Village Festival Research Articles

Invented origins: Muromachi interpretations of okina sarugaku

Okina , a ritual play without plot, a collection of old songs and dialogues interspersed with dances, can be seen in many parts of Japan, performed in various versions. In village festivals, it may be put on by local people using libretti derived from oral traditions, and in larger shrines professional players might be employed to perform it at the New Year. Puppets enact Okina dances at the start of Bunraku performances and Kabuki actors use them to open their season. Such Okina performances derive from Nō traditions, and as might be expected, the Nō schools have their own Okina, based on texts deriving from the Edo period, which they perform at the start of celebratory programmes. These ‘official’ versions feature, among other roles, two old men: Okina and Sanbasō (). Before the fifteenth century, when Nō traditions were being established, it was common for a third old man known as Chichi no jō () to appear as well (I shall refer to this ‘complete’ form as Shikisanban, three ritual pieces, a term used by Muromachi performers). These old men are marked out from all other Nō roles by their use of a unique type of mask, having a separated lower jaw connected by a cord (the so-called kiriago).Erika de Poorter, in her introduction to Okina, suggests that actors dropped the third section because its Buddhist content conflicted with a trend away from Buddhism towards Shinto (a trend she refers to as ‘the spirit of the times’). She supports her theory by adducing a similar ideological shift in contemporaneous interpretations of Okina and legends about the origins of Nō. De Poorter tells us little about these interpretations, as is perhaps appropriate for an introductory essay. This study, however, aims to give a full account of them, starting with a Buddhist reading, recorded near the beginning of the Muromachi period, proceeding to interpretations current among performers in the fifteenth century, and concluding with the purely Shinto explanation taught by the Yoshida lineage in the mid-sixteenth century.

Cattle markets and local festivals: Development of HIV/AIDS prevention interventions for specific risk situations in rural Northeast Thailand

In rural Northeast Thailand, risk of sexual transmission of HIV is popularly perceived to be site-specific. Risk of HIV transmission in local scenarios like cattle markets and village festivals has not been adequately addressed. This paper assesses the use of community consultation and formative research to overcome prevailing assumptions about HIV risk by involving community members in the process of identifying risks and developing HIV prevention strategies. This participatory approach can be used to develop prevention programs that are responsive to the specific context of risk behavior in rural environments.

The Private Life of the Victorian Novel

REVIEW ARTICLE THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Deirdre D'Albertis. Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text. New York: St. Martin's P, 1997. ? + 230. ($39.95 US (cloth). Patricia McKee. Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878). Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ix + 245. $49.95 US (cloth); $19.95 US (paper). Catherine Waters. Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 246. $54.95 US (cloth). Each of these books examines the nineteenth-century detachment of private from public existences. Though in the late twentieth century we take the idea of a private life as a given, its separation from public life is not simply apparent. These categories were constructed during the century through re-definitions of knowledge, family life, and ideology. Novels have a place in this construction. Catherine Waters investigates one powerful aspect tool of private life, the idea of family. Waters's study focuses on the family as an "imaginary construct," (16) a part of a middle-class ideology. Middleclass readers and writers assume that the family is a transcendent value, a desirable object that united ages, classes, regions, and genders. Nineteenth-century discourse depicted domestic life as a universal ideal. Following Jacques Donzelot, Waters notices a shift in definition of the family as the family came to be regarded as a nuclear unit through which the state could operate: "a transition of a government of families to government through the family" (26). The nuclear family replaced feudal notions of the family as a bloodline or mercantilist notions of the family as a corporation. Waters shows that Dickens at once participates in familial ideology early in his carer and then begins to question its transcendence later on. 70Victorian Review In a fascinating chapter on Dickens and Christmas, Waters reveals the extent of Dickens's domestic ideology. Waters notes that in the early nineteenth century the holiday was depicted as an old-fashioned feast-day that few celebrated anymore. Christmas had been a village festival, a time for the landowner to treat his servants and tenants. In Pickwick, Dickens represents a traditional, pre-Victorian Christmas celebration. But by mid-century, the holiday was reconceived as a family party; new customs (like the tree) were adopted, and the village events were reinvented in smaller, indoor venues. Scrooge can be seen not only as a convert to Christmas, but to the idea of the family. Dickens's Christmas books not only show a change in the representation or Christmas but in the amount of ideological weight the season was meant to bear. Moreover the Christmas books help create and maintain that ideology. Dickens's many fractured families help establish the ideal family by counter-example. In Oliver Twist, Mrs. Mann, Fagin and the workhouse authorities all access the rhetoric of family life. Dickens provides examples of numerous failing, rather than parodie, families as well. Waters notes that in Dickens, families that do not adapt themselves to the domestic ideology inevitably decline and can only be re-established by a woman who reconfigures the family to fit it. Dickens's portrayal of the Dombeys in Dombey and Son is a diagnosis. Dombey runs his family like and as a firm; he fails to follow middle-class ideology and separate the family from his business practices. When Dombey's firm-as-family fails, a woman is called upon to establish true domestic virtues. Florence creates a family that is almost transcendent - though, as Waters notices, threatening characters like Carker and Alice have been removed from the narrative. Waters notes that that bureaucracy in Little Dorrit exists through a series of families; these families show an older idea of the family not as a nuclear unit, but a public conglomeration of blood relatives. The Barnacles and their bureaucratic tribe support the anonymous functions of governing like the Circumlocution Office. Their presence threatens the idea of the individual self. Mr. Dorrit too, with his misplaced idea of paternalism — while playing at being the Father of the Marshalsea he forgets to be father of his own family — satirizes ineffectual, pre-industriai familial organization. Like so many of Dickens's...

Black Magic: Woman(ist) as Artist in Alice Walker's 'Temple of My Familiar'

Two old women, both experienced artists, frame four-hundred-plus pages of Alice Walker's The Temple of M y Familiar (1989), a broad canvas of African and African American life from beginnings to contemporary San Francisco yuppiedom. The opening page introduces South American Zed6, Sr., a seamstress or sewing magician, who creates from peacock, parrot and cockatoo feathers traditional capes worn by priests, dancers, and musicians at local village festivals. At close of Walker's novel, Miss Lissie, a most bewitching womanist artist, has left for posterity a self-portrait, in which Lissie-as-Lion looks daringly at viewer, her abundant tail almost obscuring elegant, red, high-heeled slipper on her back paw.1 With(in) this frame, Walker paints black feminine creativity as a marginal, maternal, and magic space inhabited by goddesses, whose knowledge and power explode traditional symbolic and social codes. In process, Walker presents a womanist interpretation of the blackness of blackness, Henry Louis

Ritual Efflorescences in a Sri Lankan Muslim community: The interplay of local, national and pan‐Islamic identities

This article examines the interplay of local, national, and international historical and contemporary processes as manifested in a Sri Lankan Muslim village festival. The author shows that the festival is a product of the historical isolation of the village and its attempt to establish a distinct Muslim social identity. In contemporary Sri Lanka a separate Muslim identity is no longer in doubt and the festival has become a focal event for competing and, potentially, mutually exclusive social identities as exemplified by Sufism, Sri Lankan nationalism, and pan‐Islamic fundamentalism.

The Calendar of Village Festivals: Japan

The Calendar of Village Festivals: Japan

Deux fêtes de village en Corée

The Korean village as a basic sociological unit is held together by religious festivals (tongje) celebrated at regular, mostly annual, intervals. Two villages in the south-west of Korea are presented as typical examples. The first, Kuryong, is an agricultural community located at the foot of a mountain. The second village, Suri, is situated on an island off the west coast of the Korean peninsula. Its inhabitants live mostly on fishing and the gathering of seaweed. Both villages hold an annual festival at the beginning of the lunar year. The protective deity feasted in the agricultural village is at the same time the deity of a mountain east of the village — a feature not uncommon in Korea. The festival is conducted by six officiants who are male representatives of the community selected a few days prior to the ceremony. The central rite consists in the offering of incense, wine and food to the deity, accompanied by numerous prostrations and prayers for protection of the village. Ritual purity is strictly observed and women are excluded from the ceremony. The community participates only in a final reunion. A very similar ceremony is found in the village on the island. However, in Suri, the ceremony of offerings and prayer to the protective deity — residing on top of the island hill — is only one part, called sangdangje, of a larger festival. The other part, hadangje, takes place on the beach. Women play an active role, all villagers participate and a large part of the ceremony consists of improvisation and merry-making. The deity being feasted is the dragon king present in the form of a puppet. The villagers approach him with offerings of wine and money and the deity, through a spokesman, gives words of praise or admonition in an improvised dialogue with the fishermen. A strong sexual symbolism and much spontaneity characterize the festival in which no taboos of purity are observed. At the end, the dragon king is sent off into the sea in a small boat bearing impurities and misfortune away. Comparing these two village festivals, it appears that they belong to two entirely different types. The first, with its strong emphasis on ritual purity and fixed ritual procedure, is related to Confucian ancestor worship and was introduced in the villages by the educated elite. In contrast to this, the second festival seems to be much older and to have a popular and indigenous origin. Traces of similar festivals held in the same region during the first centuries A.D. can already be found in the San-kuo chih. What Christian Deschamps describes here for Korea is of great interest to historians of Chinese religion. The ceremony of sending off the Dragon King's boat, as practiced in the Suri village, resembles the Chinese Pestilence King Exorcism still practiced in Taiwan as well as in mainland China (see Kenneth Dean's report in this issue of the Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, p. 203). The tension between indigenous cults and the Confucian administrators who try to replace these festivals with their official rites is a phenomenon well known throughout Chinese history. Jean Lévi's study (in this issue, p. 81) throws new light on these perennial efforts of the Chinese government to "civilise" local customs.

The Politics of Brutality: Toward a Definition of the Critical Volksstück

The critical Volksstiick, which has been enjoying a new vogue on the West German stage, is a dramatic genre alien to the Anglo-American tradition, and although recent English works like Bond's Saved, Pinter's earliest plays, or dramas of the kitchen-sink school could be related to it, no one would call them folk plays. The term "folk play" in English would rather designate unliterary, impromptu dramatic performances like the mumming play that are usually accompanied by song and dance (sword dance, morris dance) and given at village festivals by the villagers themselves. These plays usually treat the themes of death and resurrection, honor local worthies, or celebrate heroic feats. Since this term does exist in English and does refer to a historical form of the drama, the German term "Volksstück" will be retained throughout this paper.

Some Notes on the Changing Process of Village Territories in the Early Meiji Era

It is usually said that modern administrative towns and villages of Japan were brought into existence by the amalgamation of towns and villages in the 22nd year of Meiji (1889). But, by that time, the local government system had already undergone a great change and the division or amalgamation of towns and villages had been carried out on a large scale, little of which is known to the general public. If we treat this fact lightly, we will be apt to have a wrong opinion that hanseison (feudal village in Tokugawa Era) means oaza. But the fact is, this mistaken idea seems to be widespread among many geographers even now.In this paper, the author trys to clarify this division or amalgamation of towns and villages in the early Meiji period quantitatively. Moreover, he demonstrates the following facts: in Yamanashi and Nagano prefectures (esp. the former Chikuma Prefecture) in which there were many cases where oaza was larger than hanseison, but on the other hand in the Kinki District, there existed a few cases where hanseison was larger than oaza.From the seventh to the nineth year of Meiji, through both Yamanashi and Nagano prefectures, the amalgamation of towns and villages was enforced. After that, each of the former villages was called “Kumi” in Yamanashi Prefecture and “Kochi” in Nagano Prefecture. Though new administrative towns and villages were born in the amalgamation, yet in reality “Kumi” or “Kochi” formed a rural community, and the rural community, as usual, managed irrigation, communal forests, village festivals and so on. In this paper, the author takes up Toyoshina-Gun in Nagano Prefecture and Fujimi-Gun in Yamanashi Prefecture as samples of rural community, and analyze their structure closely.

Settlement Form and Rural Community

In shognate of Japan there existed rural communities in which farmers were connected strongly. It has been generally considered that each community consisted of a nucleated settlement (which is regarded as the dominant settlement type in Japan), and that at the same time each community made up a hanseison or a rural administrative commune in shognate.But in this article, the author revised such a general image of rural community through the extensive survey. He threw light upon following facts:(1) Dispersed settlements, hamlets and lockere Haufendorfer are distributed in some extend in Japan. (Fig. 2)(2) The scale of hanseison considerably varied regionally. (Tab. 1)(3) In the area where dispersed settlements, hamlets and lockere Haufendorfer dominate, the scale of hanseison was too large or too small comparing with the average scale in all Japan.And then the author practiced an intensive field survey in Sanuki province (now Kagawa prefecture) which was choiced as a sample area. He came to the following conclusion through this survey:(1) In the dispersed settlement area, the cultivated fields of each farmer were concentrated around the each farmstead, and therefore farmers cultivated their fields more independently from other's than the farmers in the nucleated settlement area. Furthermore co-operations of farmers were done in the different units according to the purpose of co-operations, for example, irrigation, land tax paying, village festival and so on. Consequently the rural community did not distinctly exist there.(2) In the nucleated settlement area, the cultivated fields of every farmer were mixed each other, and strong co-operations of farmers were compeled especially through the irrigation and consequently through the cultivation. Accordingly the rural community was typically existant there at the each nucleated settlement as a unit.(3) In the hamlets or lockere Haufendorfer dominating area, the condition of rural community was the inter-mediate one between the community in the dispersed and that in the nucleated settlement area.

The Village Festival. A Descriptive Piece, for the Pianoforte

The Village Festival. A Descriptive Piece, for the Pianoforte