Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands (review)

Arne Røkkum has produced a complex, nuanced, and carefully argued ethnography on nature, ritual, society, and symbolism in the Ryukyu Islands, specifically, in this case, Yonaguni Island. He uses the term "Dunang" to refer to the island as it is the terminology preferred by the indigenous population to describe their own home. Yonaguni (or Dunang) is a "remote" island in the southern part of Okinawa Prefecture, lying just 110 kilometers off the east coast of Taiwan.

Engaging the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Derrida, and other influential semiotic theorists, Røkkum sets out to map the relations between nature, ritual, and people on the island, using an amalgam of theory to support his conclusions. Arguing that indexicality in knowing¹ forms the foundation for contextual representation of rituals, Røkkum investigates "incidents taking place against a background of landscapes and seascapes: how people calibrate an outlook on their own lives through an apperception of effects, or indexical signs" (p. 12). He employs an ethnographic approach that anonymizes his informants, but which includes them in much of his discussion. He takes this approach because "I seldom asked those I conversed with to introduce themselves. Often I was just talking to those who happened to be around me, as when attending a ritual" (p. 17). More important, given his descriptions of private aspects of people's lives, and that he had promised to be discreet about their identities, he was obliged to anonymize their identity.

The writing style is very dense, quite technical, and at times difficult for nonanthropologists (and I suspect for some anthropologists) to access, but as the author warms to his task, and as his own experience is articulated, the monograph becomes much more engaging. While anthropologists may have more intrinsic interest in a topic such as this than other social scientists and humanities scholars, for example, the subject matter—how people use ritual in their lives to mitigate the impact of nature on them—is fascinating. Moreover, unlike the almost instantaneous expertise claimed by Susan Sered in her account of priestesses on Henza,² Røkkum's work is the product of research and fieldwork on Yonaguni over a 30-year period. The depth of and commitment to his work is immediately apparent in his carefully noted observations.

Although I found the introduction somewhat less than riveting, and the engagement with semiotic theory, the "west" and "east" as representative agencies, and the commitment to locating the work within a wider corpus of anthropological literature somewhat contrived, Røkkum's subject is one definitely worthy of a serious monograph. And this is a serious monograph. His knowledge of the history of ritual in the Ryukyus and his interpretation of gendered roles, nature, and power are excellent. Moreover, beyond the historical context, this is a rich resource of firsthand observations made over a lengthy period, broken down into sections that lend themselves to structural analysis.

The first section is on commuted landscapes and species, and deals with the history of ritual, its relation to the environment, and the importance of signs in ritual. This is a long chapter, comprising almost half the volume. By focusing on the interaction between people, ritual, and signs, Røkkum develops an argument that incorporates the concepts of indexicality and symbolism of representation. He looks in great detail at how parts of nature are consumed. For example, he spends almost six pages discussing the implications of crabs in ritual: they are sign amplifiers, they multiply quickly, their life cycle is driven by the lunar cycle, they mix in the manner of boys and girls. These signs are employed in ritual: crabs procreate on the third day of the third moon; a Women's Festival on the same day allows boys and girls to come together by themselves for the first time for a picnic on the beach. They eat vagina-shaped soft rice cakes. Crabs...