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The Ethnology of Okinawa: Between Folklore Studies and Social Anthropology

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The Ethnology of Okinawa: Between Folklore Studies and Social Anthropology The Ethnology of Okinawa: Between Folklore Studies and Social Anthropology. 沖縄の民族学：民俗学と社会人類学のはざま Patrick Beillevaire (French National Center for Scientific Research – Japan Research Center, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) With a population of slightly over 1,300,000 people, Okinawa must be one of the regions of the world that has received the greatest attention from scholars, be they historians, folklorists, anthropologists or linguists, although this is hardly common knowledge outside Japan. Any systematic attempt at reviewing the scholars and literature concerned with folklore studies and anthropology would assuredly prove tedious and of little interest in comparison with various sources, of which, I am sure, you are already aware.1 Here I would like to take a more casual approach based on my personal experience of Okinawan studies. But, first, let me introduce myself briefly. My interest in Okinawa arose from the reading of Mabuchi Tōichi’s and Muratake Seiichi’s papers when I was a student of Louis Dumont, a specialist on India and a prominent figure in French anthropology. His teaching at the time, which developed new perspectives on socio-symbolic order and hierarchy, provided immediate connections with what I was starting to learn from Mabuchi Tōichi and Muratake Seiichi concerning Okinawa. My first visit there took place in March 1977, and I started doing fieldwork on Tarama-jima the following year, while I was attached to Ryūkyū Daigaku as a kyakuin kenkyūsha. My stay on Tarama-jima lasted one and a half years. Since then I have been visiting Okinawa at least once a year. From around 1990, I gradually turned to history, with a special focus on the 19th century. However, I always maintained an interest in folklore and anthropological studies, as well as in the evolution of Okinawan culture and society. Only two years ago I published the notes of Charles Haguenauer (シャルル・アグノエル), a French specialist on Japanese culture and language, and an acquaintance of Iha Fuyū, who did a remarkable fieldwork in Okinawa in 1930. Editing his notes and drawings took up a huge amount of my time over a ten-year period and plunged me back into the publications of the 1920s. Since my first steps in Okinawa I have received assistance from many people, but in particular, for what concerns anthropology, from the late Yohena Kenji, who welcomed me at Ryūdai, from Mabuchi Tōichi and Higa Masao sensei, and today I am much indebted to Akamine Masanobu, professor at Ryūdai. Questions of terminology. As this presentation is about ethnology, folklore studies and social anthropology, we are expected to have a clear notion of the concerns associated with each of these disciplines. In actual fact, though, it is quite difficult to differentiate them precisely. 1 Such as 野口武徳『南島研究の歳月：沖縄と民俗学との出会い』東海大学出版会 1980年; 渡邊欣雄 「沖縄の宗教と社会」『日本民族学の現在: 1980年代から90年代へ』ヨーゼフ・クライナー（編）新 曜社 1996年: 202-223; 金城朝永「沖縄研究史」『民族学研究』15 (2), 1950年: 2-14. 1 On the one hand, folklore studies refer to the study of traditions, which includes daily life practices, rituals, tales, oral history, artifacts, music and songs, etc. In encyclopedias the discipline is often defined as a branch of anthropology. Folklore studies tend to specialize in regional cultures or minority groups within national entities. However, as evidenced by George Frazer’s famous Golden Bough, the term folklore could also apply to beliefs and customs of so-called primitive societies until the early 20th-century. But, generally, its geographical scope is limited to western societies, if one sets aside the case of Japan. The activities of folklore societies are usually confined within national boundaries, when they are not confined to much smaller areas. Laurence Gomme in England, whom Yanagita Kunio had read, and the French Arnold Van Gennep, not to mention any other European, have been leading figures in that research field. To many people, folklore seems to be something from the past, although, if it is equated with popular culture in general, there is no reason to deprive it of its potential creativity.2 Actually, the present status of folklore studies differs greatly from one country to another. In Britain and in the USA, for example, there are still active folklore societies and journals, while in France, where folklore studies — also called “study of popular traditions” — had found institutional recognition in the first half of the 20th- century, societies or journals of national standing no longer exist. Even the fine museum of popular traditions that stood in the Bois de Boulogne (ブローニュの森) in Paris has closed its doors.3 The word folklore itself nowadays most often carries a pejorative meaning. In Japan, of course, minzokugaku 民俗学, folklore studies, or the study of popular traditions and customs, have gained a very different status. It is an incredibly rich and active research field, which partly encompasses what would elsewhere be called religious studies. Through the Nihonjin-ron and Nihon-bunka-ron literature, elements of its production reach a wide readership. It is true that modern Japan has preserved a wealth of rituals and traditions, in face of which no western country can compare. More specifically, Japanese folklore studies appear to fulfill a permanent and somewhat anxious quest for national cultural and social markers of singularity. In other words, they are a national cause. Because of their intimate involvement in the formation of Japan’s 20th-century national culture, Japanese folklore studies, minzokugaku 民俗学, would actually be better rendered, as some Japanese scholars occasionally did, by the German word Volkskunde. On the other hand, in contrast with the thematic and fragmented approach of Folklore studies, social anthropology tries to apprehend societies as wholes in order to understand their working principles. Essentially, it aims at revealing the organizational and mental structures 2 See, for instance, Marian W. Smith, “The Importance of Folklore Studies to Anthropology”, Folklore, vol. 70 (1), March 1959: 300-312. 3 The meaning attached nowadays in Europe to the notion of “people” (peuple in French, Volk in German) is a politically sensitive issue. This was evidenced by the placing, at the very entrance of the Paris Museum of Popular Traditions, of a signboard warning visitors that the phrase “French people” should not be construed as carrying any racial or ethnic meaning, in that there had been a constant miscegenation of populations through history. Implicitly, it was understood that “the French people” could only have a political dimension and only refer to citizenship. 2 that govern collective or individual behavior in all sectors of activity. Research material is in part identical to that used by folklorists, but in the first place it is collected by means of participant observation, often on a long-term basis. For decades, in the wake of Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society, kinship has been a central focus of social anthropology, as it appeared to be the backbone of many non-western societies. The conceptual tools produced by social anthropology allow comparative and theoretical insights into human behavior, whereas folklore studies do not go much beyond classifying data and making them available for other disciplines. Although it was not quite true, social anthropology has long been synonymous with the study of what Westerners and Japanese alike at first called “primitive societies”, then “societies without writing” or “stateless societies”. But since the 1950s and ’60s, many corners of old or new nation-state societies have also entered into its scope. I do not want to go into designation issues here, such as to know whether social anthropology and cultural anthropology — the latter term being now favored in Japan as in the USA —, cover the same concerns. In the tradition of French and British anthropology, it seems rather futile to conceive of culture and society separately, although personally I would not mind adding the adjective “cultural” to “social”. It should also be clear that the specialized branches of anthropology which have arisen since the 1970s, such as symbolic, cognitive or ecological anthropology, stemmed in some ways from previous social anthropological research. Now, I come to the third term in the title of my lecture, “ethnology”. It is intended to stand as a midway expression between folklore studies and social anthropology, but I must admit that the choice is not satisfying. The “Study of Okinawan culture and society” or, although more inclusive, “Okinawan studies”, Okinawa-gaku, would have surely been better choices. “Ethnology”, minzokugaku 民族学, is in fact largely synonymous with social anthropology, zoku 族 (meaning yakara) being indicative of a primary concern with family and social organization. It is also closely associated with prewar research on overseas ethnic groups, as the Japanese Journal of Ethnology, Minzokugaku kenkyū, launched in 1935, bears witness. In French too, until today, ethnology and social anthropology remain largely interchangeable terms. In my defense, however, I could say that, from a historical viewpoint, the term ethnology may refer to an early and less theoretical stage of social anthropology that corresponds to a period of accumulation of data. The ambiguous positioning of Okinawa-gaku. Okinawa-gaku, which is also comprised of history, linguistics and archaeology, is an interesting term to consider. It is found as an entry in many reference books, and I wonder if there is any other example of a Japanese name suffixed with gaku that is so ordinarily used. On the database Nacsis-Webcat I counted no less than 35 books carrying Okinawa-gaku in their title — and there are probably more — whereas I found only 4 titles with Ainu-gaku. Such a specific designation is obviously a double-edged sword: on one side, it establishes Okinawa-gaku as a sub-field of Japanese studies, which covers just about the same disciplines 3 as the latter on a regional scale, on the other, it puts them and their object outside Japanese studies.
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