Book review: The Fox's Craft
Oct. 6th, 2010 23:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiThis is my last Sirens 2010 pre-reading post. See you in Vail!
Bibliographic Data: Bathgate, Michael. The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Main Argument: Stories of shapeshifter foxes in Japanese culture, religion and society across history reveal how the fox's craft signifies and is itself a form of signification, and how stories of the fox were craftily put to use by various groups throughout history to alter discourse according to their desires. The continued propagation of these stories, moreover, is testament to their continued significance.
Historiographical Engagement: Major literary collections; most major pre-modern epic narratives (i.e. monogatari); Karen Smyers' The Fox and the Jewel; Umberto Eco; Harry Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen; Steven Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The fox throughout the history of discourse appears at is boundaries and margins, simultaneously threatening and instantiating the human regimes of signification whose limits it delineates. Stories about shapeshifting foxes are thus as much about signification itself as they are about anything else, and they can be mobilized by any agent in the field of signification--what Bathgate calls imaginaires--to turn that field, and the fields it transverses, to their advantage. As Bathgate points out, fairies or foxes are no less imaginary, in the end, than any other idea; the key lies in those ideas' interpretation. Examples: The story of Lady Tamamo and her predations on the retired Toba-no-in via Komatsu Kazuhiko.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples One of the predominant themes in shapeshifter discourse is that of the fox-wife and fox-mother, a fox who out of obligation or curiosity takes the form of a human woman and bears a human man's children. Changes in the details of these tales over time reveal changes in Japanese marriage and inheritance practices, changes which these tales were then mobilized and resignified to authorize and to normalize. In particular, these tales reveal a profound fixation on how to deal with a woman's (spiritual, economic) influence in order to ensure a tranquil domestic arrangement, whether uxori-, duo-, or virilocal, though all of these tales think in more than one register--social, spiritual, economic, ecological. Ex: The Fox Wife of Mino, the Fox Wife of Bicchuu.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The stories of shapeshifting foxes--and of foxes' inherent duplicity--highlight and have been used as a sign of the difficulty of correctly interpreting and navigating the imaginaire of non-human agency, i.e. of gods, spirits, and the weird. What is the difference between kami and youkai, and how does one discern properly between them, and what according is the proper response? As time wears on these questions are imbricated in the nativist discourse of things seen and unseen, which relentlessly subordinated the former to the latter in its attempt to craftily take control of discourse about the social order in the Tokugawa period; they are also bound up with questions of spirit-possession, and whether when someone is possessed they are actually possessed by the spirit claiming to be doing the possessing or whether it's just a fox having a laugh. In these context, shapeshifter foxes offered an important means by which discursive moves could be disqualified without thereby disproving the legitimacy of the entire field of signification (in this case, all of religion and belief in the numinous). Ex: Lady Joudo-ji's attempts to have Go-Shirakawa posthumously enshrined, and her defeat by the monk Jien.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples In the Edo period, the socially destabilizing forces of asymmetrical wealth accumulation and of the currency of currency--i.e. cash money over rice as the dominant means of exchange--were linked with multiple foxy discourses, principally that of "fox-owning" (kitsune-mochi) families, who were seen in villages to have illegitimately acquired their wealth and accused of complicity with foxes in order to limit their social influence and with the popularity of the cult of Inari, the divinity of rice agriculture who in this period became identified with success in business and with the fox itself, which had previously only been the messenger of the kami--a contemporary saying had it that 狐つき落ちて稲荷が一社殖え, "a fox is exorcised and Inari adds another shrine." The disquieting disjuncture between use- and exchange-value was not wholly papered over by these discourses; wealth (and capitalism) remained an ambivalent concept in Japan until at least the 1960s and the advent of "growthism."
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The discourse of kitsune-tsukai, (crafty) people who (craftily) use foxes by means of craft, predates that of kitsune-mochi, and unlike the latter is not associated with wealth as it is with violence, spiritual and otherwise. Because the significatory power of signs is not fixed, these fox-using sorcerers may be understood as agents trying to turn fields of signification to their advantage; sorcerous contests like those between Abe no Seimei (himself said to be the son of a fox) offer an isomorphism to semiotics and to academic discourse itself, in which entering we find ourselves changed no less than the man who learned how to leap the gates at Fushimi Inari found himself changed into a fox. At the same time, the ambivalence encoded in the duplicitous figure of the fox has made them a target of various "heresies," including the dispute over "Buddhist" and "Shinto" praxis among the Tokugawa nativists and in the modern period the dispute over superstition by the Enlightenment set of intellectuals and their successors: in each, the fox signifies that which must be expunged (and which cannot be expunged, and craftily survives in another form).
Critical assessment: Bathgate's footnotes are uniformly too long; he should either have integrated their context into his main text or cut most of them (though they are usually interesting, which is important). I also have minor quibbles with his characterizations of the details of the politics of the later Heian period, and wonder from which time period exactly he takes his kanji pronunciations, but let that be. My major complaint is the way he unceremoniously begs the question of belief, at times dismissing the praxis of belief entirely, as well as implicitly reifying the premodern/modern divide in the "popular imagination;" I think Bathgate measures unfavorably against Michael Dylan Foster in this respect. But, as a specific diachronic study of the discourse of shapeshifter foxes in Japan the book is quite good, and his comments about all discourse--even academic discourse about the discourse of fox-spirits--boiling down to "a skillful practice of strategic meaning-making" (161), a practice in which those who are foxier carry the day, are insightful.
Further reading: Karen Smyers, The Fox and the Jewel; Steven Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text
Meta notes: I had no idea that Abe no Seimei's mother was a fox. That makes so much sense. More seriously, the fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one great things; there are advantages to both, but both should be held in mind simultaneously if at all possible.
Bibliographic Data: Bathgate, Michael. The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Main Argument: Stories of shapeshifter foxes in Japanese culture, religion and society across history reveal how the fox's craft signifies and is itself a form of signification, and how stories of the fox were craftily put to use by various groups throughout history to alter discourse according to their desires. The continued propagation of these stories, moreover, is testament to their continued significance.
Historiographical Engagement: Major literary collections; most major pre-modern epic narratives (i.e. monogatari); Karen Smyers' The Fox and the Jewel; Umberto Eco; Harry Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen; Steven Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The fox throughout the history of discourse appears at is boundaries and margins, simultaneously threatening and instantiating the human regimes of signification whose limits it delineates. Stories about shapeshifting foxes are thus as much about signification itself as they are about anything else, and they can be mobilized by any agent in the field of signification--what Bathgate calls imaginaires--to turn that field, and the fields it transverses, to their advantage. As Bathgate points out, fairies or foxes are no less imaginary, in the end, than any other idea; the key lies in those ideas' interpretation. Examples: The story of Lady Tamamo and her predations on the retired Toba-no-in via Komatsu Kazuhiko.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples One of the predominant themes in shapeshifter discourse is that of the fox-wife and fox-mother, a fox who out of obligation or curiosity takes the form of a human woman and bears a human man's children. Changes in the details of these tales over time reveal changes in Japanese marriage and inheritance practices, changes which these tales were then mobilized and resignified to authorize and to normalize. In particular, these tales reveal a profound fixation on how to deal with a woman's (spiritual, economic) influence in order to ensure a tranquil domestic arrangement, whether uxori-, duo-, or virilocal, though all of these tales think in more than one register--social, spiritual, economic, ecological. Ex: The Fox Wife of Mino, the Fox Wife of Bicchuu.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The stories of shapeshifting foxes--and of foxes' inherent duplicity--highlight and have been used as a sign of the difficulty of correctly interpreting and navigating the imaginaire of non-human agency, i.e. of gods, spirits, and the weird. What is the difference between kami and youkai, and how does one discern properly between them, and what according is the proper response? As time wears on these questions are imbricated in the nativist discourse of things seen and unseen, which relentlessly subordinated the former to the latter in its attempt to craftily take control of discourse about the social order in the Tokugawa period; they are also bound up with questions of spirit-possession, and whether when someone is possessed they are actually possessed by the spirit claiming to be doing the possessing or whether it's just a fox having a laugh. In these context, shapeshifter foxes offered an important means by which discursive moves could be disqualified without thereby disproving the legitimacy of the entire field of signification (in this case, all of religion and belief in the numinous). Ex: Lady Joudo-ji's attempts to have Go-Shirakawa posthumously enshrined, and her defeat by the monk Jien.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples In the Edo period, the socially destabilizing forces of asymmetrical wealth accumulation and of the currency of currency--i.e. cash money over rice as the dominant means of exchange--were linked with multiple foxy discourses, principally that of "fox-owning" (kitsune-mochi) families, who were seen in villages to have illegitimately acquired their wealth and accused of complicity with foxes in order to limit their social influence and with the popularity of the cult of Inari, the divinity of rice agriculture who in this period became identified with success in business and with the fox itself, which had previously only been the messenger of the kami--a contemporary saying had it that 狐つき落ちて稲荷が一社殖え, "a fox is exorcised and Inari adds another shrine." The disquieting disjuncture between use- and exchange-value was not wholly papered over by these discourses; wealth (and capitalism) remained an ambivalent concept in Japan until at least the 1960s and the advent of "growthism."
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The discourse of kitsune-tsukai, (crafty) people who (craftily) use foxes by means of craft, predates that of kitsune-mochi, and unlike the latter is not associated with wealth as it is with violence, spiritual and otherwise. Because the significatory power of signs is not fixed, these fox-using sorcerers may be understood as agents trying to turn fields of signification to their advantage; sorcerous contests like those between Abe no Seimei (himself said to be the son of a fox) offer an isomorphism to semiotics and to academic discourse itself, in which entering we find ourselves changed no less than the man who learned how to leap the gates at Fushimi Inari found himself changed into a fox. At the same time, the ambivalence encoded in the duplicitous figure of the fox has made them a target of various "heresies," including the dispute over "Buddhist" and "Shinto" praxis among the Tokugawa nativists and in the modern period the dispute over superstition by the Enlightenment set of intellectuals and their successors: in each, the fox signifies that which must be expunged (and which cannot be expunged, and craftily survives in another form).
Critical assessment: Bathgate's footnotes are uniformly too long; he should either have integrated their context into his main text or cut most of them (though they are usually interesting, which is important). I also have minor quibbles with his characterizations of the details of the politics of the later Heian period, and wonder from which time period exactly he takes his kanji pronunciations, but let that be. My major complaint is the way he unceremoniously begs the question of belief, at times dismissing the praxis of belief entirely, as well as implicitly reifying the premodern/modern divide in the "popular imagination;" I think Bathgate measures unfavorably against Michael Dylan Foster in this respect. But, as a specific diachronic study of the discourse of shapeshifter foxes in Japan the book is quite good, and his comments about all discourse--even academic discourse about the discourse of fox-spirits--boiling down to "a skillful practice of strategic meaning-making" (161), a practice in which those who are foxier carry the day, are insightful.
Further reading: Karen Smyers, The Fox and the Jewel; Steven Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text
Meta notes: I had no idea that Abe no Seimei's mother was a fox. That makes so much sense. More seriously, the fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one great things; there are advantages to both, but both should be held in mind simultaneously if at all possible.