Organizer: William W. Kelly, Yale University
Chair: David W. Plath, University of Illinois, Champaign
Discussant: Yoshinobu Ota, University of Kyushu
Takie Sugiyama Lebra, University of Hawai'i
A recent version of cultural relativism focuses critically on the Western "self" as accountable for misrepresenting the non Western "Other." What stands out in the Western epistemological tradition, as formulated in this reflexive critique, is a set of rigorous bifurcations, notably mind and body, and culture and nature. In the anthropology of personhood, another dichotomy prevails: the hidden interior and the exposed exterior of the person; the former is privileged as the locus of fundamental (Western) values such as unity, autonomy, context independence, and "truth." The exterior is associated with the "social" component of the person and thereby denigrated as contrived, deceptive, context dependent, multiple, shifting, fragmented, or decentered, according to the demands of a given social situation. Current anthropology, adopting a postmodern skepticism, recognizes how prevalent is social personhood across most non Western cultures, and how peculiar is the Western emphasis on interiority.
Japan, as a non Western case, doubly questions these taken for granted dichotomies. First, there is general consensus that Japanese personhood is socially encumbered, while it is also bifurcated between interior and exterior (as uchi/soto or ura/omote) even more sharply than is Western personhood. It is social loading, I argue, that necessitates the uchi/soto boundary in such a way that the more socially concerned a person is, the more deeply she must interiorize herself. The Western correlation of the social with the exterior is thus reversed.
Second, the primacy of the interior in the Western conception of personhood stems from the link between the interior and a disembodied conception of mind. Can we say, then, that the body belongs to the exterior? The body, while physically visible and touchable and thus external, is to be socially hidden, located in the innermost area of selfhood. Thus, anthropological discussions of Western personhood are riven with logical contradictions such as between an interior of rational mind, cool thoughts and ascetic discipline and an irrational body of drives, impulses, and hot emotions. As the whole person is split between interior and exterior, so is the interior itself split between mind and body, culture and nature, conscious and unconscious. For Japanese personhood, the interior is less burdened with such contradictions and inner splits because it is the locus of the embodied spirit identified as kokoro, ki, hara, koshi, mi, etc.,-none of which is reducible to either the disembodied mind or the mindless body.
The Japanese case problematizes not only these Western dichotomies but also their postmodern obliteration by introducing another version of cultural relativism that takes into account cultural variation in the content of interiority/exteriority, unity/multiplicity, centered/decentered, and truth/untruth. I believe that the exterior/interior distinction is universal but that it varies across cultures in its form, content, purpose, and function. It may be that [Western] anthropologists tend to focus on an interior vs. exterior dichotomized personhood because they introspectively understand the interior of their own selves, while finding it difficult to penetrate the interior of non Western selves without depending on external cues.
Anne Allison, Duke University
The intersection of feminist anthropology and Japan studies is a recent and, as of yet, uncertain one. Its tentativeness stems, I will argue, from certain trends in feminist anthropology which have inhibited the work that has been done in the area of Japan. The direction taken by feminist anthropologists has followed fairly consistently the path set out by those writing in the two anthologies that initiated this field in the 1970s-Towards an Anthropology of Women (Rayna Rapp, ed.) and Women, Culture, and Society (Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds.). The questions they posed were those of gender and power (how do different societies organize gender relations? how is power constituted in and through gender?); the paradigms used were principally materialist and culturalist. Anthropological studies of gender have become much more sophisticated and diversified since that time, and are now heavily influenced by such theoretical orientations as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and (post )coloniality. Still, as evidenced by two recent volumes, Henrietta Moore's Feminism and Anthropology and Michaela di Leonardo's edited Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, much feminist anthropology continues to privilege materialist approaches, investigating gender and power in terms of how relations of production and reproduction are organized in a society and encoded in cultural categories.
This approach can be and has been applied effectively to the case of Japan. Research that explores the gendered dynamics of the workplace, political arena, reproduction, and family life has been done by a number of anthropologists (e.g., Smith, Rosenberger, Tamanoi, Bestor) even outside the parameters of feminism. Yet other dimensions of Japanese life critically important to gender have barely been tapped-especially those produced by Japan's position as a global superpower in the late stage of capitalism, engaged in multiple transnational markets. Such areas include popular culture, commoditization, leisure and entertainment, and sexuality. These are all topics more actively pursued by scholars in other disciplines, such as literature, cultural studies, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Looking at some of this work, which theorizes fantasy, desire, subjectivity, and sexuality largely in terms of Western concepts, I contemplate how applicable such scholarship can be for Japan studies and, if applicable, how it can be molded to suit rather than distort or overlook the specificities of Japanese culture. Rather than a paper that merely catalogues work that has been done within a feminist anthropology of Japan, my focus is rather on the types of paradigms and questions that have hitherto been characterized that work and on those that have been avoided and might be developed in the future.
Margaret Lock, McGill University
Medical anthropology, the comparative study of the cultural construction of knowledge about the body, health, illness and suffering and its practice, has emerged as one of the largest subdisciplines of anthropology in recent years. At its best, this provocative field provides a major challenge to current anthropological theory, particularly with respect to the question of representation and its relationship to practice. At the same time, it reopens several of the thorny issues which have challenged anthropology since its inception, including the relationship of culture to nature, and mind to body.
Medical anthropological research in Japan has proved to be of particular importance because of its invaluable contribution to the anthropology and sociology of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I will discuss recent research in Japan in connection with biomedicine, biomedical technology, public health, and East Asian medicine, and reflect on the way in which this research has challenged our ideas of what constitutes scientific knowledge, how it is legitimated, and how it is represented in the social sciences.
William W. Kelly, Yale University
One of the central theoretical concerns of contemporary anthropology is how to formulate the recursively structured and structuring character of human action. Theories of practice have tried to overcome one sided subjectivist or objectivist accounts of behavior and its consequences by analyzing action as a historically grounded dialectic of structure and agency. A key notion in such an analysis of action is that of practice itself, activity produced by enduring, embodied dispositions of individuals and patterned by the demands of institutional fields. Practices-including academic ones like panel proposals and meetings presentations-thus lie at the intersection of the articulated and the presuppositional, the regularized and the improvised, the ideologically compelled and the personally strategic. They represent the reflexivity at the heart of social life.
In general social theory, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Raymond Williams, William Sewell, among others, have offered overlapping analytical language for what Giddens calls this problem of structuration. Anthropologists as different as Sherry Ortner, Marshall Sahlins, Sally Falk Moore, and Renato Rosaldo have shaped practice theory to the particular concerns of their ethnographic questions.
However compelling to parts of the discipline, this is not a theoretical framework that has informed much Japan work, but it is my contention that anthropological research in and of Japan can be quite productively conceptualized in its terms. My aim in this presentation is not to criticize or defend the wariness of Japan ethnographers (myself included) to adopt the language of practice theorists, nor simply to declare smugly that, lo and behold, we've been speaking the language of practice all along without being aware of it. Rather, it is to show by means of several concrete examples just how our efforts to understand and represent the structuring of everyday life in Japan may be enhanced by pursuing that understanding through the lens of practice theory.
The examples I expect to use are those of pro baseball players (Kelly), bar hostesses (Allison), urban shopkeepers (Bestor), middle class brides and grooms (Edwards), and shellfish divers (Plath).
Would you like to return to the Japan Table of Contents? Choose another area?