Enduring Identities: The Guise of Shinto in Contemporary Japan

Chapter Six: Performing Ritual

164 C H A P T E R S I X PERFORMING RITUAL Readers might find it odd that I have deferred until now discussion of a shrine and its priests’ ostensible raison d’être: those ritual events and performances said to embody the heritage, hierarchies, and myths of its primary kami. Since Japanese festivals are known the world over for their dynamism and pageantry (not to mention the expenditures lavished on them), they may seem a likely choice for center stage in a discussion of shrine Shinto within contemporary Japanese society. I opted for such a strategy of presentation in my earlier book on Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki, using that institution’s ritual performances as points of access for issues that ranged from the invention of tradition to gender politics. In the current study, I have tried to establish a different logic, one more concerned with the personal agency, sustaining ideologies, and underlying practices that enable long-lived institutions to reformulate their identities within constantly changing social environments. One of the most obvious ways this happens is through ritual performances . There continues to be enormous instructive potential in ritual and festival because a sampling of a culture’s norms and values—usually in some kind of condensed or exaggerated form—occurs within a neatly demarcatedframeoftimeandspaceconstructedbythepeopleunderstudy andnotbytheobserver(Brandes1988).Inchoosingaspecificsiteorevent and then working up into larger institutional realms, this study has aimed at distinguishing between what Clifford Geertz calls “a religious attitude toward experience and the sorts of social apparatus which have been associated with supporting such an attitude” (1968:8). While some religious historians and phenomenologists (such as Mircea Eliade) assert that the sacred is an unassailable quality transcending human society, one of the ways anthropology encompasses the phenomenon of religion is to treat it as well as its activities of worship, faith, and the sacred as fundamentally social institutions and forces created from cultural repertoires specific to certain peoples and places (see Geertz 1968:19).1 Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religion (even as early as Hubert and Mauss’ 1898 study of sacrifice) have long sought to contextualize practices deemed “religious” within specific social and cultural milieux . Such a perspective entails, however blasphemous it may sound to some, trying to understand that the construction and implementation of a religion’s texts, the pronouncements of its virtuosos, and the institution itself do not necessarily represent a religious universe. They are instead highly evocative of the concerns, dilemmas, access to resources, and preferred social organizations of a particular people at a particular time. Since the last part of this book deals with the rituals of Kamigamo Shrine, I will first consider what David Parkin refers to as “culturally loud” expression of these events within the context of contemporary Shinto. Catherine Bell notes that the term “ritual” is a farily recent concept “heavily used to help differentiate various styles and degrees of religiosity, rationality , and cultural determinism” (1997:ix). It is not, she adds, a “universal phenomenon with a persistent, coherent structure” that works the same way everywhere (1998:217). While ritual is a way of acting that shares much with other kinds of human activity, there is a tendency to privilege ritual activities as being different from other social practices. Ritual can be characterized (but not encompassed) by its strategies of formalization and periodicity, the centrality of the body as it defines (and is defined by) a specific environment, and the negotiation of power to appropriate opposing or divergent forces. By creating and maintaining a context seen as sanctified by members sharing certain cultural norms, ritual can also legitimate common interests, empower selected individuals, and negate or deny threats that challenge the legitimacy or survival of the individual or group. However, betraying a Western preoccupation with the individual, Bell denies that the goals of the community, social solidarity, or conflict resolution are the real reasons for ritual activity. Instead, she posits the “ultimate purpose” of ritual (what she calls “ritualization”) as “the production 165 PERFORMING RITUAL of ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of these schemes embedded in their bodies, in their sense of reality, and in their understanding of how to act in ways that both maintain and qualify the complex microrelations of power” (1992:221). Individuals gain through ritual an ability that is “relatively empowered (rather than conditioned or molded)” to “deploy . . . basic schemes in ways...