T0034


Worldmaking in the Archives: The Interpretation of Cultural History Between the Reconstruction of Lost Worlds and the Creation of New Practices, Spaces and Objects 
Convenors:
Fabio Rambelli (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Chiara Ghidini (University of Naples L'Orientale)
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Format:
Panel
Section:
Religion and Religious Thought

Short Abstract

This panel explores how the study of Japanese religions, folklore, and cultural history more broadly can be renewed through the reconstruction and re-enactment of practices, spaces and objects—a form of “worldmaking” that remains alert to its own provisional and creative nature.

Long Abstract

The study of the past (texts, objects, practices, people, forms of life, etc.) requires a degree of what the writer Ursula K. Le Guin called “worldmaking”: a creative intervention to “fill the gaps” in the available sources. In this sense, at least, there is only a thin and porous line separating “reconstructions” and “recreations” of aspects of cultures removed from us in time and space.

This panel explores how the study of Japanese religions, folklore, and cultural history more broadly can be renewed through the reconstruction and re-enactment of practices, spaces and objects—a form of “worldmaking” that remains alert to its own provisional and creative nature.

The first paper describes attempts of reconstruction of forms of chanting in medieval Buddhist rituals, especially from the perspective of the audience and the musical elements in them, and discusses how classical works can be bridged to the present.

The second paper examines the disappearance and the re-invention of the Sanka, a marginal itinerant community in modern Japanese cultural imagination through the work of folklorists, pseudohistorical narratives, post-war media and material collections, exposing the unstable boundary between ethnography, archive, and popular worldmaking.

The third paper focuses on reconstructions of lost music in the Gagaku repertory, with its tension between archive, body, space, and objects: how do we move across them? And what do these reconstructed sounds tell us about the past?

Moving beyond purely textual or institutional histories, the contributors examine how rituals, artefacts, ways of life and religious environments are made present again in books, on stage, in museums, in digital spaces, and in local communities, in ways that, in turn, raise new questions about method, authority and embodiment/emplacement in the study of cultures. When scholars, curators, musicians, or local actors reenact ritual actions from the past—whether in a festival, a museum, on stage, or in a virtual environment—what kinds of knowledge are produced, and for whom? More generally, what kind of “past” is being presented to present audiences, and what does this past tell us about the present and, in a longer perspective, the future?

Abstract in Japanese (if needed)

Accepted papers

 
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