Heuristically, is it helpful to posit the following two ways of thinking about death?
(1) Death as part of the life cycle
(2) Death as the ultimate experience of the Other
(1) If we attempt to see death as part of the life cycle, what happens? It doesn't necessarily indicate any greater acceptance of death, does it? Accepting death as "natural" need not entail any more acceptance of death except insofar as we "accept" other natural disasters like earthquakes and, for the ancients, eclipses. In other words, the acceptance of death as fact doesn't logically (or historically) necessitate acceptance of death as just another phase to be equated with any other stage of the life cycle. Moreover, the power of earthquakes, floods, and eclipses to frighten, mystify, destroy, and even empower (the elites) is not unequivocally diminished by an understanding of them as natural. Earthquakes are scary and destructive whether they are the work of gods or plates. Death is, too.
Is death more frightening as part of nature? If it were something supernatural, there might be a way out—an elixir, a trick to bamboozle the gods with, or a misty island on a distant shore.
(2) Seeing death as Alterity per se does what? There is a more immediate and irrevocable—or at least unavoidable—sense of self-loss implied in this conception, I would argue. The subsumption of the Self into the Other is a horrifying and abject proposition. Grant for a moment that Buddhism is essentially right to equate attachment with suffering, and then consider what you are most attached to... Chances are, it's you. And chances are that the loss of that most-attached-you would lead to the greatest suffering. So if death is seen as the loss of the Me in the Other, well, it's certainly not uplifting.
So what happens when you have the Death=Other paradigm dominant, and you start personifying death? What about the Death=Stage model?
Or what if—brainstorm—the two models are vying for intellectual and emotional hegemony? Then what does the personification of death mean?
I think that even if my models are all messed up (a proposition more likely true than not, since it's all just logorrhea anyway...) the personification of death is about a certain closeness. I mean by this both physical proximity and a reduction of emotional distance. If Death walks amongst us, we are physically close to it. The marginal, liminal, and polluted associations that death brings with it are invading our realm. This is different than having a separate Hell—it is the encroachment of Hellishness and infernality into the banal world of our everyday. How can we allow this? Well, I'm thinking that it's probably because we've already recognized (subconsciously) a reduced psycho-emotional barrier or distance. Could this be a result of a sense that society is dying? Are there other possibilities?
How do our fears of (and implied recognition of potency in) the Other, the liminal, the marginalized, and the polluted play out more generally? Here's an avenue on which good research has been done, so if the Death=Other hypothesis makes any sense I'd be able to take off from solid ground by appropriating a whole discourse on alterity to examine death. That may already have been done, too, come to think of it...
That's the real problem, isn't it? Nihil sub sole novum.
----
Several other updates for those of you who've earned them by sticking with me this far:
-Saw a fox @ University City Station Monday, happily munching carrion on one of the athletic fields. Hope it wasn't one of Penn's athletes...
-Just came back from the department fall party, which Tomomi and the kids attended, too. Much fun was had by all.
-My laptop remains broken. My new keyboard arrived today, but UPS had bent it in transit, so I have to wait at least until Friday for the replacement replacement.
That's all for now—everything below is just Japanese...
月曜日は「学園都市駅(University City Station)」で、正体不明の動物の死骸をおいしそうに頬張っている狐をみた。なぜか、お稲荷さんが食べたくなった。
先ほど、我が学科の秋祭り(ただのパーティだけど、日本人には「祭」の響きがいいかなと)から帰宅したところ。家族4人で行って、友美たちをいろいろな人に紹介しまくった。皆、楽しかったようで何よりです。
以上（異常？）です
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Photos
More new photos at our Picasa Web Album. Click here.
(I finally remembered to switch the page UI to English, so it should be a whole lot more user-friendly now.)
I'll try to put some more pictures up over the weekend, but I have two papers and a lot of research to do. Add to that a broken keyboard on my laptop that'll cost at least $100 to fix, and I might not be doing a whole lot other than sitting in the Penn library at one of their terminals all weekend.
Hopefully I'll at least get in a little rock climbing at the gym...
ネット上に公開している写真（誤変換で「後悔」となって少し考えさせられたけど）を更新しました。上記英文中のリンクをクリックしてください。
ところで、友美はめでたく仮免を取得しました。本当によく頑張りました！えらいよ、友美ちゃん！
(I finally remembered to switch the page UI to English, so it should be a whole lot more user-friendly now.)
I'll try to put some more pictures up over the weekend, but I have two papers and a lot of research to do. Add to that a broken keyboard on my laptop that'll cost at least $100 to fix, and I might not be doing a whole lot other than sitting in the Penn library at one of their terminals all weekend.
Hopefully I'll at least get in a little rock climbing at the gym...
ネット上に公開している写真（誤変換で「後悔」となって少し考えさせられたけど）を更新しました。上記英文中のリンクをクリックしてください。
ところで、友美はめでたく仮免を取得しました。本当によく頑張りました！えらいよ、友美ちゃん！
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Finally!!
After much ado and delay, Tomomi has her learner's permit!
She really studied hard. I hope she's able to get her license soon, but at least this is a major step toward independence. It'll be great for her and for the kids when hse's able to take them to the library and around to museums, events, etc.
She really studied hard. I hope she's able to get her license soon, but at least this is a major step toward independence. It'll be great for her and for the kids when hse's able to take them to the library and around to museums, events, etc.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
More deathly thoughts
I guess I'll have to reference not only literary and artistic (high culture) sources on death as much as possible. I wonder to what extent that will be possible in relation to premodern Japan?
I guess it's also a question of how much I want to focus on "popular culture," and what the definition thereof might be, particularly for earlier times.
I think I need to examine changes over time in:
heroic death
>death in religion
>>death in folk religion—particulalrly in Tohoku: Osorezan, Hiraizumi, etc.
death in literature
>both High and popular
medical death?
>changing concepts of medical nature of death?
>terminal care and conceptions of death?
>something else?
and how all of these change over time, are internally inconsistent (not monolithic), inform each other, and lead to personification of Death/death.
I'll need first to establish the non-anthropomorphic nature of death prior to the last several decades.
I have to worry about the objections that personifying death is (a) visual culture strategy, and (b) artistic pastiche. Have to show it's relevant that, despite veracity of both claims, the choice (conscious or non-) to make death more human is both influenced by precedent and becomes precedent in itself.
In this way, the oversimplified feedback loop proposed by Johnson is actually kinda useful. I'll post a better image if someone wants it, but I'm referring to the chart below. It describes the chicken-less, egg-less loop in which Johnson conceives cultures as being created. The important thing for my argument is the way in which lived cultures feed back into cultural production. It's self-evident on a certain level, and easily co-opted for profit by the robber barons in control of the means of production, but as a visual it is nonetheless helpful.
I guess it's also a question of how much I want to focus on "popular culture," and what the definition thereof might be, particularly for earlier times.
I think I need to examine changes over time in:
heroic death
>death in religion
>>death in folk religion—particulalrly in Tohoku: Osorezan, Hiraizumi, etc.
death in literature
>both High and popular
medical death?
>changing concepts of medical nature of death?
>terminal care and conceptions of death?
>something else?
and how all of these change over time, are internally inconsistent (not monolithic), inform each other, and lead to personification of Death/death.
I'll need first to establish the non-anthropomorphic nature of death prior to the last several decades.
I have to worry about the objections that personifying death is (a) visual culture strategy, and (b) artistic pastiche. Have to show it's relevant that, despite veracity of both claims, the choice (conscious or non-) to make death more human is both influenced by precedent and becomes precedent in itself.
In this way, the oversimplified feedback loop proposed by Johnson is actually kinda useful. I'll post a better image if someone wants it, but I'm referring to the chart below. It describes the chicken-less, egg-less loop in which Johnson conceives cultures as being created. The important thing for my argument is the way in which lived cultures feed back into cultural production. It's self-evident on a certain level, and easily co-opted for profit by the robber barons in control of the means of production, but as a visual it is nonetheless helpful.
Web albums
Yes, that's in the plural.
You can access our Web Album index page here.
Viewing the albums should be self-explanatory: just click one of them and see what happens.
I will be adding more photos as time goes on.
From now on, I'll also be adding a line or two of Japanese summary, etc. at the end of family-related posts. If your browser shows junk text in some of these posts, don't worry—you're not missing anything.
Example: if the next line of this post is junk characters, your browser can't read Japanese.
今後、家族関連の出来事などに関する投稿は、極力（時間が許す限り）日本語を併記したいと思います。
You can access our Web Album index page here.
Viewing the albums should be self-explanatory: just click one of them and see what happens.
I will be adding more photos as time goes on.
From now on, I'll also be adding a line or two of Japanese summary, etc. at the end of family-related posts. If your browser shows junk text in some of these posts, don't worry—you're not missing anything.
Example: if the next line of this post is junk characters, your browser can't read Japanese.
今後、家族関連の出来事などに関する投稿は、極力（時間が許す限り）日本語を併記したいと思います。
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Some preliminary notes on portrayals of death in Japan
武士道と云うは死ぬことゝ見附けたり。
二つ一つの場にて早く死ぬ方に片附くばかりなり。
The Way of the Warrior is death.
When faced with a choice between life and death, promptly choose death.
This is the famous opening of Yamamoto Tsunemoto's Hagakure, a self-styled guide to bushidō.
The "Way of the Warrior" was, as Cameron Hurst (go, Penn!) points out, largely an anachronistic, ahistorical construction introduced into common parlance that has been propagated by the work of Morioka native Nitobe Inazo (my first apartment was down the street from his birthplace, and the rumor is that his wife was an Earlham graduate—she definitely was a Quaker) in his book, Bushidō, the entire text of which can be found online or summarized as "justice, courage, benevolence, veracity, honr, and loyalty." Hurst notes "that the 'trustworthy, loyal, helpfu, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent' moral standards of the Boy Scouts are fully consistent with Nitobe's ethics, suggesting the full application of them would have made one a damn fine Tokugawa samurai." (Hurst, 1990)
Still, Nitobe's idea had its precedents, and Yamamoto's rant is one of them. Yamamoto was himself a samurai unable to follow his master into death with ritual suicide. He lived in peaceful times and probably lamented his inability to act as the "real" warriors of old did. His didactic diatribe seems to have been motivated by a nostalgia for the heroes of old.
Which leads one to wonder, what were they really like?
Well, allow me to introduce a pet theory about history. I call it the "deru kugi" approach, in deference to the widely quoted Japanese proverb that first opened my eyes to the issues surrounding the construction of cultural memory.
First you need to know the proverb and its standard interpretation:
出る釘は打たれる ("The nail that sticks up is pounded")
This adage is often referenced as evidence of Japan's conformist nature and the repression of individuality (always assumed to be a negative in this context).
But there's no evidence that this is an endorsement of the beating down of indvidualism. It could just as easily be a factual observation (which in that case is probably more universal than most Americans, at least, are comfortable admitting). It could also be seen as cultural criticism—a lament against this painful reality.
But even more importantly, you have to wonder what the need for such a proverb would be anyway. I mean, if this is a truism, whether it is critical or not is less interesting than whether there's any point at all in saying it. In that critical sense, it fails the "So what?" test. We all know that individualism is violently repressed. Thanks for flogging the dead horse (or pounding the flush nail, or whatever).
It might just as easily be argued that the whole problem is that there are too damned many nails sticking up all over the place. This brings the whole proverb into an entirely different light: suddenly it becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Consider that, contrary to the contemporary misunderstanding of Zen (a painful example given that I also subsrcibed to an entirely silly interpretation of Zen for many years) as a somehow pure rejection of the oppression of rational thought in search of detached enlightment, Zen was quickly incorporated into the apparatus of Japanese state power and served to inculcate the warrior class with (or strengthen the pre-existing) irrational disregard for their own lives and idealization of loyalty and death in service as the ultimate goal to be obtained. How better to create "mindless" killing machines able to "kill with inner peace--and die with inner calm." Which brings us back to bushidō...
But before we trace that circuitous route in its entirety, I want to emphasize my point about nails. Japan is full of wildly individualistic and eccentric people. Take my wife, please. This doesn't necessarily make it any different from anywhere else, but it does indicate that any aspirants to hegemony and control would have a bugger of a time repressing the general pandemonium of strong individuals that make up Japanese society. Again, nothing special here.
So, what happens when this lens is applied to the "Way of the Warrior?" I'd like to examine the "Tale(s) of the Heike" (Heike Monogatari) and other war(rrior) narratives to root out their conflicted and negotiated visions of death, particularly as they relate to the warrior and as they inform later interpretations.
More on this as it comes to me.
二つ一つの場にて早く死ぬ方に片附くばかりなり。
The Way of the Warrior is death.
When faced with a choice between life and death, promptly choose death.
This is the famous opening of Yamamoto Tsunemoto's Hagakure, a self-styled guide to bushidō.
The "Way of the Warrior" was, as Cameron Hurst (go, Penn!) points out, largely an anachronistic, ahistorical construction introduced into common parlance that has been propagated by the work of Morioka native Nitobe Inazo (my first apartment was down the street from his birthplace, and the rumor is that his wife was an Earlham graduate—she definitely was a Quaker) in his book, Bushidō, the entire text of which can be found online or summarized as "justice, courage, benevolence, veracity, honr, and loyalty." Hurst notes "that the 'trustworthy, loyal, helpfu, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent' moral standards of the Boy Scouts are fully consistent with Nitobe's ethics, suggesting the full application of them would have made one a damn fine Tokugawa samurai." (Hurst, 1990)
Still, Nitobe's idea had its precedents, and Yamamoto's rant is one of them. Yamamoto was himself a samurai unable to follow his master into death with ritual suicide. He lived in peaceful times and probably lamented his inability to act as the "real" warriors of old did. His didactic diatribe seems to have been motivated by a nostalgia for the heroes of old.
Which leads one to wonder, what were they really like?
Well, allow me to introduce a pet theory about history. I call it the "deru kugi" approach, in deference to the widely quoted Japanese proverb that first opened my eyes to the issues surrounding the construction of cultural memory.
First you need to know the proverb and its standard interpretation:
出る釘は打たれる ("The nail that sticks up is pounded")
This adage is often referenced as evidence of Japan's conformist nature and the repression of individuality (always assumed to be a negative in this context).
But there's no evidence that this is an endorsement of the beating down of indvidualism. It could just as easily be a factual observation (which in that case is probably more universal than most Americans, at least, are comfortable admitting). It could also be seen as cultural criticism—a lament against this painful reality.
But even more importantly, you have to wonder what the need for such a proverb would be anyway. I mean, if this is a truism, whether it is critical or not is less interesting than whether there's any point at all in saying it. In that critical sense, it fails the "So what?" test. We all know that individualism is violently repressed. Thanks for flogging the dead horse (or pounding the flush nail, or whatever).
It might just as easily be argued that the whole problem is that there are too damned many nails sticking up all over the place. This brings the whole proverb into an entirely different light: suddenly it becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Consider that, contrary to the contemporary misunderstanding of Zen (a painful example given that I also subsrcibed to an entirely silly interpretation of Zen for many years) as a somehow pure rejection of the oppression of rational thought in search of detached enlightment, Zen was quickly incorporated into the apparatus of Japanese state power and served to inculcate the warrior class with (or strengthen the pre-existing) irrational disregard for their own lives and idealization of loyalty and death in service as the ultimate goal to be obtained. How better to create "mindless" killing machines able to "kill with inner peace--and die with inner calm." Which brings us back to bushidō...
But before we trace that circuitous route in its entirety, I want to emphasize my point about nails. Japan is full of wildly individualistic and eccentric people. Take my wife, please. This doesn't necessarily make it any different from anywhere else, but it does indicate that any aspirants to hegemony and control would have a bugger of a time repressing the general pandemonium of strong individuals that make up Japanese society. Again, nothing special here.
So, what happens when this lens is applied to the "Way of the Warrior?" I'd like to examine the "Tale(s) of the Heike" (Heike Monogatari) and other war(rrior) narratives to root out their conflicted and negotiated visions of death, particularly as they relate to the warrior and as they inform later interpretations.
More on this as it comes to me.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
A few more notes on culture
Structuralism
It's why I can't fly and have no free will.
Why I can't fly
Physics.
Why I have no free will
Because if I did, I'd fly. And maybe choose to be invisible.
Or, to put it another way, if men had free will, there'd be no need for Viagra.
So what?
Structural constraints are real and meaningful. Structure is heuristically convenient and fruitful in examining trends.
Not every map needs to be the size of the area it describes. Why? We are essentially and intensely narrative creatures; one of our fundamental epistemological approaches is to narrate the data we encounter. So the question is not, "Which narrative is true?" but, "Which narrative is useful?" Is a complete ethnography of "lived individual culture" nothing more than a life-size map? If so, is it a goal worth fighting for? Or can we accept that our ability to navigate does not depend on the map's depiction of individual features but its accuracy as a symbolic, structural representation of a shared and real space?
It should concern us that the emphasis of scholarship on "lived individual culture" or experience mirrors the economics/marketing trend of individually targeted advertising and the increasing production of goods and services consciously aimed at micro-masses/individuals. To jump to a conclusion that the Academy and the Market are necessarily in conscious collusion is probably to give the Academy too much credit, but is also to engage in a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (That one's for you, Dad.) In other words, it's to apply a logic of cause-effect to something that may simply be coincidence. (So's that.)
It's why I can't fly and have no free will.
Why I can't fly
Physics.
Why I have no free will
Because if I did, I'd fly. And maybe choose to be invisible.
Or, to put it another way, if men had free will, there'd be no need for Viagra.
So what?
Structural constraints are real and meaningful. Structure is heuristically convenient and fruitful in examining trends.
Not every map needs to be the size of the area it describes. Why? We are essentially and intensely narrative creatures; one of our fundamental epistemological approaches is to narrate the data we encounter. So the question is not, "Which narrative is true?" but, "Which narrative is useful?" Is a complete ethnography of "lived individual culture" nothing more than a life-size map? If so, is it a goal worth fighting for? Or can we accept that our ability to navigate does not depend on the map's depiction of individual features but its accuracy as a symbolic, structural representation of a shared and real space?
It should concern us that the emphasis of scholarship on "lived individual culture" or experience mirrors the economics/marketing trend of individually targeted advertising and the increasing production of goods and services consciously aimed at micro-masses/individuals. To jump to a conclusion that the Academy and the Market are necessarily in conscious collusion is probably to give the Academy too much credit, but is also to engage in a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (That one's for you, Dad.) In other words, it's to apply a logic of cause-effect to something that may simply be coincidence. (So's that.)
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