Priests and Warriors Lecture 4: October 1, 2003. Understanding Culture A whole way of life vs. partial representations –Language –Day-to-day life –Historical.

Priests and Warriors

Lecture 4: October 1, 2003

Understanding Culture• A whole way of life vs.

partial representations– Language– Day-to-day life– Historical currents– Aesthetic concerns– Unspoken hegemonies– Competing ideologies– Body cultures

Example: The Tea Ceremony

“The Japanese National Character”

• seven deadly cliches– economic animals– selfless groupies– deferential subordinates– homogenous society– Zen aesthetes– inscrutable character– imitators not innovators

loyal samurai . . .?

Fallacies of Culture as National Character

• essentializing– “inherently Japanese”

• ethnocentric– they are what we are not

• homogenizes variety in everyday life

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are needed to see this picture.

Garo, avant garde manga

What is culture?

• national character

• refined accomplishment

• culture as tradition

compared to

• an anthropological view of culture– conventional– contingent– contested

Forest scenes in Princess Mononoke

How understand a foreign culture?

• fieldwork– participant-observation– interviewing– everyday life

• hanami (cherry blossom viewing)– reverence for nature, or – drunken karaoke w/ friends

ethnography = “a commitment to the actual”

Anthropological View of Culture• conventional

– language– system of ideologies – everyday practices

• contingent – historical changes– institutional forces

• contested– power / resistance– social categories

Rhymester:samurai B-Boys

Classical age of Japan (6th-12th c.)• 710 - 794 Nara

• Heian court in Kyoto 794 -1185 - political stability & Buddhism

• literacy (kanji from China, kana by women)

• dueling aesthetics as political power

see also Totman (1981) Japan Before Perry

Warring states period (1192 - 1600)• local warlords (daimyô)

• samurai (historical change)– small #, stable, elite (early)– large #, complex,commoners (late)

• shifting centers of power– Kamakura 1192 - 1333– late 1200s Mongols invade (fail)– Muromachi 1334 - 1573 etc.

• Religion moves to the masses– Zen as contrast to worldly temples

Yukio MISHIMA, 20th c. novelist,

posing as a samurai

Tokugawa Period (1600 - 1868)

• Shogun rule Edo (Tokyo)– TOKUGAWA Ieyasu

• samurai bureaucrats

• rigid class structure– samurai, farmers, artisans,

merchants

• but power shifts to merchants and rise of mercantile culture

Himeji Castle near Osaka

Meiji Restoration 1868

• 1853 Commodore Perry “Black Ships”

• Reformers “restore” Meiji Emperor

• Rapid moves to modernize selected from Western models

• Imperial aggression begins in 20th century

Izumo Shrine, the Emperor as living god of Shintô religion

Samurai discussion

Religion in Japan• This-worldly benefits

(genze riyaku)

• "Born Shinto, die Buddhist"

• Complex relationship between practice and belief

Buddhist priests at prayer

Ethnicity and Religion

• Links between kami and the people

• Imperial line

• People can become kami Amaterasu, Sun Goddess and

progenitor of Imperial line