Bonds of Civility. Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (review)

What place does beauty have in social life? In her stunning analysis of Japanese culture Eiko Ikegami tackles this seemingly intractable question, and she does so, as the subtitle makes clear, to reach to the larger society. Aesthetic practices in pre-modern Japan constituted an extra-political force that turned out to be highly political. In manifesting a distinctive culture of everyday life, the sensibility that evolved over the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867) shaped the Meiji political regime (1868–1912) and prepared Japan to take its place in the modern world of nation-states.

Political sociologists will see this work as a case study of an alternative model of modernization. Ikegami challenges the assumption that Europe and North America constitute the paradigm of the development of democratic society. The Tokugawa shogunate traces a very different path for the late (by European standards) emergence of Japan as a modern society. Strictly regulated hierarchical relations left no opening for anything resembling a Habermasian public sphere, no social space for the archetypal coffee houses, and zero tolerance for the freewheeling discussions supposed to have set the stage for democracy. In Japan, the egalitarian ties deemed requisite for a democratic polity took shape, not in voluntary organizations geared to social action, as de Tocqueville argued for America, but in groups committed to the practice of beauty in everyday life.

Instead of vertical ties challenged by an oppositional sphere, “proto-modern” (a recurrent term) associations that grew up around aesthetic practices – poetry, fashion, the tea ceremony and flower arranging, among others – linked participants horizontally. Simultaneously within and outside the hierarchy of rigidly classified and controlled socio-political relationships, these sites allowed individuals to meet on an equal footing. They fostered “bonds of civility” of a very different order from the Western model of civil society. Network theorists in particular will appreciate the intricacy of the connections.

Historical sociologists will surely prize the painstaking reconstruction of a cultural tradition. Ikegami shows how some of these aesthetic practices evolved from forms that first appeared in mediaeval times but came to serve very different purposes in the later period. Especially impressive is the range of evidence – diaries, published and unpublished poetry, civility manuals, commercial records, travelers’ accounts, novels, paintings, woodcuts, scrolls, even contemporary advertisements. (Cambridge University Press is to be commended for the abundance and quality of the illustrations.)

Yet, Bonds of Civility has perhaps the greatest riches for the cultural sociologist. Not only does Ikegami confront the questions of beauty that most sociologists scrupulously avoid, she demonstrates the relevance of the aesthetic, not only to the civilizing process in Tokugawa Japan, but also to sociological analyses of culture more generally. The bonds of civility laid before us in splendid detail are first and foremost bonds of beauty.

The art forms themselves, interactive in the main, compel sociability. Linked poetry depends on serial participation, each writer working off the preceding poetic creation and setting up the next. This collective, public poetry, which integrates the writer into a community, contrasts vividly with the Western lyric with its emphasis on the individual creator and a final product. Similarly, rather than solipsistic gustatory pleasure, the tea ceremony enacts an elaborate ritual of social integration. The tacit communication of highly controlled body movements stands in stark contrast to the Western mode of explicit articulation of aesthetic principles and beliefs. At the same time, language plays a vital role in shaping as well as expressing cultural understandings. Ikegami is ever attentive to its nuances and their significance. Like Elias, she places great importance on the particulars of expression, carefully teasing out the multiple implications of a given term (as in the discussion of “public.”

Once connected to the expanding market economy these aesthetic practices spread beyond the personal networks characteristic of the earlier periods and brought them to the attention of the state. Ikegami analyses three cultural...