Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Moerman, D. Max. Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.

Main Argument: The shrine and temple complex of Kumano on the southern coast of the Kii peninsula, which became a major pilgrimage site and political and economic force beginning in the Heian period, constituted what Moerman terms "a site of accumulated and overdetermined, a place at once real and imaginary" (2). Indeed, Moerman argues that Kumano is best understood as a heterotopia, a real place that is nevertheless a counter-site, a site of otherness that reveals and contests the rules by which utopias are constructed.

( Heterotopias are disturbing )

Critical assessment: I quite enjoyed this book; while it's not earth-shaking, it does provide a cogent, very well-written analysis of Kumano and the multivalent meanings it held simultaneously, syncretically and diachronically for various groups. Moerman's insistent emphasis on "premodern Japan," I think, robs his analysis of some of the potential contemporary relevance of his analysis, inasmuch as the work of Karen Smyers, for instance, demonstrates conclusively that the multivalent, polysemic understanding and practice of Japanese religion is perhaps its defining feature over the longue durée. Indeed, Moerman is following people like Smyers in heeding Allan Grapard's call to "studyJapanese religious phenomena in situ, starting from the basic territorial unit and community in which they developed rather than from the more traditional focus on sects or major thinkers" (qt. 3).

Though he rarely mentions it explicitly and rather obviously avoids using the word "nation," and though his study is mostly concerned with the so-called high medieval period (if I may be forgiven for using that term) which preceded the era of civil war before the early modern period, Moerman's book in the end leaves readers with the impression of Kumano as an integral part in a construction of a nation in medieval Japan, one contested and constituted in the practices of pilgrimage and itinerant preaching that he describes, defined within a boundary no less than other precincts were defined through exclusion and boundary markers that marked a shared culture uniting everyone from emperors to mountain ascetics. I am deliberately going farther than Moerman is willing to, as his title and his persistent reference to the local throughout the book demonstrates, but I am singularly unimpressed with the idea that Japan became a nation in any meaningful sense of the term only after 1867.

I also appreciated Moerman’s frank discussion of the misogyny inherent in contemporary Buddhism and the limited but notable strategies available to women to contest it, as well as his discussion of the role Kumano played in the formation, consolidation and ultimate failure of the power of the retired emperors in the 12th century, which I think was the best single chapter in the book. I do, however, question his claim that the 12th century represented the height of imperial power; reading The Emergence of Japanese Kingship surely indicates that Great Kings and Tennô of the seventh and eighth centuries enjoyed a considerable degree of personal power, perhaps most notably under Kanmu, who moved the capital of “Japan” not once but twice during his reign. If nothing else, I would like more evidence to back up that particular claim.

All that being said, however, I question to what extent Kumano really is a heterotopia. Foucault discussed heterotopias twice in his career: once, non-canonically, in the 1960s in "Of Other Spaces," which is what Moerman quotes, and again in the preface to The Order of Things, which was published in English in 1970. The quotation Moerman uses says that heterotopias are "real places--places that do exist, and that are formed at the very founding of society--which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (qt. 2). The fuller passage in The Order of Things, however, runs:

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy "syntax" in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to "hold together." This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental fabula; heterotopias. . .desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (xviii)

I don't think Kumano offers this much of a challenge to the political and religious orders which it helped to constitute, and if it did, Moerman amply documents the various discourses at hand to transform that transformative potential into the support of the established order; it may, by means of this book, offer that challenge to the "modernity/nation" consensus which has held the day in Japanese studies but may even now be yielding under a concerted and determined assault by scholars of the early modern and other periods of Japanese history.

Further reading: The Heike monogatari; Thomas Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan

Meta notes: Izumi Shikibu was totally awesome.