OAC Online Seminar 13-24 October: Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan

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There is a computing expression, What You See Is What You Get (pronounced ‘wiziwig’ for short) that refers to the aim of showing on the screen what the end-product will actually look like, as opposed to a string of numbers and letters. It was borrowed from a TV comedy catch phrase meaning “I am who I am, take it or leave it”. The idea that the truth is not what appears on the surface is endemic in western civilization and is especially favoured by academic intellectuals who often like to think that their own shambolic appearance conceals real depth. They may even cultivate being scruffy in order to suggest hidden depths that aren't there! Beauty is only skin deep after all. It is not hard to find in all this Christian notions of the soul and of heaven being vastly superior to this life. The hedonistic riposte is to say that, other things being equal, it is better to be rich, beautiful, successful and happy than not or, in Gordon Gecko’s words, “greed is good”.

Philip Swift’s entertaining and erudite essay takes off from ethnographic reports of Japanese praying at Shinto shrines. It seems that going through the motions of prayer is all that matters there and this causes problems for academic interpreters (anthropologists included). Surely there has to be more to the ritual than that? Philip asks rather what might happen if we treat superficiality not as a problem but as a resource. He also tackles a common claim that Japanese ritual does not evoke cosmology, the theories and stories that explain how our universe was made. He suggests rather that forms and surfaces – the artificial and the superficial -- might themselves be understood as being cosmologically efficacious in Japan.

Philip Swift lives in London where he taught in the history and anthropology departments at University College London for five years. Philip carried out fieldwork with the members of a Japanese religious group. An article based on this research ('Touching Conversion: Tangible Transformations in a Japanese New Religion') was awarded the Curl Essay Prize for 2009 by the Royal Anthropological Institute. OAC regulars already know Phil for his fantastic blog post The Octopus: Eight Footnotes.

You can read or download the present paper, Cosmetic cosmologies in Japan: Notes towards a superficial investig... here. This online seminar will last twelve days, so there is plenty of time to read and reflect, even to do some impromptu fieldwork! This is not just a specialist paper on Japanese religion. It touches on issues that affect us all. And to prove it, Philip’s argument starts with a scene from a James Bond novel. Now is that superficial or what?

In the movie, Last year at Marienbad, a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to go away with him, but she doesn’t seem to remember that they already met a year ago. It’s a pretty inscrutable movie. I once saw its writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, being interviewed by journalists on French TV. One of them said to him. “I have a theory about what is going on in the film: they were killed together last year at Marienbad and are now ghosts!” Robbe-Grillet replied “What I find interesting is that you need to know what really happened.” Enjoy. And please feel free to join the discussion!

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I'm afraid you just committed a form of Masked Man Fallacy by resorting to substitution thinking two designators share the same truth. Gender is not the same as prayer. Like in any theoretical proposition, a statement about gender is not necessarily a statement about prayer.

With performativity, you can ask if the American guy mimicking the religious gestures of a Buddhist monk is performing what is eastern so he will be accepted or performing what is western so he will belong.
Sorry, but no. I am talking about the logical form of propositions and what concepts add or fail to add to explanations. Stripped of the verbal abuse, my claim is a straightforward one: Saying that "performativity" adds something to what is already obvious about the examples that Phillip has provided is nonsense. I've admitted I could be wrong. If you think it does add something, please tell us about it.

Do be warned, however: Citing authorities in whom I do not believe and indulging in snide ad hominem asides does not, at least to me, count as persuasive argument.

Look at it this way. I am, in Shakespeare's terms, approaching my second childhood, only a few years away from a return to diapers. This baby is willing to be spoon fed. What can you put on the table?
I think this is enough of what was allegedly not a personal exchange. The topic was never central to Philip's paper and I would like to encourage the protagonists to leave space for others to return to what was until recently an amiable and intelligent discussion of that paper.
Okay, I will give you my experience, personal and ethnographic.

When a brown man is nailed on a cross during Lent, Filipinos consider it a penance or penitence.

When the same thing is done to a white man, which, by the way, occasionally happens, Filipinos think of it as a show or spectacle.

They are performing the same thing. How come the way they and their acts or performances are perceived are not the same?

The culprits? Cultural memory, imitation or mimicry, repertoire, archive, and the rest of the concepts you can find in the idea of performativity.

Filipinos have a cultural memory of suffering we call pasyon or passion for being under Spain for three hundred years and the white men or Americans, to be specific, have a cultural memory of media spectacle that is Hollywood, which is known in developing countries.

Ergo, on the surface, the white men on the cross performs "Filipinoness" but deep down, he performs his Americanness too. Now I just opened a hole for a postcolonial approach. That is the beauty of performativity. Surfaces and layers are scrutinized to create spaces for more theoretical possibilities.
Nice example. Let's use it as Keith suggests, to seque back to discussion of Phillip's paper. A brown man and a white man nailed on a cross; a Japanese salary man and James Bond; observers who see the same behavior but draw different conclusions about it because of the expectations they bring to what they see.

I still don't see what "performativity" adds to our understanding of what is going on, let alone how it can function as an explanation of what makes a ritual efficacious, when we can't even agree on the intended effect.

I rest my case and do hope that others will leap in, in whatever directions they prefer.

P.S. A warm thank you, indeed, for reminding Keith that you are no frail flower in need of protection.





M Izabel said:
Okay, I will give you my experience, personal and ethnographic.

When a brown man is nailed on a cross during Lent, Filipinos consider it a penance or penitence.

When the same thing is done to a white man, which, by the way, occasionally happens, Filipinos think of it as a show or spectacle.

They are performing the same thing. How come the way they and their acts or performances are perceived are not the same?

The culprits? Cultural memory, imitation or mimicry, repertoire, archive, and the rest of the concepts you can find in the idea of performativity.

Filipinos have a cultural memory of suffering we call pasyon or passion for being under Spain for three hundred years and the white men or Americans, to be specific, have a cultural memory of media spectacle that is Hollywood, which is known in developing countries.

Ergo, on the surface, the white men on the cross performs "Filipinoness" but deep down, he performs his Americanness too. Now I just opened a hole for a postcolonial approach. That is the beauty of performativity. Surfaces and layers are scrutinized to create spaces for more theoretical possibilities.
To avoid being accused of abusing verbals, I need to post two corrections:

"How come the ways they and their acts or performances are perceived are not the same?"

Ergo, on the surface, the white man on the cross performs "Filipinoness" but deep down..."

----------------------------

When I mentioned performativity the first time, I did not think that it should be the focus of the paper. The author is brilliant. He knows his stuff. Who am I to impose my theoretical leaning?

Performativity popped up because, as I see it, it is ethnography-based. It is useful in studying ritual, a system of signs, symbols, and surfaces. Even the efficacy of a ritual is a layered problem that needs to be threshed out. Each culture has a different cultural archive of effect, power, influence, end, result, conclusion, grace, healing, medicine, prize, triumph, etc. That's where cosmology comes in, and cosmology is performable and performative.
Okay, okay. So I made a quick comment on the utility of the idea of ‘performativity’. Since I gave no further explanation, perhaps it seemed as if what I was saying was that all one had to do was to solemnly invoke the term – like a performative itself – and in so doing, all the problems of ethnography would magically vanish.

Apologies, John, if that was the implication.

To some degree, I can appreciate your frustration with academic terms that can become so fashionable that their very utterance alone is thought to provide its own total explanation (‘liminality’ is one such, and I dare say that ‘materiality’ is another). But in fairness, I never said that performativity was massively explanatory, I just said it was useful.

Here, then, are some reasons why I think so, that are, I hope, relevant to the ethnographic case at hand.

Firstly, as John quite rightly says, although the theory of performatives was first worked out by Austin, then applied in anthropology by Tambiah, Roy Rappaport, etc, and sent in a different direction, via Derrida, by academics such as Judith Butler, one could argue that something like an indigenous theory of performativity existed in Japan long before Austin even put pen to paper. Thus, the 19th century intellectuals who loosely constituted the so-called school of ‘national learning’ (kokugaku) elaborated on the ancient principle of kotodama (the ‘spirit of words’), a doctrine that already amounted to a kind of occult speech act theory, in which words do not merely stand for things, but make them happen.

This idea of the efficacious power of utterances is especially prominent today in Japanese new religions. Thus, the title of a book by the leader of one such group, Seichô no Ie, is called Words are Alive (Kotoba wa ikite iru). And words were deemed capable of some performative liveliness in the group I worked with too. I remember how, on one oppressively hot afternoon outside a train station, I complained about the heat to another member. His response: ‘If you say you’re “hot”, you’ll become hot!’

But these notions of performative potential aren’t limited to new religious groups in Japan, and neither are they limited to the domain of linguistic utterances only. That is to say, it’s not just words that can ‘do’ things; things can ‘do’ words as well, and in the very places I’m interested in: Japanese shrines. What I’m referring to are the homophonic correspondences (in the Japanese language) that can invest certain objects with performative powers. One example only – because I don’t want to go on at length: when making prayers at shrines, it’s customary to throw money into an offering box. The reason why a five Yen coin (less than 1 pence) happens to be a popular offering is just that ‘five Yen’ (go-en) in Japanese is a homophone of ‘relation’ (go-en). Hence, to offer such a coin is to create a relation. In that sense, I would understand it to be performative. But to say all this isn't to explain everything else.

But I'll leave it there.
These last few exchanges have been unfortunate and a distraction. I think I agree with Keith Hart here more than anyone. John's original comment was unnecessarily harsh. I do not say unnecessarily strong, since I think that there ought to be room for demanding conceptual clarity in the language being employed, and fine-grained conceptual distinctions tend to get rubbed out from careless use of terms (e.g. methodologies for methods). It is not clear to what performativity is supposed to mean, and how it is distinct from performance, if performativity is not being used in Austin's sense.

The meaning of a performance, i.e. how a performance is interpreted by an audience, can change with the substitution of performers (white man, brown man), (Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain), or it might not(Bond, Japanese priest),(Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain). It is a matter of whether in the eyes of interpreters the substitutions are equivalent or not. I note that in Izabel's example, whether it is a white man nailed to the cross or a brown man nailed to the cross, it is still a man nailed to the cross. The significance of the act, with respect to how it is understood by an audience, changes. It will also change with the audience. Finally, I take it as one of Swift's main points that the internal mental states of performers may not be taken as having any particular significance in how an act is interpreted. Perhaps this is what is meant by performativity?
Thank you for your elaboration, Philip.

Performativity is beyond linguistic utterances. It can be a nonverbal creating a situation or a reality. It can be doing as being. Like all other theories, it is more than what it sounds or seems.

You hit the target when you explained how performativity is inherent in Japanese Culture or religion. Kata is one example. Both the masters' and the students' acts and utterances are performative. The efficacy of their performance or ritual, since kata is ritualistic in nature, is multi-layered. One really needs to investigate it by going underneath the surface.

What attracts me to performativity, or performance theory in general, is its indigenous features. It does not claim to be a new theory above all theories. It only considers an alternative approach, which the indigenous cultures have been doing, to understanding sociocultural narratives without relying much on disembodied texts.

Diana Taylor's work on the cultural performances in the Americas has led me to believe that performance theory has a place in anthropology. Human beings express and transfer narratives nonverbally through performance and imitation. I find some terms in performance theory useful in cultural studies. For instance, the archive and the repertoire can be used to label what is hidden and what is exposed by a culture.

All we need is an open mind. Reading and even watching lectures on Youtube also help.
You hit the target when you explained how performativity is inherent in Japanese Culture or religion.

Diana Taylor's work on the cultural performances in the Americas has led me to believe that performance theory has a place in anthropology. Human beings express and transfer narratives nonverbally through performance and imitation. I find some terms in performance theory useful in cultural studies. For instance, the archive and the repertoire can be used to label what is hidden and what is exposed by a culture.

To some degree, I can appreciate your frustration with academic terms that can become so fashionable that their very utterance alone is thought to provide its own total explanation (‘liminality’ is one such, and I dare say that ‘materiality’ is another). But in fairness, I never said that performativity was massively explanatory, I just said it was useful.

---------

Let me explain where I'm coming from and in a bit more detail, why I find these arguments unpersuasive.

I am comfortable with scholarly language used in two modes. In what I will call the interpretive mode it directs me to something I haven't noticed before, a difference that makes a difference. An example is the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin's distinction between painterly and linear styles in painting. I was, I recall, still in high school when I read Wölfflin's Principles of Art History, and I can still remember how the way I looked at paintings was totally transformed. In what I call the explanatory mode it asserts a causal relation embedded in an empirically grounded theory. "Electricity" is a good example."Why are the lights out? You haven't flipped the switch. There is no electricity reaching the lights." And behind those propositions, my mental encyclopedia holds a lot of basic information about power plants, generators, transmission lines, volts, amps, watts, ohms, all sorts of interesting detail about how electricity works.

My fundamental gripe with "performativity" is that it works in neither of these ways. In contrast to Wölfflin's "painterly" and "linear" it points to nothing in particular. Just listen to Phillip. It's in coins, it's in sounds, it's in architecture; it's here, it's there, it's everywhere—and, thus, analytically speaking, nowhere. And to assert that Japanese have more of it than anyone else? What makes a Japanese kabuki actor more performative than a British punk rock band or the queen opening parliament? Where is the difference you point to and say, "There, see that."

In contrast, a case can be made that "liminality," at least, is a much more useful term. Van Gennep pointed to something real. There is a moment during the movement from one place, position, or status to another, when the person, population, or thing in question is neither here nor there. And Vic Turner didn't just label the moment "liminality" and describe it as "betwixt and between." He looked for recurrent patterns in the symbolism of liminality. He started with particular empirical data, Ndembu curing rituals and other Central African rites-de-passage. He observed recurrent features of these rites: isolation, nakedness, shared suffering, physical marking, the transmission of tradition through masks and monsters. He enabled this anthropologist to look at a Chinese ritual and say, "No, that isn't what's happening here. The pattern is inverted. There is no movement from one status to another. There are worshippers negotiating favors with gods, ghosts or ancestors." If "performativity" works as well for anyone here, I'd like to see the evidence.

Fragments of verbal or architectural magic based on punning? I'm sorry, I'm not impressed. Allow me to recommend Hidden Meanings: Symbolism in Chinese Art. To me, what anthropologists who want to go this route need to think about is how we can add something to art historical scholarship. Fragmentary evidence and off-the-cuff generalizations based on trendy buzzwords? I think of what Keith Hart has said about his experience moving from the classics to anthropology and how sloppy the anthropologists still seem to him.

So, problem No. 1, I read "performativity" and I don't see anything new; I don't see a difference that makes a difference, in the way that "painterly" vs "linear" transformed the way I look at paintings.

Problem No. 2. If I try to imagine writing, "If performativity then X" as a causal statement, I (a) am at a loss what X would be and (b) unable to summon up from my mental encyclopedia a coherent theory of which that proposition would be a part, the way I can with electricity: "If electricity, light's are on." "Why?" "The power plants generate electricity that is transmitted over the wires to the light bulbs." I'm not asking for much here. The sort of explanation that you find in a Richard Scarry children's book will do. But I don't see it happening here.

What I have learned from this discussion is that "performativity" has all sorts of interesting associations: cultural memory, archives, repertoires, etc. But so, I observe, do "God" or "magic." And I know that I wouldn't think much of an anthropological analysis that concluded: "How did the ritual work?" "Magic." "What made it efficacious?" "God."

Finally, however, a point on which I think we agree. When M Izabel writes that she believes,"that performance theory has a place in anthropology," I can only agree. Our differences appear to lie in the fact that she got excited about the topic by reading Diane Taylor, while my inspiration was Victor Turner and, via Turner, Kenneth Burke and Richard Schecter. No reason at all why we can't work out the clashes in vocabulary and approach and make some actual progress beyond the meta-level sparring that I, for my part, now end here.
I am not wrapping this up. There is a whole day to go on the west side of the Atlantic and the thread can stay open as long as members have something more to say.

But I'm catching a plane to South Africa in a few hours and I want to thank Philip for the very high standard he has brought to our discussion. His replies have been unpretentious, engaging and above all an expression of his obvious passion for learning about Japan. As a result we and the unseen readers out there have learned a lot. I know I have.Thank you, Phil.

I leave you with a question raised by Fran Barone elsewhere. What does it mean to say that the OAC is a Cooperative? My answer would be that it is potentially lots of little specialized cooperatives, as well as a place where individualism thrives. This online seminar series is one of the main vehicles for developing the cooperative spirit here. Sometimes contributors forget that. I would invite those of you who would like to see more cooperation here to participate in that other thread.

Thanks to all those who made this such a rewarding experience. Come back again.
John,

Maybe I failed to put my point across with sufficient clarity, but in trying to spell out some of the reasons why the idea of 'performativity' is relevant to the understanding of certain Japanese ethnographic data, I wasn't making any sort of quantifiable claim that the pertinence of the term is owing to the fact that the Japanese 'have more' performativity than anyone else. Possibly some numerically minded anthropologist could attempt, somewhat in the manner of G.P. Murdock, to crunch the numbers for different countries and arrive at an estimate of their respective GDP (Gross Domestic Performativity), but I'd agree with you that such a project would be fairly dubious.

As I understand it, one straightforward sense of 'performativity' is that it refers to an aspect of language. This is what interested Austin, who wanted to draw a contrast between statements which do things ('I name this ship...') and statements which describe or refer to some state of affairs ('the cat sat on the mat'). The brilliance of Austin's explorations is that they showed how the capacities of language go well beyond mere reference. But what I'm saying is that the Japanese didn't have to read Austin in order to discover the idea that words do more than just 'point to' things, because they already had a pretty well-worked out idea that words could 'do' things, as well as an idea that certain correspondences between words and things can make those things efficacious too.

To be sure, calling these ideas 'performative' doesn't explain them, but it's not intended to explain them, it's merely meant as an analytical term to describe a set of indigenous notions about how language can function - and function in relation to things.

But maybe that's enough of that. Possibly, if there's still remaining energy and interest, we could pursue this particular conversation in the Theory for Anthropology group.

In any case, as Keith reminds us, the curtain is soon to come down on this discussion. Just before it does, I want to say a massive thanks to everyone who took time out to read and comment on my paper. I've enjoyed the seminar very much, and have benefitted immensely from all the advice, questions and criticism.

Once again, thank you!

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