Arne Røkkum - Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japans Ryukyu Islands

Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. Integral to this viewpoint is a comprehensive understanding of the inhabitants of these islands, including their culture, beliefs, and mores.

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japans Ryukyu Islands contains original ethnography which explores the mind of the islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression to these relationships. This book is based on extensive original research, and includes participant observation. Village priestesses in the southern Ryukyu Islands verbalize a sense of connectedness with the landscape through their prayers. Rather than interpreting this oratory as an example of symbolic or metaphoric construction, however, the author guides the reader toward a more concrete experience of the effect induced by the ornate words. This approach allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves, and also sets the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese studies, and Pacific island studies. This book strings together issues of mind, society and nature and captures the exact moments when impressionistic views of nature are composed into stylized utterances.

This study will be of great interest to the general anthropological readership interested in theoretical advances through fieldwork, as well as to Asian studies scholars.

Arne Rkkum is a professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Ethnography, University Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. He has conducted fieldwork among the Izu and Ryukyu islanders of Japan and among the Bunun and Yami of Taiwan. He is the author of Goddesses, Priestesses and Sisters: Mind Gender and Power in the Monarchic Tradition of the Ryukyus (Scandinavian University Press, 1998).

Series editor:

Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University

Editorial Board:

Pamela Asquith, University of Alberta

Eyal Ben Ari, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Hirochika Nakamaki, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka

Wendy Smith, Monash University

Jan van Bremen, University of Leiden

A Japanese View of Nature

The world of living things

Kinji Imanishi

Translated by Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi and

Hiroyuki Takasaki

Edited and introduced by Pamela J. Asquith

Japans Changing Generations

Are young people creating a new society?

Edited by Gordon Mathews and Bruce White

The Care of the Elderly in Japan

Yongmei Wu

Community Volunteers in Japan

Everyday stories of social change

Lynne Y. Nakano

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japans Ryukyu Islands

Arne Rkkum

Arne Rkkum

First published 2006

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

2006 Arne Rkkum

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Rkkum, Arne.

2005004364

ISBN10: 041535563X

ISBN13: 9780415355636

... the complete regeneration of sentiment is religion, which is poetry, but poetry completed.

C.S. Peirce

Frontispiece Visitor Spirit, the Mayunganashi. Mask carved by Mr Arashiro Hiroshi, Ishigaki Island. Photo by Ms Ann Christine Eek, University Museum of Cultural History, Oslo.

Figures

Maps

The present volume adds some important new features to the growing collection put together by the Japan Anthropology Workshop as major contributions to cutting edge scholarship in the field. We have already brought a translation of a seminal work in Japanese, collections of some of the best papers presented at JAWS meetings, and close, textured studies by young, rising ethnographers about life in contemporary Japan. This latest book is, by contrast, drawn from participatory fieldwork carried out over a period of 30 years, and thus adds the dimension of a long-term familiarity with the subject matter. It brings a sharp regional focus, set in an island of the Ryukyu archipelago, but distinguishing practices observed there from those on different islands in the same chain. At the same time, it adds a comparative dimension that ranges way beyond Japan, from the close Chinese influences coming through Taiwan, to older resemblances with practices of a broad Austronesian cultural area. Last but not least, the book also engages with theoretical issues that lie at the heart of the study of anthropology.

In this important study of ritual life, Arne Rkkum first tackles the western emphasis on text, dialogue, and the conceptual mind/body separation by setting out to demonstrate the importance of other elements of the interactivity among people, and between people and other species in nature, which he terms the sensuous matter that bears on mentalities. He insists on the necessity of participation at all levels in ritual activity, which he describes for local people as implanting their inner lives in ritual, dance, and postured greetings to overcome the power of pent-up grudges that could easily become curses. His work includes much fine detail about primary images of importance, such as vision, taste, and fragrance, replicated from natural origins for their association on particular occasions, and for specific purposes. Ritual is composed, he suggests, more like a movement in a symphony than a string of sentences in a novel, to attune to certain keys and moods in the human mind.

Rkkums analysis is guided by Piercian notions of indexicality, but the events he describes are so full of rich detail that they could be lifted, wholesale, into any number of comparative frameworks. A second important focus is on exchanges associated with the various rites, and he shows how gifts can work not only to make connections, but also to disconnect, thus offering a