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Reviewed by:
  • Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village: The Making and Becoming of Person and Place
  • John W. Traphagan (bio)
Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village: The Making and Becoming of Person and Place. By D. P. Martinez. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2004. viii, 254 pages. $25.00, paper.

Martinez has provided scholars of Japan with an interesting book that presents useful ethnographic data on social structure and daily life in a Japanese diving village. Based upon fieldwork conducted in 1984, the book represents an example of a synchronic cut in time from that era, rather than a look [End Page 424] at the life of a diving community contextualized within the flow of social change that has characterized postwar Japanese life.

Martinez begins by placing herself as an anthropologist within the fieldwork context. She discusses the process by which she located her field site, Kuzaki, as well as the difficulties she experienced becoming comfortable with the community in which she lived. In this chapter, Martinez also provides an interesting discussion of key conceptual frames that she uses in interpreting Japanese ritual. Concepts of making (tsukuru) and becoming (naru), she argues, are of central importance in understanding ritual practice in Japan. Rituals such as those she focuses on in the book "make" individual and group identities, in the sense that they are examples of how people can make efforts to become, in terms of identity, through work and effort. Rituals form processes through which people make their social and physical spaces and keep open lines of communication between humans and ancestors or kami (p. 14). This is an interesting idea related to Japanese ritual practice that is, unfortunately, not sufficiently developed in the discussions of various public and private rituals in Kuzaki.

From these initial thoughts, Martinez moves into several chapters that focus on detailed ethnographic descriptions of the ama divers, their community, and the role of different social and political structures within that community. These chapters are very informative but ultimately are not well situated within the corpus of ethnographic writing on Japan. For example, Martinez embarks upon a discussion of Japanese families and households in rural areas but does not present sufficient nuance in her examination of the various ways in which families are constituted. At one point (p. 59), Martinez indicates that elder and younger generations in some cases form "split" households because they live in separate buildings. The immediate question that comes to mind is the meaning of "split." Several scholars1 have shown how rural families may be organized into a compound structure in which all members are listed on the same koseki or, if not listed that way, are viewed by members of the community as belonging to the same koseki. Farming families may be "split" for tax purposes while remaining a unified household from a social perspective. Neither the complexities of family structure nor the content of social relationships within families come through in the writing. Unfortunately, the extensive literature on family and kinship is not sufficiently engaged by the author; had she done so, some of these problems could have been avoided.

Indeed, there is a general inadequacy of situating her data within the ethnographic literature on Japan, a problem that arises in relation to other areas [End Page 425] of her discussion of social structure. For example, in chapter four, Martinez focuses on village organization and devotes some attention to age grades. Age-grading practices are common in rural parts of Japan and are an important element in community structure, particularly in terms of allocating work responsibilities to different age and gender groups. Martinez's description of this important part of village social organization is cursory and fails to employ the literature on age-grading practices in Japan that would help in interpreting and situating the structures that exist in Kuzaki in relation to Japanese society in general.2

While alone this does not represent a major problem, it points to a general tendency in the book to only reference a very limited range of ethnographic research on Japan and in some cases to not accurately represent the work that has been done. For example...

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