic or dangerous meanings by this joining.
Domestication, in the two senses I use here—the creation of spaces both of the familial and the familiar—is a notion of some real value for anthropologists working in East Asia. It helps us see through the simulation of unity, and of history, to grasp the hybridity of places of local cultural production.
The domestication of Japanese history during Meiji hoped to cut the island off from its mainland cultural heritage, and the domestication of the West is today positioning the island somewhere off the coast of Europe. What we have to do, in our ethnographies, is to carefully avoid reifying the process of domestication, and work toward a better theoretical purchase on this process as it is found in various locales on the Pacific Rim.
The state and the market, often in concert, but increasingly with oblique goals, offer up cultural desires that share a common power aspect: they are beyond the control of the residents of the city, who are all treated like tourists, welcome to watch and spend, but not to act on their own. A domesticated national cultural place cannot be appropriated by local residents, it has already been reduced to a single meaning, and is closed to dialogic intervention.
So, it is not only the foreign, exotic space that is subject to domestication by the marketplace. Domestication also describes a process that produces places of the state from a former landscape of local spaces. The nation-state domesticates local histories (which are dangerous to national “unity”) into a single national history. But why do we tend to allow the state this process as a feature of its own production? And what are the tactics (in de Certeau's sense) that can re-hybridize a domesticated locale? This is a central problematic for my research.
Domesticated bodies
The other result of practices of domestication are domesticated bodies, bodies that are trained to act within the norms for self control. The presence of domesticated bodies in a space is vital to the ongoing domestication of the space. When all others in a space are behaving “appropriately,” the undomesticated body becomes marked and available to the attention of institutions that maintain surveillance (the police, local merchants, neighbors).
“ If some of the crowd's actions can be seen as countertheatre, this is by no means true of all. For a third characteristic of popular action was the crowd's capacity for swift direct action. To be one of a crowd, or a mob, was another way of being anonymous, whereas to be a member of a continuing organization was bound to expose one to detection and victimization. The eighteenth-century crowd well understood its capacities for action, and its own art of the Possible. Its successes must be immediate, or not at all. It must destroy these machines, intimidate these employers or dealers, damage that mill, enforce from their masters a subsidy of bread, untile that house, before troops came on the scene”
(Thompson 1993, 69).
When enough people find personal reasons to disattend to the “rules” of bodily domestication, then the tables turn, and it is the domesticated individual who becomes marked. The sudden turn that transforms a “crowd” into a “mob” is often mistakenly given as an example of this. But this transformation is more often a counter tactic with a direct, collective purpose in mind...and not well suited as an example of un-domestication. Undomestication, which occurs in festivals, is linked to an individual distancing from domestication, and is not liable to the “mass” effects that result in a mob.
So too, Buford’s (1992) accounts of riotous football (soccer) fans showed that they used their numbers to confound the usual police response to individual crimes, rushing
en masse into convenience stores and stealing absolutely everything, then using the empty racks to break the windows before rushing back out again onto the street. Like a flock of small birds distracting the hawk, the crowd enables lawlessness by submerging the individual into its mass.
Undomestication
I will take a better example from a work experience I had. In a large organization in which I was working as a writer there was a once a year “retreat” for all of the executives. This day-long event sent virtually all of the bosses off to a local resort for a day of pep-talks, strategizing, and conversation (later I became one of these and joined in this event). But that day was also a day when the remainder of the workers—the people who actually did most of the work in the office—were left unsupervised. Within an hour the entire space had been reinvented. Impromptu games (a football was tossed around until it broke a lamp) were assembled. People from different departments began to talk with one another, using the director’s office (with its plush furniture) as a base for gripes about the general office situation. Orders went out for pizza to be delivered. Dresses and sports coats were exchanged for jeans and t-shirts. There were two people who did not find entré into this transformation. The telephone receptionist was required to answer the phones, but between calls she signalled her desire to belong to the games. The director’s secretary tried in the first hour to assert her authority and maintain office “decorum.” She was unable to do so, and thereafter was “marked” as a possible snitch. While she stayed in her own office most of the day, when she wandered about, her presence provoked an irritated hush among those in close proximity.
The domesticated space and bodies of office workers is linked to the authority of superiors, and to the economic consequences of actions in their presence. This means it is weak form of domestication, or even a mere show of this. There are more durable forms. The domestication of public space, particularly in a democratic society where authority is legitimated in an inverse relation to its exercise (shooting into a crowd becomes illegitimate as soon as it happens, although the police have this authority), must be enforced through “voluntary” compliance.
This compliance is accomplished by a discipline, the desired outcome of which is a repertoire of proper behaviors, and an orthopostural (SEE:
orthoposture) attitude toward these behaviors. Domestication of the body (and the resulting decorum) is acquired as an aspect of individual identity through
body schooling. What results is the
Public Body.
Giddens’s call for a “dialogic democracy,” for a strong public sphere where differences are displayed and consensus is not the goal, points to a new politics of representation, and to the end of the nation as a homogeneous order:
“The potential for dialogic democracy is... carried in the spread of social reflexivity as a condition both of day-to-day activities and the persistence of larger forms of collective organization. Second, dialogic democracy is not necessarily oriented to the achieving of consensus. Just as the theorists of deliberative democracy argue, the most 'political' of issues, inside and outside the formal political sphere, are precisely those which are likely to remain essentially contested. Dialogic democracy presumes only that dialogue in a public space provides a means of living along with the other in a relation of mutual
tolerance—whether that 'other' be an individual or a global community of religious believers” (1994, 115).
A dialogic democracy is incompatible with obligatory membership in a community—either enforced from without (as when Nazis required Jews to identify themselves as Jews) or from within (say, when a religious cult does not permit its members to abandon membership). But voluntary communal identity is not at issue within a dialogic democracy, as long as individual members of the community act as strangers when they enter into the public sphere. This latter idea has a couple of main features.
A dialogic democracy does not support the delegation of expression. A person may claim leadership in a community, but this does not add weight to the voice she or he brings to the public sphere. Another member of the same community with a different opinion carries the same weight (ideally). Second, the interests of the group are always seen as competing with the public interest. There is no possible complete coincidence of community interest with that of the public. And so an expression of the group’s interest as such is liable to critique of the conflicts between this and the larger public interest. Individuals who carry group markers into the public sphere may be suspected of not participating with an adequate distance from the interest of the group.
“These endemic problems do not, I think, account for the travails of liberal democracy in the present day—for the fact that its emergence as the only game in town coincides with its ailing condition even in those societies where it is most firmly established. Nor do they provide much of a clue about how democratization might be further advanced; here the well-established debates pitting participation against representation offer little purchase”
(Giddens 1994, 112).
The public sphere (like the democracy within which it operates) is not a gift from the government to its citizenry. It is, rather a task that citizens and residents take upon themselves. The misrecognition of media corporations and government ministries as “shepherd” for this practice (and of the mass of the population as its sheep) inserts what Foucault called a “pastoral governmentality” into the public sphere. But the public sphere is a place for active democracy, the space from which the future of liberal democracy will be determined. The “well-established debates” about representation and participation are founded on notions of modernity that are no longer (if they ever were) capable of describing democracy as a feature of nations within the emerging transnational cosmopolis. Notions such as that of a “dialogic democracy” enable us to imagine alternative forms of democratic action in late modernity.
Various meanings of the term “festival” overlaps in a most unhelpful way with other terms: feast, ritual, rite, celebration, pageant, rite of passage, fair, parade, occasion, event, drama, etc. Although I am on the lookout for a clever neo-logism, the word “festival” will have to do in the meanwhile.
Some basic aspects of this term as I shall use it are these: Festivals are group activities with purpose. They cause the participants to pay attention to certain symbols. They represent a genre of cultural performance that has historically been linked with religious institutions, however, this link is not universal. Festivals happen more or less regularly, they reoccur. Festivals have a beginning a middle and an end.
Festivals contain rituals, but they also entertain aspects of non-ritualized action. Ritual is the road the festival takes to a place and back; no matter how carefully the road is mapped, no matter how often it is travelled, the journey still brings surprising and unexpected vistas. Festivals are people doing culture; every time it is done it is done differently. The differences matter, to them and us. Festivals change the people that perform them. Non-humans (kamis, devas, kachinas, fauns, etc.) are sometimes invited to join festivals.
The group that participates in a festival shares, at least temporarily, a heightened awareness of intimacy. The people who are excluded from entering a festival can be defined as a group outside apart from the festival itself (i.e., the inclusion/exclusion of people has a non-festival, social referent). Different people perform festivals for different reasons and show differential abilities to experience benefits and risks from their experiences. No two festivals are alike.
Festivals come in many local varieties. So, I do not wish to define these practices too narrowly. At the same time, there are many events called “festivals” that are, I believe, entirely misnamed.
A festival is an event organized to allow a de-control of emotions among its participants. It is made for collective, spontaneous enjoyment. People do these to have fun. This means that festivals fall into that non-work, non-family area of society we now call “leisure.” But this should not suggest that they are of little practical consequence.
Finally, festivals are group events, they are a genre of organized social play, and are performed in a public space. In addition to these spatial and experiential requirements, we can also say that a festival is highly inclusive; it avoids and denies the social boundaries that are normally maintained in a place. Festivals can be extremely democratic.
The headquarters for the main Shinto shrine organization in Japan is based upon the shrine system set up during Meiji, and has as its main shrine the Grand Shrine at Ise. This organization controls more than twenty thousand shrines spread around the archipelago. But the headquarters (as would be expected) are in Tokyo, adjacent to the Meiji Shrine, which is one of the largest open spaces in the central city, and one of its properties. The headquarters building was recently rebuilt and now resembles the headquarters of any large corporation: its tower is clad in glass, stainless steel, and marble.
I visited the Jinjahoncho in 1989, looking for information on the current situation of Shinto festivals in Japan. Their representative provided me with a video they had produced for an agricultural fair in Brussels, at which Japan’s Agriculture Ministry was pleading for the continued closure of Japan’s rice market.
The Ise Jingu as portrayed in IBM Japan’s “small planet” website: http://www.ibm.park.org/Japan/hometown/ise/ise-e.html. This is on IBM home page for the 1996 internet World Expo in Japan.
I was also told about the plans to reconstruct the Ise Shrine, an event that happens every twenty years. The next reconstruction would be the most expense of all, they noted. This wooden structure, about the size of a Santa Barbara 4-car garage, would be rebuilt at a cost of something greater than $US 800 million.
“Doesn’t that create an economic problem for your organization?” I asked. They assured me that their annual intake was more than sufficient to cover this.
“ So long as the work of education is not clearly institutionalized as a specific, autonomous practice, so long as it is the whole group and a whole symbolically structured environment, without specialized agents or specific occasions, that exerts an anonymous, diffuse pedagogic action, the essential part of the
modus operandi that defines practical masters, is transmitted through practice, in the practical state, without rising to the level of discourse. The child mimics other people's actions rather than 'models'. Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, being bound up with a whole system of objects, and charged with a host of special meanings and values. But the fact that schemes are able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness does not mean that the acquisition of
habitus is no more than a mechanical learning through trial and error”
(Bourdieu 1990, 73-74).
While the state and the market are busy in the production and control of micro-territories (which, in turn, results in the built environment of the street), much of the work of establishing normalcy is done not by politicians or bureaucrats and their business friends, but through regimes of social-schooling in the home
5, in public educational institutions, and through the media. This, mostly informal, education (taught, for example, at school but not necessarily in the curriculum) trains us in the micro-management of the body (as Giddens would call this).
The history and practice of body schooling has been attempted in part by Elias (1978) and by Foucault (1979, 1990). Elias looks at how the mannerisms and deferential courtly behaviors of the nobility were commodified and acquired by the middle class as “manners” and “courtesy.” Foucault points to an increasingly pervasive governmentality with an interest in the discipline of entire populations, and the consequent development of technical apparatus for this purpose (schools, factories, prisons, asylums, the use of clocks, the increase in surveillance, the discursification of “hygiene” as a public policy). Bourdieu (1984) would also add the vector of “distinction” which has both institutional outcomes (the creation of arbiters of taste) and bodily ones (such as a disgust of the lack of manners).
Body-schooling is the primary input to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus of class
6. In its carceral mode, it describes Foucault's
7 notion of a disciplined population. Advertisers use a more seductive variety (as Baudrillard [1990] noted) to feed consumer appetites. The sum effect is to teach our bodies how to act normal
8 in the street and to expect and demand normal behavior in others (See also:
Public Body).
dis-modernity
“ Enlightenment thought (and I here rely on Cassirer's, 1951, account) embraced the idea of progress, and actively sought that break with history and tradition which modernity espouses. It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains. It took Alexander Pope's injunction, 'the proper study of mankind is man,' with great seriousness. To the degree that it also lauded human creativity, scientific discovery, and the pursuit of individual excellence in the name of human progress, Enlightenment thinkers welcomed the maelstrom of change and saw the transitoriness, the fleeting, and the fragmentary as a necessary condition through which the modernizing project could be achieved”
(Harvey 1989, 12-13)
Compiling the recent accounts of body schooling can be a disheartening task. The resulting cocktail of historical, anecdotal, and theoretical descriptions and notions is simultaneously convincing and confounding. While the most basic notion of the Enlightenment might include the increase in “reason” against unreasonable authority (kingly or religious) and an increase in rational thought against revealed (and so unknowable) knowledge, the story of modernity seems to produce the opposite outcome: domination, misrecognition, authoritarianism in the most mundane arenas (such as clothing styles) and a general reduction of populations to uniform subjecthood and an epistemological coma.
Today, political power is wielded through a skein of democratic (or so represented) practices, from population polls to popular elections, but this power is also ubiquitous and intrusive on the lives of all residents. In contrast, in other, former times, the dictates of the monarch or pope were arbitrary and final, but they were also limited in scope. So much of everyday life seemed to go on without the attention of higher authorities. Power was apparent as the earthfall of some deadly asteroid, but those who steered clear of its path were also free of its effects. One of the unintended outcomes of modernity seems to be an astounding increase in available power, and a continuing acquisition of this by various institutions, against the power of individuals.
However, this equation, and the growing imbalance of power in favor of institutional interests is not somehow structurally fixed, but represents an opportunistic snatching of power. And so there is little to legitimate this taking. For this reason there are many opportunities for individuals (singularly or in groups) to take back resources and authority from institutions.
Giddens’s work on intimacy suggests that individuals can work against body schooling, creating reflexive knowledge that can return the imagination to the individual, and bring a new equation to bear on relationships with expert systems. The festival experience, both in the planning and rehearsal, and in its public performance, is another shared body schooling that is external to, and which confronts that of the disciplined social body.
There is, however, an age-determined period within which deviant behaviors are allowed (although the deviance is also often uniformly enacted as Sato [1991] noted). Youthful folly is excused until the person attains an age when s/he is expected to move along (20 for non college students, graduation for college students).
Sato, who did his work among communities in the new city additions of western Kyoto, found that this expectation of a natural end to expressions of alternative life-styles was expressed as the “measles effect” of youth gang
bosozoku (“crazy gang”) activity:
“It is widely acknowledged that
bosozoku is essentially a youthful phenomenon and that few Japanese youths are
bosozoku after twenty. This public recognition of the “graduation” from gang activity with the attainment of adulthood has led to a folk theory known as
bosozoku hashika setsu (measles theory of
bosozoku). This theory views
bosozoku activity essentially as youthful indiscretion or as a manifestation of the “storm and stress” characteristic of adolescence. It is assumed that youths’ participation in gang activity is a sort of youthful fever which can be “cured” by self-healing, as in the case of measles, if one matures enough.”(Sato 1991, 158).
Every year, thousands of youth gang members across Japan reach the age where they are expected to trim their hair, change their clothes, find full-time employment and conform their public behavior in accordance with that of older people. Within months their connections with the gang have atrophied, and in a few years, they would not easily talk about this period of their lives.
Everyday interactions “in situations of co-presence” acquire hyper-reflexivity when a doubt arises as to the presence of a differential between the ken of various people in the situation. The doubt produces a suspicion that the situation has been fabricated to produce this differential. Cheating someone else at the market or in business or during a game of chance requires that the subject (the dupe) not become aware that the situation is being fabricated against them. The cards are marked, the frozen fish has been stuffed with ice, the oil well is dry, but these facts must remain outside the ken of the dupe.
Ken is the universe of what is knowable in a social situation. Almost all social interactions between friends and strangers begin with the assumption that each participant has roughly the same ken. Interactions with expert systems, on the other hand generally rely upon the notion that the expert system (and its experts) have an expanded ken.
The question in state-nations (also a question within nation-states) is whether or not the state is an expert system. If it is so, then it can legitimately maintain a differential between what it knows and what it tells its population. If this is not so, then it should make clear all of the knowledge it uses to come to a decision about any issue.
“The crucial point for the moment is that in taking on a subject position, the individual assumes that she is the author of the ideology or discourse she is speaking. She speaks or thinks as if she were in control of meaning. She ‘imagines’ that she is indeed the type of subject which humanism proposes—rational, unified, the source rather than the effect of language. It is the imaginary quality of the individual’s identification with a subject position which gives it so much psychological and emotional force”
(Weedon, 1987, 31).
The terms available to describe the ascription of correct attitude in a population are not adequate— “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy” describe an adherence to correct speech and behavior, but the additional notion of a proper attitude requires a bit of neo-logism. I call this “orthoposture.” Orthoposture describes the willingness of the individual to spontaneously submit to a supplied attitudinal condition in a social circumstance. It requires that the individual not maintain a distance from this requirements, and so not engage in any counter reflection. It thus avoids the outcomes of parody, cynicism, and critical scrutiny.
The condition of orthoposture can describe the complicit agreement of the subject position under circumstances of domination. This attitude masks domination by pretending that the subject is actually in control. The pretense is supported by narratives (myths) that naturalize domination as an inherent feature of the subject’s personality. The outcome is a subject that is, in effect, self-dominated.
Orthoposture is a common attitudinal requirement in many formal and informal encounters. For example, in the sport of baseball, the center fielder attending to the approaching flight of a batted ball, cannot afford to also simultaneously muse about the overall circumstances of professional sports. Orthoposture releases the player from such a critical perspective, and allows for spontaneous action. This attitude is a factor in the successful completion of the current game encounter, and in the player’s ability to enter future similar encounters.
“Why should the factor of spontaneous involvement carry so much weight in the organization of encounters? Some suggestions can be made. A participant’s spontaneous involvement in the official focus of attention of an encounter tells others what he is and what his intentions are, adding to the security of the others in his presence. Further, shared spontaneous involvement in a mutual activity often brings the sharers into some kind of exclusive solidarity and permits them to express relatedness, psychic closeness, and mutual respect; failure to participate with good heart can therefore express rejection of those present or of the setting. Finally, spontaneous involvement in the prescribed focus of attention confirms the reality of the world prescribed by the transformation rules and the unreality of other potential worlds—and it is upon these confirmations that the stability of immediate definitions of the situation depends”
(Goffman 1961, 40).
The orthopostural attitude is that of
spontaneous involvement directed as what is serious for the game—whether this be a baseball game, a political rally, a business meeting, or an intimate conversation—and an equal neglect of what is trivial within the game.
The central task of an ideology is to guarantee the orthopostural attitude of all its players. The illusio here is to “buy-into” the game. Bourdieu is quite correct here. There is yet another illusio, which is also implicit in Bourdieu's sense of this term: which is the illusio that one is, in reality, a “player.” In fact there are two reasons why this may not be true. First, one may be a player in a low-level game that a higher-level game promotes, and which has the effect of limiting playership in the higher-level game, while tricking the player into thinking they are playing in the higher level game.
Bourdieu's notion of the dominated fraction of the dominant class describes how a game of “culture” is perceived to be autonomous to and equal to the capitalist “economy” game. But its autonomy is illusory, as is its equality.
And second, one might not be “a player” at all, in the sense that the ability and authority to effect changes (to “make plays”) may be tightly constrained by others. This is the common outcome of domination, and orthoposture here is both the main outcome of domination and also its main practice.
I use the term “market-state” to replace the term “nation-state” at certain locales in states that are politically decentralized to the point where local or regional control over resources allows cities and provinces to work directly with multinational corporations to create local sites of production (such as BMW factories in South Carolina) and consumption (e.g., privately owned shopping malls and amusement parks). The interests of “the nation” are, at best, only indirectly served here. The market-state
9 competes with the national government in constructing spaces for consumers. As more and more of the cityscape is managed by corporate interests, the public street loses the economic means to reproduce itself
10, and to maintain a positive mix of economic, social, and expressive cultural uses. Curiously, while private individual expression has been curtailed on the street, expressions of market-state desires are everywhere found.
The descriptions of
matsuri found in English language sources are generally brief (and in being brief, overly general). We find article-length descriptions and analyses of various
matsuri (Inoue, Noriaki, Yanagawa), and article-length theoretical descriptions of
matsuri. (Harada, Plutschow, Sadler). There is a longer description of a non-
matsuri festival in the northeast of Japan (Yamamoto), and there are other accounts of calendrical festivals, such as
oshogatsu and
tanabata, etc. (Casal, Erskine).
On the Japanese language side, there is an encyclopedic body of literature on the study of various
matsuri by Japanese folklorists and local historians. Since the efflorescence of Japanese folklore (
nihonjinron) studies earlier in this century,
matsuri have been a favorite object of reflexive folkloristic attention (in particular, see: Kunio 1985). These sources provide a welcome record of previous practices for specific
matsuri, however, on the main, one expects that they promote the Post-Meiji unitizing description of
matsuri, i.e. its correct performance (although local elements are highlighted) and its ahistorical beginnings as described by National Shinto. Other sources run from descriptions of festivals for Japanese tourists (for example, Koma and Asano, 1977), to major works intended for a scholarly audience, such as that of Sonoda Minoru (1990).
The descriptive apparatus of the latter is far more detailed than that of the former, however, such phenomenological works provide little purchase for social theories of human action (however, the more rigorous ethnographic/sociological studies, such as Inoue (1979), Robertson (1991), and Bestor (1989) are exceptions to this general critique, and will be discussed below). There are several reasons for this limit, the main one being a lack of scope—the descriptions of
matsuri usually fail to include descriptions of the communities involved as the latter are externally constituted. Instead, the
matsuri is presented as complete in itself. Another problem, one common to the ethnographic literature, is a lack of a sufficient problematization of matsuri practices in their time and place. The structuration of the event is not approached apart from its general, and discursively available forms. What then do we learn about
matsuri from English and Japanese language sources?
Matsuri ritual forms
Working from various sources on the descriptions of
matsuri ritual practices, we find that there is: 1) some but certainly not a predictable overlap in individual descriptions, and 2) a wide range of interpretations from these descriptions. These conditions point to two main problems in the study of
matsuri: fragmentary descriptive evidence and a lack of a grounding theory of
matsuri. It is difficult to know if the lack of overlap in the descriptions is a product of the description or inherent in the event. A similar problem arises in theory: are the matsuri themselves so different in their functions and meanings, or is this the result of studies disjointed at the level of theory?
The general matsuri ritual script
A basic frame for
matsuri performance is provided in Plutschow:
The Shinto festival can be divided into three major sequences. According to Haruo Misumi, most Shinto festivals are thus divided. The first can be called
Kami-oroshi (also
kami-mukae or
kami-are), meaning the arrival or bringing down of the deity: the second,
kami-asobi, which means entertaining or placating the deity, and the third
kami-okuri (or
kami-age), sending off the deity [
See Misumi, 1979, 80].(84)
Curiously, these specific terms do not show up in the descriptions of individual festivals, although the three activities, as later described in Plutschow
11, are evident. Again, we find a trifold activity pattern (beginning/middle/end) which might also relate to the now-classical van Gennep structure for rites of passage (separation/liminality/reintegration).
The opening and ending parts of the festival seem laden with boundary demarcating rituals that set off—and also purify—the space and time allotted to the festival. Purification, and with it the notion of pollution, is universally evidenced in discussions of festival ritual (Harada 100, Yanagawa 8, Noriaki 144). In fact, Harada uses purity as the defining feature of matsuri:
“The sacredness of a member of the Uji-ko [worshippers of the Uji-Gami, the village deity] is entirely due to his oneness with the deity and to his life with him. It follows, therefore, that each member of the Uji-ko retains his clealiness [sic] by living such a life as becomes his title. Retaining cleanliness is called
kessai or purification. A Matsuri is nothing more than a series of the Uji-ko’s deeds to keep himself clean.”(Harada 1960, 100)
The main types of purification rituals described (See Yanagawa 8) include certain temporary food taboos, restrictions on contact with blood or death, and the hanging of special ropes (
shimenawa) in homes and at the boundaries of the village.
The end of the festival often includes a special meal (
naorai) which originally would be shared by all participants, but in larger communities is taken by neighborhood representatives (Yanagawa 74). The use of food during the festival, and in fact, a theory of feasting in general is not found in the English language
matsuri literature.
The middle period of the festival has been variously described as “a temporary rupture of an everyday pattern that is stable and uniform” (Noriaki 159), an act of communal “consciousness-expansion” (Sadler 16) and, even as a dream: “... the festival brings disparate elements into a single space at a single time. If the festival was previously likened to a drama, here it seems rather like a dream.”(Yanagawa 41)
Of the various activities that occur during this period, one of the main, and perhaps the defining activity of matsuri, involves the parading of the
kami in a portable shrine, or
mikoshi.
To go among its people, the holy spirit needs a vehicle.... That...is called in Japanese
o-mikoshi, and is a splendidly ornamented and decorated gilt carriage, with silken cords and golden bells, and a golden phoenix at the top. It is carried by the young unmarried men of the village, who sometimes fast the day before the festival begins, and spend the night inside the shrine, in the presence of the holy. When the sun dawns on the festival, they don uniform
hapi coats (over their undershorts), powder their faces white..., and ... they begin jogging down the streets, zig-zagging all through the town, chanting a work chant, and gradually surrendering themselves to a dizzy state of ecstatic exhaustion. The
mikoshi is heavy, and although the elders go along to guide them and to ry and prevent them from injuring themselves or damaging property, the
kami-presence gradually takes over, and their procession becomes more and more erratic and exuberant. The
kami, with their help, is going among his people’s homes and dispelling evil influences, driving out infirmity, and bringing vital energy to all.(Sadler 1969, 6)
Another type of procession common to larger
matsuri are those of neighborhood floats which can be quite large and are pulled along a set route by many men (Noriaki 144, 147; Yanagawa 10). One type of float is large enough to have a stage on which dances are held at various stops. [None of the sources offered an overall typology of the floats used in various
matsuri]. Along the procession route are found a variety of artistic displays from drama to dance to poetic readings and music. The history and role of the arts within matsuri, briefly described in Plutschow, deserves a more rigorous examination.
Participants
An important feature of
matsuri is that not anyone can participate. The choice of participants in the
matsuri and in the ongoing supervision of the neighborhood
matsuri activities is made according to several criteria, most of them related to visible social status and rank (Noriaki 141). Thus the festival is seen as a way to display neighborhood identity (Noriaki 147-8; Yanagawa 16) while enhancing neighborhood integration (Noriaki 147-8; Yanagawa 21, 13, 27; Inoue 177-8).
Descriptions of ingroup/outgroup distinctions usually differentiate between some type of “nativeness”. Inclusion at any level is often determined first by consanguinuity and then by household location. To be included one would ideally be born to a family that dwells within the boundaries of the space demarcated for the festival. If a person moves to a new village, inclusion would be determined by this person taking active role in the community, through which she express a lasting identification with this new village. Presumably, participation in the old village’s
matsuri might show a conflict of identity. Matsuri is thus often performed by and for the native-born inhabitants of its place (Harada 100).
Recent studies of urban
matsuri both reflect and further problematize the notion of inclusion in the matsuri. Robertson (1991) noted that the creation of a city-wide “citizens’ festival (
shimin matsuri) still maintained a native/newcomer distinction, even though it was created to bring these two groups together (ibid, 44). Particularly, this distinction was displayed in that segment of the festival event that mimicked other, Shinto-shrine based, festivals (in which the “natives” continue to participate at other times of the year and to the exclusion of the newcomers). Robertson was, of course, describing something different than the shrine-based matsuri: the differences are many, but primarily those of a greater scale, a lack of bounded and transacted placeness (the festival occupied only the main street of the city), the inclusion of a variety of heterogeneous events (activities at various “corners”), and a conflation between the festival organization with that of the city government.
As this new
shimin matsuri attempted to import the practices of shrine-based
matsuri, it did so with perhaps counter-productive effects. The new festival failed to provide a level “playing-ground”in which the natives and the newcomers could all participate, instead, it reified distinctions it was designed to ameliorate.
These native/newcomer distinctions operate also in urban shrine-based matsuri, as Bestor (1985) described. Participation in the neighborhood’s matsuri was emblematic of recognition of a household’s status as a full-fledged member of the neighborhood, a status which is also marked by inclusion in other activities of the “neighborhood organization” (
chookai) (
ibid 147) and membership (acquired through economic and performative participation) in the local Shinto shrine
12.
Today, the matsuri presents a double facade—it is religious and also secular, a time to play with one’s neighbors and also to play with the local deity. There is a wide differential noted in how much of each side any particular individual will cathect (
ibid 234).
Beyond function and structure
Bestor (1985) and Robertson (1990) both approach matsuri with a relatively unproblematized approach vis a vis the performative and micropolitical aspects of such activities. (In fairness, neither text was centrally concerned with
matsuri per se, although matsuri played a key role in their main arguments, which would therefore have been strengthened—and probably will be
ex post facto—by a fuller, more multi-dimensional, description of
matsuri) While Bestor outlines the functional organization of his Tokyo neighborhood’s
matsuri, this description pays little attention to those who, for voluntary or exclusionary reasons were not included in this event or in other chookai activities. Similarly, Robertson loses the “voice” of the newcomer in her description of the dialogue between native and newcomer. The use of
matsuri not only as a tool for neighborhood or civic inclusion, but also as a display of civic exclusion, of marginalization and centrality needs further examination. In addition,
matsuri as performances are liable to a variety of aesthetic and experiential critiques—the people who do them and those who watch are aware of the performative failings and successes of such events. The dynamic processes of participation and reflexivity disappears almost entirely in both Robertson and Bestor.
One area of reflexivity that does receive some attention is that which concerns the notion of the
kami (deity) and its participation in the
matsuri. Robertson discounts Inoue’s (1979) conclusion that a festival without a
kami falls outside of the central definition of “matsuri” (39), although she also provides some evidience that Kodaira natives do, in fact support this same conclusion:
Kodaira natives are aware of the deities’ absence from the mikoshi and consequently refer to the citizens’ festival as bereft of authenticity, the implication being that a “real” (shrine) festival is contingent upon a supernatural presence. One participant interviewed at a shrine festival remarked that “without
kamigakari, festivals are no fun” (Matsudaira 1980, 98). (
Kamigakari refers to both the process of becoming possessed by a
kami and the individual possessed.) The same person also remarked that one “can’t
kamigakari at city hall-sponsored festivals” because the deity is not present. At the Kodaira citizens’ festival, the countless cans of beer quaffed by the bearers at the two half-hour rest stops apparently compensated for the absence of kami. Historically, alcohol (sake) has been a standard feature at festivals, especially at the social gatherings following a mikoshi procession. City hall apparently had considered banning alcoholic beverages but realized that without beer the “adult” shrine procession in particular would lack the essential zest. (Robertson 1991, 64-65)
The notion that a festival without a
kami is “authentic” as long as there is enough beer, while it does open up to the performative aspect of
matsuri, it also closes down the affective role of the
kami in such performances. Changes in the sincerity of belief about
kami are reflexively discursified by the performers in this and similar contexts (For example, see: Ivy, 186). Particularly as the
kami is felt to have a special affinity for those who were born and/or have a long tenure in its precincts, such changes would play an important part in the native/newcomer discourse. Also, as Bestor (234) notes, the presence of the
kami in the
mikoshi is important in that it supplys the motivation (integral to the process of
kami-asobi) for the movement of the
mikoshi throughout the neighborhood. The movement of the
kami articulates the neighborhood as a place apart from its normal description.
Origin of Matsuri
The sources provide minimal information or even speculation on the origin of
matsuri. Harada’s view is that in old days farmers worshipped the
kami continuously and so were always in a state of purity, and therefore had no need of matsuri. It was only when non-agricultural occupations were made and when the need for agricultural surplus distracted the farmer from his daily worship that
matsuri were started to periodically purify the people and the place. Here the dynamic is between purity and pollution.
Plutschow, on the other hand, sees the central dynamic in the dual nature of the
kami.
The Shinto festival strongly reflects the belief in local deities who reign supreme over
ara, or chaos, but who could be transformed—only in part and never completely—into
niki or benevolent deities. Whenever people settled an area and transformed the landscape, they automatically divided the local deity or deities into his or their
ara or
niki aspects. Throughout Japanese Shinto one can recognize the belief that an uncontrolled evil deity, once appeased, becomes a benevolent deity, and that its original malevolence can be transformed, without losing its power, for the good of the community. (77)
The origin of matsuri then represents the on-going tension engendered by the need to control the
kami. This control includes harnessing the protective aspect and banishing the dangerous aspect. An original “deal” appears to have been worked out where the
kami is split and his dangerous side contends itself with a small area left undeveloped while his protective side is housed in a village shrine and worshipped constantly. Every year the two sides are allowed to rejoin in the village for a set period of time. This is
matsuri. (Plutschow 77).
The discourse concerning the origins of
matsuri has been centrally occupied by the notion of
matsuri as a purely Shinto event of great antiquity. The history of any
matsuri needs to be problematized in light of recent discussions concerning the formation of National Shinto (particularly the breaking up of the Shrine/Temple multiplexes) during Meiji, and the subsequent articulation and spread of “authentic” (e.g., ancient) matsuri activities which reinvented and re-traditionalized these performances during the last hundred years.
Festival and change
A final aspect of festivals is their performative dynamic. As ritual, festival resists change. As performance, festivals embrace it. A tension is thus evident between the role of the festival as a medium of communication and its ritual context. This tension is evident in the description of a new “
matsuri,” the Kobe
matsuri. While the original idea of the Kobe
matsuri excluded any
kami, was open to yearly variation in its content, and specifically included tourists, the event is rapidly taking on the traditional ritual and activity framework of a
matsuri. (Inoue 177). While the central
kami has yet to be determined (and might never be officially included), various neighborhoods have already involved their
kami in this
matsuri. And so the ritual of the festival frames the communicative aspect, circumscribing attempts at change within
matsuri. However, where
matsuri is centrally defined by attitudes toward the
kami and toward purity/pollution, changes in these will, and probably are having a decided impact on the general attitude toward
matsuri.
Inoue alludes to a work by Yanagita Kunio which supports the notion that
matsuri has been giving way to other types of ceremony since the fifteenth century:
He [Yanagita Kunio] divided the general category of festivals into
matsuri or classical feasts and
sairei or religious festivals accompanied by para-festival activities, and he regarded the change from
matsuri to
sairei as a matter of historical change. In the
matsuri particular respect was shown for the religious purification, abstinence, and ablutions of the participants, and communion with the kami or divine spirits through various ceremonies occupied a central position. In the
sairei, on the other hand, the focus of interest shifted to the para-festival activities (for example, contests, parades, and public entertainments) that had once been of peripheral importance, and at the same time a separation between participants and spectators became prominent... Yanagita thought that
sairei grew in popularity, especially in towns and cities, from about the fifteenth century.(Inoue 166)
Yanagita suggests that today’s
matsuri display the results of previous changes; a change from an original activity of
matsuri bound up in notions of purification to that of an eclectic matsuri/sairei activity which incorporates a variety of additional ingredients. As Robertson shows, such revisions in the defining notion of
matsuri are, in fact, ongoing. Changes in
matsuri to include
shimin matsuri (citywide festivals) and other forms of
matsuri, with or without the inclusion of a
kami will be further accelerated by the the new roles that matsuri play in the process of
furosato-zukuri—in the recreation of the traditional Japanese locale.
Matsuri and the national imagination
Robertson (1990) places the recent resurgence of urban matsuri within the context of furusato-zukuri (“native-place-making program”). The latter represents a style of nostalgia-based urban and social design which is pan-Japan in scope (it has central government inputs) and evidenced in a variety of ways in different places (part of its program is the articulation, the re-territorialization, of individual locales). These re-placed native-places become both tourist destinations (see also: Ivy 1988, 33-86 for an analysis of the Japan Railways advertising scheme [“Discover Japan”]; that promoted furusato as tourist destinations) and cultural-revanchist locales for their local residents.
The repertoire of supposedly ancient
matsuri practices that Japanese folklorists and Meiji ritualists had described as central to this activity become essential in this quest for legitimacy, even if these had never been locally practiced. The local
matsuri is thus disembedded from its original matrix (or, at least from any attempt a recreating this) and reembedded into a grammar of authenticated practices which make all
matsuri somewhat identical. This sameness, which should, perhaps, reveal the contrived nature of these events, is instead employed to support its legitimacy as an essentially local and ancient practice. Such
matsuri have thus become “simulacra.” They not only bear no resemblance to real (informed by the situated historical model)
matsuri, but they achieve a higher level of reality by disregarding the real. The sameness also serves the discourse of nationalism, reinforcing the continuity of national history and practice as they produce new memories of a hegemonic “collective” past.
Furusato-zukuri relies upon the reconstruction of local practices and histories, emblematic among these is the practice of
matsuri. “Television stations regularly cover local festivals and broadcast special reports on ‘traditional’ pastimes. For urbanites wishing to enjoy their leisure in a matsuri frame of mind. The Furusato Information Center provides detailed information on regional festivals and ‘traditional’ events accessible to domestic tourists” (Robertson 1991, 38). The use of
matsuri in this process reinforces the reflexive demand for “authentic”
matsuri activities. The reflexive appropriation of local matsuri practices by the national model reflects another change in the discursive and practical field within which
matsuri operates. While Robertson and Ivy touch upon the connection between tourism, nationalism, and
matsuri, there is much work to be done in this area.
16 politics of recognition
The politics of recognition goes beyond any “identity politics” based on a simple identification with a gender, ethnic group, class, or age cohort. It presumes multiple planes of cultural domination and multiple counter-tactics aimed at both re-marking and re-moving privileged access to the public sphere, and re-inserting marginalized individuals (as strangers) into the space of the public sphere that was formerly held by privileged individuals. It seeks to change the cultural/symbolic coding of the public sphere to allow for diverse diversities—for singularities and heterogeneities.
This politics goes hand-in-hand with the “politics of redistribution” that seeks to remedy political/economic inequalities and injustice. Symbolic change is too often offered by those who would “permit
13” this as an alibi to retain political/economic privilege. And so symbolic change first is not requested, but demonstrated, and second, is not allowed to replace or diffuse demands for economic justice.
“ Returning now to the Japanese case, one might say that it represents racism in the sense of being genetic determinism, because the Japanese are strongly aware of their ‘racial’ and cultural distinctiveness from other peoples and because they closely associate ‘race’ and culture. In the ‘race thinking’ of the Japanese, the second aspect (‘racially exclusive possession of a particular culture’) predominates over the first (genetic determinism). The concept of ‘property’ suitably expresses that sense of Japanese uniqueness, since possessiveness is its main attribute. Exclusive ownership is claimed upon certain aspects of Japanese culture.
Nihonjinron describes a discourse (
ron) in and about Japan the topic of which is the Japanese people (
nihonjin). Coming out of academic reflections that helped inform the Meiji reformation in the mid-nineteenth century, it later acquired its nationalist and racialist vocabulary through interaction with more global discourses on nation and race. Nihonjinron is not atypical of discourses in and out of Japan—and in and out of anthropology—that attempt to encapsulate essential configurations of qualities that mark a national population as distinct in itself and from its neighbors. In the pre-War period, cultural configurationalism in anthropology linked tribes and their practices (including language) to a history made unique by isolation, and made possible and meaningful through practical adaptations to the surrounding environment and subsequent linguistic (symbolic) formations.
“The Japanese philosophy is deeply embedded in our individual consciousness, and it is a way of life we preserve through all the revolutionary changes of time... .... Virtue is expressed in mutual concessions.
The family feeling is continuous... Yet the concept is larger than the individual, and the family ultimately embraces the home, the place of work, society in general, the nation, and the geography of Japan itself.”
Here is JAPAN
The mixture of ethnography, ecology, biology, nationalism, and racism that each supplied facets to this discourse has left a residue of meanings that are all present when “We Japanese” is called upon to make a statement or defend a policy. While individual writers at different times may front one or two areas of the larger family of meanings within
nihonjinron, by not divorcing their remarks from the remainder of meanings that are active within the discourse, their works promote readings that are simultaneously all-of-the-above.
The other point concerns the Westerners’ sense of difference as fundamentally one of superiority. This is understandable as racism arose in the West as an ideology to rationalise colonial expansion and domination The sense of difference of the Japanese from the others (westerners) in the prevalent discussions of Japanese uniqueness has been basically that of horizontal difference or difference in kind. (This does not mean that the sense of superiority is absent among the Japanese as in the case of their attitude towards the Korean minority in Japan.) Many of the
nihonjinron of the 1970s have presented the image of the Japanese as simply being very different without explicitly claiming superiority, though some literature has discussed the strengths of Japanese society.... The important point to be noted here is that explicit claims of Japanese superiority have not been so common as non-Japanese readers, who may equate the Western style of racism with race thinking
tout court, might have supposed.”
(Yoshino 1992, 29)
The side of
nihonjinron that separates Japanese people, in their bodies, their desires, their abilities, and their sociabilites, from other peoples (and most often and most noticeably in value-laden terms from their continental neighbors—Koreans) is less of interest to me than the amount of commonness that is ascribed within Japan in order to bolster this differential cultural calculus.
It seems that for the Japanese to be different, they all, at some essential level must be the same. Internal differences are muted, discarded, and disavowed in this process. The Ainu and the Rikkyu islanders disappear. Yoshino (1992) goes to some length to show that “racialism” in Japan cannot be transparently conflated with Western ideas of “racism.” But then transparently conflating any such notion (e.g., culture, gender, paternalism, etc.) would be problematic. And where Yoshino would use this practical/semantic problematic to defend
nihonjinron against the claim of “racism,” his conclusion rests on the proposition that Japanese “racialism” is so intertwined with “culturalism” that no strong genetic determinism is implied.
The claims made in this video (and in other parts not show here) include the idea that Japan’s ecology has created a unique society, which spontaneously (along with its religion—Shinto) developed through the use of rice cultivation, which was imported into Japan in pre-historic times. The notion of an unchanging cultural tradition that informs current society, and which, though the guidance of Shinto practice, provides a moral ground for living, is presented as a local (national) heritage which is at once historical and genetic.
The video produced by the Jinjahoncho to deflect attempts by foreign growers to open Japan’s internal rice market (a move that would save the Japanese consumer several hundred billion Yen every year; and cost the government-run food agency, and also farmers, as much) is a good example of
nihonjinron from the 1980s.
“The Japanese mode of thinking and behaving is habitually associated with the ‘Japanese race’, itself an imaginary notion, in perceptions of Japanese identity. This perceived relationship itself, in turn, depends upon the ‘uni-racial assumption’ of respondents, according to which the racial homogeneity of the Japanese is unchanging.”
(Yoshino 1992, 120-121)
This conclusion fails to adequately theorize the cultural underpinnings of “racism” in the West, and it also fails to read the quotient of “racialized” meanings in the terminology (such as “homogeneity” which in Japanese carries a central uni-genetic meaning). To an extent greater than he allows, assumptions of race, and of blood and heritage may enter into the discourse even when overt arguments are not made on the basis of race. And so the racist elements of the nihonjinron discourse are perhaps more difficult to recognize and to counter than are the more overt elements of racism in the West.
The persistance of
nihonjinron statements and theses to the current day Japan is also of some concern (as is the persistance of racism, homophobia, and gender oppression in the West). This concern included Western scholars who continue to reify Japanese uniqueness in a variety of arenas, offering modern adjustments to Ruth Benedict’s war-time
14 ethnography,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1974 [1946]).
van Wolferen makes reference to the practical uses of nihonjinron to defend economic policies in Japan that protect internal markets:
“Very little serious writing by Japanese on anything relating to their society is entirely free of nihonjinron influence. It is also amazing how much nihonjinron has crept into assessments by foreign authors. The possibility of coercion or indoctrination as formative factors of Japanese behaviour is not considered in the universe of nihonjinron imagery. And therein lies its propagandistic force. In the nihonjinron perspective, Japanese limit their actions, do not claim 'rights' and always obey those placed above them, not because they have no other choice, but because it comes naturally to them. Japanese are portrayed as if born with a special quality of brain that makes them want to suppress their individual selves.
It is striking how casually Japanese seem to accept that they are physically 'a race apart' from other peoples. I have heard officials explain to foreign businessmen that medicine manufactured by foreign firms must undergo special tests before being allowed into Japan because of the different construction of Japanese bodies. The former chairman of the association of agricultural co-operatives, Zenchu, Iwamochi Shizuma, once explained before an audience of foreign correspondents that since 'everyone knows that Japanese intestines are about one metre longer than those of foreigners' we should all understand that American beef was not suitable for digestion by Japanese. Visiting Washington in December 1987, the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's agricultural policy research council, Hata Tsutomu, also spoke of longer Japanese digestive tracts that had difficulty in coping with red meat.
The great 'scientific proof' of Japanese uniqueness was supposed to have arrived with the famous studies of Dr Tsunoda Tadanobu, who discovered that Japanese brains are essentially different from Western brains or, indeed, the brains of most other people in the world. According to this researcher, Japanese hear insect sounds, temple bells, humming and snoring with the left half of the brain, whereas Westerners do so with the right half.
Dr Tsunoda implies that Japanese reasoning is different from that of other people because they use their two brain halves differently. His testing methods are highly suspect. My impression, based on an account by one of his foreign guinea-pigs, is that auto-suggestion plays an important role. Yet his books sell well in Japan, and his views have been officially credited to the extent of being introduced abroad by the semi-governmental Japan Foundation” (1990, 265).
That a shared history of isolation would create not only cultural differences, but biological ones as well is a central feature of nihonjinron. And this logic of sharing a common and unique history is also available to use against Japanese living in buraku areas who have been isolated from Japanese society, often for several hundred years. The suspicion that these persons now have a divergent biology—that they no longer share the full genetic heritage of the “We Japanese” gives this discrimination its racist undertones. “
Lots of people consider burakumin to be different,” a Kyoto University student once told me, “
for example, there is a belief that their blood is thicker than that of Japanese.” Just how widespread such racializing notions are, I cannot say.
On a recent (1994) April fools day,
Kansai Timeout, an English language, leisure magazine in the Kyoto/Osaka region, printed a phony story which claimed that doctors in Japan had just determined that the reason why Japanese had difficulty learning English was that their mouth was shaped differently from Westerners. A simple surgical procedure can alter the shape of the mouth, and those Japanese who have had this procedure suddenly speak fluently with ease. The magazine’s editors were inundated with requests for more information, and had to circulate a disclaimer in the next issue. For the editors, the very idea that Japanese mouths were different, that this difference might affect English language learning, was an obvious joke (after all, millions of persons with Japanese ancestry who grow up in other countries speak other languages without the need for surgical intervention). But for many in Japan, the joke overlapped with a discourse that they had been hearing for decades, a discourse that is used by government and industry and in the schools, and in the home.
“The objective homogenizing of group or class
habitus that results from homogeneity of conditions of existence is what enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction or, \
a fortiori, explicit co-ordination. The interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures that have produced the dispositions of the interacting agents, which continue to assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere.”
(Bourdieu 1990, 58)
Despite the failings of Yoshino’s (1990) theorizing about racism in nihonjinron, he is certainly correct to point out that, unlike racism, “Japaneseness” has performative aspects. In this way it is much more like Bourdieu’s habitus. While the entry condition to appropriate this habitus is determined by heredity, continuing sincerity in observing its behavioral constraints is also expected. Those who venture outside its social institutions (e.g., the national school system) and its physical boundaries (e.g., living abroad, or even independent travel abroad) invite suspicion about their desire to remain truly Japanese. The sedimenting outcome of a shared habitus is furthered when sharing becomes obligatory, and the “harmony” that is so often associated with groups in Japan is far less a harmonic congruence of differences (a true harmony) than it is the repetition of similarity, i.e., uniformity. When everyone sings the same melody line, it is a simple matter to see, and to mark, anyone who misses a note.
At Ritsumeikan University, where I had part-time employment, a semester abroad program sent those with a desire to do so (and with advanced English skills) to Vancouver, Canada. But returning students were many times so disoriented (or dis-Oriented) from this experience that special counsellors had to be hired to help them deal with: a) isolation and the loss of connection to groups and friends they had left (for 4 months); and b) various, new dissatisfactions with school life in and out of the classroom. The experience abroad had, in fact, achieved more than it advertised, it had dis-located students from a lifetime of pursuing “Japaneseness.” But it also left them strangers in their own backyard.
The omni-present is the present we find on the street. Not the “anthropological present” of narrative ethnography. It is the present that determines, as much as anything, the future. It is the present where the openings of culture are found.
19 Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding
“...The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding—or allowing the decoding of—the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the other. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 260).
Notions of “coding,” “recoding,” and “overcoding” refer to applications of meanings/values to bodies and practices, these meanings/values having been acquired from discursive/practical fields many of which are maintained (the meanings and the fields) by institutions such as religions, schools, corporations, hospitals (and other expert systems) and governmental organizations. The terms themselves are derived from the use of these in the work of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, but with an added attention to semantic theory, particularly that of George Lakoff. And so, the linguistic vehicles for these practices are figures of speech that overlay and underlie the myths that claim to be figureless, i.e., that proclaim meaning as natural (as Barthes noted). These practices are at work within and between discursive/practical fields, and to a greater extent are now proving the inadequacies of attempts to limit knowledge to specific fields. This brings in a forth notion: “Decoding,” which dissolves the boundary conditions that allow the other three notions to operate as levers between knowledge and power.
“Coding” refers to the action of applying a meaning/value
within a discursive field. The discursification of knowledge within a field of science results in this knowledge being coded into practices (grant applications, career opportunities, etc.). Coding is the output of discursification as this informs identity and practice.
Coding is an ongoing process, a machine that doesn’t work once and then stop. Coding is what reproduces a discourse over time. And because this must be done with some care, the institutions with an interest and position within the discourse develop strategies and procedures to ensure that the coding neither stops, nor is recoded by others. Overcoding (see below) is one strategy that maintains a code by applying this to other codes, and so reducing the potential for alternative narratives. But within the discourse itself, the code is also strengthened, say, by a consistent application of this to all practices and places, and/or through a monovocal logic that resists internal counter-narratives. The result is a singular code with universal application to a space: e.g., the national space and narrative.
In these ways, the code becomes “self-authorizing.” Institutions and persons receive it, but claim to not have authored it, and the question of authorship does not arise. “Scientific knowledge” has this “found” quality: it is discovered, not authored. Even so, scientific institutions spend time and resources to code existing knowledge in ways that resist appropriation by others (e.g., through access to funding, and by authorized texts [journals]).
“Recoding” occurs when one code is replaced with another. Recoding occurs with some regularity in discursive fields where new knowledge is highly valued. Because most of discursive fields have preexisting conditions, much of what occurs as a change within them today is the result of recoding. Recoding occurs for several reasons, such as the discovery (or the imagination) of new knowledge or the success of alternative sources of authority within the field.
“Recoding” is the central tactic that marginal groups have to break the chain of codes that marginalize them. However, recoding must take place within the discursive field, and so access to this field is central concern, and exclusion the main strategy of domination. And so, the job of recoding is a multipart operation. Recoding is also the tactic that individuals use to resist the identities that have acquired their own imaginations. The recoding of the individual by the individual is one of the primary moments of the recoding of a discursive space by a counter-discourse group.
“Overcoding” is the practice of applying meaning/values from one discursive field to others. This is where power connects with knowledge to create codes that dominate not only their own discursive field, but others as well. This may occur through active institutional programs which insist that their scope is universal. Religions, such as Christianity or Islam, may be promoted in this fashion, overcoding discourses of diseases, of sexuality, of economies, and political behaviors, etc.
But meanings/values may also spread as individuals apply these without reflexive attention to their useful limits. Overcoding happens at the reception side as well. Meanings/value judgements about sexual gender, for example, may be applied to circumstances where this notion, upon reflection, is at best an arbitrary feature. But then a history of overcoding
15 configures the space within other discourses so that this imaginable arbitrariness becomes masked by everyday practices that avoid just this imagination.
When sexual gender becomes a logic that is applied to employment, to social roles (say, in public spaces), or to a role within the home, then this overcoding of these practices by the discourse of gender can acquire a history of use that obscures the fact of overcoding. In the same way, the coding of practices and spaces as “national” practices and spaces colors these practices and spaces in a way that, over time, avoids attracting attention to the fact that this meaning/value was overcoded from a more limited discursive field.
Overcoding also occurs when a discursive field acquires meanings/values from external sources, thereby enlarging its purview. Here again, “national” narratives that acquire (or reinvent) pre-historic, mythic narratives overcode these as national narratives. National narratives may acquire local myths and recode these as national narratives. Anderson’s (1983) description of nation-state formation is centrally a process of recoding and overcoding leading to a naturalized, geographically uniform narrative that is continually coded by the state.
“I call it a scholastic bias—a bias to which we are all exposed: we think that the problems can be solved only through consciousness. And that is where I differ from Foucault, and would draw a contrast with his important concept of discipline. Discipline, in French at least, points towards something external. Discipline is enforced by a military strength; you must obey. In a sense it is easy to revolt against discipline because you are conscious of it. In fact, I think that in terms of symbolic domination, resistance is more difficult, since it is something you absorb like air, something you don't feel pressured by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that is very difficult. Workers are under this kind of invisible pressure, and so they become much more adapted to their situation than we can believe. To change this is very difficult, especially today. With the mechanism of symbolic violence, domination tends to take the form of a more effective, and in this sense more brutal, means of oppression. Consider contemporary societies in which the violence has become soft, invisible”
(Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992, 115).
The intersection of bodies and public spaces opens a host of potential outcomes. And so much of “history” has been performed and accomplished, determined and demolished (through warfare) in this intersection that it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the calculus of the public body.
In part, I would guess that a legacy of “private” elites (royalties and sacerdotal hierarchies) throughout much of recorded history and in many places where these records were kept has created an unbalance in the reporting of “where the action is”, while also delegitimating the actions of bodies in public. That is, the above imbalance is both an artifact from and desired outcome of the externality of the rulers to an (not fully determined) “public” in both space and body. (So, we cannot simply “shoot” the historian.) And in part, I would also suggest that the more recent, although increasingly global, rise of democratizing institutions has brought increasing legitimacy to actions and bodies in public. This means that we need to be more careful to record public actions, and more rigorous in determining how to best study bodies and public spaces.
Anthony Giddens is one of the recent social scientists who has granted “place” its own place in his work. And while his writings still lack an attention to specific spatial, ethnographic locales, they present locale as a necessary feature of action. For example, take the following:
“The zoning of the body seems in most—perhaps all—societies to be associated with the zoning of activities in time-space in the trajectories of the day within locales. Thus eating usually occurs in definite settings at definite times, and is usually also 'public' in the restricted sense of involving gatherings of family members, friends, colleagues and so on. The dressing or adornment of the body may not be universally regarded as 'private', but at least in most cultures seems to be so regarded. In spite of Elias's claims that sexual activity was carried on in an unconcealed way in medieval Europe, genital sexuality seems everywhere to be zoned as a back-region phenomenon—with many variations, of course, in intersecting modes of public and private behaviour” (1985, 280).
Giddens’s “zones,” like Goffman’s “frames,” point to a multiplicity of “bodies” determined by—and also determining
16—appropriate actions in specific places and times. But where spaces determine actions, the questions are begged of how this comes about? How are these actions taught? Why are they accepted as appropriate? Why is this idea of appropriateness unitary?
body schooling accounts for the training of the body and the recognition of public spaces as having a single mode of appropriate actions. Body schooling, in its aggregate effects, contributes to the sense of “normalcy” we encounter—as if it were something of the place—when we venture onto the street. But normalcy is not cheap. This expense is counted both by the amount of coding required to normalize bodies and street-scapes, and by the increased effort required to counter or resist this coding—as feminists have discovered in their struggle to rearticulate the masculine-coded public workplace as a multigendered space.
The public body is the body we take into the street. It is the bodies we meet there. It is the body that apologizes without thinking for brushing against another on the sidewalk. And, as I mentioned above, it is the body, the presence of which, more than any other feature, that makes a place public.
This last notion is rather foreign to our awareness of our own presence in public. The discursively available part of the public body (our own body) tells us about the “rules of the road.” We can discuss, for example, eye contact, nudity, defecation, queuing for the bus, staring and being stared at, whistling, talking to oneself, picking one’s nose, using a public water fountain, and a hundred other topics where prohibitions and generally expected behaviors are known and knowable.
Why is it that we do all of these things without giving much attention to them? And why do we pay so much attention when others violate these behavioral expectations? Garfinkel’s (1984) ethnomethodology attempted to answer some of these questions for specific practices. But in general we can point to the construction of public space as a pre-determined “game” arena where we enter as players by assuming an orthopostural (SEE:
orthoposture) attitude that disattends to the construction of the space. We have learned how to play, and what to do to repair our own mistakes. But how is this game managed? And by whom? for what purpose?
“ As an example of proprieties of the body we might consider table manners. The topic is addressed in explicit detail in a famous treatise by Erasmus, his
De civilitate morum puerilium of 1530. This book specifies maxims of conduct with respect to what Erasmus calls 'outward bodily propriety'; such 'outward' proprieties, of bodily carriage, gesture, posture, facial expression and dress, being seen as the expression of the 'inner' person. The impact of the treatise was immediate, wide and lasting. In the first six years after its publication it was reprinted more than thirty times; it was rapidly translated into English, French and German; and in all there were more than 130 editions, thirteen of these as late as the eighteenth century. The questions addressed in this treatise... gave new precision and centrality to the concept of civilitas.... Since decorum and restraint were essential attributes of civility, it was natural that crucial importance should be assigned to the cultured control of appetite in the most literal sense, and hence to table manners”
(Connerton 1989, 82).
This is a question of some enlarged interest of late, as several think-tanks have been recently set up to ponder the “collapse of civility” in the United States. While there may be some argument about presuming that the US federal government has an obligation to reproduce the inputs to notions of public propriety (through school curriculae and other media), there is a more general agreement that this goal needs to be somehow accomplished (in families, through churches, etc.). In other nation-states, such as Japan, the lead role of government in this task is not questioned. And so the state makes its own claims over the construction of the normalized public body.
“The reflexive monitoring of action in situations of co-presence is the main anchoring feature of social integration...”
(Giddens 1984, 191).
It would be difficult to understate the importance this word, in various uses, has acquired in the social sciences today. It is absolutely central to the debate about the conditions of late/post modernity: about modernity as an increasingly reflexive order wherein the “loops” of reflexive knowledge range from internal, personal “self-awareness,” to interpersonal, familial and social relationships, to global corporations that target trends in local markets by tracking innovations and reflexively appropriating these into new products. Reflexivity is the outcome and the input into the global knowledge industry. And it is the quiet voice of “self-help” that resists the influence of expert systems, reappropriating expert knowledge into the personal life project.
At one level, reflexivity describes the mirror with which the individual surveys their own
ken. This feed-back loop allows the individual to assess the condition of their self knowledge, and compare this to their knowledge about others (and about the ken of others). This mirror is generally kept at arms length, and is one of the background features of life that does not rise into the field of conscious attention. In traditional life-styles, self monitoring was actually discouraged because the decisions (over marriage, career, and residence) were made by others (parents, clan leaders, etc.). However there have always been times when the mirror is held close and what it reveals becomes of primary interest. At this time the mirror it itself open to inspection. Let me call this a moment of “hyper-reflection”. This moment used to be most common as the moment when a doubt arose about the circumstances of a personal interaction (for example when five aces appear at the same hand of poker). At the time of hyper-reflection the edge of one’s ken becomes known. And this knowledge is what allows the ken to grow.
The enlightenment promised a release from the mystifications of religion and cultural dogma; it proposed a new “rational” social order. This rationalization, as a project of modernity, has been shown to be both incomplete and, at times, inappropriate. “Modernity,” as an empirical accomplishment, is somewhere ahead of us still—fully as much as it is behind us—but this will not look at all like what its 19th century prognosticators foretold.
“Late modernity,” which describes our current situation, is seen as a time when an increase in the available information and the reflexive application of this information is pushing rationalization to its limit in certain arenas: notably in lifestyle planning, and in institutional management. As these feed-back loops become built into institutional plans and personal interactions the outcomes of these plans and interactions become destabilized, and so, unpredictable. The end of prediction is the beginning of late modernity. But where every consequence may become unknowable in advance, they are not all unintended. Increased reflexivity is itself a desired consequence of the increase of knowledge, and in increased, democratic availability of this. Modernization, which for decades has been based upon an instrumental logic—industrialization, efficiency, control, prediction—proceeds, and even accelerates, but it must also coexist with reflexiviation, as a social and institutional feature of late modernity.
For Giddens, reflexivity begins with the availability of individuals and institutions to reflect upon their own circumstances.
The point is that reflection on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of events they describe. No such phenomenon exists in the world of inanimate nature, which is indifferent to whatever human beings might claim to know about it....It is impossible to have a modern sovereign state that does not incorporate a discursively articulated theory of the modern sovereign state. The marked tendency towards an expansion of political ‘self-monitoring’ on the part of the state is characteristic of modernity in the West in general, creating the social and intellectual climate from which specialized, ‘professional’ discourses of social sciences have developed but also both express and foster. (Giddens 1984, xxxiii)
Of course, the academy is (or should be) a fountainhead of such reflection. Giddens goes on to note that one of the distinguishing circumstances of modernity is the active incorporation of reflection/correction/reform/response into institutional, interpersonal, and individual actions.
For sociology, itself an engine of reflection, to ignore the actual and potential practices of reflection within social organizations, is to make a fundamental error which reduces the grasp that its theories hold on empirical practices. Sociology and social anthropology have so far failed to account for reflexivity in society. This inattention to reflexivity as a core organizing feature of modern institutions and lifeworlds is the central critique that Giddens applies to the works of earlier theorists (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, for example). And the need to account for ever more locations where reflexive practices now occur means that a new sociology must be built, one that has the scope of Weber, and the critical focus of Marx, but one that is also constructed through and for a new account of discourses and practices as these are reflexively organized.
The notion of “symbolic violence” as I will use this comes from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this notion represents an extension of the term “violence” to include various modes of social/cultural domination. Symbolic violence is the unnoticed (partly unconscious) domination that every-day social habits maintain over the conscious subject. Symbolic violence should not be confused with “media violence.” It is not the acts of murder and mayhem portrayed on television. Actually, symbolic violence is not normally even “recognized” as violence. For example, gender domination, and gender itself (say, in the construction of sexuality) represents one prominent arena of symbolic violence.
Institutionalized modes of “discipline and punishment,” as Foucault noted (in his work of the same name (1979)), have also acquired a positive social value, without much further thought about the violence involved in these practices. Indeed, Bourdieu tells us that such “soft” violence has been mostly overlooked in social theories, and is subject to “misrecognition” in everyday life. Misrecognition allows symbolic violence to hide itself within dominant discourses as these are spoken, and within other forms of violence as these are applied to bodies.
We can further locate symbolic violence as
those forms of soft violence which, through their misrecognition, are applied by the subject to the subject. Misrecognition is integral to the effects of symbolic violence, which opens this up to precisely the forms of therapy available in neighborhood festivals.
Much of the symbolic violence that Bourdieu is describing is “purely” psychological in the sense that it is internal to the self-consciousness of the individual, most often without tell-tale, observable features; to counter this, some form of individual psychotherapy is required. Psychotherapy replaces the misrecognition of this form of symbolic violence with reflexive discourses that allow the individual access to their self-consciousness.
However, some forms of symbolic violence operate upon the body, and these articulate a (misrecognized) relationship between the individual’s self-consciousness and their body. The body becomes the site of this violence. These embodied violences articulate the non-discursively available portion of social identity, which is reproduced simultaneously within the self-consciousness and also as a social practice, that is, as a shared
habitus.
From one vantage point you can call a theory a type of concept. A concept-as-tool. You use it to articulate something formerly inarticulate. You use it to unscrew the inscrutable (as Ken Kesey would remind us). You use it up when you use it; once it has fully articulated its object it has no other conceptual use. For the object acquires the theoroid while being articulated. The inscrutable knows it’s been (un)screwed. The concept is first set loose as a signifier, but then it is captured by its signified.
What type of concept is a theory? Well, all concepts in Deleuze’s sense. Gilles Deleuze (1994 [1991]) unscrambled the omelete that is modern philosophy and renamed philosophical concepts as “centers of vibrations, each in itself and everyone in relation to all the others” (23). Concepts do not cohere, they are not building blocks in some greater construction, they are not a part of a greater philosophy; they constitute philosophy through their multiplicity. They are each a knife-edged bridge between what is and is not discursive. And they stay sharp by being replaced, not adored. Deleuze notes that concepts are “...like multiple waves, rising and falling...,
...the archepelago,... a spinal column not a skull,... concrete assembages, like the configurations of a machine,... Concepts are events,... [they] pave, occupy, or populate...” (ibid 36). A theory is a concept that is directed at a practice in a place.
In contrast to “hyperreality” in which “reality” and its (unreal) image compete in a struggle that reality ultimately loses, areality is a state in which reality and its images coexist without struggle, but also without a default preference for “reality.” Areality exists, for example, when an NHK documentary team goes to Nepal and then films a disaster that has been staged, without considering that this might be a problem. Areality exists when a Japanese cabinet minister speculates that the “rape” of Nanking did not happen.
Areality is the wedge between history as a recordable happening in a place, and the desire to forget what happened and record something else. It is the time between memory and forgetting. Because it can mix made-up images with found objects and practices, areality offers institutions a means to overlay a nasty and recalcitrant institutional history with images that deflect attention from this.
The presence of the real within areality masks the role of the non-real in this. The real becomes the alibi for other desires. The impact of collapse of the “bubble economy” in Japan has real consequences, but the concept of a “bubble” economy is itself an areal concept, as this takes away attention from the management responsibility of the Ministry of Finance (which had taken much of the credit for guiding Japan’s post-War economy until then). The bubble becomes something that happened to everyone, like a typhoon.
Another areal concept is “the Pacific War.” It is not just that most people in Kyoto talk about “the Pacific War” instead of “World War II,” but rather how they talk about this, as though it was another natural disaster that swept across Japan and then ended. “After the Pacific War ended,” they say, except for Resident Koreans, who might prefer, “after Japan was defeated in the last War.”
Areality happens mostly in a passive voice. It is useful in describing circumstances that might otherwise reveal institutional involvement. It often describes a reality that is beyond intervention. In Kyoto, burakus exist in an areal haze of nationally funded remedial programs, and official inattention, and covert discrimination. What is real is the fact that little happens to change the stigma that keeps buraku-dwelling persons trapped inside their neighborhoods.
A civil democracy is realized through actions taken by its citizenry. The use of the street for demonstrations of civic belonging and collective celebration are not merely windowdressing for the mass media. Simply consuming the spectacles of the state is not nearly sufficient to reproduce the ground for a democratic nation, and this ground—spatially and discursively—must be reproduced regularly. In particular, there must be room for the collective voice of crowds.
Places and crowds fill the histories
17 of democratic revolutions. Civic festivals are the reenactments of these founding moments, and civil societies are their offspring. Because there were crowds that used violence to protest social and economic circumstances, crowd control became another feature of the modern street. And again, this constraint was said to be aimed at others, at anarchists and gangs, but its effect was to preempt the crowd event as a regular forum for civic participation. By and large we can today track the disappearance of crowds on the streets of our cities. But then what are the effects of this absence on democracy and on the public sphere?
playing in public
I submit that violence or its threat is not a feature of the agency of what I call a “civil crowd.” The notion that a civil crowd has agency, that its formation can open up space where a difference is produced, has been almost entirely subsumed by the metaphor of the crowd-as-mob, and its agency reduced to anarchy. Bill Buford describes in fine detail the riots of British soccer fans, who created their own game, one that involved glass breaking, car turning, head busting, and police confrontation. There is, however, no civic intention in this, nothing inherent in the violence that makes the resulting rampage somehow work toward any external goal. Rabblerousing does carry its own history, but this history is not sufficient to explain the potential for civic action by a crowd. As Thompson (1993, 65-66) notes, “...the “to-fro lackeying” of the crowd itself has a history of great antiquity: the “primitive rebels” of one age might be seen, from an earlier age, to be the decadent inheritors of yet more primitive ancestors.
Too much historical hindsight distracts us from seeing the crowd as it was, sui generis, with its own objectives, operating within the complex and delicate polarity of forces of its own context.” In fact, the atavistic “mob effect” that Gustave Le Bon (1960 [1895]) discursified 101 years ago, is only parasitic on this agency.
What the civil crowd represents at its potential limit is a display of individual expression that is unconstrained, and therefore uncontrolled, and thus, in a certain fashion, genuine. There is a moment when this crowd follows no leader, and, should it speak in a single voice, an actual consensus appears that is neither prefigured, nor subservient to an external interest. But consensus is not the goal of such a crowd. For it is a crowd of strangers, in that peculiar sense where all citizens must be strangers in public to join in the public sphere. And where this crowd of strangers finds consensual agreement may be a point less valuable than where the crowd voices a plurality of desires.
Whatever the content, the source of the crowd's inherent
democracy is the performance in public of individual expression. The latter, in turn, legitimates the actions of a civil crowd in the public sphere (cf. McClelland 1989, and Canetti 1962). More than public opinion polls, which respond to questions posed by pollsters, and more than voting, which offers only a choice between preselected alternatives, the civil crowd opens up to dialogical and multivocal interaction. Here is where the melodies of democracy become polyphonic.
What I wish to discuss is how, and, more specifically,
where civil crowds take place. For a civil crowd is a spatial performance that is not possible apart from public places that situate its practice. While the media now broadcasts images of this place to other places, such a crowd cannot be generated by the media itself. Most crowds are not civil crowds, although this notion is neither exclusive nor singular in its definition. The ability of a civil crowd to reach a plateau of genuine expression depends upon a complex series of moments; it is a game that must be played with some skill. And so this process is liable to various types of failure. For example, the internal dynamics of the process will collapse into an orchestrated simulation of a civil crowd, if the participants allow their expressions to be scripted. This is a common feature of political demonstrations where leaders with bullhorns prompt a chant from the crowd. Conversely, attempts at orchestration may also fail. Nicolae Caucesceu's final orchestrated demonstration is an example of a civil crowd developing out from a scripted event. The force of this chorus of genuine expression sent him scampering for his helicopter.
And, though a civil crowd can come about without planning
18, I want to look at how one of these can be planned. How does one organize an event that cannot be led, in which individuals feel free to display a genuine expression of their desires? The claim that an expression is genuine is what needs to be examined here. Quite obviously, “genuine” here is a scalar notion. Its more-or-less quality is tied to the location of the expression in question. Which is to say that the more an expression is produced by the individual qua individual, the more this can be called genuine to the individual. The civil crowd is a aggregate of individual voices.
There is a whole literature on hegemony that describes how the expressions of individuals in modernity are externally managed, other comments on modernity detail the deskilling of individuals in various modes of experience and knowledge, and so we have to be careful in assigning the site of production to an individual, and we must ask what skills are required to author a “genuine” expression. These twin conditions of late modernity—the surrender of individual authority, and the bodily deskilling in expressive practices—are structural impediments to the civil crowd as a site of democracy. It may be that we are today “crowd-impaired” to an extent that it is difficult even to imagine the potential agency of a civil crowd. But it is not impossible.
getting private in public
I have constructed a theoretical scaffold for the notion of the civil crowd in public space. This theory is based upon the work of several social theorists, with some major enhancements, mostly accomplished by assembling scattered parts. There are times, I argue, when “private”
19 spaces open up within a public space. Festivals are typically times when this transformation can, an indeed, must take place. Step outside on a certain evening in February in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and normalcy is conspicuously absent, and in its place are usually private expressions of joy and sexuality. But Mardi Gras, like many festivals, is a civil crowd that refuses to take itself seriously, and so its range of expression is quite limited.
This takes me to my final point. A civil crowd is a
serious private party on a public street. It is private because it opens up to a form of intimacy that denies the visual monitoring of the street. Individuals in the crowd dis-attend to the “publicness” of the street, and actively transform the space into an ad-hoc private realm.
Now, the crowd is a “party” because it uses embodied skills to carry the individual to a condition where emotional self-monitoring is no longer possible. This decontrol of emotions is what actually warrants the genuineness of the expressive display, and the (above) disattention to visual monitoring of expression is what promotes the sharing
20 of this content. The civil crowd is a festival rehearsing its own performance—but where the rehearsal
is the performance.
Finally, the crowd is
serious in that its expressions are representational of the participants' desires and perspectives. A type of “sur-rationality” emerges that is both hyper-reflexive and morally potent. A localized conviction congeals on the spot, binding words to emotions to bodies and to the crowd as a group. Such an event probably comes as close as one gets to Habermas's ideal speech situation. The work of the civil crowd can now begin.
Giddens (1994: 127) talks of “active trust” as a formative feature of a “dialogic democracy.”
21 The crowd creates active trust between individual participants, beginning a public conversation that has long-term effects. To take the street away from the cops and the shops and the government for an hour or two decentres, if only momentarily, positions of influence, and brings new voices into the center stage.
The possession of the public square by a crowd establishes a claim to ownership, and to belonging in public. The voices emerging from (or spoken to) the crowd enter into a public-sphere arena of discussion and dissent. The crowd demands to be heard, and any democratic state that does not listen does not deserve the title.
Here I am also promoting the idea that a festival—should the process of organization and performance of this be done with attention to the limits of scripting and an open invitation to its membership—is a model example of a civil crowd.
1I attended an evening meeting, which was held in a hall that was filled with men in business suits. The speakers spoke with passion about their histories and circumstances. The audience listened with barely controlled impatience. The final speaker asked for questions. When there were none, the meeting ended. Outside, I noticed that, as they walked away from the meeting, and out of the
buraku, clusters of government officials and business executives chatted animatedly. Many of them fumbled in their pockets, and returned to their lapels the lapel pin that marked their corporate affiliation—The pins they refused to wear even though their supervisors required that they attend this meeting. By this gesture they affirmed the active social discrimination that the meeting was supposed to address.
2This practice has a long history as well in China (Mayfair Yang, personal communication), and was modified within the cadre system of Maoist China.
3When we moved into Kyoto, our house was, by proximity, a member of my landlord’s tonarigumi, and we were coached to be on our best behavior at all times. We failed in this duty more than once, I’m afraid.
4Other occupations with less-obviously Buddhist-related stigmas (such as bamboo manufacture and indigo dying) also carried a stigma. These may have been occupations that required little capital or land, and were simply available to persons with little means, and so were marked by their lack of entry-controls.
5 A common feature of this year's US presidential election is the call for “the family” to shoulder a greater share of this schooling. Of course, “the family” here is only a front for “the church” as the wellspring of moral instruction. Also implied in this return to “family values” is a critique of the marketplace as a surrogate source of social edification, and an underlying sense that necessary skills are not being learned, because nobody is teaching them.
6 Normalcy is also a territorial outcome of
class. Streets, neighborhoods, and districts become concretized articulations of class desires, moulded also by class-directed market forces. For example, in Kyoto, the city's several
buraku neighborhoods have been obviously excluded from the massive real estate speculation that remade most of the city in the last 50 years. But the “hardware” of city life: buildings and trains and boulevards, are not the topic of this paper, although this is also important in the creation of the “reality” of the street. Here I will be looking at the “software,” at cultural practices and expectations, and at the use of space to express cultural imaginations.
7 It was, of course, Michel Foucault who noted the transformation of governmentality from an external, princely rule, to an internal pastoral rule as a condition for the modern nation-state. He also noted that this transformation created a break between the open display of violence upon the bodies of subjects—as, I would add, feature of normalcy—and the modern government's carceral programs of institutionalized (and hidden) re-schooling of criminals; a practice that was sequestered from the street. The rehabilitation of criminals in their prisons was not different, Foucault noted, from the training of children in government-run schools, nor from the regimenting of armies in military camps, nor from the disciplining of the workforce in factories. A carceral regime developed which acted upon bodies as docile instruments of this new governmentality. Having read this before I moved to Kyoto, I was at times struck by the visual uniformity of the street in Kyoto, which could very well have advertised itself as Foucault-land, except that it really is no different in this respect than other cities in the region.
8 This fulfills Aristotle's notion (in
Nicomachean Ethics) of the “right education,” that is, one that teaches us “both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought...” (1941, 954).
9 The rise of the market-state within the modern nation-state is a primary feature of late modernity. This process brings global flows of culture and capital to many a city, but it also interrupts the circulation of local spending, shunting this return flow of capital into the international monetary organizations that finance the market-state. The city in a market-state is a decentred space, defined not by its boulevards and plazas, but by the number of “world-class” consumption palaces it can boast and the number of minutes it takes the travel between these. The public street becomes only a conduit that takes people somewhere else. And so we cannot reimagine the public street without finding a way to release this from its service to the market-state. Note also that Japan (perhaps even more than Singapore) is a singular example of a
national market-state where the national government and national corporations control local production for consumption to the exclusion of both local interests and transnational corporate interests. The slow relaxation of Japanese national cartel control, under external trade pressure, does not require the opening up to a market-state, although this seems to be what is happening in Kyoto.
10 The city that once embodied the nation-state now touts its private pleasure realms and curries corporate capital by offering tax incentives for private development of properties, development that leads to further abandonment of real estate connected to the public street and to sites of public history. Public parks that were once ceremonial centers, are now surrounded by vacant lots and shuttered businesses. Under long-term market-state conditions, the city can no longer serve as a metonymic site of a national heritage—except as a cynical mirror reflecting a lack of this—and even sites of local history fare badly in competition with the spectacles that transnational capital can provide. And so Los Angeles becomes the home of Universal City.
11 The three sequences, in Plutschow’s analysis, involve a dialectic between chaos/eros and society/civilization. In the middle, liminal state, chaos has been invited into the village. At the end it is again banished to a remote place. Thus the festival is a commentary on the control of dangerous extra-society forces:
11 “Japanese and non-Japanese documents suggest that the opening
kami-oroshi sequence not only refers to the end of time but to the overthrow of the social order. Therefore the community reacted in noise and confusion, releasing hostilities, reversing social roles, and rousting about with erotic license and orgies. Such sexual license is recorded in the so-called
utagaki (poem hedges), poems composed during the festivals dedicated to the deities of Mt. Tsukuba [cf. Manyoshu, 1965, 222]. Even today, violent competition and unruly behavior can be observed in Shinto festivals and injury to the shrine bearers is not uncommon. The ancient Japanese
matsuri were certainly more violent than those of today, when the law curbs such behavior our of respect to human health and safety.”(85)
11 “Nowadays the
kami-asobi sequence often takes place at a temporary shrine called
tabisho (travel rest), specially erected to entertain the deity. After having toured the community on the shoulders of the shrine-bearers, the deity is finally brought to a temporary rest at
tabisho. The
tabisho toady may be placed in a sacred reserved area within the human territory or it may be at or near the frontier between cosmos and chaos. As a neutral place, the frontier seems a most appropriate site to enact this sequence of the Shinto festival.”(86)
11After the series of
kami-asobi performances, which have properly appeased the deity, the community prepares to send the deity back to his territory or his shrine.... the deity in the Wakamiya festival makes his ceremonious return to this mountain shrine under the cover of darkness, symbolizing chaos. Dozens of shrine priests tightly surround the
shintai (symbol of the deity) carried by the highest-ranking priest. Such
kami-okuri (or
kami-age) processions end the
matsuri sequence and its ritual recreation of the original cosmogony. The Shinto festival having thus been completed, time and order are temporarily restored and the community returns to its orderly daily routines.”(93-94)
12Shinto shrines, and (before Meiji) Buddhist temples, have historically played an important political and social role throughout Japan, as the organization of shrine/temple membership was a ubiquitous means of communication and surveillance in cities and towns. In recent decades this role has been supplanted by organizations such as the chookai.
13“Allowing” multiculturalism while promoting this as a mere “play” of difference—for example, by forcing difference into a normative framework, where each group fills a pre-figured slot in a matrix of cultural practices—recreates difference as a variation on a single theme. Culture “X” is allowed this and that distinct cultural properties, and culture “Y” has corresponding properties of its own “unique” variety. Authentic, incommensurable difference is not allowed, and individual variations are not important. Difference is domesticated by being subsumed under a framework of expectable variation.
14This work has the ethnographic distinction of being written without the author having ever visited its location. Benedict used interviews with Japanese interred in camps in the US to write this highly influential book.
15I once got into an argument with an economic anthropologist who insisted that women did not have the upper-body strength to handle a plow, and so could not receive the direct benefits of this agricultural innovation. Having seen women carry 50 kilo sacks of coal up steep mountain trails in India, I was not impressed with this claim. Rather, I argued that there were other reasons for the sequestering of women into domestic spaces, which then led to many women not developing the upper-body strength that they might use should they find themselves, unexpectedly, in a situation of having to control an ox and plow. But give them opportunities to strengthen their bodies as children, and nearly all women could do this task.
16Curiously, “public” places are usually seen as places where the former happens, where the place determines appropriate activities. Spaces where an individual’s actions can signal which “body” is appropriate are thereby marked as “private.” I say this is curious, because there might also a presumption of freedom of action in public space. It would not be bizarre to suggest that a public space should be open to multiple frames.
17From Boston to Philadelphia, to Paris and London, to Moscow and Warsaw and Tienanmen in Beijing: the places where the public acquires its legitimate claim to its self rule are places defined by crowds and by protests and festivals. Note here the absence of such events in Japan.
18Tienanmen is an example of a civil crowd fashioning a collective agency out of a wellspring of genuine expression. Its failure, was, in large part, due to the failure of bringing this expression into a realm of planning and into a coherent voice.
19A private space “in public” is no longer “private”, but then neither is the public space during this event “public.” These terms show their limits under these conditions. It is this transformation that opens up a public space to a civil crowd.
20The word “share” here is important, as the means to arrive at this condition is mutually created. The participants rely upon each other's willingness to proceed to a plateau of collective intimacy. Intimacy is always shared (otherwise it is just another confessional episode of modernity), and in this sharing an active trust is formed. Like combat, or brain surgery, or baseball, the civil crowd makes a team out of individual participants, and it manufactures memories that persist. And, like, baseball or brain surgery, practice hopefully does make perfect.
21During the course of the festival any number of expressions are possible, as these are produced dialogically and without scripting. Individual comments reverberate and are inverted, parodied, and reflect the plurality of individuals within the event. Bodies and words play an ensemble of discursive sonatas, the content of which is never predictable. But the content is also not what is foremost in the event. Here is where silence also speaks, as it is not, for a moment, the product of terror. The ability of a state to allow the festival in its streets brings with it a measure of legitimacy, as the crowd's voices and demeanor will comment on the state. The availability of civil protest also legitimates the state, as this marks its openings to democratic reappraisal.
