Anthropology Times

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 20: 395-431 (Volume publication date October 1991)
William W. Kelly
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Kelly writes separately of Shinto and ancestor worship.  My memory from elementary school is that I was taught that the two were almost synonymous.  W. G. Aston writes that this error of belief came about due to statements by Captain Francis Brinkley, and quotes Brinkley as saying, “Ancestor worship is the basis of Shinto.”  I didn’t have access to Aston’s whole article…sigh.  When I wrote on Monday that Kelly noted some things about Shinto that helped me better understand the connection I felt when first learning of Shinto, what I really should have said was that Kelly noted some things about ancestor worship.  Here’s what he wrote:

[Ancestor worship] expresses a concept of a life continuum in which the household comprises a circulation through, and mutually dependent relationships among, the yet-unborn, the recently born, the “fully” living, the recently deceased, and the long departed (252).

Kelly goes on to say that the term “ancestor worship” is doubly misleading as the practice is not limited to direct ancestors and worship does not give proper attention to the notion that “the living and deceased are linked in reciprocal flows of assistance and dependence.”  The “concept of a life continuum” as described above was very much alive in the rural Mississippi town of my childhood.  Recently, I’ve been thinking more specifically on the way my family life encouraged a connection with the “yet-unborn.”

Speaking with friends and acquaintances with very young children, I’ve made casual notice of the increasing level of parent-to-child attachment from birth.  It appears takes many people at least a couple years to reach the level of attachment that seemed present at birth in my extended family.  I had a nickname before I was born; this was common practice.  At the earliest stages of womb implantation, the anthropomorphizing of the fetus began.  The fetus was talked to and talked on behalf of in full baby-speak.  There were full-on, two-way conversations.  For example, if my pregnant aunt were eating, she might say in baby-speak, “Ooh, Mama, I like that food!”  Someone might respond (to the fetus), “Do you really?  I’m gonna get more of that for your Mama.”  Or, if she were sewing something or shopping for something in anticipation of the birth, she might ask the opinion of the fetus.  The interactions were plentiful and, perhaps, more robust than my examples.  And while fetus-speak might originate with the mother speaking “the mind” of the fetus, others would start to do so more and more as time went on.

The recently deceased were talked about as being present in guiding what a person might say or guiding a person to a beneficial opportunity.  A long-deceased person might be present in the fact that a tree grew in a odd way, maybe leaning to one side in similar fashion to the deceased person.  Both the recently deceased and long deceased might help with acquainting the fetus with family life and the like.

I haven’t read enough about ancestor worship in Japan to have a clear idea of whether the things I remember about the “life continuum” from my hometown are similar to how that concept is expressed in Japan.  I look forward to fleshing this out more.

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 20: 395-431 (Volume publication date October 1991)
William W. Kelly
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

With reading “Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan,” I felt like I reached the goal I set back at the beginning of November of having the level of comprehension from my first read-through that I only got after a second read-through at that time.  The change came faster and more suddenly than I had expected.  I noticed a marked improvement several weeks ago, but it has taken me a little while to settle into the change.  With this review it hit me that I was once again reading in groups of words; I was seeing the written page differently.  I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been doing that until I started doing it again.  I think back to the feeling of mental motion sickness while reading, and of how I seemed to have vocabulary stored in my mind that I couldn’t easily access consciously; and I believe the fact that I was reading word by word played a big part since vocabulary is best learned and understood in context.  It was as if I was breaking apart sentences and attempting to reconstruct them when I saw a period.

I experienced a higher occurrence of that phenomenon where common words all of a sudden seemed very strange.  I would see a word like “door” and stop to wonder whether that were really the word for that thing.  I would mouth the word and say it out loud; and it felt strange and it sounded strange.  Maybe this is what comes from seeing words stripped of context whether it’s because the word is actually standing alone or because I’ve parsed out the word in my mind.

I remember back in elementary school when a kid had trouble reading, he would sometimes use a straight-edge to underline the sentence he was currently reading and to partially block off the rest of the page.  Perhaps having this image in mind led me to think on some level that reading in smaller bits was the way to go when rebuilding reading comprehension.  If I had said to myself, “Hey, stop reading in little bits,” would I have been able to do that… or is it that reading in small bits first is just how you learn and relearn to read.

I’ll say more about the actual content of “Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan” later in the week.  Some of the things Kelly had to say about  Shintoism clarified for me why I felt such a connection to Shintoism when I first learned about it in elementary school.