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- Convenors:
-
Emma Cook
(Hokkaido University)
Andrea De Antoni (Kyoto University)
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- Stream:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 1, Sala 1.11
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
The research, based on an ethnographic study of Japanese perception of body in the world of Nihon Buyō, describes the training of the body to obtain certain movement, as well as cultural codes. Thus we learn that the research of the dance is the exploration of the embodied knowledge in society.
Paper long abstract:
The research, based on an ethnographic study of Japanese perception of body in the world of Nihon Buyō, describes the training of the body to obtain certain movement, as well as cultural codes. Based on Bourdieu's concept of habitus and the assumption that embodiment is crucial to social-cultural learning, the paper demonstrates the complex interweaving of social meanings that may be experienced through, and read into, the practice of dancing.
The idea of learning through the body is very strong in Japan, because everything is learnt through physical activity of the body. True knowledge, according to the Watsuji's (1994) opinion could not be obtained through theoretical thinking, but only through "bodily recognition" (tainin) or "physical realization" (taitoku), this is through the use of body and mind. Thus learning or "cultivation" (shugyō) is a practice, which seeks the right knowledge with the full use of the mind and body. Such learning is particularly characteristic to Zen Buddhism, the arts and martial arts, where is also reflected general thinking and philosophy found in everyday life. (Yuasa 1987)
Dance has the function of social control and according to Spencer (1985) has a major educational role, as it carries cultural codes to the younger generations. Other key features of dance education are mutually co-operation and preservation of common emotions, symbols, values, morality and harmony.
Specific teaching process in Japan is the result of long-standing tradition of individual transmission of cultural information in dance, where the exercises involve all three modalities (auditory, visual, and kinetic) and not just one. This way of learning is called "in-body learning" and thus the embodied habitus and practical sense can be viewed as forms of knowledge, or "tacit knowledge". Through the body learning (body hexis) the whole cosmology, ethics, metaphysics, politics, etc. could be imprinted in human. Learning a set of movement phrases through physical imitation rather than verbal description helps a pupil develop a high level of somatic awareness. The increased level of awareness has the advantage of absorbing large quantities of non-verbal clues in dance as well as in everyday social situations (Sellers-Young 1993).
Paper short abstract:
This presentation compares anthropological approaches to the study of passion, introduces examples from the amateur practice of gagaku, and suggests that more "resonant" methods may enable us to understand better how ethnographers and their Japanese research participants may become mutually attuned.
Paper long abstract:
Saturday night, 11 pm on a train going from Nara to Kyoto. A woman in her late fifties talks to a younger man who is quietly unwrapping a sandwich. They laugh and show each other pictures on their smartphones: ordinary commuters on an ordinary day. Forty minutes before, however, the couple was among a group of forty in a practice room (okeikoba), performing gagaku, the ancient performing art simplistically known as "Japanese court music". In both scenes, there is an intruder sitting next to them: an ethnographer. He speaks on the train, and plays with the group. What is he doing? What is he practicing: anthropology, gagaku, or both? And what is the relationship between the practitioners' and the researcher's attachment to this music? Are they similar? Do they even compare?
In this presentation, I will try to answer these questions proposing a participatory, immersive anthropology of gagaku. In order to complement and complicate the recent "ontological turn" of Japanese anthropology by offering some reflections on an area of social life that is particularly charged with ideological and "spiritual" values, I will analyze the affective dynamics at work in a specific communities of practice.
To do so, I will contrast two opposing paradigms to the study of passion, emphasizing their approaches to materials and ontologies. While a "semiotics of passion" ultimately betrays the structuralist roots of authors working in the so-called "anthropology of ontology", a "pragmatics of taste" attentive to the non-human mediators that co-construct the passion of music lovers prioritizes the performativity of everyday practices, describing music as "a technology of the self".
Based on two years of fieldwork among a gagaku group of amateurs with special ties to Nara's Kasuga Taisha, this presentation will show that a "vibrational ontology" may offer a third way to look at passion -one in which ethnographic participation is conceived as a process of "enskilment" always suspended between immersion and auscultation. Such a resonant method places the researcher's body at the center of a bundle of mutually responsive tangibilities, reconfiguring the affective dimension of anthropology and refining our attunement to the world.