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- Convenors:
-
Kaori Fushiki
(Taisho University)
Ryoko Sakurada (Ikuei Junior College)
- Location:
- 101b
- Start time:
- 18 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The physical body is a 'media'. All physical 'things' are experienced trough our skin and our senses which interpret a recognition of the world. Our recognition can't exist without our 'physical body'. This panel will rethink anthropological concerns from the perspective of the physical body.
Long Abstract:
What lays at the core of anthropology? Recently, we debated the anthropology of 'things' as a continuity of all kinds of physical existence, recognition, thoughts and knowledge. However, we cannot ignore our individual existence and our experience that constructs our world as a kind of cohesiveness. Once 'things' that exist outside of our recognition are captured by our individual senses, recognition and experience construct our world around us. But at the same time, our senses and recognition have also been constructed through individual experiences interpreted through our physical body. Therefore, it can be argued that from one perspective, all anthropological subjects revolve around the 'physical body', leading to the inevitable question of what is a human and what is constructed culture?
In this panel, we will explore the following themes. 1) Rethinking linkage including classic themes such as lineage, family, lifestyle, living sphere, and moving. 2) The body itself, including the topics of the deficiencies of the body parts, the lack of the bodily functions, and medical treatments. 3) The topic of dead bodies, human lives and death. 4) Human behavior depending on our physical body which has limits in terms of movement and social behavior. 5) An interim body such as the body of spirit mediums, additional body parts, and cyborg-nized bodies and their lives. Within this discourse, we will be able to discuss the limits of the self, the expanded self, what is the essential 'self' and what is a human?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
What is in the body of a Chinese? How is the body tied to the intimate environment – the house? This paper, through the Household Investigation Ritual, seeks to revisit the idea of the Self in relation to the cosmic and spiritual realm, and also its interaction with others in a household setting.
Paper long abstract:
In traditional scholarship on Chinese kinship and family, the focus on the Self seems to be obsessed with the surname. However, the zodiac as a birth element, which is fixed and determined since birth till death of a Chinese, and in the body of a Chinese, is usually being neglected in these studies. In view of this, how can the incorporation of the zodiac, also as a part of the identity of the Self, into current research enhance our understanding of Chinese kinship? While the study of the Self is never complete without considering the aspect of "others" and also the physical environment it resides in, this study will also consider the anthropology of house, another area that is relatively neglected by scholars working on kinship studies in the context of overseas Chinese communities, and examine how are the everyday activities of the Self closely knitted with the house. Through the Household Investigation Ritual conducted by some temples in Singapore, a ritual that had not gained the attention of scholars working in the related fields, this paper fills up certain gaps in the current scholarship, and explores how do traditional rituals influence our understanding of the Self and the house. I would argue that through close analysis of this ritual, the idea of animal and farm as metaphors for the Self and house respectively could be clearly illustrated, while at the same time providing new insights to Chinese kinship organization and structures of modern-day Singapore.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the body of Chinese woman is treated in the domestic sphere in contemporary Malaysia. A woman’s body is often considered as ‘problematic’. Nevertheless, the continuity of the house and lineage is maintained not only by male existence but also female corporeality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the body of Chinese woman is excluded and included from/in the domestic sphere, where patriarchal ideology strongly affected, in the context of contemporary Malaysia. Under patriarchal social system, a woman's body is often associated with 'otherness' or 'problem' due to various bodily aspects such as child bearing and menstruation, and excluded as being covered, locked, and disfigured from the realm of men. In this way, women are closely associated with the body. Especially bleeding women are considered as highly 'problematic. This logic acquires widespread perception that women are much closer to nature thus inferior while men are closer to culture thus superior.
In Malaysia, most Chinese women who are in the menstruation periods are strictly prohibited to participate in the temple rituals. Also pregnant women are advised not to participate in Chinese New Year's ancestral prayer, which is the most important social event of the year. This folk practice vividly shows that despite the fact that menstruation and pregnancy are purely biological, these bodily aspects are perceived as something beyond biology, rather socio-cultural. Woman's body is thus often considered something ought to be excluded from the social realm. Nevertheless, even patriarchal Chinese relation never exists perpetually without female fertility. The continuity of the house and lineage is maintained not only by male existence but also female corporeality. In this way, this paper examines both dimension of exclusiveness and inclusiveness of female corporeality from/in the house in order to rethink social body of woman.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the body of the woman is defined and treated in the context of abortion ritual in Taiwan nowadays. The body is regarded as a "fetus carrier". Nonetheless, the active participation of the woman during the ritual process allows her to interact with life spheres over time.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to demonstrate how the body of the woman is defined and treated as a "fetus carrier" in Chinese religious context through the lense of abortion ritual in Taiwan. The abortion ritual is newly popularized, and widely practiced in Taiwan today, which attempts to appease the aborted fetus spirit, called Yingling 婴灵. The emergence of abortion ritual has changed the post-abortion routine of women. By means of ethnographical studies this paper observes how the the body of the woman is transformed into an arena where familial and societal conflicts and compromises take place. The attachment and the detachment between the body of the woman and the yingling construct a shifting identity of the woman, as well as their relationships with their life spheres. Meanwhile, this paper hightlights, through her agency and bodily experiences during the ritual, the woman is able to interacted with these changes over time. Ritual has become the key field for the negotiation of the forces of modernization -- including the liberation of the body, economy and society - as Taiwan has formed its own vernacular modernity within globalization.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic data from fieldwork with male-bodied transgender people (waria) in Indonesia. I consider the body as a locus for the experience of memory and desire, focusing on ‘the family’ as key site at which the ‘self’ can be understood as intersubjectively constituted.
Paper long abstract:
In my ethnographic research in Indonesia, I explore how male-bodied transgender people (waria) navigate family life, focusing on their experiences of gender, kinship, relatedness and belonging. In this paper I will present possible ways to contemplate the relationship between knowledge and the body, paying particular attention to the materiality of kinship — gendered bodies which are intersubjectively constituted through kin relations. Reflecting on recently collected ethnographic data, I will discuss how the body is a medium through which diverse lived experiences of the family can be understood. Kinship is a classical anthropological concept that is receiving renewed attention. Research in feminist and queer anthropology has challenged the assumption of 'the family' as a universal fact, with many scholars contributing to questions concerning its relationship with gendered embodiment in particular. My paper will build on this literature to consider the following questions: How is the body shaped by kinship? How are the gendered roles that constitute family relations (such as mother, father, daughter, son) experienced, contested, made and unmade through the body? How does the transgender body complicate understandings of kinship and gender? I expand on these questions by reflecting on how waria understandings of kinship are themselves related to the production of gender, contemplating how memory and desire is experienced through the medium of the body.
Paper short abstract:
This paper illustrates how space is conceived and experienced by the performer through ritual within a Brahmin settlement, built around the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum, Kerala.
Paper long abstract:
"Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image is deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself."
- Siegfried Kracauer
Rituals make one understand the image of natural order created by symbolization and differentiation within a culture. From the earliest architecture, these fundamental relationships, such as an intermediate physical and metaphorical place have been articulated through various methods of ritual performance.
This paper illustrates how space is conceived and experienced by the performer through ritual within a Brahmin settlement, built around the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum, Kerala. The study chooses 14 of the 16 samskaras (rites of passage) which a person goes through from birth unto death. One discovers that not only during these rituals, Vedic cosmogony manifests itself and can be experienced in by the performers but also that ritual performance has been a guiding factor for spatial articulation, right through from a singular housing unit to city planning.
Paper short abstract:
The paper first presents a case for paranthropology as an underlying principle for ethnographic research methodology, and then illustrates the value of the methodology through conversations with mediums in trance.
Paper long abstract:
In the study of Taoist spirit mediumship in Taiwan and Singapore, anthropologists have often detailed the functions of spirit mediums in society, the related material and temple culture, the beliefs and practices, ritual violence and healing. However, there is an absence of literature on the actual physiological experience of trance possession from either mediums in trance who invariably have little if any memory of events during trance possession, or from the mouths of the mediums whose bodies are possessed by deities. This paper will argue in support of a research methodology, which, unlike other ethnographic research paradigms, focusses on the actual phenomena of trance possession rather than on the social groups and material culture that surrounds it. The paper will include discussions with deities tranced through their mediums conducted over an eighteen month period in 2010 and 2011 in Taiwan and Singapore. The subjects reported on will include the physiological sensations during trance states from the perspective of the entranced medium including body awareness, sense awareness, and soul awareness, and interactions between the spiritual body of the possessing deity and their devotees and clients through ritual power objects.
Paper short abstract:
Through examining field data of spirit possession phenomena this paper aims to introduce new aspects of anthropological thinking by applying affect theory and thereby setting the physical body/self into a fluctuating, living world.
Paper long abstract:
On 16 November 2004 at morning assembly in a junior high school in Southern Thailand, four pupils fainted. This event was the start of a series of similar group incidents at the school which were attributed to spirit possession. By December, the events began to receive attention in the mass media and the school became known all over Thailand as the ‘School Possessed by Spirits.’ Studies of possession have largely been based on assumptions of possession as an example of people behaving in non-rational ways, and a mind?body duality. This paper will introduce new perspectives on aspects of people’s lives by focusing on ‘affect’, and attempt to go beyond previous anthropological discussions of possession phenomena by focusing on the body as the locus
of possession. Affect is described by Deleuze - derived from Spinoza’s ideas - as shedding light on the process of effects not only between person-to-person, but also between persons and things beyond the theory of subject. The Anthropology of Affect sets the body in the living flux of the world based on the relational aspects for achieving communality through personal experience. In anthropological theories following the ‘linguistic turn’, relational viewpoints emerged, such as those of Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern, and Alfred Gell, which try to grasp an actuality of the world beyond the conventional dualism of subject/object and mind/body. This paper aims to develop this relational aspect by considering the body in the phenomena of spirit possession as penetrating subject and object.
Paper short abstract:
Deafness viewed in terms of a deficient physical body perpetuates social limitations. This paper presents a holistic view of the deaf body - biological, ecological, phenomenological, social and cultural - to move beyond impairment and explore the body as a media to interpret and express meaning and worldview.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic exploration of deaf people in Japan organized around Mark Johnson's philosophy of embodied meaning (2007). Meaning and worldview are created, interpreted and expressed through the body and bodily interactions. For Johnson, the body is not limited to a single essence. The application of this holistic approach to the body treats deafness as a condition that affects human behavior rather than a deficiency/impairment. For the deaf person as a living organism, the body is a whole, its parts coordinating in terms of shape, space, movement and directionality to discern and express qualities. The interaction of the deaf person with her environment creates visual images and clarifies her reality. The sensation, perception and experience felt in the body generates meaning and emotion that are expressed in facial expression and body posture. The body is key in social interactions (family, friends, education, employment, etc.) and the manipulation of cultural artifacts sometimes vastly different from those of hearing people. How do deaf people in Japan deal with limits - or challenges - of communication with hearing people and among themselves? For deaf people the body is a media they use to create text and discourse through the performance of sign language. These ideas will be illustrated through real-life ethnographic observations and examinations of Japanese Sign Language, Signed Japanese, issues of sign language interpretation and advances in technology (extensions of the body) that assist in the transmission and recording of body generated text in non-face-to-face-settings.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the so-called ‘living art’ of horimono, Japanese tattoos, as practiced in shitamachi Tokyo. Lived experiences of tattooed bodies suggest horimono are more than just visual images, signs, symbols, or markers/makers of identity, inked onto the surface of the physical body.
Paper long abstract:
The process of tattooing permanently alters the surface of the body and draws a myriad of historically and culturally contextualized interpretations of the physical and symbolic breaking of boundaries, namely those between the body/self and society. In the Japanese context, large scale tattoos known as horimono have been approached in academic scholarship from a predominantly visual perspective - as signs or symbols - of such transgressed boundaries. Historical practices of punitive tattooing, along with a present-day yakuza inclination towards horimono, means, more often not, an equation with social (dis)affiliation and criminal identity formation within broader public discourse. Such views of horimono, however, effectively disregard the ontological status of the horimono itself. This paper takes on this issue, exploring the varied ways both wearers of horimono, and horishi, Japanese tattooists, as well as others in the public sphere may experience horimono and tattooed bodies.
Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the shitamachi, 'downtown' area, of Tokyo, illustrates how horimono may be experienced as protective, talismanic, or some other 'supernatural' physical manifestations. When paying particular attention to both the boundaries brought into question through the process of tattooing, and to the relations between both people and 'things' brought into play within the horimono itself, we can see horimono are implicated in complex entanglements of relations. Engaging Alfred Gell's conceptualization of agency, I suggest that horimono may be at times both part of, and also beyond, either the physical body, the person on whom they are etched, or the image formed in skin and ink.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a five-year ethnographic fieldwork between Japan (Tenri) and France (Orleans and Martinique), this paper investigates the role of material culture and sensations in judo performance (Hilpron, 2012).
Paper long abstract:
Based on a five-year ethnographic fieldwork between Japan (Tenri) and France (Orleans and Martinique), this paper investigates the role of material culture and sensations in judo performance. From an anthropological point of view, this Japanese discipline is an example of a global practice that generates many specific local variations (Hilpron and Rosselin, 2010). From the perspective of the ethnography of the action (Piette, 1996), judo is organized as an actions network on the actions of others, and supported on material culture.
In the fighters' duo, judokas bodies linked through kumi-kata, judogi and mat form a single volume: the body schema is expanded to include the other and the sensations are motor communication. To be effective, judo players have to be attentive to each other, to be able to do with the opponent in order to do better against him, and develop body awareness techniques (Hilpron et al., 2012) to be efficient.
Such an approach allows us to understand how judokas question the capacity of acting within the human possibilities by anticipatory reflex, below 450 milliseconds of the threshold of consciousness.
Hilpron, M., Hamard, A., Chenault, M. (2012). « Héritage oriental des Techniques de conscience du corps », Transverse, 1, p. 47-55.
Hilpron, M., & Rosselin, C. (2010). « Vécu corporel du judo et globalisation du sport : une comparaison France-Japon ». Journal des anthropologues, 120-121, 313-332.
Piette, A. (1996). Ethnographie de l'action. L'observation des détails. Paris, Métaillé.