Narrative Cultures in the Mirror

Abstract

This new journal, Narrative Culture, widens scope of studies to embrace traditional narratives across media and in various forms of cultural expression. Following this trend, I use plural form narrative to address studies across cultures. Almost thirty years ago, Alan Dundes recalled that anthropologists and folklorists need to engage in bold and imaginative forms of comparative method if they are to get beyond data-gathering or data amassing (139), and his remark remains true today. A comparative approach to stories, and their cultural contexts, is crucial in order to understand particular themes and to gain insight into workings of human imagination. At its best, intercultural comparison offers a chance to gain insights into vernacular cultures and to overstep boundaries of common sense so as to think out of box, ask fresh questions, imagine new problems.And yet comparative approach is not without its dangers. All too often, folklorists and anthropologists turn narratives brimming with conceptual chal- lenges into reflections of their own common sense. In Through Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll nicely explains how this principle works. As Alice stands in front of her drawing-room mirror, she speculates that image in mirror is a glimpse of an alien place she calls Looking-Glass House, where there's room you can see through glass-that's just same as our drawing-room, only things go other way (133). There, the books are something like our books, only words go wrong way. It follows (although Carroll leaves inference to us) that to decipher those books you simply have to put their words back in proper order so as to find your own script. According to this analogy, I call academic effort to find in alien settings reiteration of things already known.Instances of looking-glass scholarship are rather pervasive in disciplines that rely heavily on typologies, such as folkloristics (where drive to fit protean data into standard genres, types, and motifs is ongoing) and anthropology (where different cultures often illustrate predefined social types). In this essay I address an exemplary case of looking-glass scholarship. I examine how a short article by Claude Levi-Strauss, called Goodbye to Cross-Cousin, deals with a complex from a remote culture-The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century Japanese literary masterpiece by Murasaki Shikibu.1 My subject is interaction (or lack thereof) between a hailing from classic tradition of Western anthropology and a literary work from Heian Japan.2 Sir Edmund Leach has put on record that is to Levi-Strauss's lasting credit that he has made it once again intellectually respectable to indulge in broad cross-cultural comparisons in an- thropology (xvi), and Levi-Strauss himself explained that his method is about using differences to think about commonalities (L'Homme 32-33). And yet, arguably, what he says about Genji resonates with a leitmotif of Western thought rather than with anything Japanese.Looking-Glass AnthropologySo my tale of two cultures deals with refracted meanings. In a sense this is inevitable because anthropology is an exercise in mirroring identities (and same goes for folkloristics). As Clifford Geertz memorably put it,Know what [the anthropologist] thinks a savage is and you have key to his work. You know what he thinks he himself is and, knowing what he thinks he himself is, you know in general what sort of thing he is going to say about whatever tribe he happens to be studying. (346)It is true that early anthropologists have set up stage for their speculations by means of a stable contrast between two essences, them and us. Take three short examples. Lewis Henry Morgan, who aggregated humankind into and modern societies, depicted lowest reaches of ancient society in terms of scant notions, promiscuous sexual mingling, and collective property (41, 384, 535). …