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.