Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2011-01-24 08:28 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2011-01-24 08:28 pm
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Book review: Localizing Paradise
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Moerman's analysis ranges over texts, paintings, and accounts of pilgrimages, ritual practices, legal cases, itinerant preachers and visions of Hell, as well as poems, poets, emperors, and imperial poetry collections.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples: Moerman situates Kumano both geographically, institutionally, and artistically, sketching its development from approximately the 7thC to the flowering of its power and influence in the medieval period concomitantly with the countrywide circulation of artistic representations of Kumano, as enticements and substitutions for making a pilgrimage there--indeed, for many centuries Kumano was the most visited religious site in the entire archipelago.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples: The syncretic history that is depicted and emblematized in the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala is comprised of several distinct layers: first, the legendary mythical past of the Kojiki, Man'yoshu and the Nihon shoki, which granted Kumano great significance in the Japanese legendarium. These thanatic Shinto associations were overlaid and subsumed by Buddhist associations through the concept of honji suijaku into those associated with the greater truth of Buddhism and not death but rebirth, not an underworld but a Pure Land of enlightenment, at the same time as various engi constructed the geography of Kumano according to Buddhist encodings.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples: In this chapter Moerman examines in great detail the practice of Fudaraku tokai, a form of ritual suicide in which one or multiple practitioners would set off over sea and swiftly sink beneath it to find Kannon's paradise in this life and which overwhelmingly occurred at Kumano. This form of literal death-for-enlightenment is echoed in the habitus and praxis of pilgrimage, in which pilgrims donned the vestments of the dead and hazarded their lives to enact the end-of-life journey to enlightenment in this life.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples: I think this is the single strongest chapter of the book; it's told well and with a flair for the dramatic that at times almost elevates it to the level of a saga. Moerman considers the instantiation of the Kumano pilgrimage, which unlike most pilgrimages began as a ritual enacted at the very highest echelons of society, namely by retired emperors, and which in the 10th through 12thC became both a means and the sign of the consolidation and re-establishment of imperial power through the institution of retired emperors and their consorts, called in--the retired emperors in particular, by accepting ordination as esoteric Buddhist priests, were harkening back to the earlier heyday of the Great Kings and Tennô of the 7th and 8thC, when men and women ruled Japan with a great deal of personal power, augmented with sacral magnificence. It's fascinating stuff.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples: In this chapter Moerman confronts frankly what rendered Kumano exceptional even among sacred sites, namely, its utter lack of prohibition against female worshippers, devotees, and pilgrims. This lack of prohibition, however, served only to highlight the gender-based barriers in place against women's participation in Buddhism at every level, even that of its basic salvific promise. Though Kumano nuns and exemplary women such as Izumi Shikibu did what they could to appropriate Buddhism's various misogynist discourses and turn them against those same barriers, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and ultimately the religious freedom of Kumano served only to confirm general religious oppression.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples: Moerman concludes by arguing that "by recognizing the unresolved ambivalences, one can see Kumano not only as a locus of religious aspirations but also as a site of struggle between rival claims of meaning and value" (234). The ambivalences and unresolved contradictions facilitated the geographic and political spread of the Kumano cult, which in turn constituted one of the threads of a common, countrywide culture binding medieval Japan together.
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:
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.
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Moerman's analysis ranges over texts, paintings, and accounts of pilgrimages, ritual practices, legal cases, itinerant preachers and visions of Hell, as well as poems, poets, emperors, and imperial poetry collections.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples: Moerman situates Kumano both geographically, institutionally, and artistically, sketching its development from approximately the 7thC to the flowering of its power and influence in the medieval period concomitantly with the countrywide circulation of artistic representations of Kumano, as enticements and substitutions for making a pilgrimage there--indeed, for many centuries Kumano was the most visited religious site in the entire archipelago.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples: The syncretic history that is depicted and emblematized in the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala is comprised of several distinct layers: first, the legendary mythical past of the Kojiki, Man'yoshu and the Nihon shoki, which granted Kumano great significance in the Japanese legendarium. These thanatic Shinto associations were overlaid and subsumed by Buddhist associations through the concept of honji suijaku into those associated with the greater truth of Buddhism and not death but rebirth, not an underworld but a Pure Land of enlightenment, at the same time as various engi constructed the geography of Kumano according to Buddhist encodings.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples: In this chapter Moerman examines in great detail the practice of Fudaraku tokai, a form of ritual suicide in which one or multiple practitioners would set off over sea and swiftly sink beneath it to find Kannon's paradise in this life and which overwhelmingly occurred at Kumano. This form of literal death-for-enlightenment is echoed in the habitus and praxis of pilgrimage, in which pilgrims donned the vestments of the dead and hazarded their lives to enact the end-of-life journey to enlightenment in this life.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples: I think this is the single strongest chapter of the book; it's told well and with a flair for the dramatic that at times almost elevates it to the level of a saga. Moerman considers the instantiation of the Kumano pilgrimage, which unlike most pilgrimages began as a ritual enacted at the very highest echelons of society, namely by retired emperors, and which in the 10th through 12thC became both a means and the sign of the consolidation and re-establishment of imperial power through the institution of retired emperors and their consorts, called in--the retired emperors in particular, by accepting ordination as esoteric Buddhist priests, were harkening back to the earlier heyday of the Great Kings and Tennô of the 7th and 8thC, when men and women ruled Japan with a great deal of personal power, augmented with sacral magnificence. It's fascinating stuff.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples: In this chapter Moerman confronts frankly what rendered Kumano exceptional even among sacred sites, namely, its utter lack of prohibition against female worshippers, devotees, and pilgrims. This lack of prohibition, however, served only to highlight the gender-based barriers in place against women's participation in Buddhism at every level, even that of its basic salvific promise. Though Kumano nuns and exemplary women such as Izumi Shikibu did what they could to appropriate Buddhism's various misogynist discourses and turn them against those same barriers, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and ultimately the religious freedom of Kumano served only to confirm general religious oppression.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples: Moerman concludes by arguing that "by recognizing the unresolved ambivalences, one can see Kumano not only as a locus of religious aspirations but also as a site of struggle between rival claims of meaning and value" (234). The ambivalences and unresolved contradictions facilitated the geographic and political spread of the Kumano cult, which in turn constituted one of the threads of a common, countrywide culture binding medieval Japan together.
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.