The Body in Asia 9781845459666

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Piety, Politics And Philosophy: Asia And The Global Body
1 The Global Body Cannot Ignore Asia
Part I. The Body And Religion
2 Saint or Serpent? Engendering the Female Body in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives
3 Creating Religious Bodies: Fasting Rituals in West Java
4 Formations of Public Piety: New Veiling, the Body, and the Citizen-Subject in Contemporary Indonesia
Part II. The Body and Culture
5 Westernized Body or Japanized Western Body: The Desirable Female Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Magazines
6 Fatness and Well-Being: Bodies and the Generation Gap in Contemporary China
Part III. The Body and the State
7 Seki Jūrōji and the Japanese Body: Martial Arts, Kokutai, and Citizen–State Relations in Meiji Japan
8 The Sacred and the Sanitary: The Colonial ‘Medicalization’ of the Filipino Body
9 State and Religious Contestations over the Body: Hook Swinging and the Production of New Human Subjects
10 Women’s Revolution Embodied in Mao Zedong Era Ballet
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE BODY IN ASIA

Asia-Pacific Studies: Past and Present Series Editors: J.S. Eades, Ritsumeikan Asian Pacific University and David Askew, Ritsumeikan Asian Pacific University The Asia Pacific is the most economically dynamic region of the world. It can boast large numbers of new economic and political groupings that extend from the Russian Far East in the north to Australia and New Zealand in the south. The forces of globalization are producing new population, cultural and information flows throughout the region. At the same time, the past continues to cast a long shadow and newer issues are fuelling regional tensions. This series provides an outlet for cutting edge academic research on Asia Pacific studies. The major focus will be the politics, histories, societies, and cultures of individual countries together with overviews of major regional trends and developments. Volume 1 Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian John Postill Volume 2 The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture Edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi Volume 3 The Body in Asia Edited by Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen

T HE B ODY

IN

A SIA

Edited by Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Turner & Zheng text2:Turner & Zheng text

10/23/09

12:39 PM

Page iv

First published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2009 Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-84545-550-7 hardback

C onTenTs

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Piety, Politics and Philosophy: Asia and the Global Body Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen

1

1.

The Global Body Cannot Ignore Asia Susan Brownell

23

Part i – The Body and Religion 2.

Saint or Serpent? Engendering the Female Body in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives Monika Dix

3.

Creating Religious Bodies: Fasting Rituals in West Java Jörgen Hellman

4.

Formations of Public Piety: New Veiling, the Body, and the Citizen-Subject in Contemporary Indonesia Sonja van Wichelen

43 59

75

Part ii – The Body and Culture 5.

6.

Westernized Body or Japanized Western Body: The Desirable Female Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Magazines Junko Ishiguro Fatness and Well-being: Bodies and the Generation Gap in Contemporary China Anna Lora-Wainwright

97

113

Part iii – The Body and the state 7.

Seki Jūrōji and the Japanese Body: Martial Arts, Kokutai, and Citizen–State Relations in Meiji Japan Denis Gainty

129

Contents

8.

9.

10.

The Sacred and the Sanitary: The Colonial ‘Medicalization’ of the Filipino Body Julius Bautista with Ma. Mercedes Planta

147

State and Religious Contestations over the Body: Hook Swinging and the Production of New Human Subjects Santhosh Raghavan Nair

165

Women’s Revolution Embodied in Mao Zedong Era Ballet Zheng Yangwen

183

notes on Contributors

203

Bibliography

207

index

225

vi

L isT

2.1

oF

F iguRes

Dōjōji engi emaki.Woman turns into serpent and follows monk to Dojoji temple.

44

Dōjōji engi emaki. Fire-spitting serpent-woman encircles the bell and sets it on fire.

45

Dōjōji engi emaki. Monk hides in a box to avoid the violation of serpent-woman’s passion.

45

Kegon engi emaki. Zenmyō threw herself to sea following the boat of the departing monk.

46

Kegon engi emaki. Zenmyō transforms herself into a serpent dragon and carries Gishō’s boat back to Korea.

47

Women demonstrating in Jakarta against the ban on the veil in France.

80

4.2

Inside the glossy women’s magazine Noor.

89

5.1

The contemporary ideal ratio of face to body.

108

5.2

A Westernized body with a Japanese face.

108

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 4.1

10.1 (Prelude) Qionghua chained and beaten (1970 production).

191

10.2 (Prelude) Qionghua chained and beaten (1972 production).

191

10.3 (Act One) Qionghua escapes again and runs to the forest.

193

10.4 (Act One) Party Secretary Changqing points the way.

195

10.5 (Act Two) Qionghua joins the Red Girls’ Regiment.

197

10.6 (Act Four) Qionghua swears her allegiance to the CCP.

198

10.7 (Act Five) Qionghua drills with the Regiment.

199

10.8 (Act Five) Qionghua drills with a fellow comrade.

200

A CknowLedgemenTs

We would like to thank the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS) for financing and hosting the conference ‘The Body in Asia: Cosmos and Canvas’ on the 15th and 16th March 2007 that has now produced this volume. We thank ARI’s Events Team: Rina Yap, Valerie Yeo, Alyson Rozells and Henry Kwan for facilitating the conference. We thank Marion Kant, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ballet who introduced us to Berghahn Books. Finally our thanks go to Berghahn Books, to Marion Berghahn, Anna Wright, Noa Vázquez, Mark Stanton and Ann Przyzycki whose interest and industry made the speedy publication possible. August 2009 Bryan S. Turner Wellesley, Massachusetts Zheng Yangwen Manchester, England

i nTRoduCTion P ieT y, P oLiTiCs And P hiLosoPhy: A siA And The g LoBAL B ody Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen

She began to leap from side to side, flinging herself down in a kind of curtsy and springing up again with extraordinary agility, in spite of the long longyi that imprisoned her feet. Then she danced in a grotesque posture as though sitting down, knees bent, body leaned forward, with arms extended and writhing, her head also moving to the beat of the drums. The music quickened to a climax. George Orwell (1934) Burmese Days

In George Orwell’s novel relating to his experiences as a policeman in Burma during British colonial rule, the attempts of the principal character Flory to interest Elizabeth in the local culture of Kyauktada in Upper Burma always end in disaster. In the performance of the pwe, the body of the young Burmese dancer fills Elizabeth with amazement, boredom and ‘something approaching horror’ (Orwell 1989: 107). Encounters between the British and their colonial subjects, even where their intentions were honourable, were prone to disaster, partly because the unruly nature of sexual desire tends to disrupt social life. The problem of colonial life in relation to courtship and marriage as described in E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India is probably the classic example. The disruption of social relations owes a great deal to the perception of the uncontrolled, erotic native body. Much has been written of course about the Orientalist fantasy of the 1

Bryan Turner and Zheng Yangwen

female body in colonial literature most notably in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) or more recently Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995). Tracing the erotic interaction between East and West has become a significant feature of the literature in this field (Prasso 2005). Travel and crossing borders has become associated with postmodern readings of fleeting sexual encounters in global cities such as Tokyo (Kelsky 1996). In this collection, Junko Ishiguro looks at the construction of the Japanized Western body in women’s magazines. Increasingly the focus of critical theory, especially in feminism, has been directed at gaining a better understanding of the veil and the status of the female body in Islam (Mahmood 2005; Yegenoglu 1998). In this study, veiling in Indonesia is examined by Sonja van Wichelen. Much of the Western literature on the body and the Other has been concerned to understand how bodies are represented in official discourses about sexuality. The philosophy of Michel Foucault has been central to this recent literature on the body in the context of power and knowledge. Foucault distinguished between on the one hand the ars erotica and on the other the scientia sexualis (Foucault 1979b). The former he believed were characteristic of China, Japan, India, Rome and the Arabo-Muslim societies. In this literature, the truth of sexuality is drawn from the actual pleasure of sex. This ‘is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific qualities, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul’ (Foucault 1979a: 57). While the West possessed no real tradition of ars erotica, it did develop the confessional as a medium for telling the truth about sex, especially sexual deviance. The confessional became a central component of what Foucault (1997a) called ‘the technologies of the self ’. Psychology in the colonial context played a major role in constructing subservient subjectivities and disciplining the colonial body (Young 1990). Colonization of the native body therefore appears to be an inevitable and necessary stage in the building of colonial states; but we need to consider new issues and themes in a period of globalization.

The sociology of the Body Any attempt to develop the sociology of the body raises the perennial problem about the exact relationship between nature and culture. Although Western sociology has been prone to by-pass ‘nature’ as merely a cultural construct, the conceptual tensions between treating the body as a living organism or as a cultural product continue to shape sociological understanding of the body. There are of course cogent political reasons for being suspicious about the contrast, because the nature/nurture distinction has often been used to justify social inequality as natural inequality, including gender inequality between men and women. The ideological justification of this division suggests that men ‘belong’ to culture, thereby being responsible for rational activity in the public sphere, while women 2

Introduction

in their domestic roles fulfil natural functions such as child-rearing and family maintenance in the private sphere. While one can dismiss these ideological justifications relatively easily, this distinction needs to be taken seriously and where necessary re-evaluated in the light of modern science, since developments in the natural sciences have contributed to a profound change in the ways in which the human body is conceptualized. This contrast between nature and culture also therefore influences the ways in which we think of science itself. Different traditions of science, for example between East and West, inevitably produce different conceptions of nature, and consequently different conceptions of the body. This collection of papers on ‘the body in Asia’ is based on a general assumption that the understanding of the body in Western and Asian cultures is likely to be very different, given significant differences in cultural traditions of East and West. However, in some respects there are also significant parallel assumptions about the body, and the differentiation of gendered bodies is one obvious example. Insofar as patriarchal forms of authority have characterized both Western and Eastern societies, then there have been at least some common views about gender divisions of labour. For example, this issue raises important but difficult questions as to how Confucius and Mencius understood human nature and what role their systems of thought allowed for the impact of environmental and biological factors on human character (Bloom 2002). Contemporary interpretations of Confucian thought have tried to argue that the traditional distinction between ying and yang does not provide grounds for inequality between men and women (Bell and Chaibong 2003). However, if societies are characterized by patriarchal systems of power in which heads of households, rather like kings with respect to their dominions, exercise absolute power, then there will be considerable inequality between men and women. This issue is further complicated by the fact that neither West nor East represents homogenous cultural units. The treatment of women has varied between Catholicism and Protestantism, and it is generally assumed that Southeast Asian societies were much more flexible in their attitudes towards sexual freedom than was common in either South or East Asia (Andaya 2000). In Asia, Japan probably represents the most extreme form of status consciousness rather than gender consciousness. Chie Nakane in her famous Japanese Society (1973: 33) reminds us that in Japan age and sex are normally superseded by social status. Japanese women are almost always ranked as inferior to men, not because gender plays a major role in power relations, but simply because women rarely occupy positions in society of high social status. She argues that while American society is sex-conscious, Japan was historically statusconscious. But all of these arguments point to the fact that, while there may be very different cultural understandings of the ‘sexed body’, there are common structures of patriarchal power. This issue of patriarchal power is explored by Monika Dix (Chapter Two) where she considers some aspects of Buddhist characterization of the dangerous quality of the female over the male in Japanese 3

Bryan Turner and Zheng Yangwen

narratives. In more general terms, women have found it difficult to achieve equal recognition as religious in Asian Buddhism, for example in seeking to acquire a status equal to Buddhist monks (Kabilsingh 1991). While the Abrahamic religions with their creation myths in which Eve is a secondary creation are unambiguously patriarchal, Buddhism is also patriarchal (Palmer and Ramsay 1995). The Buddhist pantheon was originally exclusively male and it took much persuasion from Ananda, the follower of the Buddha, to persuade him to modify his view of women. All of these religions have subsequently developed powerful female figures – the Virgin Mary, al-Sayyida Zaynab and Kuan Yin – to create a space for female spirituality – albeit a spirituality that remains subordinate to the dominant theme of patriarchal powers. Although the nature/nurture distinction has been a favourite topic of modern anthropology, we should not forget that the original contrast was an important part of classical Greek philosophy, where nature referred primarily to biological life outside the city and culture was the rational life of the citizen. The contrast between ‘mere life’ and ‘the form of life’ within the city was a basic component of the idea of sovereignty. Classical Greek had no concept for the social and saw rational life as a political form within the city. The modern sociological debate about whether the body is natural (outside the city) or socially constructed (under the realm of political sovereignty) has unfortunately become disconnected from the political. If the sociology of the body is to have an important future role in shaping sociological debate, it needs to embrace the relationship between the political and the corporeal as at least one aspect of its research focus. In this study of the body in Asia, several chapters – such as the medicalization of the body in colonial Philippines (Chapter Eight) or the attempt of the local state to regulate ‘barbaric’ hook swinging rituals in contemporary India (Chapter Nine) – take up the theme of the body’s contested relationship to the (modernizing) state. The original debate around the contrast between nature and nurture, between nature and culture, or between nature and the political was thoroughly explored in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics where there is a decisive distinction between zoe as the life which humans share with all living things, and bio as the way of life of a particular person or group (Aristotle 1998). Similarly, the Stoics recognized a distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (law). While human beings shared nature with animals, their moral or spiritual well-being could only be realized in the polis or the political community in which they could exercise rational discourse, thereby rising above their natural being. A civilized person is one who has been nurtured by education. When human beings acquire a hexis or stable disposition, they can exercise moral virtues, acting in terms of their practical wisdom. Politics exists to ensure the happiness (eudaimonia) of its citizens by expanding their excellence in rational action. We should note that in Aristotle’s world, rational excellence was grounded in a habitus that involved bodily perfection and control. This notion that the polis was the environment in which rational men could be fully cultivated has persisted in Western philosophy. For example, in the work of 4

Introduction

Hannah Arendt (1958), there is an articulation of this classical view that the private world is closer to nature (and to deprivation), while the public sphere brings nobility to human actions. She argued that human life can only be meaningful if people can engage effectively in the public sphere. The issue here is that the division between nature and culture or between the body and society is in fact the foundation of political sovereignty. The body also comes to define the space of the political. A sceptical reader might ask reasonably, what has Aristotle to do with the Asian body? One answer is that Islam has had a major impact on Asian societies, especially in Southeast Asia. In this volume, we have sought to include chapters not only on Buddhist influences in Japan or tensions around modernity and Hinduism in Kerala, but we have also wanted to explore the modernization of piety, for example in Indonesia, in Chapters Three and Four. One very important change in the Muslim body in this region is being brought about by an intensification of piety, especially among women, where veiling is increasingly a sign of pious practice (Tong and Turner 2008). An important contribution to the debate about piety has come from the influential work of Saba Mahmood on the Politics of Piety (2005). In exploring the discipline of the self that is associated with religious renewal (or da’wa), Mahmood explores the construction of a female and religious habitus, noting that at least one foundation for the recognition that self, virtue (or excellence) and bodily comportment are connected comes from the work of Aristotle. We should note in addition that there is no overwhelming reason to think of Aristotle as a ‘Western philosopher’, on the grounds that it would be impossible to understand Al-Ghazali or Al-Farabi without Aristotle. The West became acquainted with Aristotle mainly through the translation of Arab sources, and hence we can reasonably assume that educated Muslims have for centuries been influenced by Aristotle’s ideas about the virtues. In the study of authority and power, Muslim writers have depended heavily on Al-Farabi’s notion of the ‘virtuous city’ – a notion that draws significantly on the legacy of Aristotle (Arkoun 2002). These interwoven influences should warn us not to accept, however implicitly, some reified notion of West or East. We shall return to this issue shortly. Governmentality, as a generic term for these micro-power relations whereby bodies are controlled by the state through local institutions and authorities, has been defined as ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target populations’ (Foucault 2001: 219). The importance of this definition is that historically the power of the modern state has been less concerned with sovereignty over things (land and wealth) and more concerned with maximizing the productive power of populations, the human body and reproduction. Furthermore, Foucault interpreted the exercise of administrative power in positive terms, that is, enhancing a population’s potential through state support for family and 5

Bryan Turner and Zheng Yangwen

reproduction. The regulation of the body in order to achieve the growth and discipline of populations in the process of modernization has been an important goal of the state not only in Japan but in Turkey, Germany and Hungary in the early twentieth century. The subtle interconnections between training the body and shaping the personality are evident in many contributions to this volume, but especially in the case of martial arts in Meiji Japan as Denis Gainty demonstrates in Chapter Seven. The government of the body involves the idea of a diet and the issue of fatness and femininity has been a problematic issue in Western cultures, where anorexia nervosa has become a prevalent disorder among young women. By contrast, Ann Lora-Wainwright found that she was complimented for putting on a bit of weight in rural China (Sichuan) where weight and health are closely associated.

Towards a Conceptual Framework This reference to Foucault’s notion of governmentality is a useful point at which to start to define a set of concepts relating to the body that can help to clarify any discussion of the body in Asia. We propose that as a starting point we distinguish between ‘the body’ as a ‘living organism’ and as a ‘cultural representation’. For example, the body is often used as a metaphor for different functions of government. We speak of the head of the state or the head of a corporation. Traditional societies harnessed the body to express the sacred authority of the group or society, and hence there is a close relationship between the body, the sovereignty of a king, and the notion of sacredness. This theme has been pursued with great philosophical skill by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his inquiry into the origins of homo sacer, the sacred man. Agamben shows that, following Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics in The History of Sexuality (1979a), there is always a necessary relationship between the sovereign power of the state, power over the body and the control of life. We would express this somewhat differently to say that there is a necessary relationship between the sovereignty of the state (king) and control over the sovereignty of the individual body. Since the body expresses both sacred and sexual power, this control involves sovereignty over sexual and religious potentialities. Images of the body – slim and athletic or obese and out of control – are used to describe effective government or failing leadership. In the eighteenth century the notion of a diet of the body was also used to describe the proper control of the institutions of the state. Left-handedness is almost universally regarded as an unfortunate characteristic, partly because in the West left-sidedness is also associated with evil (Turner 1992). The characteristics of the body are therefore taken to be characteristics of the virtues of the individual or their absence. A handicap of the body is often read as a blemish of character. In the writings of Mencius it is claimed that the wickedness of a man can be read in the dullness of his pupils. 6

Introduction

Recent work on the sociology of the body has been significantly influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who invented or developed a cluster of terms that are conceptually useful in the study of the body. He was primarily concerned with the relationship between practice, discipline, habitus and the self. He was particularly interested in the idea of the habitus as an ensemble of dispositions that shape, if not determine, our taste for cultural objects. A person’s habitus is produced by the training they receive and hence our dispositions are profoundly shaped by our education (in the broad sense), and education is closely related to social class. These ideas were employed by Bourdieu (1984) to study the dispositions of various classes in French society towards consumption. Bourdieu borrowed the idea of habitus from Aristotle who, as we have suggested, was concerned to understand how the virtues are acquired through training in a particular habitus. Bourdieu was less exercised by the question of the moral understanding of excellence and more concerned about how preferences for certain goods or lifestyle appear to be natural or taken for granted. By extension, for example, the performance of a ballet dancer who has been properly trained appears to the observer to be effortless or natural, whereas in reality excellence in dance, as in the martial arts, is the outcome of training and effort, and to some extent is ‘unnatural’. How can this discussion clarify the issue of ‘the body in Asia’? The principal sociological argument must be that embodiment – the practices we perform in order to accomplish various tasks such as playing table tennis or opening a fan – is the product or effect of training and discipline. For humans, walking, sitting, standing or jumping are not as such merely natural activities but socially produced practices, the sum of which constitute our embodiment. We have to be trained to perform the great variety of tasks that are expected of human beings from riding bicycles to performing Swan Lake. If embodiment is the effect of social practices and if these practices are determined by the habitus, then embodiment varies between cultures, simply because the training of children and adults is specific to a given milieu – such as a school, a military barracks, a ballet class or an institution for producing debutants. Because the habitus is specific to different cultural fields, the Asian body and the Western body as an ensemble of socially sanctioned practices are different. More precisely, Asian forms of embodiment must be different from Western forms of embodiment. In even more technical or philosophical language, we might argue that, while humanity shares certain properties in common – human beings are vulnerable – the specific manifestation of this commonality will be determined by local differences pertaining to the creation of habitus. Although it is obvious that ‘the Asian body’ will vary depending on differences, for example, between a Buddhist-dominated and a Taoist-dominated habitus, for the sake of argument we can persist with the idea of an Asian and a Western tradition of embodiment. Our principal thesis here is that there are distinctive traditions of embodiment in the East and West which indicate profoundly different traditions of corporeal experience and expression. Different cultural traditions produce different types of 7

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embodiment. In turn different forms of embodiment reinforce different cultural traditions. Against this notion of the separateness of the body in Asia and the body in the West, we are going through a very deep process of globalization which means that national cultures become increasingly hybrid, thereby embracing different ‘body techniques’ as a consequence. The mixture of body cultures produces new forms of embodiment. Whether these changes dilute or enhance cultures is debatable. It is possible to argue that new hybrid cultures create new artistic possibilities. In Chapter One, Susan Brownell shows how the national politics of sport, in this case the Olympic Games in Beijing, also becomes bound up with questions of prestige in a context where sport is a globalized institution and an aspect of the global economy (of entertainment). Globalization has also had a troublesome impact on notions of female beauty in which Western ideas about the ideal female form have spread around the world through the cosmetics and fashion industries. Some aspects of this global aesthetic are discussed by Junko Ishiguro in her analysis of the Western round face in Japanese women’s magazines in Chapter Five. The main issue, however, is that globalization is challenging the apparent separateness of East and West, and we explore many of these issues through the specific case of dance a bit later in this chapter.

The Body and mind Perhaps the most significant argument we can entertain about the Western world concerns the profound impact of natural science, especially medicine, on the conceptualization of the body. This medicalization of the body is discussed by Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta in their account of the colonization of the Filipino body by Western science (Chapter Eight). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was an attempt to emulate Newtonian science in the application of medicine to the human body. This attempt to discover the laws that control the body involved the employment of mathematical reasoning to the flows and fluids within the body – in, for example, Harvey’s account of the operation of the human heart. One consequence of these developments in socalled iatrogenic medicine was the separation of mind and body, in which the body came to be treated as a machine. These developments produced the famous Cartesian theory of the division between mind and body in which the world of mind is privileged over the body, and the aim of Western rationalism was to subordinate and control the body by science in the interests of liberating the mind or consciousness. Although this Cartesian philosophy was closely associated with secular rationalism and positivism, it was also consistent with Protestant abhorrence towards the body as the seat of irrational desire. Western positivist philosophy reversed the relationship between nature and culture, arguing that human nature (human materiality) determines mental and cultural existence. Empiricism and materialism attempt to demonstrate that 8

Introduction

mental life is determined, often mechanistically, by our material organic life. The development of a mechanistic dualism between mind and body, or between mental and material causation, is often historically associated with Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. Cartesianism rejected the speculative scholarship of medieval philosophy, and paved the way towards rationalism and empirical scientific experimentation. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century laid the foundations of experimental (laboratory) science in which scientists attempted to explain human behaviour by reference to human anatomy or biology or chemistry. For example, medical scientists became interested in the eighteenth century in the theory that human diet determines human behaviour. Physicians such as George Cheyne in the eighteenth century attempted to explain the prevalence of suicide in England in terms of poor diet, and developed various dietary regimes for sedentary occupations to guard against obesity or depression, a condition known at the time as ‘the English malady’. Cheyne’s dietary recommendations influenced religious leaders including John Wesley, who felt that these dietary recommendations were especially compatible with the requirements of Christianity for discipline. As we have already observed, diet has in fact a double meaning – the political government of a sovereign body and the government of a human body (Turner 2008a). It is interesting to compare here the Western idea of dietetics with fasting rituals in Jörgen Hellman’s discussion of West Java in Chapter Three. There is both a dietary regimen and a political regime. In the late nineteenth century, the discovery of the calorific scale allowed scientists to calculate with considerable precision the intake of food that was required for a given output of human labour. Dietetics was subsequently used to improve the efficiency of the military, and to make the management of prisons more rational. Dietetic science gave some scientific foundation to the traditional notion that man is what he eats. In the modern world, advanced societies have become obsessed with the problem of clinical obesity as a cause of depression, death and morbidity. There are in addition various arguments from nutritional science that various products, especially sugar, produce uncontrollable behaviour in children. These contemporary attempts to explain offensive or criminal behaviour by reference to genetics or diet can be seen as the modern legacy of nineteenth-century positivist criminology (Davie 2005). This view of the mind–body distinction is very different from Buddhism, if we take the example of the Japanese tradition, where mind and body are seen to be mutually dependent. Mind and body in Zen Buddhism should be brought into harmony; while in secular Cartesianism they must be divided and separated. In Japanese Buddhism, the body is a field of energy or power (ki). In acupuncture, martial arts and dance, the aim is to increase awareness and control of this force, enhancing its flow through the body (Yuasa 1993). This practical awareness is acquired through experience rather than through intellectual contemplation. These techniques of performance which are central to this practical experience are 9

Bryan Turner and Zheng Yangwen

found in the tea ceremony, archery and theatre, and hence we can argue that these embodied practices shape the particular habitus of Buddhist practices. The cultural framework in which these practices take place enshrine a set of aesthetic values that are dominant. In her study of traditional dance (nihon buyo) in Sensational Knowledge (2007), Tomie Hahn argues that there are four components to the Japanese aesthetic – simplicity, irregularity, suggestion and impermanence. Let’s take irregularity. One might argue that the Western approach to nature is to impose a symmetrical pattern in order to control it. English garden design for the landowning aristocracy often used Greek architectural themes to achieve perfect symmetry and in France Le Notre’s magnificent parks sought to capture a complex geometrical organization of space whereby nature was ‘subdued by the hand of Man to serve the greatness of the king, whose bedroom was placed right in the centre of the whole composition’ (Pevsner 1963: 331–32). By contrast, the Japanese aesthetic celebrates the irregularity of nature by mimicking its asymmetries. In the art of bonsai the miniature tree is not situated in the centre of its pot but to one side. The other principle, of impermanence, expresses the Buddhist notion of the transitory nature of life, and impermanence is beautifully captured in the ephemeral qualities of a dance performance. Because these practices and their related habitus are specific to traditional Japanese culture, it raises the question as to whether, for example, an American woman could actually perform a traditional dance. This problem is addressed by Tomie Hahn, whose answer supports our argument that, because habitus determines embodiment, we should expect different types of embodiment in different cultures. Thus she writes that Japanese dance is designed for the Japanese corporeal form: The aesthetic components of the style reinforce this to some degree: the attire, the mimetic movements, and the physique itself. Of course, these aspects of the performance were well established specifically for the Japanese physique hundreds of years prior to contact with the outside world. Kimono and other traditional costumes are constructed to comfortably fit the compact, petite Japanese body. (Hahn 2007: 168)

Performance and the Body Dance is perhaps the most powerful expression in art of the inescapable presence of the body in cultural performance. If we think of the ways in which different art forms depend as it were on different materials, then we might note that in painting and sculpture, materials can be used for either abstraction or representation (that is, figuration). In painting, paint readily lends itself to the formal expression of values – for instance in the work of Rothko. In dance, however, the dancers are perceived by the audience as human bodies and hence 10

Introduction

the audience tends to respond to them as they would to bodies in the everyday world. In modern dance, choreographers like Clement Greenberg and Alwin Nikolais had, in order to realize the aesthetics of formalism, to negate the body. This ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘de-humanization’ of the body was achieved in part by masks and props which allowed Nikolais to find a method of expressing the pure motion of the body while masking the individual nature of the dancer as subject (Gitelman and Martin 2007). The body-in-motion offers the possibilities of rethinking ideas about space and motion. Dance is a very potent vehicle of national culture – as Chapter Ten on the Chinese revolutionary ballet so graphically demonstrates. The power of the body is expressed by performance in dance, and it is in dance that the sexuality and potency of the body is ritually expressed. Formal, stylized dance often occurred within the court, where the carefully trained and manicured body expressed not its own power, but the power and authority of the sovereign. The dancing body was an expression of the order of society as orchestrated in the body of the king. Oppositional dances were noteworthy for their coarseness and vulgarity. There is therefore always a complex division between the regulated sexuality of classical ballet – the dance par excellence of the court and the elite – and the erotic or grotesque dances of the ordinary people. In modern societies, this sexuality of dance has become a commercial product. The aura of the body is an effect of its embeddedness in tradition and ritual. In this sense, dance perfectly illustrates the sacredness of art in its traditional forms. These sacred dimensions of dance have been captured in modern aesthetic theory by the work of Aby Warburg on the serpent ritual of Hopi Indians towards the end of the nineteenth century; for Warburg, collecting was not simply a method of cataloguing the past, but of recapturing its sacred qualities (Michaud 2007). Following Warburg’s anthropological theories, we can claim plausibly that dance as an art form is resistant to mechanical reproducibility. As a performance, it cannot be easily and exactly recreated over and over again. Choreography has been developed as a method, a scientific method, of reproduction, but it is not a perfect science of movement. There has been a long debate in dance studies about whether a dance can be perfectly reproduced from a score and whether such reproduction is artistically desirable. While film and photography have brought dance, especially classical ballet and modern dance, to a wider audience, the experience of a live performance cannot be captured by such mechanical or indirect means (Shusterman 2008). As a traditional or ritual art form, dance has remained resistant to modern means of mechanical reproducibility, but dance played an important part in the emergence of nation states and the process of modernization. Because the body is a powerful medium for expressing social values, it was important in the nationalist framework of modernization in the twentieth century. We might say that the aura of the body was embraced by national movements to embody national values. Dance appears to have an enduring relationship to national culture, if not to 11

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nationalism. Ballet in the nineteenth century and well into the second half of the twentieth century was an important component of diverse projects of cultural nationalism. For example, Frederick Ashton, the arch-classicist, created ‘English’ choreography and a canonical repertory that dominated the Royal Ballet for decades, creating a national style of lyrical, romantic, fluid dance. In its high culture forms, dance has been constitutive of nationalism. As we can see in Chapter Ten, ballet in China was reconstituted and refashioned to express a revolutionary ideology through stylized gestures – the clenched fist for example. It is interesting to compare the status of ballet in two separate revolutionary contexts – Russia and China. National ballet emerged in Russia on the basis of a revival of folk culture. For example, Igor Stravinsky incorporated folk music directly in The Firebird. We can date the globalization of ballet from the performance of Mikhail Fokine’s Le Pavillon d’Armide on 18 May 1909 under the directorship of Serge Diaghilev. Vaslav Nijinski’s performance of L’Apres-midi d’un Faune in 1912 caused the first global scandal in ballet, because the ballet’s overt eroticism broke with existing conventions. The Ballets-Russes were ironically criticized in France because they were too international, whereas the French critics wanted genuinely national Russian or exotic Asian performances. Diaghilev responded in 1908 by producing Moussorgsky’s deeply nationalistic Boris Godounov. This period of the globalization of Russian ballet shows the interaction of folk and classical art, and the invention of traditions through which folk idioms were transformed into global-national art. Urban Chinese in cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai had embraced various forms of decadent Western dance in the 1920s, when many urbanites flocked to the new dance halls and attended lessons in dancing schools. Eventually dance halls overtook coffee houses as the place to display modernized taste and aspirations; and there were over three hundred casinos and cabarets in Shanghai by 1936 where dance hostesses thrived (Lee 1999). It is against this Westernizing background in which the dance hall was synonymous with decadence that ballet and modern dance began to flourish in China. In the early 1960s classic Chinese ballets like Red Girl’s Regiment emerged. The ballet adopted a Western genre of dance but refashioned it to express class struggle and the triumph of women in the new society. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), under the influence of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, a former actress, Red Girl’s Regiment was converted into a revolutionary model play. The Communist Revolution had the unintended effect of making ballet, a most bourgeois genre of performing art, part of the revolutionary repertoire of the Party (Li 2003). While classical ballet converted folk idioms into high culture, nationalism embraced folk or peasant traditions for political purposes. The flamenco, although closely associated with Andalusian culture and with oppositional politics, has been coopted as the national dance expression of Spain. In Hungary, the discovery of folk dances was an important expression of political resistance to Soviet influence. The rumba was adopted by the revolutionary Cuban 12

Introduction

government as its national dance, because it was assumed to express an egalitarian culture. Modern dance has emerged out of this international interaction between folk, national and global cultures. National dance genre has always been fractured by both regional and global politics. A national ballet culture was typically a state project, because the size of classical ballet required considerable resources, and therefore national dance traditions have been difficult to sustain. The classical ballet of the dominant classes has been challenged by alternative expressions of nationalism in the form of folk traditions and peasant cultures. However the world of performing arts, especially classical dance traditions, is changing dramatically under the impact of globalization. Helena Wulff ’s Ballet Across Borders (1998) has demonstrated these changes in the case of ballet. Dance is important for theories of globalization for several interrelated reasons. Dance, both classical and popular, provides a powerful illustration of cultural globalization from the late nineteenth century. The interweaving of national and global forms of dance offers a sociologically informative case study of ‘glocalization’, that is, the adaptation of a particular global trend to local customs and tastes. Social struggles over dance, especially in high culture forms of classical ballet and modern dance, illustrate global pressures towards democratization. Dance has become a major aspect of popular culture; in youth culture specifically, it has played a central role in expressive individualism and sexual intimacy. From rock and roll to the gay rave circuit, dance has been a major cause of global social change in terms of sexual mores and drug use. As Helena Wulff reports in her research on Ireland (2007), the stiff posture and straight arms characteristic of Irish folk dance reflects a Catholic tradition of hostility to dance as a stimulant of sexual desire. Finally, from the perspective of the sociology of the body, classical ballet created a global aesthetic of female beauty that is lithe, diminutive and anorexic, and simultaneously an ambiguous male body that is athletic, virile, and gay. We should not think however that globalization is merely Westernization. The impact of Asian art forms on the West is equally a measure of globalization, whether in popular culture (through Bollywood) or through high culture (in terms of Japanese flower design or Buddhist meditational techniques). One interesting example – again from performing arts – is the impact of Japanese Butoh – the dance of darkness – that expresses an aesthetic movement rather than simply a dance tradition. While Butoh has its origins in Japanese folk culture, it has had an influence on some aspects of postmodernism dance forms in the West (Fraleigh 1999).

Religion and the Asian Body Our argument so far has two components. First, culture determines the habitus within which the body is situated, and therefore cultures are embodied in different ways. We have illustrated this argument by reference to dance, which has very specific cultural and political contexts. Our second argument has been that, where 13

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the process of globalization changes cultural values – possibly bringing about a certain standardization of cultures – then the different forms of embodiment are weakened and national distinctiveness is eroded. We can anticipate that religious differences have played a large part in shaping distinctive forms of embodiment. It is certainly the case that different religious traditions have very different interpretations of the nature of the body. The notion that the body is central to religion may appear at first sight to be counter-intuitive. Meredith B. McGuire (1990: 283), when giving her presidential address to the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1989, said that the ‘human body probably seems like the most unlikely imaginable theme for a presidential address to this society’. However the study of the body in religious studies and sociology has flourished subsequently (Mellor 2004; Mellor and Shilling 1997; Shilling 2003 & 2005). Feminist theology has also drawn attention to the centrality of the body in the history of religions and gender differences in religious practice and belief are widely recognized as socially significant (Woodhead 2007). The West has been profoundly influenced by the three Abrahamic monotheistic religions. There is an extensive literature on the patriarchal nature of the Abrahamic religions which share in common the story of creation, the female temptation of man, the need to cover women’s bodies, the elevation of male spirituality and the underlying fatherhood of God as the cornerstone of theology. Female figures that represent motherhood are therefore especially interesting to both theologian and sociologist: the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, Elizabeth, Aisha, Khadija and al-Sayyida Zaynab. Women often challenge the traditional rigid division between male and female; this challenge was preeminently expressed in the figure of Joan of Arc who was put to death in part because the ambiguity of her gender (Warner 1981). There are of course important differences between the celibacy of the Essene–Christian tradition and Islam, but some remarkable parallels in the need to seclude and regulate female social behaviour. Women can become oppositional figures in such a system of spirituality, for example when the Virgin achieved the status of an immaculate and pure figure, in some cases being regarded as ‘coredeemer’ in Christian theology. Female saints are important in both Christianity and Islam. Two crucial social changes are, however, changing the role of women: entry into higher education and the growing numerical dominance of women in such institutions, at least at the undergraduate level, and the radical decline in fertility throughout Asia (apart from the Philippines and East Timor). These changes are particularly significant in the Muslim world (Jones 2006). The consequence is that women have more time to ‘invest’ in religious activities and hence piety is a growing pattern of behaviour among educated women. These changes in female piety are clearly and visually illustrated by the growing prevalence of the veil in women’s public attire, as Sonja van Wichelen argues in her account of contemporary Indonesia (Chapter Four). The body places an important role in various religious traditions but one 14

Introduction

obvious difference between East and West is over the question of the resurrection of the body. In Buddhism and Hinduism, there is the doctrine of the cycle of rebirth, which is strikingly different from the principles of soteriology in the Abrahamic religions where the doctrine of resurrection is an important aspect of orthodoxy. In Christianity, the promise of eternal life was a central feature of the Nicene Creed and in societies with high mortality rates and short life expectancy belief in an afterworld played a significant role in religious belief and practice. Christianity was itself originally a millenarian religious movement in which the expectation of a Second Coming and resurrection was a dominant theme of the early Church. The human body was a recurrent issue in medieval theological works including speculations about the physical survival of the Virgin Mary after death and about how devils possessed the human body. In Christian eschatology, body and soul could not be separated without damage to human happiness and survival beyond life. Caroline Bynum (1991: 228), in her superb Fragmentation and Redemption, notes that Aquinas argued that a ‘full person does not exist until body (matter) is restored to its form at the end of time’. Of course the doctrine of physical resurrection raised acute conceptual difficulties for Christian theologians. Would for example the finger nails of an individual all be restored with resurrection? Could a person eaten by a dragon enjoy resurrection? The issue of the resurrected body was not merely an issue for theologians. It formed the basis of popular religious belief and practices with respect to the relics of saints and their miraculous healing of the laity. In these respects, Christianity had a decisively corporeal cosmology of the world. There is an alternative of course to life after death, namely the secular quest for longevity in this world. The fascination for an elixir of life motivated premodern science. Belief in the existence of natural substances or elixirs produced from them that could prolong life was a significant aspect of Chinese medicine at least from the time of the Warring States. We might say that while Christians fervently expected the resurrection of the body, Chinese emperors looked to medicine to preserve life indefinitely. Because these substances that were employed as elixirs included mercury, lead and arsenic, many alchemists who experimented in the hope of preserving the emperor suffered early deaths rather than enjoying prolongevity (Needham 1970). The preparation of these substances was costly, and therefore the alchemists were typically members of the imperial court, providing services to the elite. The occupation of alchemist was thus precarious since they were often accused of poisoning the emperor and hence were executed by the new incumbent. Confucianism did not have a clear idea of an individual soul and was in any case more interested in promoting social success and mobility in this world. It was reluctant to engage in any debate about personal survival. In orthodox agnostic Buddhism, the notion of the persistence of the soul in an afterworld was wholly contrary to its teaching. Taoism recognized a range of forms of existence, but after death they simply dispersed. The aim therefore of the medical elixir was to sustain existing life on 15

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this earth and to make it more enjoyable. It was therefore a distinctively secular medicine of this-worldly prolongevity. The secular quest for life extension in China was not confined to experiments with elixirs. The Chinese notion of matter recognized the fluidity of material existence in which matter can become formless only to later congeal and solidify. From these beliefs, there was the view that human life could be prolonged more or less indefinitely. Longevity (for men) depended on the production of semen and its retention in sexual intercourse. Taoist teaching on sexual relations involved correct adherence to appropriate seasons, time and rhythm. These views supported the idea of sexual intercourse as a therapeutic activity in which women supplied the ying components of life. A variety of sexual techniques were developed to prolong sexual intercourse and to delay orgasm thereby promoting longevity (Unschuld 1985). In the Christian West, the search for an elixir of life was not entirely unknown, at least among the elite. In The Pope’s Body, Agostino Paravinci-Bagliani (2000) shows how speculation about longevity was an important dimension of medieval theology, especially insofar as papal spirituality was related to questions about the nature of longevity. Medieval popes had remarkably short lives and this fact was often taken as an indication of their profound spirituality. In the West, the vision of paradise in which the body was incorruptible and everlasting was an important dimension of utopian thought. The imaginary world of Prester John was an object of considerable fascination during the political rise of the papacy to the Peace of Venice in 1177. For example, Lothar of Segni (later Pope Innocent III) wrote a commentary on old age in his De miseria conditionis humane, in which he developed a mythical history in which at the beginning of time men lived for over nine hundred years, but with the onset of human decline God, addressing Noah, created a new limit for men of one hundred and twenty years (Gen.5:3). After which time, human life became shorter until the Psalms declared that the years of our life are merely threescore and ten. The Flood was a dividing point in human existence in which human decline can be measured by the brevity of life. Lothar argued however that this brevity was important in squashing human delusions of the prolongation vitae and on this point he agreed fully with the early medical school at Salerno that the prolongation of life was not possible. Thinking about age and aging in this period was associated with the De retardatione accidentum senectutis – on delaying the misfortunes of old age – a work that was addressed either to the pope or the emperor. This work has occasionally but mistakenly been attributed to Roger Bacon, a Franciscan and leading Aristotelian of the thirteenth century. The attribution is related to the fact that Aristotle’s On Generation and Decay itself played an important role in Western medical doctrines about ageing, including the writings of the Salerno school, an important centre for translating Greek and Arabic texts. Salerno thus contributed to the latinization of Western medicine and produced such texts as 16

Introduction

the Regimen sanitatis salernitanum which in verse form offered useful tips for healthy living (diet, exercise and temperance). While the Salerno school had rejected the idea of prolonging life, the De retardatione kept alive in medieval society the possibility of extending life through the discovery of ingredients. Ageing was seen to be an effect of losing two of the humours that compose the human body (heat and moisture) over two other humours (coldness and dryness). The secret of longevity was to discover those ingredients that retained heat and moisture while delaying the negative impact of cold and dry elements. The knowledge required to delay such developments was occult: ‘because he who possesses the secret of all their properties sooner or later transgresses the divine law; it follows that only the “wise in speculation” (sapiens in speculatione) and the “expert in the ways of things” (expertus in operatione) can derive “noble and sublime” profit from such substances’ (Paravinci-Bagliani 2000: 203). The treatise was largely concerned to provide a list of such substances. The principal elements were gold and amber. For Roger Bacon, humans could extend their span of life by drawing upon the empirical knowledge made possible by astronomy, alchemy and optics. In short, longevity did not have to depend on resurrection, but could take place in the here and now. The promise of prolongevity was natural not supernatural. The experimental sciences which Bacon defended and promoted could repair the defects of human nature that resulted from their expulsion from Paradise with the Fall. Empirical knowledge would assist humans to manage their humoral decay, thereby arresting the apparently inexorable decay and corruption of the mortal body. In this respect Bacon’s thought was revolutionary. It proposed that through science – in this case alchemy – men could gain control over their own natures and did not need to succumb to mortality, but these thoughts were indeed so radical that the proper understanding of the secrets of life should be reserved to those who have a duty ‘to rule themselves and others’. These secrets should be entrusted to the few to rule over the many, and in particular these secrets should be at the service of the body of the sovereign and the pope. This prolongevist alchemy therefore played an important role in the evolution of Western attitudes. It involved a radical view because it assumed that man could achieve power over nature. Bacon’s defence of experimental and empirical science against scholarly speculation was seen by his contemporaries as a revolutionary doctrine. Bacon asserted in his Opus majus that an ‘extension of life’ was possible with the aid of an ‘experimental art’ that could overcome the defects of existing medical knowledge. These Western and Eastern traditions in the search for longevity were probably motivated by similar this-worldly interests in survival, but they were set within very different theological and ethical contexts. In those cultures that are heavily influenced by Confucianism, the issue of life after death is closely connected to filial piety, and fear of offending the ancestors becomes connected to the fear of angry ghosts. The relationship between the living and the dead in Western 17

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Christianity and Eastern Confucianism is therefore very different, and rests on different conceptions of the dead body (DeBernardi 2006). Unlike Jesus, Confucius made few comments on the afterlife, focusing instead on the conditions of social harmony in this world. In actual practice, there is a significant emphasis on rituals to placate the dead ancestors in all East Asian cultures. In summary we can say that one major difference between East and West is that whereas in the Christian West time is linear, in Asia it is cyclical. These conceptions of time have had, as one might expect, important consequences for how life and death have been conceptualized, and hence how to deal with the body in death.

women, Religion and the Polluted Body Christian teaching attempted to subordinate human nature (the passions or desires) by moral training, confession and discipline (or cultivating the soul). Christianity established a set of disciplines – or technologies of the self (Foucault 1988) – that were designed to regulate the natural man through ascetic regulation, primarily in the form of dietary regimes. By abstinence, religion could transcend the limitations of the animal life of desire. By contrast, laymen were to a large degree ensnared in their natural desires, but various institutions of grace – confession, eucharist, baptism and the last rites – offered partial relief from these tribulations. In particular, marriage provided some moral regulation of natural sexual drives which could be channelled through holy matrimony to some beneficial purpose, namely reproduction. Traditional religious teaching on the family in the West obviously depends on the biblical view of sexuality, marriage and reproduction. Given the authority of the New Testament, it is important to recognize that Jesus had relatively little to say about marriage and family life, and his observations on sexual relationships were limited. The Gospels do not therefore contain a developed or systematic theology of this-worldly institutions such as marriage, the family, inheritance and divorce. In order to discover what the teaching of the early Church was on marriage and family life, the letters of St Paul to the primitive church provide our best guide. These epistles to the early Christian communities, such as the letter to the Corinthians, were essentially ad hoc responses to local issues, but they have come to have a clear authority over subsequent practice. Paul’s teachings precluded divorce, and if the couple did separate, they were not permitted to remarry. In recognizing that celibacy was superior to marriage, he created a new hierarchy of virtue: virginity, widowhood and marriage. Throughout subsequent Christian history, virginity became a significant test of sanctity. Christianity inherited the traditional Middle Eastern assumption that women, because they are closer to nature, are inferior to men. In the Genesis story, the Serpent tempts Eve and subsequently Adam and Eve, recognizing that they are 18

Introduction

naked, are forced to cover the genitals with the leaves of a fig tree. One thing that distinguishes humans from animals is human modesty; humans need to cover nature (genitals, hair or the face) with culture (the loin cloth, the head scarf or the veil). In some cultures, eating is also assumed to have animal connections, and hence it is polite to cover the mouth while eating. One could list a whole series of activities – defecation, copulation, mastication and so forth – which have strong animal or natural connotations, where human societies have the cultural need to hide or disguise such activities. In the Christian view anything that comes out of the body, especially any involuntary secretion, has the potential to defile a person. We can detect various aspects of this Christian legacy in the chapter on the Philippines by Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta (Chapter Eight). Because the Prophet had several wives and many children, Islam appears to have developed a view of marriage, family and women that was less ridden with anxiety than the Christian tradition. However, reformist Islam has given a distinctive significance to female modesty which we clearly see in the practice of veiling. The complexity of Muslim traditions with respect to the body and women is thoroughly examined by Sonja van Wichelen (Chapter Four). When we compare Eastern and Western traditions, it is, however, the similarities rather than the differences that are striking. The similarities – despite major differences in religions and cultures – are the result of an underlying pattern of patriarchal authority, probably most prominent in the legacy of Confucianism. Attitudes and customs regarding sexual orientation were historically flexible and tolerant throughout much of Southeast Asia before the period of modern colonization and state building. Ritual specialists in the region often assumed the attire and manners of the opposite sex or embraced practices that marked them off as a ‘third gender’. These ritual specialists often adopted androgyny, which gave them greater access to deities that were also characterized by ‘two spirits’ or male and female. In South Asia, these specialists were known as hijras and their occupational status gave them a caste-like membership. These hijras suggest that in South Asia sexuality and gender have been regarded as fluid and flexible (Nanda 2000). Transgender practices were equally common in Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines, where myths and cosmologies gave some legitimacy to the playfulness of these hybrid gender identities. Because gender differences have been diffuse and muted, diverse expressions of gender and sexuality have been tolerated and accommodated throughout the region, thereby giving women also greater autonomy and freedom (Peletz 2007: 52–3). With globalization, there has also been some degree of Americanization and Westernization of Asian homosexualities (Altman 1996). A mixture of commercialized sexuality and Western ideologies such as feminism are also transforming existing practices, especially among youth groups, where binary divisions between heterosexuality and homosexuality have revived. Homosexuality flourished alongside polygamy during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911). In Japan, there had been at least since the Tokugawa 19

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period (1603–1867) an acceptance of bisexuality among men as normal and homoeroticism was given a privileged cultural position. Cross-dressing and samesex identities were common in the Kabuki tradition of popular drama. In contemporary Japan, there is a fascination with androgyny in youth cultures and it has become commercially significant with the growth of comic books, clothing fashions and animations (McClelland 2002). The growth of gay pride and coming out in Japanese popular culture is an example of ‘glocalization’ as global sexual cultures mix and interact with local traditions of sexual representation. This flexibility in popular commercial cultures stands in sharp contrast to the violent gender relations that are characteristic of rural Asian societies and to violent conflicts over gender that surface in ethnic conflicts in modern India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Conclusion: Body as motion In modern studies of the human body, it is difficult to avoid some discussion of the legacy of Marin Heidegger and his Being and Time (1962). Heidegger set the body in the context of time; for him, being is always becoming. Why conclude a book on the Asian body with a comment on Heidegger’s notion of Being? There are two reasons, one trivial and the other significant. The trivial reason is that Heidegger’s notion of Being is closely connected with his reading of Aristotle, for whom being is always the coming into existence of the presence of being. In other words, being is motion (Brogan 2005). This conclusion provides a nice linkage to our opening commentary on nature and nurture from the perspective of Aristotle. The second important reason is that there are good grounds for believing that Heidegger’s interpretation of Being – apart from Aristotle – was heavily indebted to Taoism. Heidegger made early contact with Asian philosophy when in 1922 he made the acquaintance of the famous Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime. As Heidegger became more aware of Asian philosophy, there is strong evidence that his notion of Being was influenced by Taoism (May 1996). In particular, his Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) is a text in which the body is central to the understanding of the temporality of being. The Western tradition of philosophy had little to say about the body by comparison with Asian thought and hence there are good reasons to believe that Heidegger’s view of embodiment was conditioned by his encounter with the thought of Lao-tzu (Parkes 1987). The notion of Nature in Chinese (tzu-jan or zi ran), in Japanese (ji-nen) and in Korean (ja-yun) signifies a serene composure for the spontaneous naturalness of things and that the role of contemplation is to grasp the ‘this-ness’ of material beings. This way of thinking about nature is very close to Heidegger’s notion of the throwness or facticity of being.

20

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In the contemporary Western tradition, philosophy of the body, including Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is profoundly Heideggerian, but few realize that Heidegger’s idea of Being was profoundly influenced by Taoism. The point of this exercise is not however to show Heidegger’s dependency on Lao-tzu but to make the division between the body in Asia and the body in the West problematic in a global world.

21

1 T he g LoBAL B ody C AnnoT i gnoRe A siA Susan Brownell

Is there an Asian phenomenology of the body? There are many inevitable universal processes of the body, such as ageing and illness, which call into question the degree to which the body really is ‘culturally constructed’, i.e., variable across cultures. The study of the body has been dominated by Western scholars studying Western bodies, which has necessarily limited the development of theoretical frameworks to better understand what is universal or biological about bodily experience, what is culturally variable, and what are the implications of both sides of the equation for cross-cultural understanding. Asia is a particularly productive region for looking at the culture of the body because it is a part of the world with very complex cultural traditions of the body, documented in literary traditions dating to ancient times, which are very different from those of the West. It is also a region that has undergone intense contact with the West through war, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, in which conflicts were often expressed in bodily idioms. In this chapter I will advocate an approach to the body that focuses attention on cultural difference. Because of my own particular background in American anthropology, I choose to use a notion of ‘body culture’ that is grounded in an anthropological understanding of ‘culture’. While it is also possible to carry out analysis that is sensitive to cultural difference using other disciplinary paradigms (such as phenomenology and practice theory), a paradigm that takes ‘culture’ as central is particularly useful because it requires that the body is thickly contextualized within the local symbols and meanings that are significant to the 23

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people whose bodies are in question. Scholarship on the Asian body has been increasing since its emergence in the 1990s, and in this chapter I will provide an overview of the current state of the field, summarizing the arguments that have been made about significant cultural differences between Asian and European/North American bodies. Based on my own field of expertise, I will largely concentrate on the literature on the East Asian body and on sports. I then discuss the role of the body in China’s one-hundred-year quest to host an Olympic Games, which was achieved in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Along the way, I also deal with the question of how much cultural differences ultimately matter, since in the end all humans share certain defining bodily experiences.

Culture ‘Culture,’ as used by American anthropologists since the early twentieth century, has referred to the shared beliefs that make social life possible, the mental map for behaviour that serves as a guide for the entire way of life of a people. Culture is an abstraction that exists in the realm of beliefs and symbols, but it is physically manifested in human behaviour and in material culture. The human body is located at the nexis of behaviour and material culture, since it is both the medium for human behaviour, and – at least with respect to those bodily aspects that are malleable – a material product, an artefact of culture. The discipline of anthropology has given a central place to the body since the mid-nineteenthcentury beginnings of the discipline in Europe and the US, which were dominated by physical anthropology with its fixation on the question of race. Anthropometry, the science of measuring the human body, led to a minute fascination with body parts due to the belief that certain bodily features could be used as ‘racial markers’ (Brownell 2008b). Although this early racist anthropology was largely scientifically repudiated and morally rejected in the first half of the twentieth century, it did leave a legacy in the discipline that was useful for the anthropology of the body when it began to crystallize in the 1980s and 1990s. The interest in the racial body gave way to a different emphasis on the culturally variable body, including body adornment, dances, music, games and sports, sexual and religious practices, and so on. Thus, my use of the word ‘culture’ draws on a long history in anthropology, which has since its beginning considered body techniques such as manners, dress, bodily decoration and alteration as worthy of study.

Body Culture I use the notion of ‘body culture’ or the ‘culture of the body’ to refer to everything that people do with their bodies (Marcel Mauss’s ‘body techniques’), together 24

The Global Body Cannot Ignore Asia

with the cultural context that shapes the nature of their actions and gives them meaning. Body culture is a broad term that includes daily practices of health, hygiene, fitness, beauty, dress and decoration, as well as gestures, postures, manners, ways of speaking and eating, and so on. It also includes the way these practices are trained into the body, the way the body is publicly displayed, and the lifestyle that is expressed in that display. Body culture reflects the internalization and incorporation of culture. Body culture is embodied culture. I was first introduced to the phrase ‘body culture’ in the work of the German Henning Eichberg (1998), who lives and works in Denmark. His genealogy of the concept of ‘body culture’ extends back into the exercise traditions that emerged on the European continent in the early nineteenth century. Around 1900 the label of ‘body culture’ (Körperkultur) appeared (Eichberg 1993: 257–58). Similar ideas were picked up by the German Socialist Worker’s Movement and by Karl Marx. Körperkultur was translated into Russian as Fiskultura, which was in turn translated into English as ‘physical culture’ (Riordan 1977: 46–47). The Soviet model was imported into China, which established a centralized sports system in 1955 and imported the Marxist-Leninist notion of physical culture along with it, using the word tiyu. Tiyu (Japanese taiiku) was the word coined in Japan in the late nineteenth century to translate the notion of ‘physical education’ found in the work of the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, who argued that humans have a tripartite moral, intellectual, and physical constitution, and that three different kinds of education are necessary to cultivate each aspect. Social Darwinism and tiyu were imported by China from Japan in the late nineteenth century. German Körperkultur underwent a Renaissance in West Germany after 1968, and particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the Communiststyle ‘mass physical culture’ was criticized and rejected, Körperkultur, along with other European equivalents (such as Danish kropskultur), became a key word in a new perspective on the body that emerged in Germany and Denmark (Eichberg 1993: 258). Like its predecessors, this approach seeks to reconstitute a whole notion of body/self. It attempts to overcome the fragmenting effects of competitive sports, with their dichotomies of elite versus mass sport, professional versus amateur, performance versus health, and so on (ibid.: 52–56). A similar trajectory occurred in China from the 1980s to the present, as Maoist-era ‘mass’ tiyu was rejected and a new ideology of the body was constructed. This will be described below.

Body Techniques The legacy of the history of the body in anthropology is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it provides a conceptual tool for linking bodily behaviour and practices, which may sometimes seem trivial, to the larger circles of meaning 25

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that shape and motivate behaviour. Marcel Mauss, in 1939, was the first to conceptualize ‘techniques of the body’: ‘the ways in which from society to society [people] know how to use their bodies’ (1979: 97). Mauss reminded us that human beings do learn, either consciously or unconsciously, the most seemingly automatic actions. Building on Mauss, I would advocate for a body-cultural analysis that never takes bodily actions as completely ‘natural,’ but instead views the body as a cultural artefact, and seeks to unpack the elements of culture that have produced bodily action. My understanding of ‘body culture’ owes much to Norbert Elias’s (2000) and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1978, 1984) concept of ‘habitus’. A major difference between their approach and my anthropological approach is that they lack a well-developed concept of culture – that is, of the ways in which practice is culturally organized by cultural schemas, myths, symbols, rituals, and so on (see Ortner 2006: 11–12). The use of ‘culture’ as an analytical concept is closely linked to cultural relativism, which is one of the defining methodological stances of American cultural anthropology. Because the use of the culture concept relativizes the cultural background for body techniques, it forces the recognition that among other people and places there may be different rationales and meanings for a similar bodily action. In my opinion, it is this relativism that is often lacking in studies of the body in other disciplines, and it is because of this lack that it has been possible for a large body of literature on ‘the body’ to emerge that is really only about Western bodies. In his foundational article on ‘body techniques,’ Mauss observed that even walking styles vary from one society to another. In my book, Training the Body for China (1995), I excerpted the following description of the walk of the protagonist in a novel by Lin Yutang: He walked with a young, steady gait, with slow but firm steps. It was obviously the gait of a trained Chinese athlete, in which the body preserved an absolute poise, ready for a surprise attack at any unsuspected moment from the front, the side, or behind. One foot was firmly planted on the ground, while the other leg was in a forward, slightly bent and open, self-protective position, so that he could never be thrown out of his balance. (1939: 4)

My analysis suggested that the Chinese walking style that was typical when I was doing my research (1985–1988) had its roots in the traditional forms of physical training such as t’ai-chi and other martial arts. These body techniques emphasize solid footing, a low centre of gravity, balance, and rootedness in the earth – thus, the feet should be flat on the ground, the shoulders rounded and pressed downward. Chinese posture also reflected social relationships: rounded shoulders characterize the bow, which is an expression of humility before superiors. I also suggested that the 1980s walking style was influenced by agricultural labour and the habit of walking beneath a carrying pole, since at that time a large number of adults had spent time ‘labouring with the peasants’ in the countryside during the 26

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Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). When one contrasts this with the Western walking style it is clear that walking styles express broad cultural differences. Western ideas of ‘good’ posture emphasize an upright stance with the shoulders thrown backward and a raised centre of gravity. This is related to the fact that in Western cultures, people rarely bow down to others, while a slight bow is a common show of respect in China. The point is that something as automatic and seemingly trivial as walking style expresses an entire orientation to the world, or what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘the history incarnated in bodies’ (1990: 190). The history that is thus incarnated is a personal history of training and habits, but that personal history is itself also the product of a social history of the body – the habits and practices shared by a social group by virtue of its shared history.

orientalism The other side of the double-edged legacy of the history of the body in anthropology is that any attempt to link bodily practices to membership in a social group can be seen as repeating the now-discredited linkage between the body and racist anthropology. One of the complementary disciplines that developed along with the anthropology of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that of Oriental Studies, the legacy of which is particularly relevant to those scholars working in Asia. With respect to my own prior work, the present essay, and the endeavour undertaken by the authors in this book, this means that one must seriously reflect upon whether an attempt to define an ‘Asian body’ results in an artificial creation of an ‘East–West’ dichotomy motivated by the mechanisms of ‘Orientalism’ as described by Edward Said in his influential book Orientalism (1978). Said described Orientalism as a style of thought based upon a fundamental distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident,’ which produces ‘the altogether regrettable tendency … to channel thought into a West or an East compartment.’ The result is that the Oriental becomes more Oriental (is ‘orientalized’) and the Westerner becomes more Western, which ‘limit[s] the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies’ (ibid.: 46). His most radical point is that this intellectual distinction is part of the Western style of ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (ibid.: 3). Said does not believe that academic texts are ‘merely decorative;’ they are a form of cultural domination that complements political domination (ibid.: 25). The study of the Orient was motivated by the desire to control it. Furthermore, due to the sheer weight of Orientalism as a body of ‘knowledge,’ Orientalism imposed limitations of thought and action on any Westerner engaged with the Orient (ibid.: 3). From this angle, the British-educated scholar from Taiwan, Hwang Dong Jhy (2005), criticized my analysis of walking techniques in a paper written in Chinese by stating, ‘One can dispute whether Brownell places excessive emphasis on the 27

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influence of Chinese wushu and Western body culture on Chinese people’s style of walking, and whether Chinese people’s walking style is essentially different from the Western style.’ He utilizes excerpts from Said’s Orientalism and Albert Memmi’s (1965) The Colonizer and the Colonized to conclude that: ‘In Brownell’s conception, which is a bit too Western-centric and rigid, it is as if the abstract concept of “the unique essence of Chinese people” is imagined and completely unalterable.’ He further argues that behind this conception is the larger reality of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized: presenting the Orient as if it is essentially different from the West, and thus incapable of being understood, is also a justification for dominating and controlling it. Hwang’s concern about the danger of drawing distinctions between East and West that create a rigid and artificial barrier is one that is relevant to this volume; likewise, the insight that such distinctions can serve as a foil for bigger power differences between social groups should provoke self-reflection about the social groups involved in producing scholarship, including edited volumes such as this one. If one applies a social-scientific perspective to the above passage and to this volume, however, it is also important to point out that when I wrote the above passage, I was not a latenineteenth-century colonial officer, and that the current volume is an attempt to overcome precisely these limitations of previous scholarship by bringing together a mix of Western-born, Asian-born, Western-based and Asian-based scholars. To further develop the first point: 1980s China was not a US colony – in fact, 1980s China was very anti-imperialist and the government carefully controlled and monitored the actions of foreign researchers due to the legitimate suspicion that we were there representing anti-Chinese power interests. It would be too simplistic to assume that I was continuing exactly the same Orientalist power relations that Said describes for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet one must also acknowledge that I, like any other Western-educated China scholar, built my research upon a foundation of intellectual work that was strongly shaped by the Orientalist tradition that Said criticizes. Although by the 1980s the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Orientalist tradition was in the more distant past, the more recent Cold War with China had produced a newer version of it; a movement to reject this legacy within East Asian Studies was initiated in the late 1980s (more on this below). However, it is interesting that Lin Yutang (1895–1976), whose description of walking styles I quoted, was a US- and German-educated author who was passionate about explaining China to the West, and the book in which the passage appears, Moment in Peking: A Novel of Contemporary Chinese Life (1939) was one of several books that did reach a wide Anglophone audience. Lin was influenced by Social Darwinism. It is ironic that Hwang particularly singled out a passage in my book that owed a large debt to the thinking of a Chinese scholar who was a major cultural bridge between China and the West in the twentieth century. Still, this irony should not be quickly dismissed. How could it be that, although both of us were (I believe) sincerely motivated to create a better mutual 28

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understanding between China and the outside world – and not in reinforcing imperialist power differences – a contemporary scholar could read them as fine examples of Orientalist thought? After one hundred years, have we not developed any better ways of writing about and thinking about the cultural differences between Western and non-Western cultures than those characterized by the Orientalist worldview that Said criticizes? I believe the answer is that we have developed better ways, which are more complex, more dialogical, not strictly motivated by the West’s will to dominate, and not completely constrained by (although, perhaps, not completely free of, either) the legacy of Orientalism. The current volume is an example, not just because of its mix of scholars, but also because of the ways in which these scholars have grounded their analyses of Asian bodies within thickly described historical, cultural and/or political contexts. Furthermore, to return to the point raised at the start of the chapter, if attempting to describe cultural differences has a tendency to ‘limit the human encounter’ (a potential that I do acknowledge), then at least focusing on the body provides a counterbalance by reminding us of the human bodily experiences that we all share. The tension between difference and similarity, the local and the universal, remains – but a focus on the body at least allows the possibility of maintaining a balancing act between them.

scholarship on the Asian Body In the US, studies of the body were a rallying point for an effort to move beyond the old theoretically spare, male-dominated Sinology to engage with trends taking place in other disciplines: the postmodern turn, the use of Foucault’s concept of ‘sexuality,’ cultural studies, and feminism. One of the leaders of this effort was Tani Barlow, and in 1995 it resulted in the founding of positions: east asia cultures critique, envisioned as an alternative to the Journal of Asian Studies, the journal of the Association for Asian Studies (US). Angela Zito and Tani Barlow’s edited collection Body, Subject and Power in China (1994), which should be recognized as the starting point of studies of the body informed by the new paradigms, was part of this effort. My book, Training the Body for China, was also part of this trend, though this was somewhat inadvertent. I had already done my fieldwork and written my dissertation when I turned to the studies of the body that were just then becoming popular. I did it for obvious reasons – sports inevitably led me to the body.

Foucauldian, Feminist, and Cultural Studies The literature on the Asian body that has emerged in the last two decades has been quite varied, but it can be roughly categorized into four streams. The first stream is that which derived from the trends just mentioned. In addition to the 29

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foundational volume edited by Zito and Barlow, one might also consider the following works in that vein: Aihwa Ong, ‘State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia’ (1995); Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (1999); Judith Farquhar, Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994) and Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China (2002); Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China (1997); Laura Spielvogel, Working Out in Japan: Shaping the Female Body in Tokyo Fitness Clubs (2003); Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride : Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (2003); Everett Yuehong Zhang, ‘Rethinking Sexual Repression in Maoist China: Structure, Ideology, and the Ownership of the Body’ (2005); and Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (2006). As is evident, this trend was dominated by female scholars who often took women’s bodies as their central theme, with Everett Zhang’s work on masculinity as a notable exception.

Medical Anthropology of Asia The second trend was related to the rapid rise of the subfield of medical anthropology. Arthur Kleinman, whose medical anthropology program at Harvard University helped to establish the field, was a China scholar who had been writing about the body in a different theoretical paradigm as far back as the 1970s, including his edited book Culture and Healing in Asian Societies (1978), and his authored book on Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (1986). An essay on ‘Somatization: The Interconnections in Chinese Society among Culture, Depressive Experiences, and the Meanings of Pain’ (co-authored with Joan Kleinman, 1985), had put forward the influential concept of ‘somatization’: ‘the expression of personal and social distress in an idiom of bodily complaints and medical help seeking’ (1985: 430). While they were interested in the ways that their patients expressed depression through physical symptoms (headaches, dizziness, fatigue), they also acknowledged that somatization can occur in the absence of any medical disorder as a habitual way of coping with social stress (ibid.: 473). They noted that persons who are the most powerless are most likely to somatize (ibid.: 475), and they argued that the social sources of human distress can be found in the micro-level inequalities that result from larger-scale political, economic, and institutional forces (ibid.: 467; Kleinman 1986: 2). One of the products of the Harvard medical anthropology program was Matthew Kohrman, whose Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China (2005) was the first major study in English of the lives of the disabled in an Asian country. In South Asian Studies, Joseph Alter was an anthropologist like myself, who had chosen to write a Ph.D. dissertation about sports because of his personal 30

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experience in sports. He had learned Indian wrestling during his childhood in India and returned to research it and write The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (1992). He then moved into medical anthropology with Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (2000), Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (2006), and the edited volume Asian Medicine and Globalization (2005). Alter was a product of the anthropology program at the University of California at Berkeley, which emerged, after Harvard, as a second major centre for studies of the body and medical anthropology in Asia, due to the presence of Aihwa Ong (a South-East Asianist/China scholar whose work was mentioned above) and Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family and Other Modern Things (1998). One of the students from that program was Nancy Chen, whose Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (2003) described the qigong craze in China, which will be mentioned below.

The Neo-Confucian Revival and the Search for Identity Among East Asian Scholars A third trend that produced studies of the body was linked with intellectual trends within East Asia, where an interest in traditions considered uniquely East Asian and non-Western emerged in the 1970s and was further stimulated by the NeoConfucian Revival sparked by the conference on Asian values convened by Lee Kwan-Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, in 1982. This gave rise to a multifaceted effort by East Asian scholars, who began to try to define what was unique about ‘Confucian’ or ‘Chinese’ traditions of the body, and how they differed from Western concepts. It is worth noting that while these efforts were not highly informed by traditional Oriental Studies in the West, they were informed by the Western modernization theorists (most prominently, Ezra Vogel) who were then trying to explain whether or not Confucian traditions would hinder or aid economic modernization in East Asia. This body of modernization theory has been criticized for carrying on the Orientalist tradition of assuming a strict East–West divide and taking the West as the measure of modernization by which the East should be judged. Depending on one’s perspective, one can either praise the work on the body that emerged out of this trend, for contributing wellresearched evidence to our understanding of East–West cultural differences, or one can criticize it for assuming an overly simple East–West divide. Personally, I find this work valuable for the fact that it was well-researched, but think we should also keep in mind that the purpose of the work was to pinpoint differences, not understand similarities. What is still lacking, perhaps, is work that does both. One of the foundational thinkers was the Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo, who read English and German and undertook comparative studies of East–West philosophy. He argued that in the East Asian concept of the body based on 31

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classical Chinese medicine, there is a ‘mind–body synthesis,’ in contrast to the ‘mind–body dualism’ of the West. Qi constitutes a ‘third term’ mediating between the psychological and the physiological, or mind (xin) and and body (xing/shen), which cannot be understood from the standpoint of Western mind–body dualism. In reviewing scientific evidence for the existence of qi, he argued that the activity of qi is some kind of correlative relationship between psychology (mind), physiology (life), and physics (matter) (Yuasa 1993: 137). The Harvard-educated and US-based scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama later echoed a similar theme in his comparison of ancient Greek and Chinese medicine. He observed that by the second century AD, in the writings of the Greek physician Galen, the schism between voluntary action and natural processes, and ultimately between mind and body, had already begun to appear (Kuriyama 1999). The ancient Greeks became fixated on establishing the ruling principle, the controller, of the body. They focused on the heart or the brain. The Chinese body was more of a dynamic system. No one organ (zang, fu) ruled the others. This would later become a fundamental split in Western culture: in the sixteenth century it would lead to Cartesian dualism in philosophy, and in the twenty-first century to a Western medicine that relies on instruments and machines rather than subjective experience. Yang Xubin’s Rujiade shentiguan [‘The Confucian Concept of the Body’] (1996) came out of a series of projects on Chinese medicine at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Primarily based on Mencius, Yang found that Confucian thought constructed the body as a tripartite division into form (xing), qi, and spirit/mind (shen/xin). He also noted that Confucian thought assumed an integral connection between the body and society, body and nature, body and mind, interior and exterior, and that (unlike the static dualisms of Western philosophy) there was continuous motion between the poles. In Zhongguo wenhuade shenceng jiegou [The ‘Deep Structure’ of Chinese Culture] (1983), Sun Lung-kee argued that Chinese people grow up in a condition of dependence within a network of social obligations, first and foremost among them being the hierarchical family, which generate a ‘disorganization of the self.’ The older generation is overly concerned for the physical well-being of the younger generation, a concern that centres on the act of feeding (Sun 1988: 164). The inter-generational relationship epitomizes the somatization (shentihua) of Chinese culture as a whole, which refers to the fact that ‘the entirety of purposes in life all lead toward the satisfaction of the needs of the body (shen)’ (ibid.: 21). The most marked aspect of this somatization, Sun argues, is the obsession of Chinese people with oral gratification. Chinese culture as a whole values food like no other, and ‘“Food” is indeed the pivotal point in Chinese government’ (1983: 40). A similar point is also found in Gang Yue’s The Mouth that Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (1999), a creative history of the relationship between eating and politics in China that surveys all the ways in which this basic bodily function has served as a central metaphor of social and political life. He concentrates on themes of cannibalism 32

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in Chinese literature and history, arguing that it is a central paradigm in Chinese culture because this is where eating and human bodies literally converge as humans eat the bodies of other humans.

Body Culture in Japan Studies and in Taiwan A final trend resulted from the importation of Eichberg’s concept of body culture into Japan after Shimizu Satoshi was a visiting scholar at Eichberg’s institute in Denmark in 1994–95 and returned to one of the centres of sport studies in Japan, Tsukuba University, where his colleague Whang Soon Hee also began using the concept. This linked up with the growth of sport sociology in Japan since the 1970s. As with the current volume, the associated conferences and published works have been interdisciplinary and international. The Japan scholarship was introduced into the US by a conference organized by William Kelly at Yale University. He provides an overview of the Japanese developments in the resulting book, This Sporting Life: Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan (2007), which includes chapters oriented around the body by Shimizu, Whang, Lee Austin Thompson, and Spielvogel. However, he observes, ‘Given their creative deployment of Western social theory and critical sports studies, it surprising that so little of this scholarship has appeared in English’ (Kelly 2007: 5). Actually, the honor of founding the first learned society and website (www.bodyculture.org.tw) devoted to body culture belongs to the Japaneseeducated Hsu Yi-hsiung, a faculty member of the National Taiwan Normal University, who established the Taiwan shenti wenhua xiehui [‘Taiwan Body Culture Society’] in 2003. This society published Shenti wenhua wenji [‘Collected Works on Body Culture’] in 2004. However, it appears that none of the Taiwanese works have been translated into English, and so their outside influence has been limited to occasional usage by scholars in mainland China. The phrase ‘body culture’ itself has become quite popular in both Taiwan and China, but it is grounded in a current Chinese understanding of ‘culture’ and not the Anglophone understanding. I will say a bit more about this difference below, but one result is that ‘body culture’ is frequently used in connection with consumerism and the marketing of sports and body products and practices. This diverges markedly from the application of the concept that I posed at the beginning of the chapter. A second usage links it with discussions of Eastern vs. Western or traditional vs. modern body culture. While this usage approaches the anthropological understanding of culture, these discussions tend to be grounded in the same assumptions as the Neo-Confucian revival described above. The result is that at the moment the usages of shenti wenhua are sometimes used to counter Western imperialism while at the same time reinforcing rather than challenging the Orientalist and modernist assumptions that East and West, traditional and modern, are fundamentally different. 33

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This overview of the literature on the body in Asia was brief and partial to East Asia, but it illustrates the general point that the topic of the body is very recent, since the field only reached a critical mass in the mid 1990s. There is still not a large amount of work on the topic, there are many gaps that remain to be filled, and better links need to be created between the English, Japanese and Chinese scholarship.

The Chinese Body: do Concepts of the Body matter? Today, concepts of the body throughout East Asia are still largely shaped by the classical Chinese medical tradition, which has become highly sophisticated and systematized over its several-thousand-year history. If we agree with the work of Yuasa, Kuriyama, and others, then this tradition represents a very different understanding of the body from that of Western biomedical science. The concept of qi, ‘vital energy,’ occupies the most important place in the three related traditions of medicine, religious meditation, and martial arts. In medicine, the conduits that channel qi throughout the body form the theoretical basis of acupuncture. Acupuncture needles are inserted into the points (xue) at which the conduits meet the surface of the body. The Taoist and Buddhist meditation traditions involve learning to control the body’s flow of qi so that it can be utilized to achieve enlightenment and immortality (note the absence of a mind–body separation in this religious tradition). In the martial arts traditions, the master becomes able to perform astounding feats by developing the ability to concentrate qi in specific body parts to make them hard and impervious to injury. By redirecting an enemy’s qi against him, the master is able to repel attack. In sum, qi is an all-purpose essence that can be used to cure illness, attain enlightenment, and achieve success in combat. It is the sine qua non of Chinese concepts of the body. Most East Asians are walking around every day imagining that qi is circulating throughout their bodies, while most Westerners do not imagine that their bodies are functioning in this way – is this difference important? Certainly it has larger implications in the kinds of medical treatment people seek and the kinds of physical exercise that people engage in. However, on an individual level, I have always found it interesting that Westerners can develop close relationships with Chinese people without ever realizing that the Chinese person possess a body concept that is quite different from the Western one. Ultimately, then, how important is cultural difference in body concepts? Bryan Turner recently recalled that a large number of articles submitted to the journal Body and Society described the ways in which different languages divide up the body with different words. He noted that after reading a number of such articles, one starts wondering whether there is a larger point (Turner 2007). When body concepts are manifested at the broader social level it becomes clear that they are important, but their importance seems to lie in the interplay between individual bodies and collective social entities. In China, changes in the words used to describe 34

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the exercising body over the last century are linked to larger issues. A summary of this history illustrates the kind of body-cultural analysis advocated here. Like many languages, Chinese has several words that may be translated into English as ‘body.’ The two most common characters in the language of the body are shen and ti. Sun Lung-kee notes that in thinking about themselves and their relationships with other people, Chinese people use the word shen rather than concepts like ‘personality’ or ‘individual’ (Sun 1983: 20). Mark Elvin adds that ‘in most Chinese phrases that translate into English phrases where the ideas of “person,” “self,” or “lifetime” are used or implied, the word shen appears’ (Elvin 1989: 275). Examples are the common phrases an shen (‘to make peaceful one’s body’ = ‘settle down in life’) and zhong shen (‘body’s end’ = ‘to the end of one’s life’) (ibid.). In the Communist system one’s chushen (‘family background’) and shenfen (‘class status’) became important. This conflation of self and body leads Elvin to translate shen as ‘body-person.’ Shen implies a lived body, a life history. Before the modern science of physical education arrived in China in the late nineteenth century, physical training tended to be oriented toward shaping moral character and life force. An old phrase for self-cultivation, xiu shen, primarily implied the cultivation of moral character. Yang sheng, ‘to cultivate life,’ referred to the Taoist physical exercises that were aimed at achieving bodily immortality. Ti is the character that is used in the words for ‘physique’ (tizhi, xingti, tixing, tipo) and ‘physical exercise’ (ticao). Its primary sense is that of an individual unit or a closed system. However, the inanimate body is also the vessel for lived experience, indicated by the phrases tihui, ‘to know from experience,’ and tiyan, ‘to learn through personal experience.’ Ti, not shen, is the character that became most common in the language of modern sports. The earliest forms of physical education, tiyu, were introduced by Japanese and Germans in the late nineteenth century, who were developing new conceptions of the body that would serve the cause of national strength. Thereafter, China began to move away from the Taoist ‘way of life cultivation’ (yang sheng zhi dao) and toward ‘physical education’ (tiyu). After the Communist Party came to power, the primacy of ti was cemented by the famous slogan penned by Chairman Mao in 1952, fazhan tiyu yundong, zengqiang renmin tizhi (‘Develop physical education and sports, strengthen the people’s physiques’), which became ubiquitous in the placard sections at opening ceremonies of sports events and on the walls of gymnasiums. After the end of the Maoist period in 1978 and the beginning of the era of reform, there was a backlash against qunzhong tiyu (mass physical culture), the compulsory early-morning radio broadcast exercises, and the group callisthenics that were used to celebrate big events. Mass physical culture was officially left behind in China’s 1995 Sports Law, which used the phrase quanmin jianshen (‘fitness for all’) for the first time in an official document. At a popular level, the backlash against the state’s instrumental use of the body was reflected in the 1980s fashion of qigong, a loose grouping of exercises based on the cultivation of qi. Qigong was one way of reclaiming the body from the Maoist instrumental use of 35

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the body as a tool for revolution; it was also a reaction against the withering state healthcare system, which left many people feeling that they had no choice but to heal themselves (Chen 2003). In the 1990s the qigong fad led to Falungong, now well known in the West as a symbol of religious repression by the Chinese government. ‘Life cultivation’ (yang sheng) became quite popular in the new millennium, and was used to refer to a whole range of health-preserving practices. Farquhar and Zhang (2005) argue that they are frequently a response to the social pressures brought by the market reforms. In the period leading up to the Beijing Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG), together with the Beijing City government, implemented an extensive program of ‘Olympic education’ in the schools and universities in Beijing. ‘Olympic education’ was seized upon with great eagerness by principals and teachers who developed various creative practical activities in physical education and art classes, as well as content in academic classes, to teach students about the history and philosophy of the Olympic Games. As the Games approached, the university scholars who had been involved in initiating the programs began to reflect about what they had achieved. One of them, Ren Hai, argued that ‘Olympic education’ was a new kind of education in China because it portrayed a vision of an interconnected world striving for world peace, which contrasted with the national focus of existing versions of history and patriotic education. In addition, because it took physical education and sports as its foundation, it was anchored in individual human bodies, which meant that it presented what he considered an ‘individualistic’ approach toward human development (Ren 2009: 59–60). In short, by introducing a specific version of embodied Western individualism, Olympic education had transcended the limits of the traditional nationalist emphasis on collectivism. Ren’s discussion echoes some of the previously discussed ways in which a focus on the subjective body or body culture has played a role in post-socialist transitions. Body culture (shenti wenhua), sports culture (tiyu wenhua), and Olympic culture (Aolinpike wenhua), are now popular phrases in academic, popular, and government-sponsored works intended to help improve the suzhi, or ‘quality’, of the population and ‘internationalize’ it. Culture, or wenhua, is also part of the backlash against the state-promulgated rhetoric of ‘civilization’, or wenming, in the name of which the state has been promulgating urban codes of conduct and implementing rules and laws shaping everyday behaviour. Wenhua, culture, is not associated with state discipline, but with art and inspiration. It is also used to promote consumer culture. One example: the president of the Chinese Basketball Association convened a summit in summer 2005 to discuss how to build a ‘basketball culture’ in China like that of the American NBA. A major goal of the summit was to explore ways for gaining a bigger audience and thus more ticket and souvenir sales revenues, advertising revenues, and corporate sponsorship. In sum, while the concepts of the body that individual Chinese people have in their heads have manifested themselves in important ways at the social level, it is 36

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not possible to understand the shift away from ‘mass physical culture’ toward ‘fitness for all,’ the Falungong movement, the popularity of ‘life cultivation,’ or the fervour for the Olympic Games, without first understanding the basic concepts of the body upon which they are based. A body-cultural perspective draws our attention to the importance of both concepts of the body and concepts of culture in these transformations. Both sides of the equation have been important in China – the body has been central in people’s efforts to gain control of their lives and their health in the post-Mao period; culture has been central in their effort to define a Chinese/Confucian identity against the onslaught of Western culture, as well as in the backlash against the Maoist era.

The 2008 olympic games and the ‘sick man of east Asia’ Let us conclude by returning to the question of Orientalism raised at the beginning of this chapter. In 2008, Beijing hosted the XXIX Olympic Games, and it was the most grandiose Olympic Games to date. Why was hosting the Olympic Games so important to China? The answer is that this is part of the legacy of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Orientalism. In the fashion described by Said, Western scholars and commentators believed that the essence of ‘Western civilization’ was expressed in the tradition of the Olympic Games, which had been ‘revived’ in 1896. The essence of ‘Chinese civilization’ was said to be expressed in the Imperial Examination system. In the writings of Western intellectuals from the early twentieth century on, the West was personified as a manly athlete, while China was an effeminate intellectual. Because of the tradition of ‘esteeming literacy and despising martiality’ (zhongwen qingwu), Chinese society was ‘lethargic,’ unlike the ‘active’ society of the West, which was used to explain the ‘lack’ of sports in China (Brownell 2008a: 30–33). The ‘truth’ of this equation was taken to be proved by the fact that the ‘cultured’ (wen) Chinese were not able to stand up against the ‘warlike’ (wu) Western and Japanese powers. The Orientalist stereotype was taken to heart by Chinese patriots and resulted in the notion of the dongya bingfu, or ‘sick man of East Asia’. It was widely believed that this label was applied by Japan and the West to China, although for nearly a century it has had more currency in China than it did in the West. The first call for China to host the Olympic Games appeared among YMCA patriots around 1907–1908 in a campaign that asked, ‘When will China be able to invite all the world to Peking for an International Olympic contest…?’ (Robertson 1910: 192; Morris 2004: 1–2). The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, it was said, would once and for all ‘erase the label of the Sick Man of East Asia’. Echoing the arguments made by Said, the sheer weight and power of Orientalist ‘truth’ placed limits on human encounters. There was ample observable evidence that could have contradicted the Western notion of the intellectualized, effeminized, non-competitive Chinese with no sports of their 37

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own. Imperial court sports (most prominently, wrestling and horse racing) and popular sports (acrobatics, martial arts, dragon-boat racing) were easily observed by Westerners, but their pre-existing views did not predispose them to see them, and, seeing themselves through Western eyes, reform-minded Chinese people echoed the Orientalist views. In Beijing at the end of 2007, I made a habit of asking taxi drivers what they thought of the Beijing Olympic Games. Their first answer was most often that the Games were an opportunity to display national strength. One of them began his answer by stating, ‘I support them. They demonstrate a country’s power and its culture.’ Chinese hopes for the Olympic Games were organized around the poles of power and culture, body and spirit. On the sports fields, Chinese bodies would compete against other bodies in highly regulated competitions that would attempt to remove the appearance of cultural difference. In the opening and closing ceremonies, surrounding cultural programmes, and wushu exhibitions the Chinese organizers would attempt to promote Chinese culture to the world. Wushu, however, was only locally sponsored, since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) failed to vote it onto the Olympic program, a source of great discontent within China. The acceptance of a sport regarded as ‘authentically Chinese’ would have signalled the simultaneous ascendancy of a strong Chinese body and a strong Chinese culture on the world stage. The most basic reason for the IOC’s disinterest in including wushu actually had to do with the balance of power in the IOC and the international sportworld, which is thoroughly Western-dominated, but this fact was disregarded in the public debates within China. Those debates focused instead on the question of whether or not Westerners could accept Chinese culture, whether wushu would have to be further modified in order to become an Olympic sport, and whether the modifications necessary for inclusion on the Olympic program might eventually eliminate its Chinese essence. A similar debate surrounded the cultural program for the 2008 opening ceremonies. The ‘Eight Minute Segment’ choreographed by the famous director Zhang Yimou for the closing ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games was widely criticized in China for not being ‘Chinese’ enough, and catering to Western stereotypes. It sparked a heated discussion about what actually is ‘Chinese culture’. Some people felt that only a Westernized Chinese culture could be accepted by Westerners, while others felt that the Chinese ceremony should present a Chinese culture that would appeal to Chinese, and no effort should be made to second-guess international tastes. Ultimately the opening ceremony was highly praised by Western audiences, while for Chinese people the emphasis on ‘traditional’ elements was neither innovative nor representative of today’s China. In the debates surrounding wushu and the opening ceremony, there was a tendency to misrecognize power differences as cultural differences. This is one of the legacies of Orientalism – though there were other elements at play, too, such as the limitations on the development of wushu resulting from Chinese internal 38

The Global Body Cannot Ignore Asia

politics. Of course, it would be nice if a dazzling display of ‘Chinese culture’ at the Olympic Games could seduce the rest of the world into accepting Chinese culture. On the other hand, with enough money and power it is possible to force one’s culture onto others whether they like it or not. This returns us to the tension discussed at the beginning of the chapter: too great a focus on cultural difference can be a distraction away from the connections that humans share. Ultimately the 2008 Olympic Games were made possible by the shared human body of the athletes as well as by the shared global capitalism of the corporate sponsors and television broadcasters.

summary: The interplay of western and Chinese Bodies/Cultures In this chapter I have outlined a kind of historical sociology of the interplay of Western and Chinese body cultures over the last century, taking sports as one example. I do think that more theoretically informed and complex scholarship can play a role in creating a more equal cultural playing field between Asia and the West, and that the realm of body culture is a good place for such an intervention. It would be better, for example, if young Chinese start to understand that thanks to Chinese kungfu films, Jet Li, and Japanese anime, young people in the West do not consider East Asians to be the weaklings that they were portrayed to be over a century ago. And it would be good if Westerners realize that Chinese people think that Westerners consider China to be the Sick Man of East Asia, and attempt to correct this misimpression. These may seem like trivial things, but they lead to multi-billion-dollar Olympic Games, and ultimately feelings of national inferiority that are shared by top leaders who command militaries, which are not trivial things. Hopefully this volume can contribute toward using the study of the body to arrive at more complex and accurate understandings of cultural differences, as well as of the bodily humanity that we all share.

39

PART i T he B ody

And

R eLigion

2 oR s eRPenT ? e ngendeRing The F emALe B ody in m edievAL J APAnese B uddhisT n ARRATives

s AinT

Monika Dix

The Dōjōji engi emaki and the Kegon engi emaki, two Japanese didactic Buddhist tales, present us with a dramatically compelling vision of a constructed conflict: while the Buddhist goal of enlightenment is to transcend sexuality altogether, it is female sexuality that becomes a major impediment, whereas male sexuality is the prerequisite for salvation. This chapter examines the issue of gender and metamorphosis through the analysis of the ‘demonic’ nature of the heroines in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki. It explores how different representations of women, focusing particularly on the impure nature of their bodies due to their sex, are presented both textually and pictorially in medieval exegesis. Why are women shown transforming themselves into serpents and dragons in these Buddhist narratives of female salvation? What is the necessity for women to undergo such a metamorphosis in order to attain enlightenment, and how does it enhance the elevation of these ‘transformed’ women to saints? By focusing on two different but related ‘demonic’ transformations of the heroines in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki, I will show how the reading, meaning, and reception of women’s impure nature based on their sex underwent a significant semantic drift from denoting forms of existence external to women to connoting a state of being inherent to them. Within the corpus of medieval Japanese setsuwa 説話, collections of didactic Buddhist tales, there are many stories concerning women and their search for enlightenment. However, there are only a few representations of conceptions of the impure nature and redemptive potential of women’s bodies in these popular religious texts, which circulated widely throughout Japan from the twelfth to 43

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sixteenth century as a means of proselytizing the Buddhist faith. The Dōjōji engi emaki 道成寺縁起絵巻 (‘Hand Scroll of the Miraculous Origin of Dōjōji Temple’) and the Kegon engi emaki 華厳縁起絵巻 (‘Hand Scroll of the Miraculous Origin of the Kegon Sect’) significantly enrich our understanding of the contesting attitudes towards the female body and the soteriological path open to women in Māhāyāna canonical literature by offering a rare insight into the complex and often contradictory ways in which women, their bodies, and their sexuality, were constructed in medieval Japanese culture. The earliest extant textual accounts of the Buddhist legend Dōjōji appear in setsuwa collections such as the Dai-nihon hokkekyō genki 大日本法華経験記 (‘Account of Japanese Miracles brought by the Lotus Sutra’), dated c. 1040–43, the Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集 (‘Tales of Times Now Past’) dated c. 1120, and the Genkō shakusho 元亨釈書 (‘Annals of the Genkō Years’) dated 1332 (Waters 1997; Inoue and Osone 1974). However, the oldest surviving textual and visual record of this Buddhist tale is the Dōjōji engi emaki, an illustrated narrative handscroll painting owned by Dōjōji temple 道成寺 in Tanabe city 田辺市, Wakayama prefecture 和歌山県 and dated to the fifteenth century. The scroll depicts the story of a young noblewoman who attempts to seduce a handsome monk passing by on his pilgrimage to Kumano. Trying to escape the woman’s lustful desire, he promises to visit her again on his way back, but when he fails to do so the woman – driven by her uncontrollable passion – chases after the monk. She then turns herself into a serpent and follows the monk to Dōjōji temple (Figure 2.1) where his fellow monks hide him from the demonic woman underneath a bell.

Figure 2.1: Dōjōji engi emaki. Woman turns into serpent and follows monk to Dōjōji temple. 44

The Female Body in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives

Figure 2.2: Dōjōji engi emaki. Fire-spitting serpentwoman encircles the bell and sets it on fire.

In a rage, the fire-spitting serpent-woman encircles the bell and sets it on fire (Figure 2.2). Later the monk appears to the old head priest of Dōjōji temple in a dream, and asks him to recite the Lotus Sutra (J. Hokkekyō 法華経) on his behalf because, having been violated by the serpent-woman, he himself has been reborn as a serpent. In the end, both the woman and the monk – in the guise of serpents – appear to the priest in a dream, and thank him for copying the Lotus Sutra for their salvation (Figure 2.3). The Kegon engi emaki, also known as Kegon soshi eden 華厳祖師絵伝 (‘Illustrated Lives of the Patriarchs of the

Figure 2.3: Dōjōji engi emaki. Monk hides in a box to avoid the violation of serpent-woman’s passion.

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Kegon Sect’), is a set of two illustrated narrative handscroll paintings owned by Kōzanji temple 高山時 in Togano 栂尾, located northwest of Kyoto, and dates to the thirteenth century. It tells the story of the Korean monks Gishō 義湘 (625–702) and Gangyō 元暁 (617–686) who set out on a journey from Silla to T’ang dynasty China in 630 in search of the dharma, and who became the patriarchs of the Kegon sect in Korea. The oldest extant record of the exemplary lives of these two monks is the Chinese work entitled Sung kao-seng chuan 宋高僧傳 (‘Lives of Eminent Monks of the Sung Dynasty’), which was compiled between 982–988 and focuses exclusively on Gishō’s dissemination of the Avatamsaka Sutra (J. Kegon-kyō 華厳経) and Gangyō’s commentary on the Vajrasamadhi Sutra (Brock 1984). The Kegon engi emaki adds a new spin to this Buddhist tale because it shifts the focus away from the eminent lives of the two monks to the heroine Zenmyō. Upon his arrival in China, Gishō meets the young noblewoman Zenmyō who attempts to seduce him. However, being a monk and committed to the Buddhist precept of celibacy, he resists her. Zenmyō prepares a box of Buddhist vestments for Gishō as an act of devotion but – when she hears about his departure and arrives at the harbour too late to offer him her presents – overcome by passion, grief, and rage she throws herself on the ground (Figure 2.4). Finally, she dives into the ocean, transforms herself into a serpent dragon, and carries Gishō’s boat back to Korea (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.4: Kegon engi emaki. Zenmyō threw herself to sea following the boat of the departing monk. 46

The Female Body in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives

Figure 2.5: Kegon engi emaki. Zenmyō transforms herself into a serpent dragon and carries Gishō’s boat back to Korea.

The story ends with Zenmyō transforming her body into a giant boulder in order to safeguard Gishō’s Kegon temple. Both the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki present us with an ambivalent view regarding images of women in medieval Japanese Buddhism. On the one hand, women are viewed as negative and sinful due to their sex – represented as the embodiment of passion and desire – but, on the other hand, women are considered capable of attaining salvation once their female bodies have undergone a metamorphosis. Therefore, by including women in the promise of salvation, but at the same time excluding them due to their sex, Buddhism presents a contradictory and challenging case of ‘exclusive inclusion’ (Faure 2003). This chapter owes a great deal to Japanese and Western scholarship, which has provided the foundation for research on the female body and sexuality in Japanese Buddhism. The most current ground-breaking studies are Chūsei no josei to bukkyō 中世の女性と仏教 (‘Medieval Japanese Women and Buddhism’) by Nishiguchi Junko (2006), Josei to kegare no rekishi 女性と穢れの歴史 (‘The History of Women and Impurity’) by Narikiyo Hirokazu (2003), and Nihonshi no naka no josei to bukkyō 日本史の中の女性と仏教 (‘Women and Buddhism in Japanese History’) by Yoshida Kazuhiko, Katsuura Noriko, and Nishiguchi Junko (1999), which have been instrumental for my research. In terms of English-language publications, Virginia Skord Waters’ translation of the Dōjōji engi emaki (Waters 1997) and Karen Brock’s translation of the Kegon engi emaki, as well as her textual and visual reconstruction of the scrolls (Brock 1984), serve as invaluable resources for scholars of medieval Japanese Buddhist literature and art history. My theoretical approach to this chapter has been influenced by Susan Klein’s work on the interrelationship between women and enlightenment in the noh play Dōjōji, and her pioneering psychoanalytical reading of this text (Klein 1991). Concerning illustrated Japanese Buddhist narratives of female salvation, not only do religious implications immediately come into play, but the literary tradition is 47

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also an integral part of their study. As this tripartite significance indicates, pictorial Buddhist narratives intersect the disciplines of literature, religion, and cultural studies. My study bridges these disciplines – incorporating a fourth one of gender studies – by placing representations of the female body in the context of medieval exegesis. Therefore, this chapter complements recent interdisciplinary scholarship such as The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender by Bernard Faure (2003) and Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan by Barbara Ruch (2002), which presents a milestone for the study of women in Japanese culture. Given my interest in the oblique yet powerful way in which fiction illustrates the tensions of reality and its milieu, I will contribute to this existing scholarship by examining the extent to which the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki address the problem – or, speaking in terms of religious history, the place – of the female body in Japanese Buddhism, particularly from the twelfth century onwards. I will begin by providing a brief synopsis of selected canonical treatises that describe women as impure and sinful due to their sex. Next I will explore some possible psychoanalytic explanations for the negative view of women that is presented in these Buddhist setsuwa, a strain of misogyny that intensified from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Lastly, I will draw all these strands together through a close comparative reading of the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki, challenging the displacement of female sexuality as the site of defilement based on the Buddhist doctrine of non-duality.

The demonic Feminine in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki The Buddhist view of women that pervades the setsuwa versions of the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki is profoundly negative. Both the serpent-woman and Zenmyō are shown as psychologically and biologically determined to a weakness of will that keeps them from being able to control their passions; their very existence is seen as an inevitable obstacle to the monks’ spiritual progress. Considering that the popular Buddhist sects of the Kamakura period (1185–1392), including the Pure Land (J. Jōdo-shū 浄土宗), the True Pure Land (J. Jōdo shin-shū 浄土真宗), the Time (J. Ji-shū 時宗), the Nichiren (J. Nichiren-shū 日蓮宗) and the Zen (J. Zen-shū 禅宗) sects, held ‘enlightened’ views of women’s spirituality, the explicitly misogynist tone of these stories is rather puzzling. Where does this Buddhist view of women as a powerful ‘demonic’ force that must be excluded come from? In Māhāyāna doctrines, there are various contesting representations of women and the soteriological path available to them. One commonly found assertion in the canon is that women cannot qualify for bodhisattvahood and buddhahood without first being reborn as men. The Sutra on the Teachings of Infinite Life (Skt. Larger Sukhāvativyūha Sutra, J. Muryōju-kyō 無量寿経), the Sutra of Amida (Skt. Smaller Sukhāvativyūha Sutra, J. Amida-kyō 阿弥陀経), and the Sutra on 48

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the Meditation of the Buddha of Infinite Life (J. Kanmuryōju-kyō 観無量寿経) promise birth in Amida Buddha’s Pure Land Western Paradise to all who have faith in him. However, in speaking of salvation for women, the thirty-fourth vow of Amida stipulates that women must ‘feel disgust at their female nature’ before they can be reborn, in a male body, in the Pure Land (Paul 1985: 169). According to Buddhist thought, women are considered impure and defiled due to the concept of the ‘Five Obstructions’ (J. goshō 五障), which refers to the five states of existence that women are unable to attain as expounded in the Lotus Sutra. Initially, these five states of existence referred to those of the gods Brahma, Sakra, Mara, Chakravartin, and the Buddha (Ruch 2002). These obstructions were corporeal rather than spiritual; it was physiology that rendered women unfit, unable to conform to the thirty-two primary and eighty secondary marks of the Buddha. In the sutras the Five Obstructions denoted only the ranks which women were unable to attain. However, in medieval exegesis, the phrase underwent a subtle but significant semantic drift from denoting those forms of existence external to women to connoting a state of being inherent to them. In medieval Japan, the Five Obstructions were seen as innate qualities that excluded women from attaining salvation, and over the course of time menstrual blood became the most popular claim for women’s impurity and inability to achieve salvation (Yoshida 2002). Another motif frequently cited in the Buddhist scriptures is the theme of women’s ‘sexual transformation into a male body’, known as henjō nanshi 変成男子 in Japanese. Examples include Chapter Twenty-three of the Lotus Sutra, entitled ‘Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King.’ It states: If a woman, hearing this chapter of the Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King, can accept and keep it, she shall put an end to her female body, and shall never again receive one. If after the extinction of the Thus Come One, within the last five hundred years, there is a woman who, hearing this scriptural canon, practices it as preached, at the end of this life she shall straight away go to the Pure Land, to the dwelling place of Amida Buddha, where he is surrounded by a multitude of bodhisattvas, there to be reborn on a jeweled lotus throne among blossoms, never again to be tormented by greed, anger, envy, or other defilements. (Watson 1993: 287)

Further reference occurs in Chapter Twelve of the Lotus Sutra, ‘Devadatta,’ which tells about the young daughter of the Dragon King, who is said to have gained enlightenment upon hearing the Lotus Sutra. Various bodhisattvas question this and ask her: You say that in no long time you shall attain the unexcelled Way. This is hard to believe. What is the reason? A woman’s body is filthy; it is not a dharma-receptacle. How can you attain unexcelled bodhi? The Path of the Buddha is remote and cavernous. Throughout incalculable kalpas, by tormenting oneself and accumulating good conduct, also by thoroughly cultivating perfections, only by these means can one then be successful. Also, a woman’s body even then has five obstacles. It cannot become 49

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first a Brahma king god, second the god Sakra, third King Mara, fourth a sage-king turning the Wheel, fifth a Buddha-body. How can the body of a woman speedily achieve buddhahood? (Watson 1993: 187)

Upon hearing this, the textual passage in the Lotus Sutra tells that the daughter of the Dragon King transformed herself into a man and achieved enlightenment. The Pure Land sutras echo the Lotus Sutra in their statements about women and their capability of salvation. While they assure women that they are not excluded from salvation, they do so without relinquishing suppositions about women’s inferior nature, as is indicated in the following passage from the Sutra on the Teaching of Infinite Life which states Amida’s thirty-fifth vow: Were I to attain buddhahood, and yet if there were women in the countless inconceivable Buddha lands of the ten directions who, when they die, were again to be [born] in feminine form, even though they heard my name, had joy and faith, gave rise to the aspiration for enlightenment, and despised their female body, then I would not accept true enlightenment. (Dobbins 2004: 97)

As indicated in this thirty-fifth vow, Amida has staked his own enlightenment on welcoming women into his Pure Land, specifically those who have faith in him, recite his name (J. nembutsu 念仏), and aspire for birth in his Pure Land. On the one hand, Amida’s vow promises women that they can enter the Pure Land but, on the other hand, only in a male body. Early versions of the Pure Land sutras do not contain actual references to the Five Obstructions. This concept was added to the interpretative tradition of Pure Land Buddhism (Dobbins 2004). This interpretative tradition originated with the Chinese Pure Land patriarch Shantao 善導 (613–681), who explicated the thirty-fifth vow to mean that at death women would ‘instantly transform their female bodies into male ones’ (Dobbins 2004: 98). This belief continued with the Japanese Pure Land patriarch Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212), who taught the meaning of Amida’s vow to be ‘faults which are numerous and obstructions which are profound’ and listed the Five Obstructions as the primary ones. Shinran 親鸞 (1175–1262), founder of the True Pure Land sect, further inherited and elaborated this interpretation of women’s inferior aspects (Dobbins 2004: 98). This concept of the Five Obstructions – a male construction by the Buddhist clergy – shaped the religious self-image of women from the twelfth century onward, as found in the stories of the heroines in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki. A comparison between these two Buddhist setsuwa reveals a similar narrative structure emphasizing women’s impure and sinful nature due to their sex. In the Kegon engi emaki Zenmyō falls in love with the monk Gishō and tries to seduce him, but he resists her advances. Whereas in the Dōjōji engi emaki the monk’s refusal to obey her will causes the heroine to transform herself into a serpent out of rage and jealousy, in the Kegon engi emaki Gishō’s refusal causes Zenmyō’s religious awakening (J. hosshin 発心). Confessing her shame at the 50

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blind attachment to passion, Zenmyō vows to entrust her fate to Gishō and the Buddhist Law: she will follow him like a shadow throughout all their future lives and provide for his daily needs as he benefits sentient beings in the dharma realm. Zenmyō’s metamorphosis from a ‘demonic’ being – a woman who suffers from the burden of the Five Obstructions – into an awakened being is depicted in the scroll painting by the heroine throwing herself into the ocean, transforming herself into a serpent dragon, and safeguarding Gishō’s boat back to Korea. The following passage indicates that the compiler of the Kegon engi emaki was familiar with the negative view of women’s bodies presented in earlier Buddhist setsuwa through his comparison between the heroines of the Dōjōji and Kegon engi emaki: We have previously heard of another instance where [a woman] caught in the raging flames of jealousy, along the path of attachment between men and women, turned into a snake and chased after a man. However, these two tales are not the same. The woman [in the Dōjōji story] fell prey to the power of passionate desire and actually became a snake. Her sin of attachment was deep. In this story the woman [Zenmyō] received the blessings of the buddhas and bodhisattvas because of her earnest vow, and instead became a dragon. This was because of her belief in the Buddhist teachings and respect for the virtue of a profound teacher (Klein 1991: 302).

Considering this direct reference to the Dōjōji engi emaki, it seems clear that the compiler of the Kegon engi emaki was trying on purpose to counter the negative image of women and the female body in the Dōjōji story by showing how women can play an important positive role supporting not only the male Buddhist clergy, but also becoming guardians of the Buddhist Law, and even saints. The moral of the story in the Kegon engi emaki demonstrates that the power of feminine desire, even in the demonic form of a dragon, can be transformed by the Buddhist teachings into a power for good. Previous studies by Klein (1991) and Brock (1984) have suggested that the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki are cautionary didactic tales addressed to the male Buddhist clergy. Their contents emphasize that monks must avoid women, exclude them from participating in sacred affairs and from attaining salvation in their female bodies because of women’s inherent weakness of will with regard to passion, desire, and attachment which is based on the constructed Buddhist ideology of women as bearers of the Five Obstructions. However, little consideration has been given to the significance of these tales for women. In medieval Japan, the Five Obstructions came to be seen as innate qualities that disqualified women from salvation in their female bodies. In his study of the waka 和歌 topos of the ‘Five Obstructions’ in Heianperiod (794–1185) literature, Edward Kamens (1993) has shown that religious and secular ideas crossed over boundaries and created new possibilities for the manipulation of ideas in language. While the Five Obstructions initially denoted the five states of existence women were unable to attain as expounded in the Lotus 51

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Sutra, from the early twelfth century onward the Five Obstructions, in poetry, setsuwa, and Buddhist discourse, took on new meanings and interpretations setting women clearly apart from men, portraying women as having particular handicaps due to their sexuality. Therefore, in order to supplement the religious and literary explanations for the misogyny in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki, in the next section, I will examine some psychoanalytic explanations for the negative view of women as presented in these two setsuwa.

Psychoanalytic Theory and the misogyny of women in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki Studies by psychoanalytic theorists such as Melanie Klein and Nancy Chodorow have focused on the role of the female body as the root of the almighty ‘demonic’ woman, a fantasy vision that occurs during an male child’s earliest relationship with his mother. The confrontation with the almighty mother causes anxiety in the young male child and impacts on the development of his autonomous identity from the mother both as subject and as engendered male (Klein 1991). Underlying the unconscious mind of every adult male is a vision of being reunited with his mother in a pleasurable satisfying way. However, ironically it is precisely this union that threatens to overwhelm the young male child’s precarious subject and gender identity as indicated in the following statement: The dread of women, unlike the fear of the father, is ‘uncanny’ in quality because its formation occurs at a time when the child has no reflective capacities for understanding. Through a process of metonymic contagion, the simultaneous fear and attraction that the young boy feels for his mother infects his attitudes toward all women (Chodorow 1978: 183).

This ‘uncanny’ quality seems to inhere in the ‘demonic’ nature of the serpent woman in the Dōjōji and Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki – a return of the suppressed in a new guise, simultaneously fascinating and dangerous, seductive and repelling to the monks. In contrast, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysts state that ‘the origin of the “demonic” feminine is the child’s discovery of his mother’s “castration” because in patriarchal society to posses a phallus is a sign of power’ (Klein 1991: 303). Assuming that the almighty mother is retroactively phallic, once the male child discovers the implication of his mother’s ‘castration’ – that the lack of a phallus makes her powerless within a patriarchal society that suppresses and marginalizes women – the vision of an uncontrollably powerful, phallic woman, a veritable force of nature, frequently appears in popular narratives in form of the ‘demonic’ woman (Rieff 1963). As Laura Mulvey (1989: 175) has pointed out: 52

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The problems, contradictions and irreconcilable demands made by the acquisition of sexual identity, family structures and historical conditions surface in collectively held desires, obsessions and anxieties. This is the shared social dimension of the unconscious, of the kind that Freud referred to in Jokes and the Unconscious, which erupts symptomatically in popular culture, weather folk tales, carnival or movies. These are temporal forms, narrative forms.

Julia Kristeva’s study combines elements of both theories described above. She labels the pre-oedipal maternal body as the abject, impure, defiled ‘Other’ which threatens the unity of the subject within language and which must therefore be eliminated (Kristeva 1982). She argues that religious rituals of purification and exorcism are based on a feeling of abjection and/or defilement that centres on the maternal body. These rituals ‘attempt to symbolize the other threat to the subject: that of being swamped by the dual [pre-oedipal mother–child] relationship, thereby risking the loss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living being. The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’ (Kristeva 1982: 64). The monks successful victories over the serpent woman in the Dōjōji and over Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki appear to bear out Kristeva’s argument that: ‘The masculine, apparently victorious, confesses through its relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational, wiley, uncontrollable power … [and] that the other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed’ (1982: 70). The jealous, angry, and defiled heroines in both Buddhist setsuwa who undergo a transformation from a ‘demonic’ being to an ‘enlightened’ being and who become protectors of the Buddhist Law, might thus be said to represent a return of the repressed with the strength of evil in the female heart. This analysis shows how a pragmatic hostility toward women, who according to medieval Japanese Buddhist ideology were seen as vessels of sexual temptation and therefore obstacles to enlightenment, might be supplemented by unconscious fears of women as uncontrollably powerful, to create the serpent-woman in the Dōjōji engi emaki who encircles the bell with the monk inside, like a phallus. The engendering of the female body based on medieval Japanese Buddhist ideology in both the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki is explicitly dualistic: women in their female bodies are associated with uncontrollable nature, sexuality, the profane world, and pollution; men in their masculine bodies are associated with culture, asexuality, the spiritual realm, and purity. In the next section, I will investigate this dualistic vision of psychosexual intensity by challenging the displacement of female sexuality as the site of defilement based on the Buddhist teaching of non-duality.

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The Buddhist Concept of non-duality: Towards a new interpretation of Female sexuality and metamorphosis in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki Upon examining the depiction in the Dōjōji engi emaki of the serpent-woman encircling the temple bell, under which is hidden the monk, with her entire body, and setting it on fire (Fig.2.2), we confront the obvious Freudian fact that the woman’s body, the embodiment of lust, is transformed into a living phallus. I have already touched on a psychoanalytical explanation for the unconscious fear of a phallic woman and on a didactic explanation for the Dōjōji narrative as a cautionary Buddhist tale that reinforces unconscious fear as a measure to insure the chastity of monks. Now, I would like to discuss how the Dōjōji engi emaki resolves the problem of male desire through its fetishization of the young woman’s body. In both the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki, we can see male desire being projected onto women, a projection that enabled men to deny those negative aspects of their own sexual nature that had to be eliminated in order for enlightenment to occur: the woman as female serpent-snake or serpent-dragon – that is simultaneously phallic and female – embodies the animal nature of both female and male sexuality. The ‘pure’ appears as a passive victim of feminine passion; the danger of a sexuality associated exclusively with the feminine is reinforced by the moral in these Buddhist setsuwa which implies that it is the woman’s blind passion alone that causes the tragedy. In the Dōjōji engi emaki, the symbolic union of feminine and masculine in the form of the serpent-snake is strengthened at the end of the narrative when both the monk and the ‘demonic’ woman are reborn as snakes. Some time after the serpent-woman burnt the bell under which the monk was hidden, the old head priest of Dōjōji temple has a dream in which the monk appears as a snake, explaining that he has been reborn into this vile, filthy body as the husband of the evil serpent-woman. He begs the priest to copy out the Lotus Sutra chapter on ‘The Limitless Life of the Tathagata’ to release both of them from their suffering. After the priest does so, the man and woman appear and thank him, explaining that due to his intercession they have been reborn in separate heavens (Fig.2.3). In the Kegon engi emaki, the symbolic union between feminine and masculine in the form of the serpent-dragon is also emphasized at the end of the narrative when Zenmyō throws herself into the water and transforms herself into a dragon to protect the monk Gishō and the Kegon Buddhist doctrine (Fig.2.5). Zenmyō’s transformation into a dragon, eventually becoming not only a protector of the Buddhist Law but also a female saint, indicates that the symbolic realm of desire is no longer the result of a ‘natural’ attraction between the sexes because male desire does not exist. Instead, desire is produced ‘spontaneously’ in a woman who is at the same time symbolically a man. Therefore, although the didactic Buddhist tales of the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki intensify the projection of desire onto the female body, in the end this 54

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fusion of male and female in the two snakes and the dragon carrying Gishō’s boat symbolically enable the monks as well as the women to attain salvation. In this sense, both the Dōjōji and the Kegon setsuwa follow the Buddhist concept of gyakuen 逆縁 which is translated as ‘reverse karma’, meaning that sin itself may paradoxically be the path to salvation. Although in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki the serpent-women’s passions appear to be negative, they can ultimately be interpreted as something positive because they result in the heroines’ attainment of salvation. Probably the most famous didactic Buddhist tale of a woman associated with a snake is the story of the Dragon King’s daughter in the ‘Devadatta’ chapter of the Lotus Sutra. The monk Sariputra argues against the possibility of the eight-year old daughter of the Dragon King gaining speedy enlightenment: A woman’s body is filthy; it is not a dharma-receptacle. How can you attain unexcelled bodhi? … Also, a woman’s body even then has five obstacles. It cannot become first a Brahma king god, second the god Sakra, third King Mara, fourth a sage-king turning the Wheel, fifth a Buddha-body. How can the body of a woman speedily achieve buddhahood? (Watson, 1993: 187)

In the Lotus Sutra, the daughter of the Dragon King achieves buddhahood with amazing speed, despite her five hindrances as a woman. Since she is unable to become a Buddha immediately, she goes through an intermediate stage as a man first. Interestingly, it should be noted that this transformation from female to male body is only described in Buddhist texts; it is not depicted in any Buddhist imagery. The transformation of the Dragon King’s daughter and her attainment of salvation echo the stories of the serpent-woman in the Dōjōji and Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki. However, instead of depicting their transformation from female into male bodies, these two illustrated narratives depict their transformation from a female body into that of a serpent and a dragon. What is the significance of showing this particular transformation of the heroines for female salvation? How can we interpret the appearance of both the woman and the monk as serpents in the final scene of the Dōjōji story? I would like to suggest that all three women – the Dragon King’s daughter in the ‘Devadatta’ chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the serpent-woman in the Dōjōji engi emaki, and Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki – in spite of their ‘demonic’ nature – are held up as positive role models for women and their capability of attaining enlightenment, challenging the constructed duality between pure and defiled, man and woman. Whereas both the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki cast the serpent as a Buddhist symbol of worldly attachment as well as an embodiment of women’s innate evil nature and lustful temptation on the one hand, they also cast the serpent as a vehicle for enlightenment on the other. The key to the women’s enlightenment are the Buddhist doctrines – in the case of the Dōjōji tale, the Lotus Sutra, and in the case of the Kegon tale the Avatamsaka Sutra. The final scene of 55

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the Dōjōji engi emaki, where an old priest has a dream in which the young monk appears as a snake, requesting that the Lotus Sutra be copied in order to free him from his state, states: When we consider this carefully, there is no woman, high or humble, who is a stranger to jealousy. I could not begin to relate all the examples past and present. Even in the sutras, it is said that women are servants of hell, blocking the path to enlightenment. They are like bodhisattvas on the outside and demons on the inside (Waters 1997: 81).

Having established this point, the setsuwa then suddenly counteracts it with the following statement: I have heard of no precedent for a woman instantaneously turning into a serpent. But then again, this woman was no ordinary person. The effect of her deep passion was to teach wild and unruly people to reflect. This demonstrates the deep will of Kannon and the Kumano deities to offer expedient means to salvation. Similarly, the Buddha came into this world to give us the Lotus Sutra as a means to teach all living beings, as it is reverently recorded in the sutra. Those who open and view it will be blessed by the Kumano deities. They should repeat the nembutsu ten times, and call upon Kannon thirty-three times. (Waters 1997: 81)

This passage is significant because while it affirms the orthodox Buddhist view of women as temptress, it applies the Buddhist doctrine of hōben 方便 – an expedient means pointing the way to salvation – to reinterpret the womanturned-serpent as a sacred agent of the will of the bodhisattva Kannon and the Kumano deities. Dōjōji temple was founded in 701 and is the oldest existing Buddhist temple in the Kumano region of Wakayama prefecture, therefore believed to receive divine protection from the Kumano deities. The central icon of worship is a statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, which is a ‘hidden image’ (J. hibutsu 秘仏), meaning that it possesses such enormous power that it is only shown to the public on special occasions. Thus, both the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki imply that the heroines’ female bodies and sexuality represent an anti-pilgrimage ultimately imbued with a soteriological path equal to or maybe even greater than the conventional Buddhist pilgrimage – as is emphasized in these didactic Buddhist tales through the physical transformation from woman into serpent, and through the spiritual transformation from sinful defiled being to enlightened being, transcending sexuality altogether. Furthermore, the reference to the Lotus Sutra invites the audience to consider the more positive connotations of female sexuality, the woman as serpent, as mentioned in the story of the Dragon King’s daughter in the Lotus Sutra, the major articulation of the concept of salvation for women, as well as the story of Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki, who relinquishes her love for the monk Gishō, transforms herself into a dragon that carries his boat back to Korea, and becomes a protector of the Buddhist Law. 56

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In terms of this interlinked nature of man and woman regarding the capability of salvation, the final scene of the Dōjōji engi emaki depicts two snakes entwined and indistinguishable from each other (Fig.2.3). According to Michael Kelsey, this particular depiction resembles the pattern found in various medieval Japanese didactic Buddhist narratives describing encounters between snakes and human beings, whereby ‘it is not at all clear that victim and aggressor are to be taken as separate entities, especially in stories of monks’ (Kelsey 1981: 105). In the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki the monks and women, pursued and pursuer, represent a mutually forged unit, dissolved only through salvation secured by the power of the Buddhist Law. Following the depiction of two snakes appearing in the priest’s dream to thank him for his intercession, the two snakes transform themselves into heavenly beings and ascend on clouds. The accompanying textual passage in the Dōjōji engi emaki reads: Thanks to the power of the Lotus Sutra, we have shed our serpentine bodies. I am in the Tōri heaven, and he has been reborn in the Tosotsu heaven. They then parted from each other and seemed to fade off into the empty heavens (Waters 1997: 83).

The entire narration in the Dōjōji and Kegon Buddhist tales has vacillated between man and woman, chaste monk and lustful temptress, each playing catalyst to the other’s spiritual transformation through means of representation and inversion. The new dimensions accruing to the constructed conflict of female sexuality as an impediment for salvation in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki challenge common assumptions regarding attitudes towards the place of women in Japanese Buddhism, demonstrating a more sophisticated dynamic of interdependence and non-dualism. The serpent-women in these two setsuwa embody the evil that lurks within the female body as well as the agent vanquishing that evil according to Buddhist soteriology. The path to perdition has terminated in salvation; the route traced counter to the conventional pilgrimage route has proven to be a pilgrimage in its own right, what Virginia Skord Waters calls ‘an exercise in rebirth and magical transformation’ (Waters 1997: 74). It is precisely the Buddhist concept of non-dualism that is expressed through this inversion duplicated in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki. The doctrine of emptiness (J. mujō 無常), meaning that all things are empty and ephemeral, constitutes the central teaching of the Three-fold Truth which leads to the Middle Way; the simultaneous affirmation of both emptiness and worldly existence as aspects of a single integrated reality. This logic, which questions the subjective discrimination of reason, necessarily negates discrimination between all dualistic categories, including mind/body and male/female. It thus provides the foundation for the Māhāyāna teaching that ‘passions are none other than enlightenment’ (J. bonnō soku bodai 煩悩即菩提), since according to the doctrine of emptiness, there is no essential difference between samsara (J. rinne 輪廻) – the continuous cycle of death and rebirth depending on one’s karma – and nirvana, which is the state of enlightenment (Swanson 1989: 7). 57

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Conclusion In conclusion, my analysis of the ‘demonic’ nature of the heroines in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki has illustrated how different representations of women, focusing exclusively on the impure nature of their bodies due to their sex, are presented both textually and pictorially in medieval exegesis. According to Japanese Buddhist ideology, women’s capability to attain salvation was limited due to the ‘Five Obstructions’. By eliding morality with physiology, women’s religious imperfections were rendered inescapable due to their sex. As I have shown, to portray Buddhism as a timeless, homogenous and unchanging oppressor of women neglects the intricate ways in which different configurations of specific religious and cultural discourses empower or marginalize ascribed gender characteristics. Based on extant Buddhist texts describing the foundation of the order of the nuns (Skt. bikkhuni), we know that the Buddha was hesitant to admit women into his community of monk disciples because he believed that this step would cause his teaching to last for a period of only five hundred years. The Buddha’s initial hesitation and prediction have had and still have a negative effect on the way bikkhuni are perceived, both in past and present Japan. The psychoanalytic interpretation of the serpent-woman in the Dōjōji and Zenmyō in the Kegon engi emaki has demonstrated how a pragmatic hostility toward women, who according to medieval Japanese Buddhist ideology were seen as vessels of sexual temptation and therefore obstacles to enlightenment, might be supplemented by unconscious fears of women as uncontrollably powerful. However, while medieval Japanese Buddhism promised women salvation – seen in the transformation of the heroines in the Dōjōji and the Kegon engi emaki – at the same time it did not offer salvation for women in the true sense. Since women can only attain enlightenment and become a Buddha once they have changed their female bodies into male bodies, Buddhism’s practice of ‘inclusive exclusion’ simply placed women in an inferior position where men could look down from a higher plane of existence and take pity on them. By questioning the validity of dualistic construction of male and female in the conjunction with the Buddhist doctrine of ‘non-dualism’, this chapter offers a new approach to writing women into religious histories, thereby elucidating the power of images of women and salvation created and exploited by Japanese Buddhism.

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3 C ReATing R eLigious B odies : FAsTing R iTuALs in w esT J AvA Jörgen Hellman

The intention of this chapter is to explore how bodies are created and honed through religious practice. Specific attention is paid to fasting rituals that aim to educate the individual to take control over impulses and needs in order to create space in the body for divine presence. The material brings forth the paradoxical (at least from a liberal, Western and humanistic perspective) willingness of humans to submit to powers and norm systems understood to be outside individual, and even human, influence. The chapter discusses how norms, exegeses and bodily practices interact to establish both empowerment and subjugation. It is argued that ritual fasting in West Java includes a specific edification of the body which enables the transformation of control and subjugation into empowerment. In its broadest sense, this text pursues a discussion about power in the form that Anderson (1990) and Moertono (1981) described it. These authors directed our attention to the cultural construction of power. They contended that power is considered in Java to be a concrete entity similar to energy, such as electricity, which must be collected and stored in objects or the body as a prerequisite to the execution of political influence. Power is described as concrete and diffused in the universe and there are certain practices such as fasting and meditation that help leaders access this power. However, whereas Moertono and Anderson tended to focus on ideology, kings and formal leaders, this chapter is concerned with ordinary people, informal leadership and the way in which the body must be manipulated in order to allow access to this concrete power. My informants also pointed out that this kind of power, often termed kesaktian (also kasektèn in Javanese), is only one among several resources that individuals may employ in their attempts to influence social and political environments. 59

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Any discussion of power as a substance that is susceptible to individual and collective manipulation engages naturally with questions about agency. This debate has aroused interest in the issue of the freedom of the subject and scholars in ritual studies have pointed out that the subject position is not an outcome of a discourse in which a timeless body is entangled. Approaching power from the angle of ritual practice requires theorization of the construction of the body and its potential in a particular cultural context. The point of departure taken here is that the body is moulded into a specific tool through religious (Hirshkind 2001; Mahmood 2005), sociocultural (Butler 2004; Csordas 2002; Turner 1999) and ritual (Bell 1992) practices. In response to theories of the subject by authors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, a critical anthropological discussion has been developed by Sherry Ortner (2006). According to Ortner (2005) there is always a degree of reflexivity built into the process of creating specific subject positions. Humans have a propensity for reflexivity, and assuming they are understood to live in a socially constructed world rather than a God-given universe, this ability must be considered an essential feature of human life. Although it always takes cultural form, reflexivity cannot be totally subdued. In order to capture the kind of reflexivity I encountered during fieldwork, I employ the theory of praxis developed by Ortner (2006). A tenet of this theory is ‘that culture … constructs people as particular kinds of social actors, but social actors, through their living, on-the-ground, variable practices, reproduce or transform … the culture that made them’ (Ortner 2006: 129). Looking closely at specific practices can thus reveal when the individual has the opportunity to take control of the body-tool created by ritual fasting. In the case presented here, and I suspect in most cases, this is performed in a power struggle with larger collectives that also strive to control individual bodies for various reasons. The theoretical framework for this chapter is that the human propensity for reflexivity makes it possible to transform the specific form of power accumulated in one domain of activity into another. For example, religious merits may be transformed into social or political power. The accomplishment of such a transformation is here termed agency. Fasting is considered to be one domain of ritual activity in which power is particularly pregnant and it is therefore appropriate for a study of practices related to the acquisition of power. The objective of this chapter, hence, is to explore how transformations of power may be described and conceptualized.

Fasting as a Conceptual Field This chapter uses the term puasa as its springboard. The literal translation of this word given by Echols and Shadily (1992) in their dictionary is ‘to fast’. Poerwadarminta (1996) in Kamus Umum Bahasa Indonesia (‘Indonesian 60

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Dictionary’) explains the word as ‘intentionally not eating or drinking’ (tidak makan dan tidak minum dengan sengaja). In the religious literature puasa is described in terms suggesting ‘abstention’. In Pedoman Puasa (‘Guide for Fasting’) the following interpretation of the word puasa is given: ‘To resist something and to leave something behind’ (menahan diri dari sesuatu dan meninggalkan sesuatu) (Shiddieqy 1993: 53). The Virgin Mary’s vow of silence when she becomes pregnant (sura 19, verse 26 in the Koran) is often given as an example of puasa. By refraining from speaking, she is considered to fast (puasa). Puasa in this latter case refers not only to abstention from food but has wider connotations which have to do with the intake and expulsion of substances (in this case words are considered to be substance) to and from the body. According to Hidayat (2000: 89) the word puasa derives from Sanskrit where it means ‘controlling the self ’, but today it is conventionally used in Indonesian to mean ‘fast’. The word puasa refers to the abstention from food but has a clear body-centred rather than food-centred meaning. Fasting denotes a desire to control the body as a whole. This wish extends the objective of the fast beyond only regulating the consumption of food into establishing a technique by which to take charge of the body. As we shall see, although fasting would appear to be a material matter, its ultimate goal is not only to control substances but also to enable people to transgress body boundaries.

The Ambiguity of Fasting As Anderson and Moertono have pointed out, fasting has a long history of being one of many ascetic practices available to the Javanese. As the term for fast (puasa) with its Sanskrit derivation indicates, the practice contains strong historical Hindu influences. But, as we will see later in this chapter, there are also several local forms of food taboo that are categorized as fasting (puasa). Islam and its specific traditions of fasting therefore ‘landed’ on fertile soil and among people who were used to a variety of fasting practices. Fasting is part of what is considered tradition (adat) as well as Hindu and Islamic practices and people often explicitly use a combination of these to achieve religious as well as material goals. With this historical backdrop in mind it may be unsurprising that fasting has become a multi-layered phenomenon in Java that reaches into many different social practices, institutions and thought systems. Individuals fast to enhance their religious piety and to attain salvation, but they may also fast to secure a better grade in their exams, to get a new job or a new car. This interlocking of different traditions within a single phenomenon may also help us understand the tremendous popularity of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, in Java. The development of widespread celebrations during this month indicates how important fasting has become for demonstrating individual piety as well as collective solidarity. According to André Möller, Java stands out in its 61

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joyful celebration of the fast (Möller 2005). Other predominantly Islamic countries such as Iran, Iraq and Palestine certainly also celebrate Ramadan but in Java this specific celebration has become the most accentuated and popular in the yearly cycle of Islamic rituals. Social networks are activated to stage prayer meetings during the month and families take great care to teach their children about the virtues of fasting. Workplaces and schools close down and the Department of Religious Affairs collects religious taxes at the end of the month. The media reports extensively on all aspects of Ramadan and it has become customary for political leaders to refer in public to the virtues of fasting. Fasting is also used as an explicit way of building political legitimacy. Shortly after his installation as President, when the nation was threatened by a severe shortage of food and social unrest, Habibie held a remarkable speech ‘asking his fellow Muslims to join him in sacrificing for the nation’ (Scott 1998). Habibie pleaded with his fellow Indonesians to follow his own example and fast twice a week in order to save rice and strengthen the nation. In short, the phenomenon of fasting in Java cross-cuts between the personal and the public, the individual and the collective and the religious and everyday realms. This seemingly bewildering variety of reasons for fasting and its presence in the daily life of individuals as well as in political rhetoric and religious debates spur questions about how people imagine fasting to be relevant to all these different contexts and how they reason, in making connections between material success and fasting. As we shall see in detail later there is a wide variety of fasting practices in West Java. These have their roots in different traditions but share a common philosophy that disciplining bodily desire is rewarded with religious power or kesaktian. Even in the short description above it is clear that in local thought systems, fasting and empowerment of the individual are closely linked. Fasting is perceived to be a way of achieving goals in social as well as political life. However, to achieve these objectives a degree of control is necessary. The practitioners must control knowledge, personal emotions, bodily functions and basic needs. Resisting certain desires, connected to bodily needs such as food, sleep and sex, allow others to be fulfilled. In this sense, fasting is part of a theory of empowerment, that is, ideas concerning how individuals may use their bodies to access power, kesaktian, and in this way improve material conditions and take control of social interaction. Engagement with fasting as an ascetic practice (that is, as a means of acquiring spiritual guidance) also fosters the individual within wider religious, normative and moral frameworks that demand submission and control of the individual in several senses. The body, mind and behaviour are submitted to rules and regulations formulated in contexts that are largely beyond the reach of individual manipulation. This ambiguity of subjugation and agency has been noted in earlier research. In his seminal article, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’, Benedict Anderson tries to expose an ‘indigenous “political theory”’ (Anderson 1990: 17). He defines asceticism (including fasting) as essentially techniques for concentration and he compares asceticism with a burning-glass because of its 62

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capacity to concentrate energy and power. According to Anderson, the significance of the Javanese fast lies in the fact that it is not directed to ‘selfmortification with ethical objectives, but solely and singly the acquisition of power’ (Anderson 1990: 24). Paul Stange (1984) considers this ability to focus to be the kernel of Javanese asceticism. Fasting practices in Java are often described as technologies used in order to gain something else, usually material benefits, in this world. This is a point emphasized also by Ward Keeler (1987) and Clifford Geertz (1960). In his research on Javanese religions Geertz, however, stresses the importance of fasting as a means of achieving a higher state of consciousness. He describes the fast as a mystical discipline that unifies all the powers of the individual and directs them to the single end of reaching rasa, a clearness of insight (Geertz 1960: 317 ff.). Like Anderson, Geertz concludes that the Javanese nevertheless have ‘a “this-worldly” mysticism’ (Geertz 1960: 311) but approaching the fast ‘solely’ as a means of acquiring worldly benefits would hinder a full understanding of the practice and its evocative power. A few other studies dealing with Javanese mysticism note that the fast is not only about power and material success, but is also considered a method of achieving ultimate understanding of life and unification with God (e.g., Koentjaraningrat 1985: 403; Mulder 1983). Embarking on a fast requires knowledge (ngélmu) of how to accomplish the act in the correct way. This esoteric knowledge can be gained through study under a personal teacher, or it may be revealed after specific ascetic preparations. Once this knowledge has been obtained, fasting may help achieve a state of mind in which one is able to communicate with the otherworldly and receive ‘divine guidance and ultimately the revelation of the mystery of life’ (Mulder 1983: 23). According to Niels Mulder the search for worldly power and ultimate knowledge are not two separate things but are two steps on a ladder of mystical revelation through asceticism (Mulder 1983: 23 ff.). This previous research illustrates the ambiguity of fasting as being directed towards ultimate enlightenment even as it is connected to material circumstances and social interests. However, these analyses have not examined how fasting is conducted or accomplished, nor has it explored local exegeses about how these practices are supposed to affect the body, let alone how it affects the individual’s relation to religious or non-empirical reality. By taking a close look at local practice we may better understand the ambiguity noted in earlier writings. These practices and their explanations emphasize how the body has to be moulded into a specific container in order to be able to attain religious power.

Bodies as Containers and gateways During any fast attention is, of course, focused on the body. But what is a body? As noted in the introduction, bodies are not universally susceptible to religious experiences; this susceptibility is cultured and learned (Armour and St. Ville 63

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2006; Bowie 2006; Coakley 1997). Fasting can thus only be conceived of as a technique for obtaining religious experiences in concert with an understanding of cultural constructions of the body. A common analogy for the body in West Java is wadah. Wadah carries the literal meaning of ‘container’ and the process of creating a body container (wadah) is an intrinsic part of fasting. Pak Aca, an informant we will meet again later in this chapter, described wadah as a container that can be filled with either knowledge or desire (keinginan). He described the wadah as the sum of all body parts and explained that it is not ready-made at birth – it has to be achieved by learning. Building a wadah requires knowledge. The wadah becomes stronger or weaker according to the amount of knowledge the individual receives. Not only religious but all kinds of knowledge strengthen the wadah. Using scholars as an example, Aca said that by studying at the university they achieve knowledge and thereby strengthen their wadah. However, the knowledge one pursues has to be balanced with the current strength of the wadah. This is why a teacher who is able to assess the student’s individual strength should guide quests for knowledge. Individual descriptions of the wadah vary, but they converge on the idea that fasting (conducted in the correct way) affects the wadah by strengthening it and filling it with knowledge, at the same time as it empties the body of food and desires (nafsu). Wadah is also described in ethnographic material from other parts of Java (c.f. Woodward 1989: 72–73, 157–59, 237, 239). Woodward makes a distinction between wadah and content (Javanese, isi), where wadah is the outer form (such as the body, the state or a ritual) and ‘[t]he purpose of the wadah is to guard, contain, and circumscribe the isi, which is otherwise subject to decay’ (Woodward 1989: 72). Woodward also describes Javanese circumcisions in Central Java as means of creating ‘a normative wadah’ (1989: 163). According to Woodward, circumcision serves virtually the same purpose as the construction of the palace walls by Sunan Kalijaga in the myth of the founding of the kingdom Mataram. The building of the walls established a normative vessel that was subsequently filled with magical power through asceticism (tapa) and the acquisition of regalia (pusaka). Writing about West Java, Wessing (1978) claims that ‘[t]he power within each wadah may wax or wane according to the condition of the wadah in time and space. If the wadah is dirty (kotor) the power will tend to flow elsewhere’ (1978: 25). There has to be harmony between the size of the wadah and its content (Sundanese, esui). The wadah as Wessing describes it is a bounded entity but it does not have fixed boundaries. Several factors determine the size of the wadah, such as time of birth, name and acquired knowledge. In his description of the Javanese wadah, Woodward (1989: 72) also compares the wadah with shari’ah (Islamic law). Another example of wadah that he provides is the ‘populace [which] constitutes the normative wadah for the mystical content (isi) formed by the sultan’ (1989: 72). When Sundanese [ethnic group] informants in West Java speak of wadah they tie it more explicitly to a concrete body or vessel. It may be 64

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deduced here that the boundaries of the wadah are not fixed; they must be established and re-established since they are in constant flux. Certain ritual activities, such as circumcisions, create the formal and material circumstances for the wadah to come into existence. However, it is the processes of emptying, filling, purifying and strengthening the wadah that are the focus of attention during religious education and in ascetic rituals such as fasting. The term wadah renders the body as a container, and fasting means this container is employed as a gateway between different cosmological realms. Anthropological sources on Sundanese culture are scarce but Wessing (1978) has identified three concepts – cosmic power, containers and boundaries – as crucial to understanding Sundanese cosmology. According to Wessing the Sundanese cosmos is conceptually divided into three parts; the world above, the earth, and the underworld. These are bounded entities containing different beings and forces. The upper world is the dwelling of gods. The earth contains people and earth spirits, and the underworld contains demons and ambiguous forces, such as the serpent Antaboga and the goddess of the South Sea, Lara Kidul. These last beings embody the forces of both death and life. Communication between these different realms requires the establishment of a gateway. The forces that are communicated through these portals are extremely powerful, both life and death may result. Control is therefore of utmost importance. Places such as graves, mountains and caves may serve as openings between different domains in the cosmos. So too may the body, if it is honed, educated and disciplined properly. The ideas of creating a container, transgressing borders and opening gates are all themes central to fasting, whether Islamic or traditional. The aim of fasting is to mould the body into a gateway to and a vessel for cosmic powers. Traditional fasting focuses on opening gateways to other cosmological dimensions such as in the Sundanese tripartite cosmology, where kesaktian is present, while the Islamic fast creates a gateway to a specific divinity, Allah, who bestows powers on the person. Fasting is a way of building and maintaining the boundaries of the corporeal container (wadah) but in Islam it also establishes and maintains borders between believers and non-believers since only believers perform the Ramadan fast. It provides a way of filling the wadah (individual body or collective umma of believers) with knowledge and spirit (or power), but it is also a way of transgressing the limits (borders) of everyday bodily sensations to attain religious experiences in dimensions of reality that are only perceptible after prolonged education of the body. To elicit how this is achieved requires a closer look at the practices of fasting.

Practicing and explaining Fasting There are numerous norms, practices and explanations that structure the discourse of fasting. Yet some themes are recurrent and salient. By giving examples from specific interviews and normative statements given in texts and by 65

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informants, this section aims to show variations and continuities in practices and explanations of fasting. These continuities and variations traverse individual perspectives, as well as collective norms and values related to Islam or local traditions. Three specific voices that will be heard in this section are those of Ibu [Mrs] Hajj, Pak [short for Bapak or Mr] Aca and Pak Udi. During fieldwork several interviews and casual conversations were conducted with each of these informants and I got to know them quite well. They come from rather different backgrounds. Ibu Hajj lives in the city of Bandung, belongs to the well-to-do middle class and is well versed in Islamic texts. Pak Aca and Pak Udi are both living in villages outside the urban centre and farm for their daily living. Pak Aca has the position of being Pak RT meaning that he deals with administrative issues relating to a specific part of the village and he is consequently quite a central figure in collective and social deliberations in the village. Pak Udi works as a traditional healer and has a reputation for possessing strong powers. I met up with each of them regularly during my fieldwork and although they held different social positions, I noted that they shared in a single discourse on fasting. This is not to say that they would agree on all issues but they would at least understand each other’s positions. For example, Ibu Hajj emphasized that the power acquired through fasting is a direct intervention by God while Pak Udi saw fasting as a way of gaining kesaktian power. Each of them would be able to argue with the position held by the others. By relating comments made by these three informants to textual references I hope to communicate an understanding of how the discourse of fasting is founded upon ideas about bodies being containers (wadah) and gateways. During Ramadan a longer interview with Ibu Hajj was conducted, touching upon several important aspects of fasting, such as the body-centred focus of the rituals, transforming religious piety into material and social rewards, control and agency. Ibu Hajj will therefore be given more space here than other informants and a slightly edited version of the interview will introduce the themes I propose to address. Ibu Hajj lives in a simple but spacious house on the outskirts of Bandung. Both she and her husband have performed the pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca and since they are considered pious persons, they receive a regular stream of guests who want to discuss religious matters. By virtue of her religious knowledge and her assiduous practice, Ibu Hajj constitutes a role model and informal teacher for a loosely connected network of people who assemble at her house for advice and discussions. She is confident and gives her opinions with clarity and assuredness, although she sometimes adds apologetically that this is, of course, only her personal opinion and not canonical truth. She warns that she may be wrong, so I should check with religious authorities before following her advice. Her view of fasting is that there are several methods but they share a common aim: to cleanse oneself and to approach God. It is a way of getting to know the will of God but she does not see it as a form of sacrifice (which she associates with Hinduism and self-mutilation). On the contrary, she describes fasting as 66

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something pleasant. She compares it with learning to eat a new dish. First you have to be persuaded to sample some but after a while you get the taste for it and enjoy eating it. When you get used to Ramadan, fasting once a year comes as a reward, she said. Deden, a regular guest at Ibu Hajj’s house also attested to feelings of joy and well-being during the fast. The body feels light, the skin becomes lean and even the senses are heightened by fasting. Deden told of how he once experimented by breaking the compulsory fast. The consequences as he recollected them were that he felt heavy and drowsy and soon became hungry after a meal although he ate as usual. He also felt like an outsider. Not acting in solidarity with his fellows stressed him and he developed rashes and blisters on his arms. The whole body, biological and social, was affected by his breach of the rules. During the fast, Ibu Hajj explained, the body is emptied of its contents – she demonstrated this by pointing to a half-empty glass on the table. If the body is empty, God can fill it with his wishes and his intention goes straight into our arms and hands (and people consequently perform good deeds). Ideally, people should feel relaxed during the fast, although they work as usual. It is only the inner self that is supposed to rest. It is a question of balance, she elaborated. If bodily needs (nafsu) and perceptions are kept to a minimum, the empty space created in the body will be filled with piety (rohani). Emptying the body is also risky, Ibu Hajj continued, as Satan may fill it with lies and evil. Therefore people should never fast alone but always have a teacher who shows them a way to conduct the fast that is in balance with their inner strength. Each person is on a specific level of strength and should not empty the body too much. During the Ramadan fast, however, you do not need any specific teacher since this is something you learn from parents and friends. She also explained that praying and fasting sharpens the senses and make communication with other people and with God easier. They may also appear to grant people supernatural gifts but this is really because people are empty and God guides their steps more forcefully than usual. As an example of this, she told a story about a friend who was living in Germany. During Ramadan this friend was trying to find a relative who she knew lived nearby, though she did not know exactly where. Without any map or directions she sat in her car and drove around the town. She held her hand with the thumb pointing upwards in front of her. Suddenly, the thumb turned and pointed in the direction of a certain house, and there she found her friend. Miracles like this happen when you are ‘empty’, Ibu Hajj told, because you are open to advice from God. To fast is to give up everything and to put yourself in God’s hands, and this makes room for God to enter your body and guide your behaviour. Ibu Hajj claimed that fasting is about control, and there are three levels of training involved. The first level is when only the stomach is affected. People are still hungry and they see the fast as a test to endure hunger and thirst. The second level is when words and deeds are likewise controlled and restrained (strictly speaking, the fast is thus broken if you long for food or dream about it). At this 67

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level hunger and thirst are not a problem any more – one has to concentrate on what one says and does. People who have arrived at this level try to control what they say, their eyes and their ears, meaning that they do not long for or need anything other than what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs. It also means that they behave in a pleasant and agreeable way and do not irritate other people. The final stage is Puasa Kalbu. At this stage it is no longer an effort to follow the rules but they become part of oneself and one’s mind (kalbu/heart). According to Ibu Hajj, not many people reach further than the first stage. She compared the levels to formal education, and commented that not everyone has to become a ‘doctor’, that is, to reach the highest level. Each person has to try different fasting techniques and different kinds of fasts to find out how ‘empty’ they can get without feeling sick. The important thing is to control and minimize impulses and needs (nafsu). Nafsu is not bad in itself, but it is bad when it is not controlled. It has to be used in a proper manner. Fasting means not simply depriving the body of food, but it is about teaching oneself not to eat more than necessary and not before one ‘needs’ to. The objective is not to test the ultimate limits of endurance and persistence but to become the master of one’s desires. Ibu Hajj describes nafsu, something ever-present in the human body, as five types of need named: Amarah, Wamah, Sawiah, Loamah and Mutmainah. Amarah is the impulse of anger, Wamah refers to bodily needs such as eating, earthly and material needs, Sawiah is sexual drive, Lomah is the animal side of humanity but also the drive to communicate. Finally, Mutmainah differs from the others in that it has no negative aspect. This nafsu is pure and is given to each person directly from Allah. It imbues man with a need for God, purity and spirituality. According to Ibu Hajj, the purpose of Ramadan is to control the four drives of Amarah, Wamah, Sawiah and Loamah so that they do not dominate or destroy Mutmainah. Ibu Hajj compared this to the light reflected in a crystal, where Mutmainah is the crystal. If the other four desires are allowed to occupy too much space in the body, the Mutmainah crystal will be soiled. Another difference between Mutmainah and the others is that Mutmainah does not disappear at the moment of death but returns to the care of Allah. Animals have the same nafsu as man except that they lack Mutmainah. Ramadan is an annual event given to humans by Allah where they can educate and take control of the four nafsu that threaten to overshadow pure Mutmainah. To Ibu Hajj, Mutmainah represents a kind of heavenly intuition installed in every human by Allah and from which it is possible to receive correct and true instructions for making decisions in life. When in need of help one should delve back into the clear inner voice of Mutmainah but in order to do this other voices (nafsu) have to be contained by fasting. Many of the themes evoked by Ibu Hajj in the interview are recognizable from the public discourse on fasting. There are the different stages of fasting, the central aspect of nafsu, rewards and miracles. Among the many possible themes in fasting, such as mystical revelation, family 68

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issues and social cohesion, sacred time and Islamic history, Ibu Hajj chose to emphasize the education of the body and the direct relationship with God that is made possible by the fast. When she discusses rewards and how the fast is transformed into social behaviour, she does so using the language of mental or psychological satisfaction that is derived from religious experience (or, as in the ‘thumb story’, a kind of reward that satisfies a social need). Ibu Hajj concentrates on the individual religious experiences associated with Ramadan. However, her presentation and Dedens’ corroborations of how fasting affects the body and improves relations to God are also of a general character, relevant to many forms of fasting. She sees the meeting with God as the ultimate goal of fasting and she notes that He rewards people with miracles and guides their action if His law is obeyed. The submission of the person to the system of strict regulations and the control of nafsu may therefore result in a direct transformation of the divine presence into social rewards. If we move our focus to texts describing Islamic fasting we recognize several of the themes encountered in the interview with Ibu Hajj. During Ramadan the basic rules stated in the Koran are that food, drink and sex are prohibited during daytime. These rules are elaborated through an exegesis of the Hadiths to regulate the intake and expulsion of all substances to and from the body (except for faeces). This means that smoking, masturbation, kissing, voluntary vomiting and blood letting are forbidden. The debate concerning precisely what acts are forbidden is filled with astonishingly detailed deliberations. Subjects debated include whether or not it invalidates the fast if a person has a wet dream, bleeds, takes medicine through the nose, ear or eyes, or receives injections. There is a wide variety of different interpretations of these rules in the Islamic community (Shiddieqy 1993: 98). Apart from detailed rules such as these, there are some benchmarks. One rule of thumb is that an action only breaks the fast if it is carried out intentionally. The majority of people therefore do not consider it a breach of the fast to have a wet dream, vomit because of sickness, swallow an insect by accident, or eat or have sex under coercion. To be effective, fasting must be intentional and conceptualized as such by the individual. A fast will have no effect if it is not performed as a specific fast. Just being hungry is not the same as fasting. Abstinence from food must be conceptualized as a fast according to local categories (such as, for example, Puasa Mutih, only eating rice and drinking water) and executed according to specific standards. The same is true of Islamic fasts. Ramadan may still be valid even if one accidentally eats during the day, as long as the breach was not intentional. The important thing is awareness of the period during which one abstains from food as being a fasting period. This rule of ‘consciousness’ is crucial to understanding what the fast is about. If one just forgets to eat and drink it is not considered a fast, one has to be aware and have knowledge about the prohibitions, submit to them and resist the urges of the body by an act of will power and in this way bend the individual spirit to 69

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the will of God. In this sense the fast can be considered both an offering and a form of discipline. Ramadan is not the only occasion for Muslims to fast. Islam recognizes a number of different reasons for and kinds of fasting, including at least five different classes, Wajib, Sunah, Kada, Nazar and Kaffarat, where Wajib refers to Ramadan. Sometimes a vow is made to perform a fast on a certain occasion or for a specific purpose. Fasts performed to fulfil these promises are categorized as Nazar. The length of and time for the fast is decided by the person themselves. Kada fasts are performed to make up for days lost during Ramadan. In certain cases one can decide to postpone fasting (if one is sick or travelling for example) while in other cases (such as menstruation) people are even forbidden to fast during Ramadan. Everyone who has ‘missed’ a day of fasting during the month is supposed to substitute that day with a day of Kada fasting before the next Ramadan. Certain violations of the Ramadan fast, such as having sex, or accidentally causing the death of a person, are considered so serious that Kaffarat has to be performed. This means that the person has to pay back more than the one day of broken fast. A penalty fast may last up to two months. Sunah stands for the Islamic tradition represented by the life of Muhammad. Texts retelling events from the prophet’s life are collected in the Hadiths, comprising thousands of stories. As a Muslim it is imperative to strive for a life that adheres to the Sunah. By reading the Hadiths one can receive guidance in matters ranging from legal issues to daily routines (Burton 1994). In addition to the fasts connected to Ramadan and the Nazar there are the Sunah fasts, which are sanctioned by the Hadiths but are not compulsory. The Sunah is one of the bases of Islamic jurisprudence and the shari’ah law based on the Sunah is, of course, not optional. However, the Sunah also includes recommendations (sunnat) for a religious life, which are rewarded if executed but do not count as sins if they are not followed. In the case of fasting, the Hadiths prescribe individual fasts that may be performed for a specific purpose, such as enhancing physical or social well-being, but they are usually carried out as part of a broad moral and religious ‘education’ to become a religious person. Applying the Hadiths does not necessarily mean becoming a more orthodox/literal Muslim (although that may be the case). Sunah fasts are used by people who consider themselves strict adherents of a pure, scriptural Islam as well as by people who question orthodox interpretations of Islam and readily admit that they also respect local traditions. However, Ramadan, Sunah and other Islamic fasts are only part of a variety of ascetic techniques available to a Javanese actor. In the history of Java, different forms of bodily practices such as fasting, meditation, inserting objects under the skin and staying awake all night form a living tradition, adat, that enhances the individual’s ability to take control of their own lives. Included in the adat are fasts that are loosely connected to the realm of Hinduism. The border, however, between what counts as adat or Sunah is fluid since actions may be similar in 70

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structure and because of disagreement about what constitutes the correct Islamic approach to non-prescribed actions. Some Muslims consider traditional fasts acceptable since they are not forbidden, while others classify them as heresy since they are not prescribed either in the Koran or the Hadiths. Citing Bukhari and Muslim (two of the most renowned Hadiths), Hidayat (2000: 90) states that it is forbidden (haram) to engage in Ngeblang (continuous fasting without breaking the fast each night), Mutih (eating only plain rice and drinking water), Patigeni (only eating food that is not cooked), Ngalong (a fruit diet), Ngeplong (continuous fasting for three days without breaking). These are all fasts that are considered to belong to local traditions. Some other varieties of traditional fasting often mentioned in conversations are Tepunggelang (twenty-four hours without food or drink), Beubeutian (only eating tubers), Matigeuni (twenty-four hours in a dark room without sleep), Puasa Pengantén (fasting for three days before marriage), Puasa Jimat (using fasting and ascetic practices to reveal the place of a talisman that can protect the bearer), Puasa Pélét (fasting and using mantras as love charms), Puasa Hari Lahir (fasting a certain number of days according to the day of one’s birth). These lists blend together different categories. Some names denote a specific way in which to accomplish a fast (e.g., Tepunggelang, Puasa Mutih, Matigeuni), others denote a specific reason to accomplish a fast (e.g. Puasa Jimat and Puasa Pélét). Very often the reason for the fast is given as a generic name for a specific kind of fasting. The categories are taken from the conversations I engaged in and are all activities that are referred to as different kinds of puasa (fasting) by informants. Adat fasts are related not only to physical strength or invulnerability but to all kinds of extraordinary events, abilities and skills. The Penghias who does a bride’s make up and supervises certain aspects of the wedding is known to fast, as is the female Pengawas Goah, who is in charge of distributing food at rituals, and the ‘rainmaker’, who protects feasts from unexpected showers. These are all people who are known to need extraordinary powers to be successful in their social and ritual activities and they themselves say that fasting is one way of gaining such power. Different fasts are often combined to enhance their effect. For example, Puasa Pengantén is a classificatory name used for fasts carried out by the bride or groom before marriage. They are free to choose what kind of fast they wish to perform but Puasa Mutih is often recommended as this is considered to give the person a radiant face (and slim body). This is often combined with a fast such as SeninKamis (Monday-Thursday) meaning that the couple eats only rice and drinks only water on the Monday and Thursday before the wedding. The choice depends on what kind of advice the couple receives and what they consider themselves capable of doing. A woman who helped to prepare couples for their wedding day talked nostalgically about brides who used to stay indoors several weeks before their weddings. She considered this also to be a kind of fasting (puasa). The classification of staying indoors as a kind of fast makes sense if fasting is understood as resisting desire rather than being exclusively connected to 71

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abstention from food. Adat fasting is used by and large in times of distress and when especially arduous tasks are approaching and people feel that they need extra strength to accomplish something. The intention is here often explicitly named as gaining a fiancé, or an amulet, or the power to conduct social (for example preparing the bride) and ritual (for example preventing rain) obligations for which both prestige and salaries are awarded. The exegesis and verbal interpretations that explain adat fasts are much less elaborate than those for the Islamic fasts, which are woven into a complex theology. Adat fasts are definitely more closely tied to the mastering of different kinds of power and practices. The teachers in these cases are experts in practice. They know how, when and where to perform the correct actions or utter the correct words to access extraordinary power. This knowledge originates from their previous teachers and it is validated by their ability to attract a stream of goods and visitors who ask for help and miraculous performances (such as preventing rain or spirit possession). There are no canonical books from which to study this kind of knowledge and there is not necessarily any explicit exegesis of the forces involved. The practices may or may not be interwoven into complex cosmological schemes. Both Mulder (1983) and Zoetmulder (1995) have, albeit in very different ways, elaborated the philosophical foundations of these practices. However, knowledge about these foundations, or even awareness of their existence, is not necessary in order to perform. Pak Aca knew of my interest in different kinds of fasts and took me to visit an elder (Sesepuh) named Pak Udi. Pak Udi possesses great powers that enable him to call forth spirits to possess others and he also produces healing water. He claims he has ‘paid’ for this power by fasting. Udi has accomplished several kinds of fasts but the most rewarding, and also the most difficult, was a five day total abstention from food and water. He carried this out at home in his bed and he vividly illustrated to me how weak and tired he became. He continued the fast until he was on the verge of fainting. This fast represents the final stage in his education so far, as it gave him the power to call forth spirits. He and Pak Aca agree that this knowledge is not something that emanates from the Koran or is recognized by Islam. They both use the word tapa, which they relate to Hinduism. However, since they both consider themselves Muslims they also agree that it is not a sin to use this kind of power as long as the aim and practice is in accordance with Islam. This means helping people, curing them and also performing at circumcision rituals, where possession is sometimes used as entertainment for the guests. Because of these extraordinary powers Pak Udi receives prestige and admiration although he remains economically marginalized. The powers achieved by fasting are, then, transformed into practical skills, such as the ability to heal and possess people, and also into prestige. Neither traditional nor Islamic practices are completely mutually exclusive. Pak Aca tells a story about his own son to exemplify the way in which people use 72

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a combination of Islamic practices and adat fasting as a way to fulfil their wishes. His son wanted a position as headmaster at the local school but there were many applicants for the post and he had neither the money to offer bribes, nor influential family connections. So, the only option was to pray and fast. A fast performed to achieve a certain goal, Pak Aca explained, is not ‘complete’ without prayers. It is the prayers that are heard and may be received by God. The fast is performed to ‘strengthen’ the prayers. So, the son embarked on a one-month Puasa Mutih (eating only rice and drinking only water), which he ended with three days of total abstention from food and water. According to Pak Aca, it was as a result of this combination of Islamic prayers and traditional fasting that he got the job. In both the case of Pak Udi and the latter story about Pak Aca’s son, the acceptance of discipline and the correct performance of the fast is considered to empower the individual, for example with the ability to heal or with a new job. Though at first glance Islamic and traditional fasting may appear to be driven by different rationalities and different logics and to be differently structured, they are not always easy to distinguish from one another. Intertwined with the different practices are fundamental ideas about how bodies, knowledge and power are constituted and work together. Common to all the varieties of fasting is the need for knowledge about how to perform the fast in the correct way to constitute the body as a container, empty it and use it as a gateway for power, even though the nature of this power may be debated (the direct influence of Allah or the containment of kesaktian energy). This knowledge may include specific information about food taboos, the periods of Ramadan during which you must fast, or which form of fasting is most effective before organising a wedding.

Conclusions: A Further note on submission and empowerment Fasting creates bodies that have the potential to bridge the public and the private (the practices are often very private in their accomplishment while public in acclaim), the individual and collective (especially during Ramadan when the performance of the fast is individual but it is collectively framed) and also the everyday, empirical world and the non-empirical (a world inaccessible to the senses). Controlling these gates/bodies for individual as well as collective purposes is a question of enabling access to not only material wealth but also to sacred power. Ritual fasting works toward cohesion and control through its emphasis on collective norms and compliance with institutionalized knowledge, at the same time as it is a way of empowering the individual with abilities, knowledge, perceptions and experiences that are not available to the un-ritualized (untaught) body. The creation of the body as a gateway/container is a first step in achieving agency. By fasting, people gain authority not only because of their religious virtues but also because they open a gateway to sacred realms by which they are ‘blessed’ with power. Evidence of their capacity to act as gateways and their ability to 73

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contain power may take the form of wealth and political power but it may also become apparent through the fact that people pay respect to them, that they fulfil personal ambitions (such as becoming the headmaster of a school), that they can produce healing water or that they have other extraordinary abilities. The fasts conducted by political and religious leaders, or influential persons such as Ibu Hajj and the healer Pak Udi, resonate with everyday practices and ideas available to the vast majority of people in West Java. In this sense fasting is a ‘this worldly’ (or rather, an everyday) form of mysticism that politicians and other leaders may appeal to in order to sanction their legitimacy according to righteousness rather than votes. However, the legitimacy of the healer, and the prestige acquired by people known to be assiduous fasters, stem from their active engagement in educating and transforming their bodies into gateways for non-worldly powers. In the cases of fasting explored here, social and political empowerment and religious submission are not opposites but are two sides of the same coin. Submission to collective norms and the execution of prescribed behaviour create an opportunity to form a gate and container, which both the individual and the collective strive to control. To create the wadah is to erect a structure that enables the containment of power. The practices of fasting then empower the individual wadah with kesaktian, religious power or divine presence. Understanding this specific construction of a culturally honed body is the first step in analysing agency in West Java, where agency is achieved via the ‘detour’ of submission.

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4 F oRmATions oF P uBLiC P ieT y: n ew v eiLing , The B ody, And The C iTizen -s uBJeCT in C onTemPoRARy i ndonesiA Sonja van Wichelen

introduction Many studies on practices, representations, and meanings of veiling concentrate on the problem of women’s agency in relation to their body and their self. While some present the phenomenon of veiling as ‘accommodating resistance’ (MacLeod 1991; 1992), others point out how veiling enhances a feeling of piety important in the modern and political configuration of female Muslimness (AbuLughod 1995; Göle 1996). Research has also indicated that Muslim women need not to be either passive or resisting: while some ‘bargain’ with Islamic patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1988), others identify with ‘revivalist ideals of motherhood, male authority, and the imagines of the body politic’ (Ong 1990: 258). From these perspectives, sociological motivations are explored within the domain of economy, political protest, or feminist strategy. In her analysis of Egyptian women in Mosque movements, the anthropologist Saba Mahmood (2005) goes a step further, and dismisses feminism’s universality of ‘women’s emancipation’ or ‘gender equality’. She argues that secular reason and morality – as proclaimed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the paradigm of modernity – are not the sole anchors through which notions of self and agency are constituted. As such, the assumed basic goals of ‘freedom’ or ‘empowerment’ might very well not be basic goals for everyone (2005: 13). Thus, 75

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when women explain that they wear the veil not because of issues of identity, but because it is part of a religious and divine doctrine, it should not be judged as ‘false consciousness’ but taken seriously as a form of human agency in which the self is cultivated through notions of docility and shyness (2003: 857). From this post-secular framework, veiling is approached as part of self-realization within the confines of convention and religion. Following on and engaging with the studies cited above, I would like in this chapter to concentrate on the different ways in which practices of veiling are emerging in the contemporary Indonesian public sphere. As I will illustrate, representations of veiling practices for Indonesian women today constitute numerous elements of religious piety, politics, ideology, fashion, and personal growth, all negotiating identity and belief with existing and evolving paradigms of Islam, Islamism, secularism, capitalism, feminism, and nationalism. Veiling, therefore, cannot be seen as complying with one normative worldview. Instead, as counts for the study of all gendered practices, it is intersected by class, ethnicity, race, language, kinship, family and gender systems. My aim is not to uncover the question as to why Indonesian women veil or to start from the premise which problematizes the so-called ‘woman question’ in Islam. Instead, my intention is to indicate the different modes of veiling manifested in Indonesia’s public sphere today and to examine how this contributes to different semantics of womanhood and the female body in public discourse. I would like to explore further the tensions between different forms of veiling and the manners in which these contestations are played out visually and spatially. My contention is that the political, religious, socioeconomic, and cultural connotations of different modes of veiling contribute to the broader issue of negotiating democratic and religious citizenship.

islamization and veiling in Retrospect Political policies throughout Indonesian history were geared to avoid public religiosities, especially symbols and signs of political Islam. One of these policies included banning the veil in public educational settings (in 1982). With the exception of private Islamic schools, girls or women were expected to wear school uniforms that did not include a headscarf or the covering of the body. With respect to Java, the most densely populated province with the biggest Muslim community, traditional dress did not require a covering up of the body or the head. On the contrary, the traditional female costume (kebaya and sarung) is worn tightly around the body, showing the female body’s contours, and is sometimes accompanied by a shawl that covers the head loosely – leaving visible the woman’s hair. This head covering is called the kerudung and originally it is mostly women in the villages who wore the traditional costume in everyday life. Mainstream Islam as such did not oblige women to wear a veil. Many of the pious women from the traditionalist Islamic organizations, the so-called santri, however, opted for the traditional kerudung. 76

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In contrast, urban women, who were often associated with modernist Islamic organizations, wore Western-style clothes in everyday life (Brenner 1996: 674). At times and especially for special religious events, some urban women would wear the traditional costume with the loose veil. In the past, it was a common thought that urban people regarded the practice of covering one’s head as belonging to the rural class, often labeling it derogatively as kampungan, which literally means ‘village-like’ – often used to denote backwardness and primitiveness. Since the 1970s the process of Islamization in Indonesia conjured up new images and discourses of Muslim bodies. Moreover, the newly acclaimed democratic space of post-Suharto Indonesia has also contributed to making Islamic symbols and representation of ‘Muslimness’ more visible. As exemplified in other countries, the most significant symbol for this Islamic turn is the image, meaning, and debate around the veil. Whereas before, Indonesian women rarely veiled, the present public landscape cannot be imagined without the image of veiled women from all ages and social strata – celebrities, career women, students, teachers and housewives. Rather than the traditional headscarf, which is worn loosely over the head (kerudung), the ‘new veiling’ involved wearing the tight veil (jilbab). By donning this new veil, the ‘Indonesian woman’ increasingly profiled herself as being committed to an Islamic way of life. These practices occurred against the background of the Iranian revolution and should also be read as a protest against the Suharto administration, which in its first period of office practiced a subtle but consistent politics against political Islam. As anthropologist Suzanne Brenner (1996) argues, the new appearance of veiling in the 1980s cannot be compared to other Islamic countries where a return to tradition or local practice was envisioned by an Islamic revival (such as in Iran or Egypt). Women in Indonesia were not re-veiling themselves or returning to an earlier, more ‘pure’ tradition. On the contrary, in many cases women chose to veil themselves against local traditions and the wishes of their family. In this manner, the choice to veil oneself was an act of courage and often accompanied by processes of exclusion by others. As Brenner argues, ‘veiling served not as a means of protection for women entering public spaces but as a marker of their marginality and the reason for their harassment’ (1996: 675). The sight of veiled women was seen as a sign of extremism. Incidents of women being harassed because of wearing the jilbab hit newspaper coverage in the early 1990s, indicating a strong social and cultural stance against the veil. The veil had become a stigma, but now young women had voluntarily started wearing the veil. This coincides with what the sociologist Nilüfer Göle has observed in Turkey. Female students donned the veil despite disapproval and even contempt from those around them, family, and peers. They adopted the turban (the tight veil) rather than the basörtüsü (the traditional veil), and therewith voluntarily adopted a stigmatized symbol (1996; 2003). Parallels can also be made with Egypt (Abu-Lughod 1995) and Malaysia (Ong 1990), although with respect to the latter, the process of Islamization had started earlier and with the strong compliance of the state. 77

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In 1990 the ban on veils in state schools was lifted. For many, this was an important turn in Suharto’s policy on the influence of political Islam. The decision on lifting the ban fitted well with the new course that Suharto was taking, namely of incorporating Islamic politics into his own course of national control. The powerful political act of veiling that emerged in the 1980s, therefore, was tactfully incorporated by New Order populist politics. This was especially embodied in the image of the veiled Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, better known as sister Tutut (mbak Tutut), President Suharto’s daughter, who after her pilgrimage to Mecca (haj) decided to don the veil. Her move and choice to cover herself went hand in hand with her father’s ideology in accommodating Islamic identity for his political purposes. The representational effect of Tutut’s ‘conversion’ – which was fashionable and stylish – was powerful in setting an example for the whole nation. She was a prominent businesswoman in the commercial field, but had also become the new leader of the Golkar party. In such a way, her conversion emphasized once more the image of the modern Muslim woman.

Politicized Bodies as spectacle Indonesian media representations of Islamic protests reproduce images in which veiled bodies are ubiquitously present. These images convey communal representations of veiled women as forms of collective action. Often, they involve the sight of mass protests or collective actions against particular political events, such as the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, or for instance the approval of the French law prohibiting religious symbols from educational settings. Where there are large numbers of veiled women present, the groups depicted are often connected to the so-called Dakwah movement, and the people protesting are mostly represented by students from the Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union (KAMMI) or men and women from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), two very active components of the Dakwah movement that have established themselves in the political and public sphere. These young dakwahists are politically very vocal and their political power is rooted in visualizing social change through paradigms of Islamic politics and law. When rallying or protesting, they assemble en masse in central urban spaces. Female adherents constitute half of the group and are very visible in that they all wear their green (KAMMI) or white (PKS) veils. A closer look at the mass meetings of the Dakwah movement illustrates its emphasis on being peaceful, as ‘demonstrating but also smiling’, projecting a moral force onto the Indonesian field of politics (Kraince 2000: 15). Nationalists, non-Muslims, and secularists in Indonesia – especially at the onset – have been wary of the movement and at times labelled it fundamentalist. Their anxiety focused on the perception that women were treated badly by these groups. However, while debates have sprouted about gender biases in the Islamist movement and while many believe the PKS to be an ‘anti-woman’ party, the 78

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movement and its political branches have taken pains to counter these claims. The Prosperous Justice Party and its student allies have begun slowly to be acknowledged for their commitment to a democratic nation-state. In a relatively short period, the party has become extremely popular, especially in big cities. In the 2004 elections, the Prosperous Justice Party came out as the largest party in Jakarta. Their popularity has stung nationalists and local Jakartan liberal feminists who still distrust the party. Pious Muslims, however, have found a party in which they can find their ideas and hopes translated into a politics. The symbol of the veil has played a significant role in these translations.

Visuality and Spatial Power The visual power of seeing ‘veiled women’ becomes productive when played out spatially. With spatiality I mean the media effects of seeing for instance a homogenized crowd, such as masses of veiled women in public spaces, on streets or in colossal spaces. After one demonstration, the heading in a regional paper read: ‘The Senayan Arena Becomes a Sea of Veils’ (‘Istora Senayan jadi lautan jilbab’, Jawa Pos, 28 September 1998). The article referred to the famous arena in central Jakarta used for national sporting events, concerts, or political gatherings. It can host up to one hundred thousand people, making the arena one of the largest arenas in South-East Asia. On that day, the Justice Party held a gathering within the framework of the 1999 campaigning for elections the following year. The ‘sea of veils’ referred to the masses of women wearing headscarves and dresses, mostly in white, spread out over the whole arena. The heading exemplifies the powerful media effect of uniformity, especially in women, adhering to collective representation. The image of masses of veiled women becomes a potent symbol of collective identity and collective action, but also suggests the threat and danger of ‘uncontrollable’ masses. In his Covering Islam (1981), the postcolonial critic Edward Said described succinctly how the Western media and its experts contributed to creating and refining this new enemy. Portrayals of Muslim men and women were cast in such negative cultural stereotypes that the sight of a veiled woman was immediately associated with extremism, fundamentalism, and contempt for the West. In such a way, journalism photography cashed in on photographs depicting Iranian women in black veils, Taliban women in dark blue burqas, or, to return to the case of Indonesia, Hizbut Tahrir women in black veils, PKS women in white veils, or KAMMI women in green veils. The ‘sea of veils’ came in different colours, but depicted masses of Islamists, much feared by the nationalists, Christians, or secular Muslims that for long held the decision-making power in independent Indonesia. The visual power that images of uniform masses evoke, involve the fear and anxiety involved in imagining these masses becoming bigger and overtaking culture, society, and even civilization. In Indonesia, the sight of masses of 79

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uniformly veiled young women, with tight veils and loose dresses, gave way for a politicized discourse of the veiled body. The veiled woman in this respect became a spectacle through which Islamism and political Islam was imagined. Moreover, the sight of black, white, and green veils was powerful in that it conjured up new images of Muslimhood in Indonesia not connected or associated with mainstream Islam represented by the traditionalists and the modernists. Traditionalist women wore the loose kerudung, which most often came in different colours. Modernist women, on the other hand, often rejected the head-covering, regarding it as a custom of traditionalist Islam. The sight of Islamist women, therefore, was not only ‘alien’ to Western observers, but it was also an unknown development for Indonesians, especially the nationalist and secular ruling elite. The photo in Figure 4.1, below, attends to these same elements of uniformity, similarity, and proximity. It is a photograph taken from the prominent daily Kompas and depicts a group of female high school students who in February 2004 gathered in Jakarta to protest against the ban on the veil by the French government. Although the original affair of the Islamic scarves in France dates back to 1989, it was not until major debates peaked again in 2004 that the news travelled to the Indonesian archipelago. The news about the ban triggered many angry reactions, especially from students linked to the Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union (KAMMI) or men and women affiliated with the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).

Figure 4.1: Women demonstrating in Jakarta against the ban on the veil in France. (Courtesy Kompas/Agus Susanto – published 6 February 2004) 80

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The image depicts a close-up of the protest by female pupils of KAMMI’s sister organization, called KAPMI: the Indonesian Muslim Pupils Student Action. The young women are dressed uniformly. They wear white Islamic dresses covering most of their body thereby showing no bodily curves. Their heads, hair, ears, and neck are covered by a long white jilbab which falls loosely over the shoulders. Their hands are bare, they do not wear gloves. Their faces are clean of make-up and no hair is visible. It is also important, however, to imagine what we actually do not see in these images. We do not see the Western-style clothes that these young girls wear underneath the robes. We do not see the displays on their hip mobile phones, nor do we see what kind of popular television series they like to watch. In short, in the first instance we do not see individuals protesting, but a collective group protesting. The body plays a crucial role in this imagination. The characteristics exposed assume disengagement with the autonomous body and project instead the imagination of a strong collective. However, although at first sight the photograph appeals to the image of uniformity and collective action backed up by the ideology of Islamism, this particular photograph does not correspond to or exemplify the stereotypical image of Islamist masses protesting. The reason why I chose this particular photograph is precisely because it illustrates the paradoxical nature of the Islamist movement. Moreover, it illustrates how the image of veiled women and expression of piety contribute to this paradox. I will return to this point later in the chapter.

The Purity of Piety Whiteness or cleanliness plays an important role in the social imagination of the movement, rendered through the image of ‘white’ and ‘clean’ women in the public sphere. As explicated in their modest and simple attire, their ‘clean’ (free of makeup) faces; and their white traditional veils, the women convey a message of sobriety and uniformity that corresponds with their political Islamist project. ‘Whiteness’ or ‘cleanliness’ conveyed by the images of these political female bodies is partly associated with the practice of a clean politics, meaning clean from corruption, clean from collusion or clean from nepotism. Significant to note is that ‘white’ or ‘whiteness’ is the colour associated with the so called santri, devout Muslims, in contrast to nominal Muslims, the so-called abangan. The latter are associated with the colour red, as represented by nationalist parties such as the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle led by Megawati Sukarnoputri. According to many Muslims, ‘red’ has had the political hegemony for too long now. It is time for ‘white’ to take over the leadership. Whiteness and cleanliness also have strong moral connotations that pertain to notions of austerity, purity, and innocence. As opposed to the consumerist and ‘Westoxified’ (Abu-Lughod 1998) images of brightly-coloured and branded fashion in the public and mediatized sphere, this image functions as a marker of difference, of exclusivity in the margins. 81

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This idea of whiteness and cleanliness is also being promoted in media and popular culture. The popular media celebrity and Islamic preacher Abdullah Gymastiar – better known as Aa Gym – for instance, refers to ‘cleanliness’ as being consistent with ‘godliness’ (Watson 2005: 776). In regarding ‘cleanliness’ as a vital part of faith, Aa Gym advices his audience and devout followers to follow not only rules of personal hygiene and health but also a form of what I would call ‘moral hygiene’. This moral hygiene extends not to clean politics as such – Aa Gym tried to distance himself from formal politics as much as possible – but more so to clean business, clean friendships, clean relationships, and clean marriages. The desire for ‘moral hygiene’ expects from people a personal trust in God and a disciplined mind and body to resist the ‘dirt’ of the world around them (corruption, illicit sexuality, drugs, alcohol, etc). ‘Whiteness’ and ‘cleanliness’ is also gendered and sexualized. For both men and women, the symbolic significance of ‘whiteness’ and ‘cleanliness’ pertains to notions of sexual abstinence, virginity, and purity. Especially the woman is attached to sexual restrictions. These restrictions at first sight seem to refer back to ‘traditional’ ideas of sexuality, or better formulated, of sexual abstinence before marriage. However, these young women have not particularly been raised in an environment which demands the outward appearances of being chaste and pure. The feminist scholar Lama Abu Odeh suggests that these young women are tired of living in conflicting gender roles and are opting for a clear notion of Islamic womanhood with its comprehensible and unambiguous set of sexual conduct and behaviour (Odeh 1993). In her study she refers to Arab women in the Middle East, who before the Islamic resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s were torn between, on the one hand, the promotion of secular and capitalist appearance, manifested in Western-style clothes, make-up, fashion accessories, and modern lifestyles, and on the other hand, the continuous conservative gaze which condemned too much Westernization, too much (financial) independence, and the loss of pristine motherhood and domestic roles. Indonesia experiences the same duality in gender ideologies. While promoting women to go to work and to become modern career women, women are also sternly reminded that they should not forget their offspring or neglect their domestic duties. Moreover, in terms of sexuality, one can wear Western-style clothes, but when sexual explicitness is manifested through these clothes, women are expected to be ashamed of themselves and are seen as asking for trouble. In opting for sober Islamic attire exempted from Western ‘contaminations’, these young women have regained a form of respect and self-consciousness. Instead of juggling between contradicting and confusing gender models that carry double standards, Islamist women have chosen to abide by a clear and respectable paradigm of female Muslimhood. They now cannot be accused of not fulfilling their roles as ‘good women’ which in turn provided them with more moral power to address other issues important to them such as education or work. Rather than a return to so-called ‘tradition’, the purity or whiteness of the movement and of the appearance of veiled women refer more to ideas of modern austerity attached 82

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to an alternative modernity of Islam. In her research on modern Muslim women in Yogyakarta, the anthropologist Leslie Dwyer (2001) argues that for women, the desire to become modern and urban is now very much linked to the idea of Islam as a universal and forward-looking religion. Dwyer’s example of Sukiyem, a young rural woman who migrates to the city to find work, illustrates this desire distinctly. Sukiyem feels she is becoming more ‘white’ by donning the veil and wearing Islamic dress. Not only because the attire keeps her skin from becoming darker in the sun, but also because the attire makes her more respectable, more urban and modern. By donning the veil, this woman defines ‘becoming whiter’ not so much in racial terms but in the social mobility to become a modern urban Muslim. In Sukiyem’s case, the appropriation of the Islamist ‘look’ appeals to an enactment of ‘social, somatic and subjective transformation, from a rural peasant to an urban worker, from a Javanese Muslim to someone ‘aware’ of Islam as a universal, world religion’ (Dwyer 2001: 261). As whiteness has come to represent modernity through privileging the ‘whiter’ or ‘lighter’ bodies (perpetuated for instance through whitener products), ‘becoming white’ – through wearing the veil – signifies an urban modernity that enforces respect.

Identity, Belonging, and the Transnational In returning to the photograph in Figure 4.1, discussed earlier, we can sum up that in reading the image and its links to discursive practice and social reality, the representation can be seen to convey the bond between the veiled pupils, suggesting a mode of belonging to a greater commonality, to a political ideal attached to a collective identity, namely that of Islamism. The manner through which this message is communicated follows logics of veiling as a mode of spatiality and veiling as representing a pure form of public piety. In analysing this image more carefully, however, one can see its paradoxical message. It is not merely the interpellation of political Islam that these pupils are conveying with their veils and attires, but also their personal religiosities. This is most accurately betrayed by the banner that one of the pupils holds, which reads: Jilbab, I’m in h [love]

These words, surrounded by other ‘love’ symbols, and its letters decorated by happy curls and doodles, create an intimacy between the pupils and the readers/viewers. It allows the viewer into the personal world of the pupils, and in particular the pupil holding the banner. She loves the jilbab and she wants the world to know that a ban against wearing the jilbab is a ban against personal feelings of wanting to wear the veil, against her personal choice, against her very own individuality. The love symbols, curls, and doodles, also indicate a form of modern ‘girl culture’, in which playfulness, femininity, and popular culture are constitutive elements. The combination of a modern girl culture and the appropriation of Islamist ideology seem to suggest in this case an Islamist image 83

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of ‘girl power’ (Driscoll 1999). This is also reinforced by the use of English rather than Indonesian. As the anthropologists Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors have argued: ‘[T]he presence of mediated religion in the public sphere is both constitutive of and constituted by political activism, especially identity politics or the politics of difference’ (Meyer and Moors 2006: 11). The words on the banner betray such mediated workings of identity politics, based on self-affirmation and a pride in wearing a symbol that they know is still a stigmatized symbol. Despite the stigmas attached to the veil, these young women self-consciously represent the Islamist movement with a collective identity marked on their bodies through their uniform Muslim dress. Moreover, the way in which the young women present themselves in this image corresponds to Annelies Moors’s ‘politics of presence’ in which nonverbal forms of communication such as bodily appearances and styles of dress mediate as much as verbal forms of communication (Moors 2006: 120–121). In such a way, these women have marked their body and have literally and figuratively taken the streets, occupied space, and accumulated an ‘in-your-face’ attitude. Nilüfer Göle has succinctly analyzed the link between the ‘marked’ body and the greater ideology and argued that Islamist women enact their Muslim-marked bodies into a public contention called Islamism (2003: 812). Whereas Black activists have turned their ‘blackness’ into overt protests, Islamist activists deploy ‘Muslimness’ as an embodied element of social protest. By wearing the stigmatized veil, the women in these media representations ‘act up’ and voice their political concerns visually. Rather than resisting stereotypes, they deploy and put into use the stereotypes attached to the tight veil (Tarlo 2005: 14). Following the anthropologists Dave Eickelman and James Piscatori, veiling is not a political act as such: ‘it becomes one when it is transformed into a public symbol’ (1996: 4). As I have attempted to illustrate with the photograph in Figure 4.1, the paradox of the representation of the Islamist movement concerns the simultaneity of representing both ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. ‘Tradition’ in terms of an ‘invented tradition’ of piety, morality, and communal responsibility embodied through Islamic attire, and ‘modernity’ in terms of scientific progress, education, and individuality. The young women embrace their veil and modest attire (associated with a conservative notion of interiority and domesticity) but at the same time are politically active, vocal, and demanding their rights as Muslim citizens. The difference between these Islamist young women and their secular Muslim peers is not so much that they are more religious and ideological per se, but rather, that the first attempt to reclaim the public sphere that has been defined by the latter. This act is a conscious move towards problematizing the normalization and hegemony of a secularist public sphere in which notions of self and society are universalized according to Western secularism. As Göle convincingly asserts, Islamism in this respect is similar to feminism:

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While feminism questions the universalistic and emancipatory claims of the category of ‘human being’ and asserts, instead, women’s difference, Islamism problematizes the universalism of the notion of civilization, and asserts Islamic difference. While women reinforce their identity by labeling themselves feminists, Muslims emphasize theirs by naming themselves Islamists. Civil rights activists also asserted the primacy of difference through the use of the motto ‘Black is Beautiful’, thus rejecting the equation of emancipation with white and western. Difference, therefore, becomes the source of empowerment of contemporary movements and the content of identity politics. It is in this context of the rejection of the universalism of Enlightenment modernity and the assertion of difference that the motto ‘Islam is Beautiful’ has gained credence among Muslims (Göle 1996: 17).

The banner held by the young woman in the photograph, stating ‘Jilbab, I’m in h [love]’ corresponds conclusively with the slogan and idea that ‘Islam is beautiful’. By conveying Islamism through an overt public display of Muslimness, these young women communicate to the outside world that their adherence to Islam is one that not only opposes secularism but more precisely, the naturalness and even the supremacy of non-religious citizenship. In his study Globalized Islam (2004) Olivier Roy pointed towards the increasing importance of religiosity as opposed to religion. The process of Islamic revivalism, he contends, is a ‘consequence of the need to explicitly formulate what Islam means for the individual (rather than what it is) when meaning is no longer sustained by social authority’ (ibid.: 24). Roy’s observation seems to correspond with the way in which the meaning of the veil is articulated by young girls in Indonesia today. Besides sheer identity politics, the banner in Figure 4.1 also betrays the need for individuals to articulate what Islam means for them. The girl in the image who is holding the banner, for instance, could have carried a banner or sign with Koranic verses printed on them. She could have taken and recited the verses from An-Nuur, verse 31 or Al-Ahzab, verse 59, which, according to many believers, explain why women are obliged to veil in Islam. Instead, the young woman from the Indonesian Muslim Pupils Student Action, chose to write down – in English – that she was ‘in love’ with the jilbab. Hence, it is not the Qur’an as such that defines her Islam, but she herself who defines the meaning and practices of her religion: it is she who finds the jilbab to be part of her belief. With respect to the particular event and context of the photograph, namely the demonstration against the French legislation prohibiting headscarves in public schools, the women from the Islamist movement illustrate how important their solidarity is to Muslim women all over the world. Not sharing any commonalities with French Maghreb women, these women, who define themselves as Muslim rather than as Indonesian, stand behind their Muslim sisters. To be Muslim articulates the very transnational idea of Muslimhood in contemporary times. For them, and for Islamist women in general, the veil and Islamic attire is not ‘just a symbol’. Although the veil works as a symbol in public realms, it conveys a political message in contexts of protest and space: ‘Islamism, 85

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in this respect, along with feminism, can be considered the most significant contemporary social movement that attempts to blur and redesign the borders between the private and the public spheres’ (Göle 1996: 811). It is transnational in so far as it attempts to rethink Islam as an object of knowledge beyond the local and national borders.

The Consumer Body The end of the nineties signalled a new phase in the process of jilbabisasi. Whereas in the 1980s and until the mid 1990s the phenomenon of veiling only took place at universities, it now took place in the rest of the public sphere. In offices, in parliament, in films and on national television, women increasingly started to cover their bodies and started to advocate modest dress and behaviour. The visibility of the jilbab became a more acceptable image in the media, particularly on national television, where female television hosts and actresses veiled themselves without losing their popularity. In many of the fancy shopping malls in Jakarta, expensive and stylish jilbabs were put on display and sold. Hence, away from the politicized discourse on the veil emerged the consumerist discourse that exemplified the increasing normalization and commodification of the veil in contemporary society. In contrast to the image of the veiled woman as being extremist and backward, this new trend challenged the stigma of the veiled woman and reinforced modern images of Islamic womanhood.

‘Jilbab Inc.’: Celebrating the Veil The phenomenon of Inneke, a well-known actress in Indonesia, is exemplary for this change in reading the jilbab. Born in 1975, in Jakarta, Inneke Koesherawati started modelling and acting at a young age. Her attractive ‘Indo’ (mixed-race) look and overt sex appeal established her as a well-known celebrity in the 1990s. She became famous for her acting in several celebrated Indonesian films, which included so-called ‘hot’ films (film-film panas), such as Metropolitan Girls, Naughty Desires and The Stained Bed. Although never pornographic, these films distinguished themselves from other films by their sexual explicitness and erotic insinuations. Her involvement in these films gave her the reputation for being Indonesia’s ‘sex bomb’ of popular films. In 2001, in the midst of her career, Inneke Koesherawati went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, the haj. Upon her return, Inneke said that she did not feel comfortable being uncovered any more. She decided to wear Islamic dress and created a new image for herself as a devout but modern woman. In an interview she explained to the press how Islamic dress had made her feel cosmopolitan rather than old-fashioned (Soetjipto 2003). Her conversion did not make her less popular; on the contrary, she became one of the 86

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most wanted actresses featuring on Islamic programs and soap operas (sinetrons). She produced religious albums (rohani) and promoted Muslim lifestyle in every talk show she appeared on. Especially during the fasting month of Ramadan, different media waited in line to feature her as a presenter or a guest. Taking a closer look at the images of her in print and electronic media, her outward appearance seems to confirm this ‘cosmopolitan’ identity. There are a couple of striking details that distinguish her appearance from the stigmatized veiled woman. Inneke’s dresses for instance are brightly coloured and often touched up by lace embroidery; her jilbab is always fashionable, and more strikingly, she always wears make-up and smiles with her bright red lipstick right into the lens of the camera. Her statement and appearance ultimately dispose of the stigma that the veil represents ‘backwardness’. Referring to ‘cosmopolitanism’ entails the appeal to modernity, to redefining ‘Muslimness’ in such a way that it does not interfere with the modern lifestyle that one has grown accustomed to. Inneke says she wants to change her life by becoming a devout Muslim woman, but that she does not want to alter her modern lifestyle. In her article on movie stars and Islamic moralism in Egypt (1995), the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod describes a similar trend among movie stars in Egypt who adhere to new modes of Islamic dress: ‘these “repentant” actresses have done what an increasing number of urban Egyptian women have done: adopted the new modest Islamic dress as part of what they conceive of as their religious awakening’ (1995: 64). As with Inneke Koesherawati, most of these Egyptian actresses have comparable narratives. They are young, sexy, modern and cosmopolitan, and in the prime of their careers, convert to being pious Muslims and start wearing the Islamic attire including the veil. They show a repentant attitude towards their past and talk about the way in which the haj, or in general, Islamic teaching, has enlightened them: Islam has given them the right insights on how they should transform their lives. Abu-Lughod argues that the religious transformation of these actresses has had an enormous impact on rural and poor women in Egyptian society who have started to identify with ‘their’ stars, believing that the stars have turned to the same moral principles as themselves (1995: 65). Due to the popularity of these stars, veiling has become a legitimate trend, and, in the case of Egypt, promoted to urban women a return to the domestic sphere. Moreover, before their conversions, these actresses were criticized for their relentless complicity in the world of ‘sexploitation’. Because the actresses represent the ‘nouveau riche westernized elite, their sexual immorality is often associated with Western lifestyles, but there is also a general impression that they are different from ordinary Egyptians’ (1995: 58). Through their conversions, the broader public can now see them as one of their own, and ‘appropriate’ their actresses to their own life worlds. Before her conversion, Inneke was regarded as one of the many ‘Indo’ actresses in the Indonesian world of celebrities. She embodied the ultimate example of a 87

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mixed-race celebrity, regarded as belonging to the ideals of ‘Indonesian’ beauty through the fairness of her skin and the ‘European’ features of her face (pointed and slim nose, round eyes, and high cheekbones) and body (long legs and firm build). To be mixed-race (though mostly referring to Indonesian-Europeanness or ‘Indo’ and not including other ‘mixes’) was considered an asset for the media world: the ‘Indo’ look dominated television, soap operas, and film. This racial imagery, however, does not simply correlate with a desire for whiteness, but a distinct desire for becoming whiter but no less Indonesian. To be ‘Indo’ was to belong to the privileged ‘race’ and class in Indonesian society; although ‘Indo’ actresses and actors were considered Indonesian stars, they were also seen as different from ‘ordinary Indonesians’. Similar to the context of Egypt, the image of the veiled movie stars – with Inneke Koesherawati being the most vivid example – contributes to legitimatizing the practice of veiling for the wider society. More importantly, it legitimizes critiques of Westernization underlying Inneke’s conversion. Her parting with her past meant a parting with a ‘Western’ way of life, a Western life which involved not only the expression of sexuality and eroticism, but also in the case of Indonesia, issues of race and class. The conversion of Inneke evoked the idea that conversions of upper-class and elite men and women to a more pious Islam, led to the closing of the gap between poor and rich people through their common bond: Islam. If the stigma had not already been challenged by the new veiling of young women, it was now ultimately challenged by the fact that ‘even’ a successful and beautiful ‘Indo’ woman had converted to becoming a pious Muslim. In such a way, advocates of Islamism must have been right all along: while ‘becoming pious’ is juxtaposed with having a Western lifestyle, the necessity to ‘cover up’ is a logical consequence of resisting the immoralities and impurities of bodily exposures associated with Western lifestyles. As opposed to the case of Egypt, however, where the actresses ended their career once they converted, the message from the celebrities in Indonesia does not necessarily promote women to leave their careers and to ‘return’ to domestic life. Although Inneke stresses her desire to settle down and to have a husband and family, she does not take measures to end her career. On the contrary, as mentioned earlier, she has been even more prominently visible in media, especially on Islamic programs and media events during Ramadan festivities. With these new religious media initiatives aimed at the mission of proselytizing, Inneke Koesherawati has received much admiration from the general public culminating in her receiving multiple TV awards. The discourse of celebrity conversion in Indonesia relates closely to images of new Muslim women’s magazines such as Amanah or Noor. Like the images of Inneke Koesherawati, these glossies promote an Islamic way of life that does not include leaving the realm of modern lifestyles. Similar to mainstream (secular) glossy women’s magazines such as Femina or Kartini or the international Cosmopolitan, these magazines adhere to images of the heterosexual and nuclear 88

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Figure 4.2: Inside the glossy women’s magazine Noor. (Courtesy Noor Magazine - published May 2003)

family. Cooking recipes, housekeeping-tips, and educational advice for the children are exchanged, presenting women and mothers as playing an important role in the management of the domestic sphere. However, also dominant in the magazines, is the idea that modern Muslim women have working careers outside of the domestic realm. Trendy Islamic dress styles are portrayed, showing work outfits, sports wear and glamorous evening garments. The magazines thus suggest that modern Muslim women can and should work, can and should do sports, can and should be sexy and attractive when going out at night. Brenner, who observed this trend in her analyses of the magazine Amanah in the 1990s, referred in this respect to an ‘apparently unproblematic blending of Muslim purity and Western sexuality in a single image [that] perfectly captures the contradictory messages and interests of the late Suharto era’; as she proclaimed, ‘it is quintessentially New Order!’ (1999: 21). These persisting New Order images in 89

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post-New Order times seems to suggest a continuation of New Order strategies, which associates the pious modern Muslim woman – and her harmonious family – with nation’s stability (ibid.: 36). Agreeing with Brenner’s observation, I would further add that the contradictory message of blending ‘Muslimness’ with ‘Western’ influences such as explicit sexuality, but also for instance ‘Western’ healthy lifestyles such as the discourse of fitness and slimness, can be put in the broader global framework of consumption and commodification in constituting and shaping the public sphere of Muslim communities.

Mobility of Class and Global Capital The process of Islamization in Indonesia partly evolved out of a discontent with the sociopolitical climate in Indonesia which adhered to New Order socioeconomic principles that privileged the already empowered secular middle class and neglected ‘the other middle class’ of middle-level urban workers (teachers or lower-ranked civil servants), professionals, or students without social status or power. This neglected class of people, as Suzanne Brenner describes, represents ‘a class of people who have been fully drawn into the state-sponsored processes of “development”, but without reaping its spoils’ (Brenner 1996: 678). The increasing visibility of ‘the other middle class’ in the public sphere of postSuharto Indonesia, signals a moment of transformation where the hegemony of the wealthy secular middle class is being openly contested. This new Muslim middle class opt, as Lila Abu-Lughod calls it, for an ‘alternative modernity’ through the practice of Islamism (1998: 4). These contestations over middle-class bodies become evident in the new forms of veiling that have manifested in Indonesia in the past ten to fifteen years. In the 1990s, Indonesian Muslims were increasingly becoming more affluent: they could afford the haj, expensive tutoring in religious teaching, they travelled and consumed more. By becoming more cosmopolitan, urbanized, and santriized, Indonesian Islam could lose its negative connotation with rural culture and backwardness (Azra 2001: 35). Home-grown Islamic literature experienced a growing popularity, also among Muslim teenagers who replaced their (secular) teen magazines, such as Hai and Gadis, for Islamic teen magazines such as Annida. Magazines especially aimed at the young female Muslim audience mushroomed at the end of the 1990s. These magazines portrayed veiled Muslim women as the new image of modern Indonesian womanhood. The stigmatization of these Islamic symbols described earlier, which had permeated Indonesian politics and society, had altered greatly. The interaction of market and religion intensified strongly. While Muslimidentified economic activities increased, such as the establishment and managing of Islamic banking in Indonesia, religious activities became increasingly commodified. The booming haj business; the popularity of attending private 90

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lectures of popular imams; religious teachings at expensive hotels; or the spiritual retreat weekends on Indonesian islands all attested to this new development. Many scholars have pointed out the increase of Muslim capital resulting in the emergence of a Muslim middle class in Indonesia, and it much resembles the way in which leisure and consumption has become ‘Islamized’ elsewhere (Hefner 1998; Hasbullah 2000). Kiliçbay and Binark, for instance, argue for the case of Turkey that Muslim lifestyles have become thoroughly intertwined with consumption, commodity, and pleasure patterns and that these are informed by local and global trends of the market economy (2002: 499). These activities adhere to a more general consumerist ideology, which deploys an ‘Islamic way of life’ as a lifestyle and practice without eschewing ‘Western’ modes of advertising or appeal. The ways in which consumer culture work together with religion or religious symbols in shaping Muslim consumers in Indonesia, have inextricably been linked to perceptions of changing gender relations, in which women are both stimulated to enter the workforce as well as reminded to take care of the home and family. The media theorist Krishna Sen is right when she asserts that Indonesian women, rather than being regarded as autonomous political actors, are being regarded as autonomous consumers. In this respect, she argues, it is the market rather than the state that has attended to women’s needs and desires (2002: 66). Not only has globalization transformed gender relations in the late 1980s when women were expected in Indonesia to enter the workforce, but globalization has now also deployed religion, and vice versa, to create consumer Muslim women who – although still working – are likewise expected to revalue and reappropriate domestic life. In such a way, the Islamization of consumer culture does not challenge the paradoxical message that women are expected to care for the home and family besides attending to her career outside of the house. Nonetheless, Muslim women who in the past have not been able to enter this consumer discourse are now able to compete in the modern workplace. For women, veiling becomes in this respect a symbol of class mobility. Through the public performances of Islamic subjectivities, women are not only Islamizing the workplace, but also contributing to the formation of a new class. Importing Islam into the development of consumerism leads to the establishment of the Muslim middle class in general and of the Muslim middleclass family in particular. Piety is central to the family’s religious life(style), but so is the so-called ‘moral economy’ of the home. It is the task of the woman to uphold the way in which the house and family is ‘managed’. This includes for instance the organization of Islamic education for the children; the purchasing of halal ingredients for the family’s meals; the moral control over the activities of their growing teenagers; or the way in which the family is spending their money. At first sight the Muslim family does not differ much from the image of the New Order family. Both are advocating nuclear, heterosexual families, where the father earns the income, the mother works for the extra money but stays at home once the 91

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children are born. The differences lie, however, in the way in which the seemingly superficial symbols of Muslimness – such as the veil – communicate a desire of Muslim families to differentiate themselves from secular families. This desire has a lot to do with the way in which today’s urban secular middle class has been looked upon by Muslims, namely as having lost all moral bearings. While husbands cheat on their wives, young girls are having sexual intercourse before marriage and young boys are caught up in narcotics. The New Order middle-class family has built up a reputation in which wealth has destroyed the ‘moral economy’ of the home. The new Muslim family aims to do it differently. Instead of relying on money, wealth and status, they set out to refashion their lives in Muslim (read pious) ways.

Bodies, habitus, and the Citizen-subject Both of the above new discourses on veiling suggest that the making of the new Muslim middle classes correspond to the idea that the middle class today prefers to define itself as Muslim rather than Indonesian, or as Muslim rather than Javanese. The hegemony of Javanese identity, strongly present during both the Sukarno and the Suharto eras, has been challenged and contested by new Muslim identities and by dakwahists especially – who find Javanese practices of Islam such as the belief in saints (kebatinan), Javanese music, and shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) to be incompatible with their Islamic teachings. But the analyses of different veiling representations above illustrates especially that the ‘middle class’ is dubiously defined. Next to a prosperous, consumerist upper middle class, there is a middle class that could eventually consume in the same manner, but that has different ideas and ideals about the ways in which Muslim identity should be expressed or experienced. Unlike the de-politicized and consumerist elite, the groups of dakwahists, although claiming their part of economic growth, do not share or desire the same middle-class culture. There are many gradations to describe different forms of veiling and often these degrees of looking are normatively defined. Many women are judged by other women in the way that they veil. These judgements draw borders about what is and what is not permissible. For the dakwahist women, for instance, this means wearing loose and long dresses. Veils that deviate from this ideal veil are labelled jahiliah veils, meaning in this context that either they are not quite ready, or these women are looked upon as ignorant.But women themselves also judge their own veiling practices. As the celebrity vocalist Trie Utami argues about her own veiling: ‘I still have a “leaking” veil (jilbab bocor), it is not yet complete’ (Amanah 2002). Women thus produce successive stages of veiling according to a ‘complete’ adherence to Islamic rules and laws. These rules and laws, however, are not solely defined by the Quran or the fiqh, but are also based on normative ideas in society and culture. These subtle layers of difference or modes of contestation are communicated through the body and can be identified by notions of habitus (Bourdieu 1977). 92

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Social elements are incorporated in bodily gestures, dress, and style that mediate the subject’s actions. Veiling in this manner becomes a mode of knowledge that is learned by the body – a mode of knowledge that is not necessarily cognitive or reflexive but that is subconsciously mastered (Adkins 2004: 194). From this perspective, the practice of veiling can be viewed as a form of habituation. Following Saba Mahmood, however, I would contend that with habituation we do not mean to denote bodily forms as ‘superficial particularities through which more profound cultural meanings find expression’ (2003: 844): rather than considering veiling practices as a symbol for something more profound, the bodily form – in this case the veil – is not something contingent but is ‘a necessary aspect of understanding its substantive content’ (2003: 846). To avoid denoting these gender dynamics with Islamic or religious practice, one can compare the dynamics in Muslim gender politics with those in Western societies. The diet and fitness culture for young women in the West for instance, has been coined by feminist scholars as a phenomenon that disciplines bodies. The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo is a well known critic of this cultural trend. While eating disorders are increasing, the normalization of a diet and fitness culture is spreading significantly. As Bordo argues, these women and their bodies are affected by a deep consumer ideology through the subjectivation of cultural discourses on fleshly bodies (1993: 183). This discussion, as the theorist Meyda Yegenoglu argues, can be extended to the discussion of veiling: ‘Emphasizing the culturally specific nature of embodiment reveals, however, that the power exercized upon bodies by veiling is no more cruel or barbaric than the control, supervision, training, and constraining of bodies by other practices, such as bras, stiletto heels, corsets, cosmetics and so on’ (2000: 93). By comparing ‘Muslim’ disciplining of the body with Western disciplining of the body, the normalized universalism of women’s emancipation in the West is challenged. It constitutes a new reality in which women both in Muslim countries as in the West are subjected to similar mechanisms of bodily control. Through the different modes of veiling in public discourse, new bodily habits are created through which women define and situate themselves in society. These new habits are not uncomplicated. While some see and feel the veil as an extension of their body, others struggle every day to relate their self to the Islamic dress. Practices of veiling, as with practices of non-veiling, correspond to ways of negotiating the self and the body in a social environment filled with new options and models of femininity and citizenship.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have analyzed two dominant discourses of veiling in contemporary Indonesia. The first concerned a politicized discourse of veiled bodies. In contextualizing this image within the process and practice of 93

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‘Islamization’, I have clarified why this image should be placed within the emerging influences of Islamist movements in urban centers of Indonesia. Islamist women play a significant role in the mediation of Islamist identity politics. Through a ‘politics of presence’ these women occupy public spaces and communicate with their ‘marked’ bodies to the outside world their Islamist message. Away from the politicized discourse, local and global processes of Islamization and global consumerism have contributed to producing a new modern Muslim middle class woman. Different perceptions of Islam and Muslimness in conjunction with processes of consumerism and global capital are at the heart of discursive contestations between existing middle classes. The second dominant discourse of new veiling in Indonesia adhered to such a consumerist discourse of the veil prevailing in the middle and upper classes. These images illustrated how committing oneself to an ‘Islamic way of life’ can be combined with a modern lifestyle. But rather than conveying a message of Islamist piety as such, they more aptly contained New Order elements of modern consumerism and middle class (gendered) subjectivity. By conveying different modes of Muslimness, the veiling discourses have made visible class relations and class mobility and thereby produced distinct middle class subjectivities. By looking at how these practices have corresponded to societal discourses and ideological politics, I have made an effort to articulate how these different new paradigms sustain one another and how the production of the female veiled body refers back to many different frameworks such as the New Order, Islamist ideology, global capital, and democratic reconfigurations – often without excluding one another. The outcome of my analysis suggests that the practices of veiling examined in this chapter point toward reconfigurations of the public sphere, to new habituations of the body, and to renegotiations of the citizen-subject in times of political transition. Issues of identity and belonging appeared essential to the reconfigurations and have included the intricate ways in which Indonesian citizenship is defined in the complex relationship between self, body, civic cultures, and the nation-state.

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introduction Japanese popular culture manifested in magazines, popular music and films, whilst developing its originality and uniqueness, has been influenced by Western popular culture especially since the defeat of Japan in the Second World War in 1945 (see, for example, Cope 2007; Martinez 1998; Morton 2003; Richie 2005; Schilling 1997). Women’s magazines have similarly been very aware of Western fashion, styles and images of women whilst forming their original and distinctive style (Moeran 1995; Rosenberger 1995; Skov and Moeran 1995a). One feature of the post-war visual representation of women in magazines for young people is that it has developed in the process of interpreting and then consuming a ‘white Western/American aesthetic’ image of women in a Japanese context (Clammer 1995; Kondo 1992, 1997; Ochiai 1998). Alongside gender, class, sexuality and age, racial classification of the body is a significant element in its presentation, and has been embedded in magazine discourse (Inoue et al. 1989; Morohashi 1993). Although the means of mimicking, appropriating and sometimes subverting (Kinsella 2005) these Caucasian images of women have transformed over time, a commonality throughout the period is that the body has always been central to the beauty ideology. 97

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From the late 1970s onwards, there was a marked proliferation of accounts of the body in magazines; they saw a more detailed and extensive focus on the body, which problematized bodily and facial attributes. Throughout the 1980s the concept of the desirable female body was gradually embodied by incorporating an imaginary Western female body into the Japanese body: a well-balanced body proportion including a smaller face and big eyes, long eyelashes and slim legs. Such an aspirational body could be understood as a Westernized body; one very different from traditionally accepted notions of the Japanese woman’s body: relatively short height, with somewhat stocky legs, rather flat, round face and single-fold eyelids (Miller 2006). The 1990s however saw a paradigm shift in the desirable female body represented in the magazines. This was the emergence of a new form of the desirable female body: a Westernized body with a Japanese face. The Western body that had been previously represented by using Caucasian models was indigenized by using Japanese women possessing Westernized or Western-looking bodies. The new form of the aspirational body became naturalized in the discourse of magazines. This significant change in the model of the body’s desirability can be analysed in terms of a paradigm shift from cultural imperialism to globalization. Desirable images of women in Japan have undoubtedly changed with the influence of an ‘imaginary’ Western woman aesthetic; however the meanings accompanying such images have also been dynamically reworked. Japan has enjoyed its unique position as one of the few non-Western countries achieving a highly advanced capitalistic socioeconomy. Accordingly it has experienced cultural mixing of ‘the local’ and ‘the West’ in the formation of non-Western modernity (Featherstone 1995; Hannerz 1992, 1996; Robertson 1991). As Stuart Hall (1991) remarks, globalization processes have not merely promoted the spread of Americanized global mass culture: they have also advanced dynamic transformation in local mass culture. Questions raised in this study are that, if so, in the site of the body, which is never neutral and in which micro powers always operate, what effects work on the formation of the representation of the body? Does globally dominant cultural power weaken a locally specific Japanese concept of a woman’s body or does it produce something new: an ‘original’ Japanese body? This chapter investigates the formation of the desirable female body and its embodiment in Japanese women’s magazines of the 1990s in relation to white Western aesthetics of women. It looks at the way in which the female body as process is constituted in the visual representation and discourses of magazines in the context of Japanese culture. Referring to the conceptual framework of cultural globalization, it examines firstly the way the Western woman as the Other is formed in representational practice, and then attempts to analyze the two bodies, namely, the Japanese and Western female bodies, according to three stages of time: from the 1950s throughout the 1960s; the late 1970s and the 1980s and finally the 1990s.

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seeing the Japanese Female Body in the Context of globalization Globalization has become a significant paradigm within which to understand sociocultural change in the world since the early 1990s. This point of view questions the pre-existing cultural imperialism thesis. In his book Cultural Imperialism (1991) John Tomlinson cites Jeremy Tunstall, who defines ‘the cultural imperialism thesis’ as positing that ‘authentic, traditional and local culture in many parts of the world is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States’ (Tomlinson 1991: 8). Cultural imperialism stresses that cultural power directs from a centre to the periphery and it is ‘a purposeful project: the intended spread of a social system from one centre of power across the globe’ (ibid.: 175). Proponents of this thesis argue that following from its political and economic power, American popular culture dominates all over the world. They thus explain the relationship between the West (mostly America) and the rest as one of cultural domination and exploitation (Mattelert 1984; Schiller 1969, 1976). This thesis however needs to be reconsidered in examining the formation of the complex and interrelating contemporary popular culture. It pays less attention to the aspect of the audience’s consumption of that popular culture. As Tomlinson (1991) claims, the cultural imperialism thesis bases its argument on a political economy approach and gives less consideration to how audiences interpret the media texts delivered from the centre and construct their meaning. Some pioneering studies on media audience (Ang 1985; Morley 1980; Radway 1984) demonstrate that the audience are not simply passive ‘cultural dupes’ but do in fact more actively consume media texts from the centre, constructing the meaning in their own right. Hall theorizes the autonomy of media audience with the encoding/decoding model (Hall 1981). The conceptual framework of the world in the cultural imperialism thesis is that, based on the boundaries of nation-states, the world is clearly divided into First, Second and Third Worlds. Accordingly, the world consists of the dominant and the dominated. As many theorists (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1992; Morley and Robins 1995) of globalization remark, however, this clear division of the world has become less applicable to understanding contemporary complex sociocultural changes within it. Appadurai claims that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries’ (Appadurai 1996: 32). Hall clearly defines globalization: Globalisation is the process by which the relatively separate areas of the globe come to intersect in a single imaginary ‘space’; when their respective histories are convened in a time-zone or time-frame dominated by the time of the West; when the sharp boundaries 99

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reinforced by space and distance are bridged by connections (travel, trade, conquest, colonization, markets, capital and the flows of labour, goods and profit) which gradually eroded the clear-cut distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. (1995: 190)

According to this conceptualization of global culture, popular culture can be characterized as trans-national traffic. The model of the cultural power of the centre/periphery is not necessarily appropriate to explain an indigenizing process of the desirable female body in magazines after the 1990s. This is not to say that American cultural power, the homogenizing power in globalization, has significantly declined. We acknowledge that the American element in the cultural formation still powerfully dominates the rest. Rather, as K¯oichi Iwabuchi (2002) observes in an East Asian context, the paradigm of globalization that provides us with ways of structuring dominant cultural power is interwoven in a site of production, representation and consumption. Whilst the structure of cultural power is becoming decentred it has been unevenly (re)organized (Ang and Stratton 1996; Appadurai 1996). This perspective enables me to articulate the indigenization process of the desirable female body. In her study of the relationship of Japanese fashion to the West in the fashion industry Dorinne Kondo (1997) claims that Japan’s cultural relationship to the West consists of complex components: mimicry, appropriation, synthesis, and domestication. After Western clothing had been widely introduced in the Meiji era (1868–1912) it became the norm in Japan. In the domain of fashion design Kondo argues that Western clothing became domesticated through a mimetic and appropriative processing of the West. This conceptual framework of the process provides a perspective to critically analyse the transformation of the image of Japanese women in representation. In Re-made in Japan Joseph Tobin (1992a) elaborates on ‘the West’ in Japanese daily life, using the term ‘domestication’ as the central concept to indicate a process of how Japanese culture receives, accepts and consumes Western culture. He defines it thus: ‘(d)omesticate has a range of meanings, including tame, civilize, naturalize, make familiar, bring into the home … The term domestication also suggests that Western goods, practices, and ideas are changed (Japanized) in their encounter with Japan’ (Tobin 1992a: 4). The process of domestication is ‘active (unlike westernization, modernization, or postmodernism), morally neutral (unlike imitation or parasitism), and demystifying (there is nothing inherently strange, exotic, or uniquely Japanese)’ (Tobin 1992a: 4). Tobin’s concept of ‘domestication’ however, needs to be questioned in examining the interconnection between ‘race’ and the body, that is, the ways a ‘Japanese’ woman’s body has been represented in the magazines in relation to a ‘Western’ female body. The neutrality and demystification of the term ‘domestication’ cannot explain the body as a site in which power operates. The body is never free from valuation and power relations (Foucault 1979a, 1979b, 1980). The Japanese female body in representation is historically constructed in relation to a web of power involving gender, ‘race’, class and 100

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sexuality. It is also formed in the process of appropriation and mixing of the Japanese body and the Western body in which the uneven and asymmetrical power relations operate as this study demonstrates.

who is the Western woman? Women’s magazines are a site of production of meanings in the capitalist socioeconomy (Ballaster 1991; Hermes 1995; McCracken 1993; McRobbie 1991, 1994; Rabine 1994; Roman et al. 1988; Rosenberger 1995; Williamson 1978). Significantly the magazine culture for young women, in a post-war Japanese context, has become a space for the (re)production and consumption of the coded West and its meaning through images and commodities (Tobin 1992b). In this respect, the body and its image as represented in the magazines construct ‘race’ as well as gender and sexuality. ‘Racial’ differences produce ‘Otherness’ (Ahmed 2002; Gilman 1985; Hall 1997). Black feminist theory claims that bodily differences based on ‘race’ produce a power hierarchy among women (Collins 1990; hooks 1994). The racialized Other is exoticized and sexualized in representation. Such a scale has been employed in representation based on the assumption that racial difference is inherent and unchangeable in qualities of the corporeal. In my observation of Japanese women’s magazines the Western and Japanese women’s bodies and their different qualities of femininities had initially been simply ‘contrasted’ and far less evaluation was attached to them until the 1960s: for instance, white Western women were represented as sexy in a way antithetical to Japanese women who were depicted as healthy (Ochiai 1998). Throughout the 1970s, however, their differences gradually evolved into the supremacy of the white Western standard of beauty typically represented as a well-balanced body with a small face, big eyes, long eyelashes and slim legs. Such supremacy was instrumental in the establishment of the Western standard of beauty. Here, a question is raised: who is the Western woman? When Western women are referred to in the magazines, although sometimes specified as French or American, in most cases they are classified and generalized as simply ‘Western’ or ‘Westernlooking’ women and they are not differentiated, for example, American from British, French or Italian. Representation of the body produces racialized knowledge. For instance, the image of the sensual white woman emerging in the 1960s’ magazines produced a discourse: Western women are, in general, sensual and have glamorous bodies. Effectively, the discourse created an imaginary, particularized Other without reference to the substantial entity, and its diversity, of the ‘real’ Western women’s bodies. Such racialized discourse in representation is structured by a set of binary oppositions (Hall 1997). There is the opposition between the biological or bodily characteristics of, for instance, the ‘Asian’ and ‘White’ ‘races’, polarized to their extremes. One of the binary is usually dominant over the other and there always exists a relationship of power between the poles of a binary opposition. 101

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The idea of ‘racialization’ implies that race is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology or culture. Races do not exist outside of representation but are formed in and by it in a process of social and political power struggle (Hall 1990, 1997). As Hall asserts, cultural identity should be regarded as ‘“production”, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (Hall 1990: 222). Stereotyping is a practice and is central to the representation of racial difference. It works in four ways (Hall 1997): it reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘differences’; it fixes boundaries and then excludes everything that does not fit, which does not belong and which is different; most importantly, stereotyping is likely to create inequalities of power, that is to say, in Foucault’s term, power/knowledge. Significantly, the process of stereotyping underpins ‘discursive strategies’ to construct power/knowledge (Foucault 1979b, 1980) in representation. Hall argues that these strategies are: idealization; the projection of fantasies of desire and degradation; the failure to recognize and respect difference; and the tendency to impose European categories and norms, to see difference through the modes of perception and representation of the West (Hall 1992). Representation makes some superior and others inferior. This stereotyping serves to connect between representation, difference and power. As noted, the diversity of Western women is reduced to a single category of ‘the Western woman’ in representation. A ‘Western’ woman becomes perceived as an essentialized entity on the one pole in magazines’ discourse, with a ‘Japanese’ woman on the other pole.

‘The sensual Beauty of white woman’ vs. ‘The healthy Beauty of Japanese woman’ With the re-opening of Japan to Western culture after the Second World War images of white Western women returned to Japanese popular culture and they began to be consumed again. This followed their temporary disappearance in the mass media in the war years as a consequence of governmental policy. From the 1950s and throughout the 1960s the Western images of women gradually became a dominant, pleasurable marker in the magazines in which they were appropriated in shaping young Japanese women’s femininity. The magazines were first exposed to images of white women after the war via the beauty industry, advertising and Hollywood cinema. Serving to ‘create new standards of appearance and bodily representation’ seen in Hollywood cinema, for instance, educated a mass audience in the importance of ‘looking good’ (Featherstone 1991: 179). Such visual images of white Western women are a medium of pleasure for the viewer, depicting the exotic Other whom the viewers fantasize about and desire, and clearly differentiated from those of Japanese women. The latter and their bodies came to be talked about with reference to the dualistic notions of ‘we’ and the ‘Other’. 102

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In the course of the rapid growth of the Japanese capitalistic economy in the post-war period and accordingly the rise of the middle class from the 1950s to the 1960s, the full-time housewife came to occupy a major role among the adult female population living in urban areas (Imamura 1996; Skov and Moeran 1995a). The majority of women’s magazines published at that time were aimed at such housewives. Most significantly, in this period ‘the housewife in visual imagery’ (Ochiai 1998: 208) was born and gradually established. A common style for pictures of such women is the half-length shot; rather than the later full-body shot. The half-length shot is a photograph showing only the head, arms and upper torso. This was probably used because the major concern with female beauty was more centred on the face and make-up and hands rather than on the body as a whole (Ochiai 1998; Miller 2006). ‘Being decent’ (Ochiai 1998) was a significant quality for young middle-class wives and the concept was framed by a distinctly fixed form and style: necklace and earrings, red lipstick, thinly plucked eyebrows and well-set hair. Elegantly posing and restrained, smiling with grace and self-control, the model shaped an image of a ‘decent’ housewife. The femininity of the middle-class housewife reflects that of her counterparts seen in American films and advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s. As such, a Japanese version of the middle-class housewife’s imagery was created by imitating and appropriating that of the Hollywood style and became an essential style for housewives. As Erving Goffman (1979) claims in the analysis of gendered norms in commercial advertisements, several gendered behavioural patterns are found in the Japanese version of housewives’ imagery in which ‘ritualized behavioural practices found in a variety of contexts in real life come to be employed in a ‘hyper-ritualized’ form in ads featuring women’ (ibid.: 26). Women’s bodies, body parts and postures are pictured, profitably, in the hyper-ritualized form. These hyper-ritualized behaviours, formed in advertising, signify the contemporary prevailing feminine ideology of passivity and domesticity. With the growing consumption of images of Western women in the magazines in the 1960s, a gendered symbolic marker that differentiated Japanese women from white women was the concept of ‘sexiness’ and ‘seductiveness’ (Ochiai 1998). The models in advertisements such as those for Max Factor presented ‘sensual’ and ‘seductive’ Western women’s images and Japanese film magazines also began to appear with sensual-looking Caucasian actresses of the time. Their sexuality was hyper-ritualized in the forms of ‘languid expression’, ‘coiled hair’, ‘arms in self-embrace’ and ‘languorous movement’. Such images were contrasted with and presented alongside the asexualized and more health-oriented contemporary popular Japanese actresses. A dichotomy of ‘the sensual beauty of white women’ vs. ‘the healthy beauty of Japanese women’ (Ochiai 1998) was formulated in this period. The opposition has been preserved until now in media discourse views of Caucasian women.

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magazines and obsession with the Body From the late 1970s throughout the 1980s magazines saw three major changes in presenting women: the intensive concern with the body and its parts; the proliferation of the disciplinary practices of bodies; and the categorization of the body (Ishiguro 2006). Here, the body emerged as a site to be managed, governed and improved. Japanese female bodies were discussed by comparing them to, contrasting them with and differentiating them from a Western female body. In the ‘somatic society’, Bryan Turner (1992) refers to ‘a social system in which the body, as simultaneously constraint and resistance, is the principal field of political and cultural activity’ (ibid.: 12): individuals recognize their identity through bodies. In other words, the body is deeply involved in the formation of identities and subjectivities. It is not a given and static entity but it has increasingly become a project in which individuals monitor, manage and train their bodies. In this study I use a Japanese women’s magazine, anan, as a primary sample text. From its inception in 1970 to now (2009), anan has continued to be a leading women’s magazine. For almost forty years it has maintained a circulation of between 540,000 and 720,000 copies (Japan’s Periodicals in Print 2007). I investigated each cover feature of 1,392 issues, from the first issue of 20 March 1970 to that of 10 December 2003, to scrutinize the process of transformation of the desirable body. The 1980s was a watershed in terms of the quantity of the accounts of the body. The first article associated with the body appeared in May 1972. Until June 1974 articles about the body did not appear in cover features. For the next five years until the May 1979 issue there were approximately twelve major articles associated with the body exemplified by ‘waist size’, ‘categorizing the self ’s body shape into six types and finding the best clothes to fit the self ’s body shape’ and the ‘diet issue’. By contrast, after the 1980s the number of cover features related to the body rapidly increased. Between the early 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, accounts about the body were found in more than seventy issues in cover features. Throughout the 1990s there was a further increase in the number of these articles, to more than one hundred. Their contents were various, ranging from dieting to cosmetic surgery, for example making eyelids double and legs slimmer, to make-up and hair styles. It seems as if the magazines were obsessed with the body. The attitude towards the presentation of the body prior to the fitness boom in the 1980s was relatively relaxed (Miller 2006). A ‘plump’ body, which would be categorized as a ‘fat’ body in a contemporary Japanese sense, was evaluated positively as a ‘healthy’ body (5 June 1974). A relatively ‘round’ body, often seen in Japan, was considered positively as a ‘natural’ and non-normative body whereas it later became regarded as a ‘fat’ body. Bodies were accepted as they are and not problematized objects to be governed. The non-normative body with a round face was a common figure that could often be seen in the representation of women in the 1950s and 1960s. The issues of 20 April 1979 (no. 217) and 21 May 1979 104

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(no. 219), however, mark the watershed of how the female body was subsequently described and deployed in representational practices. No tolerance to a nonnormative body can be seen in those issues. The language used to talk about bodies is definitive, pedagogical and instructive and appears mandatory. The contemporary preoccupation with beauty and appearance makes the body an object to be controlled and to draw the monitoring gaze (Bordo 1993; Featherstone 1991). Foucault’s conception of modern power, which is not repressive nor possessive but rather subtle, productive and constitutive, enables us to explain ways in which certain cultural practices produce individuals through the body. A primary aspect of this power is disciplinary and it is exercised on the body to produce a docile body. The disciplinary power constitutes the objectification of the subject through its invisibility: self-surveillance and selfnormalization. Looking at the (representational) practices to attain the desirable female body, it functions, I will argue, as one of the most powerful normalizing mechanisms in the contemporary culture over women. A Foucauldian feminist, Susan Bordo (1993: 186) argues that it insures ‘the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining “docile bodies” sensitive to any departure from social norms and habituated to self-improvement and self-transformation in the service of those norms’ (see also Bartky 1990; Morgan 1991; Diamond and Quinby 1988; Ramazanoğlu 1993; Hekman 1996).

The ‘small Face’ discourse Since the first brief (bodily context) reference to the face in anan in 1974, the idea of attaining ‘the body with a small face’ has become deeply engrained in the Japanese woman’s standard of beauty and it has become one of the most symbolic in constructing the contemporary desirable Japanese female body. The face is not merely a body part but works as a racialized code in representation. As Sarah Ahmed claims (2002) ‘we cannot understand the production of race without reference to embodiment’ (ibid.: 46); ‘a body with a small face’ (‘small face’ discourse) is, then, an embodiment of a racialized body. A notion of embodiment from a feminist point of view enables the examination of differences in women’s lived experiences. Embodiment refers to ‘a process of making and doing the work of bodies – of becoming a body in social space’ and it ‘encompasses moments of encounter and interpretation’ (Canning 1999: 505). Embodied practices are therefore always contextual with place, time and culture, inflected with class, racial, gender and generational locations. Looking at, for instance, the attributes of the round face that I focus on in this study, its value for attaining a desirable body is not necessarily fixed, rather it denotes the process of transformation of what female beauty contains in a particular context. Although the size and shape of the face are obviously not changeable without medical intervention such as cosmetic surgery they have been major issues in any body project for young women. 105

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By tracing back the historical transformation of the connotation of the face and its shape we can see the indigenization process of the formation of the desirable body. The initial accounts of the facial attributes emerged in anan no. 101 (20 June 1974) and no. 118 (5 March 1975). In the article entitled ‘You can change the image of your face as you wish’ (20 June 1974), face shape is categorized into three types: a round face, a square face, and an oval face, giving comments on each type of face. It asserts that the most common face shape among the Japanese is the round one and most young women with round faces, they assume, dislike their face shape because it appears childlike. It is assumed that women with such faces are less likely to consider themselves to be good-looking compared to those who have square or oval faces. However, even if young women with a round face are represented as unhappy with their face shape, the magazine takes a positive tone in addressing such women, concluding that ‘they are able to express their adult femininities’, and give some instruction on how to emphasize their femininity positively with their fashion and make-up. By contrast, people with square faces look more intelligent and closer to ‘Western’ images. This type of woman has an advantage as she looks more Western and can display herself in any style of fashion she wants. The square-faced woman is informed: ‘You can express yourself with chic fashion like a Parisienne’. Women with oval faces have the image of ‘traditional’ Japanese women and can appear to be a ‘real’ Japanese woman. The no. 118 issue of anan (5 March 1975) is especially significant for shifting the connotations of the round face from positive to negative. It began replacing the words ‘a round face’ with ‘a big face’. A big face implies having a big head, that is, having a poorly balanced body to correct. In the no.101 issue referred to above a round face is regarded as simply being the commonest Japanese shape of face. However, what the no.118 issue implied was that having such a Japanese round face equates to not having a well-balanced body. This negative valuation of the round face was applied to the ‘Japanese’ body as a whole. Most significantly, they essentialized the Japanese female bodies to a single type and contrasted it with the Western body. This naturalized Japanese female body, the round face/unbalanced body, was discovered in the magazines’ discourse. The supremacy of the Western standard of beauty seen in the discourse in this period accords with theories that emphasize cultural colonization of representation (Inoue 1989). One concern of bodily balance is to expand and develop the formulation of an admirable body ratio. An article entitled ‘How to make your face look smaller’ (20 April 1979: 42) says that ‘now the proportion of the body matters. The success or failure of your proportions depends on if you have got a small face or not … [N]ow you absolutely must get this small face in order to dress well.’ By presenting the conditions of a well-balanced body they assert that the most aesthetically beautiful head-to-body ratio is 1:7.3. In order to achieve such a body balance they advise trying to make hair styles smaller and compact, in turn making the head appear smaller and better proportioned (ibid.: 43). The image of the aspirational body with a small face is embodied by presenting real bodies of Western models and actors such as Jean Seberg. The issue provides 106

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pedagogical instruction on how to make heads appear smaller and how to achieve a compact hair style and make-up that make one’s head appear small. As Craik (1994) remarks, of similar make-over articles in the West, ‘The theme of these adaptations [is] … that misshapen bodies should be regarded as ‘problems’ to be rectified or disguised. The language of the makeovers is accordingly instructional, authoritative and critical’ (ibid.: 64). A ‘natural’ but problematic Japanese female body was thus eventually formulated: a round face (which is a common facial shape of the Japanese), which equals a big face, and therefore a big head, meaning a poorly balanced body, which needs correction (20 April 1979). A well-balanced body appears smarter, that is, fashionable. In order to achieve such a well-balanced fashionable body an unbalanced (misshapen) body needs to be corrected and disciplined. Therefore, making the face smaller or attaining a well-balanced body is to be achieved through disciplinary practices. ‘Normativities that govern the body are brought about by rigorous self-monitoring and training’ (Miller 2006: 10) and the selfmanagement to attain such an ‘appropriate’ body indicates self-control. Afterwards, the number of disciplinary practices regarding the face size and shape and how to correct the ‘wrong’ shape of a round (equals big) face continued to increase in the magazine with pedagogical advice from ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ such as fashion designers, make-up stylists and cosmetic surgeons. They categorize and classify the body into two groups: either having a small face or not, and having a well-balanced Westernized body or not. The body with the small face is reached through the process of comparing to (11 May 1980), contrasting with (1 February 1981; 5 February 1982) and imitating (1 February 1981; 13 June 1986) the ideal/desirable images of a Western woman. For an ‘ordinary’ Japanese reader who thinks that ‘I have a “misshapen” body’, achieving such an ‘ideal’ or ‘desirable’ perfect look embodied by the Other’s body is a psychologized practice involving emotions such as shame and inferiority. An interest in the practices of body-management and pedagogical accounts about incorrect bodies has, as a consequence, a self-reflective impact on readers. The magazines tempt ‘the reader to be more self-reflexive about her relation to fashion, cosmetics, and beauty, and to reflect upon her body in a new, detailed way – as object of her own creativity and control, as instrument of her own social power’ (Rabine 1994: 61). However, on this point Mary Evans (2002) comments on the relationship between the desirable body and the real body. She says that even in the context of the West the presentable and desirable body is depicted by high fashion and it does not represent normality. We can create an imagined ‘monster’ and impose that creation of the imagination onto a ‘real’ body (ibid.: 8), which for most people is unrealistic and unobtainable. As such, the essentializing of real Japanese female bodies through devaluation led to the constituting of a Westernized Japanese body. This is the nearest that Japanese women can hope to aspire to in terms of achieving the desirable Western body.

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indigenizing a western body anan issue no.1242 (26 November 2000) features articles on various disciplinary practices to achieve a ‘small face’, entitled: ‘“Small face beauty”: all girls want to get it! It is an eternal admiration’. The front cover presents a young white woman, trying to make her face appear smaller in an amusing way. Overall, the concern of this issue is less with examining the racialized Japanese body. Rather, focusing more on consumerism, the consumption of commodities related to slimming and lifting cosmetics and clothes to make the face look smaller, the issue provides all the aspects of disciplinary practices to obtain a ‘small face’. It begins with measuring the face size to recognize how big or small one’s face is; facial exercises to make the face smaller; steps to cure a swollen face, giving beauty treatment instructions on facial massage and face masks; the best cosmetics for firming and lifting up a sagging face; how to coordinate a well-balanced body look; and advising on the optimum diet for achieving a small face. Here, the most desirable head to body ratio changed from 1: 7.3, as in 1979, to the more reader-friendly, 1: 6.75 (Figure 5.1); most importantly, there is no Other’s body to compare with and contrast to in this process. Throughout the 1990s a significant shift in the formation of a desirable female body was the disappearance of exclusively Western-orientated images of the body. Instead the magazine fostered a new form of image, that is, a Westernized body with a Japanese face (9 October 1998) (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.1: The contemporary ideal ratio of face to body.

Figure 5.2: A Westernized body with a Japanese face. (Courtesy: SOMEDAY.) 108

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In this process a real Japanese woman’s figure is finally represented as an embodied entity, the prototypical image of the desirable Japanese woman’s body. This formation of a desirable Japanese female body was achieved not by the mimetic reproduction of the West seen in the representation of women in the 1950s and 1960s in which white models and actors were overwhelmingly used. Rather it was attained by indigenizing a Western body to the local condition of a Japanese woman being tall and slim and having long legs and arms with a typically Japanese face, which has been categorized as the round face. The desirable Japanese female body has come to be regarded as a Japanese female body not a borrowed one. We cannot find the explicit veneration of a Western body any more in the new form of the body. The indigenized body appeared more ‘democratized’ and popularized to young Japanese audiences. It has successfully served to construct ideas of a new desirable feminine body. Although the concern with having a small face still continues, the reference to the origin of the indigenized body, to the association of it with devaluation, has dropped out of the magazine’s text. The shift implies that the Western gaze, embedded in the magazines, observing the female body, which has long governed ‘the material and discursive construction of non-Western modernity, is now melting into a decentered gaze’ (Iwabuchi 2002: 45). As such, Japanese women have finally attained their own concept of a desirable body, Japanizing the Western body.

Conclusion The processes of appropriating, mixing and indigenizing the Westernized body with a Japanese face have become dominant themes in the media discourse about the Japanese female body. These women’s magazines have been the principal conduit of this debate. The 1990s saw that a clear boundary between the ‘Western body’ and ‘Japanese body’ as representated in women’s magazines was gradually weakened and made implausible. It was the period in which the culturally imperialistic view of the Japanese female body represented in the magazines shifted to the localized and indigenized. It also demonstrated that the conceptual framework of the globalization process does not simply mean the expansion of Americanized global mass culture. The meaning of the desirable female body has been dynamically reworked at the site of production and consumption in a Japanese context. The shift of the theoretical framework from cultural imperialism to globalization explains a switching of the images of the desirable female body from that of a Western woman towards that of the indigenized Japanese woman. It also brings about an accentuation of the form of the body as the corporeal structuring diversity and difference, that is, ‘an organization of diversity’ (Hannerz 1996: 102). Looking at the female body represented in the contemporary Japanese women’s magazines through a binary opposition of a Japanese body and a 109

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Western body misses out the complex formation of its desirability. The term ‘global-local nexus’, which Morley and Robins (Morley and Robins 1995) developed, explains the complex interrelation regarding the formation of the desirable female body. ‘Globalisation is, in fact, … associated with new dynamics of re-localisation. It is about the achievement of a new global-local nexus, about new and intricate relations between global space and local space’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 116). Another point is that the phenomenon of Japanizing the Western body that emerged in the 1990s is interwoven in the structuring of an asymmetrical and unequal cultural power that still exists. Explicit worship of the Western body cannot be seen in the media discourses, however, as ‘a form’ it still remains in the formation of the desirable body exemplified by ‘having a small face’, ‘having long legs’ and a ‘well-balanced body’ originally derived from Western images of the body. The form is nowadays embodied by the Japanese equivalent and reproduced as argued earlier. Young women have consumed Japanese versions of the Western-looking body as the Japanese body. As for the concern with the form of the body, an article entitled ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ written by Joanna Briscoe in The Guardian Weekend Magazine (17 January 2004) highlights that this is now a globally acknowledged phenomena in media discourse: the Caucasian standard of beauty has become globalized. This article gives examples of icons of black beauty such as Halle Berry and Beyoncé Knowles who conform to the ‘prevailing white aesthetic’. On this point Iwabuchi remarks in the context of East Asia: ‘Newly articulated particularism or localism in the local negotiation with globalizing forces testifies to the spread of common forms in which difference and diversity can be claimed’ (emphasis by Ishiguro) (Iwabuchi 2002: 43). As a result, the desirable female body is a site ‘where familiar difference and bizarre sameness are simultaneously articulated in multiple ways through the unpredictable dynamic of uneven global encounters’ (emphasis by Ishiguro) (ibid.: 15). However, further consideration needs to be given, in my future research, to the phenomenon, mentioned above, of women still being compelled to aspire to the Western body either directly or to its approximation in indigenized form. Finally, understanding the female body as corporeal matters in the feminist study of embodiment (Brook 1999; Davis 1997; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Young 1990, 2005). I have examined ‘racial bodies’ as discursively constructed in this chapter. A view here is that race is an effect of a process of racialization rather than its origin or cause. However, as Ahmed claims (2002) thinking of how that history impacts on bodies that are lived is also significant. The body is not simply an abstraction but is embedded in lived experience. As Kathy Davis (1997) claims, ‘embodied theory requires interaction between theories about the body and analyses of the particularities of embodied experiences and practices (ibid.: 15). This study was originally inspired by conversations with interviewees during my work on a PhD thesis (Ishiguro 2006). In the course of my interviews I 110

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became very interested in the ways in which contemporary female Japanese university students aged between eighteen and twenty interpret and embody the ‘racialized’ meanings of the female body represented in the magazines in their practices. One finding was that although very few interviewees conveyed a slight awareness of the continuing influence of the Western-origin desirable body most of them could not discern an uneven relationship between the original and the indigenized. Contemporary young Japanese women are attempting to embody neither a ‘Westernized’ nor a ‘ traditionally acknowledged Japanese’ body but something new and hybridized. However, as Beverly Skeggs (1997) asserts, recognition of how one is positioned is central to the process of subjective construction. Despite not seeing an uneven relationship the students are constantly aware of the difference between the real and imaginary Other’s body, and of how they themselves, having Japanese bodies, are positioned and classified. Identification and differentiation and negotiation are therefore significant processes for subject construction. The formation of the ‘form’ of the desirable body and the boundary of my/our body(ies) and ‘their’ body(ies) in the construction of their national identity require further investigation.

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FATness

Anna Lora-Wainwright

My first encounter with perceptions of fatness in rural China was very personal. I was baffled and perhaps even slightly upset to be told, upon my arrival in the village selected for my fieldwork in 2004, that I was ‘very fat’. With a height of 167 cm and a weight of 60 kg I had until then happily accepted the biomedical ideology which defines me as ‘normal’. As the months went by, I had occasion to realize that local parameters to assess fatness were somewhat different from my own. Being fat did not mean being massively overweight, it meant being strong enough to carry loads and engage in farming activities. Anyone who was not very skinny was simply considered fat. I also realized that to be told ‘You’ve put on weight’ was a compliment, used interchangeably with the expression ‘You look well’. This chapter examines how macrohistorical changes have affected attitudes to the body in contemporary rural China. The desirability of a ‘fat’ body is not interpreted in a unified way across generations, and what exactly constitutes ‘fatness’, health and ‘eating well’ remains a matter of contention. How is experience configured and made sense of? How does past experience (for instance of starvation) constitute present day experience, and perceptions of the body and health? How is taste established? How are differences negotiated at the table? Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural south-west China (Sichuan province), this chapter shows that the divergent experiences of starvation, relative wealth, and pressure to consume endow each age group with particular parameters for perceiving adequate diet – taste, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense – and result in conflicting attitudes at the table. In the introduction to this volume, Bryan Turner suggests that the dichotomy between nature and culture ought to be 113

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re-evaluated. This chapter suggests that historical experience is inseparable from the nexus nature–culture. Culturally situated understandings of fatness as healthy are taken as natural by those who have a particular historical baggage. Through examples, it reveals how seemingly natural and apolitical attitudes such as those to body size or taste for foods are engendered by specific historical, social, cultural and political-economic fields. Perceptions of the body thus present a prism through which to understand the impact of state policies on citizens. After Mao’s death in 1976, the new leadership advocated a series of social and economic reforms, in an attempt to revitalize economic stagnation. By going against the grain of much of Maoist ideology, reforms aimed at dismantling collectives and proposed that for the economy to prosper, some should be allowed to ‘get rich first’. Agrarian socialism was thus substituted with the ‘responsibility system’, dividing production among households. At the same time, the household registration system – which ties people to their place of residence – was loosened in order to allow migration, with some important consequences for family and social relations (Chan 1992; Croll 1994; Gao 1999; Link 2002; Perry and Selden 2003). All these changes brought about new opportunities for prosperity and mobility, yet amidst the enthusiasm lays a certain ambivalence. While some social groups have been able to take advantage in the new ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, for the majority, the demise of the Maoist collective dream has left in its wake anxiety, confusion and uncertainty. Indeed, not all areas of rural China benefited from the reforms and, at any rate, advantages were short-lived. Whilst incomes rose rapidly in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade the rising prices and inflation eroded most of the gains villagers had managed to accumulate. Disparities have widened, not only between regions and villages but also within them. Migration has been allowed in an attempt to tackle the problem of rural labour surplus, and although this does offer greater chances of employment, it also results in exploitation (Murphy 2002). Concerns with widening disparities and the perception of a decline in morality have been observed in many studies of rural China (see Chan 1992: 281; Gao 1999: 181). Overall, the recent changes have engendered new prospects, new demands and new risks as local economies are dependent on the nearby urban areas for income and opportunities and are thus vulnerable to market forces which are beyond the villagers’ experience, understanding and control. These changes have affected very visible generational differences in life experiences. Through examples from ethnographic research in Baoma village, this chapter illustrates how these differences are experienced and made manifest in bodily attitudes to fatness and health. Baoma village (a pseudonym), located in Langzhong municipality, is a hilly area in the north-east of the Sichuan basin, roughly 300 km from the provincial capital, Chengdu. Langzhong is poor by Sichuan’s standards, with an average yearly per capita income of roughly 2000 yuan (the equivalent of £135 in 2004–5) according to 2004 municipal records. While generational differences are explored in detail, this chapter also challenges simplistic and static conceptions of the generation gap by examining 114

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how young and old interact in the shared present characterized by the challenges of economic reforms. It highlights the complex and fluid ways in which the parameters defining healthy bodies are constantly ‘chewed over’ and reformulated. Different generations do not accept others’ claims to superiority unproblematically. Rather, they engage in dialogues and clashes which are fraught with claims to enduring hardship, adequate fulfilment of responsibility and familial duties and also enjoyment. As such, this chapter will show that consumerism, rather than being adopted unquestioningly, is judged in light of past experiences and present contexts. Villagers’ scepticism towards market food (such as milk, meat and snacks) and pride in their home-grown products also articulate an implicit criticism of the moral and political economy currently promoted by the Chinese state. Much of the data presented is based on my host family during fieldwork: a 36year-old landlady, whom I call Dajie [Elder/Big sister], her 36-year-old husband and their 12-year-old daughter, Lida [all names are pseudonyms]. Dajie worked as a farmer on their family’s allotment and her husband worked in the city as a carpenter. The particular exchange analysed in this chapter between Dajie, her daughter Lida, her mother, Ganma, and her mother-in-law will serve as an example of how generational differences in attitudes to the body are manifest through experiences of eating.

embodiment and Bodily dispositions Undeniably, the body has long been a matter of concern for anthropologists, yet only recently has the anthropology of the body become a field in its own right. A critical survey of this field is beyond the scope of this chapter. This section situates my approach vis-à-vis one major strand of development – the rise of the paradigm of embodiment and of its phenomenological study. Structuralist and poststructuralist approaches have considered the body as a site where social categories are inscribed, regarding bodies as signifiers of ‘local social and moral worlds’ (Martin 1987; Lock 1993: 135). Studies in these traditions are remarkable for highlighting that bodies are situated within historically contingent sociocultural settings. Yet the body itself is relegated to the position of object and thereby the lived experience of subjects is often absent. Thomas Csordas (1994; 2002) has promoted the concept of embodiment to fill this gap and to overcome the dichotomy between the body as an object of ideology and the body as an experiencing subject (Ots 1990; Farquhar 2002; Good 1994; Kleinman 1997). Although this concept succeeds, theoretically, in bridging the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, Csordas devotes relatively little consideration to social structures and social reproduction. Phenomenological interests seem to dominate his account to the detriment of more detailed analyses of the highly historical and political nature of the domains 115

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of common sense and embodied experience. While in Csordas’ work it remains unclear exactly how the ‘social’ is articulated, or what conflicts characterize it, this chapter examines the socio-historical processes by which bodily attitudes are formed and contested. For these reasons, it avoids the term embodiment and employs instead ‘attitudes to the body’ or ‘bodily dispositions’. This stance is not intended to repudiate attempts to account for the body as a subject and an object, but rather to address the balance with more attention to ideology and historical experience. The approach outlined by Judith Farquhar in her recent monograph on Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002) is more similar to that taken here. For Farquhar, bodies are never ‘innocent of discourse’ (ibid: 8), that is, they cannot be studied severed from their situatedness in the social and political conditions of everyday life. At the same time, such situatedness should not be understood with reference to a deeper structure, or to an abstract ideal of the body, nor as inscribed with meaning, but as ‘intrinsic to material life’ (ibid). Drawing from a variety of materials, ranging from newspaper accounts, films, novels and the everyday experiences of living in China she treats ‘bodies as formations of everyday life (temporal, dispersed, shifting) and everyday life as thoroughly suffused with discourses (collective, concrete, historical)’ (ibid). This chapter builds on Farquhar’s approach but focuses primarily on villagers’ daily practices surrounding their bodies, and how these intersect with wider social processes. It examines how experiences of eating are configured by past conditions, and the contrasting ideologies of Maoist and reform China. As such, this chapter is therefore also devoted to unpacking how perceptions of health have changed since the establishment of the People’s Republic. Hierarchies with regard to what constitutes a desirable body are informative of wider social processes and serve to reproduce or challenge social relations and values. Understanding the social changes underway as conversions of bodily dispositions may provide a more vivid account of how locals experience these transformations, and a closer awareness of the challenges they face.

have you eaten? Food shortage in the 1960s and 1970s As anyone who has lived in rural China would know, the typical greeting is ‘Have you eaten?’ (ni chile fan meiyou 你吃了饭没有?). This question is not a simple matter of formality and kindness, but it is also deeply rooted in the lived experience of food shortage. Fifteen-year-old Li Feng, explained that ‘only older people use that greeting, because they did not have food when they were younger, you know, that is why people ask each other if they have eaten’ (10 February 2005). Dajie similarly commented: When I was younger we did not have much food, so people of my age still find it normal to ask ‘have you eaten’, it was polite to ask, because it meant you were 116

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concerned for other people, and prepared to offer them food. But people in their twenties and younger don’t greet each other that way; they don’t know what it means. (14 February 2005)

Villagers in general agreed that food shortage was a reality until the late 1970s, although the most notorious time was at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s (Becker 1996; Kane 1988; Smil 2004; Yang 1996; Zhang 1994; Leonard and Flower 2006). Elucidating transitions in the agricultural calendar, Dajie referred to the imminent guyu 谷雨 or ‘grain rain’, when, according to a local proverb: ‘Old ladies cry’ (laotaipo ku 老太婆哭), because at that time, in the past, grains stored from the previous year finished, those produced in the new year were not ready to be harvested, and vegetables were not yet ripe. So there was nothing to eat. You ask my mum about what happened when they didn’t cook in their own house, they all ate together [between 1958 and 1961]. They never ate their fill. So now they say our generation has fun (hao shua 好耍), and we say they must have lacked ‘skills’ (mei benshi 没本事), otherwise they would have had food. (27 February 2005)

When Ganma, Dajie’s mother, born in 1942, visited her daughter that afternoon, Dajie raised the topic of famine with her. Ganma was very forthcoming with accounts about her village, and Dajie’s mother-in-law soon joined in the conversation, comparing these with her own memories of the famine in Baoma. Dajie’s mother began her recollections: I was in my teens in 1958 [at the start of the Greap Leap Forward and of collective cooking]. Living conditions were dreadful, we got up at 3am to feed the pigs and dig out sweet potatoes, and then it was off to the paddies. There was very little food, and most of it liquid. We never ate our fill. We ate grass, bran (kang 糠), the stuff we now feed to the pigs, we actually thought it was nice, you were lucky to get to eat that. So many people swelled up because of lack of food, and died. Mao was a good leader, but the local officials changed it all. We produced, but food was taken away, nobody knows where it went. Ground rice for instance, that went to hospitals but we didn’t know. And when higher officials asked if the village needed more food, local officials just pretended they had enough, so they would not lose face. And people starved to death. It got better after collective canteens were abolished [1961], better again after 1966 and better still after Mao’s death [1976]. But after Mao corruption became more fierce. In the past it was more just and equal, we were all poor; now the rich get richer and richer and the poor get poorer and poorer.

Dajie’s mother-in-law was keen to tell her side of the story. Yes, we ate grass we now give to the pigs. They [village officials] checked you before you went to the toilet to see that you didn’t hide food. Our neighbour was beaten for taking a bite of a raw sweet potato in the field. Many died. Another neighbour tried to live on half her allotted portion of rice and feed her children with the rest. She starved to death. 117

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Dajie, who seemed absorbed by the tales, commented ‘You had it worse here (in Baoma) than in our village’. But she refused to take the position of someone who had an easy life, as is usually ascribed to those in their thirties and younger by the older generations. She added: Even I remember when I was little [in the 1970s], there was no food, we went to bed hungry … We only ate twice a day. Sometimes we would just eat ground maize everyday. If we were lucky, we had rice porridge for breakfast and noodles for dinner. Families had so many children to look after, and they were busy in the fields all day. My eldest brother [born in 1963] went to work in the fields and when he came home he was so tired he would put his mouth on the edge of the table, shove the food in from the bowl, and then fall asleep right there … If we got to eat steamed rice we would run around and boast to the other children. Up until the 1980s there were times when we had little food and had to eat bran (kang 糠) … that’s horrible and very difficult to digest.

Other villagers’ accounts of the famine resembled closely that presented by Ganma. All talked of the widespread ‘water swelling illness’ (shuizhong bing 水肿病) due to starvation in the late 50s and early 60s. Those old enough to work in the fields remembered working hard but not being given enough food. Those who were children at that time remember with a great sense of loss the local school closing due to famine and being required to work. Whereas Dajie listened attentively to her mother’s tales, her daughter Lida irreverently dismissed much of her grandmother’s narration, claiming ‘I have a hard life at school too. And if you worked so hard you should have had food, how come you didn’t? People were lazy and left it to the others to work’. Her maternal grandmother was unsurprised by Lida’s attitude, which was widespread amongst children throughout fieldwork. Ganma recited a saying about the past: Carrots and kernels are sweet, we will soon celebrate New Year, children want to eat meat, grown ups have no money, [we] wait for a turn of fortune, [when we] will eat meat at every meal, as if we were celebrating New Year (hong luobo mimi tian, jianjian yao guo nian, haizi xiang chi rou, daren meiyou qian, dengdao shi yun zhuan, dundun chi rou ru guo nian 红萝卜咪咪甜, 渐渐要过年, 孩子想吃肉, 大人没有钱, 等到拾运转, 顿顿吃肉如过年).

Lida brightened up, and perhaps in an attempt to claim some knowledge of the conditions endured in the recent past, she told her grandmother ‘I know this saying’. Ganma replied severely ‘What do you know! You only know good fun! (ni xiaode ge shazi, ni zhi xiaode hao shua 你晓得个啥子, 你只晓得好耍!)’.

generational differences: health, Fatness and Taste for Food The generational differences observable through testimony relating to diet, much of it touching explicitly on the historical past, proved to be glaring, and central to 118

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shaping contemporary concerns. Experiences of famine and food shortage have fostered a perception of the ability to eat and one’s ‘fatness’ as parameters for health among most villagers, except the youngest. Dajie often boasted that when her thin husband had a cold he would be out of action for days and only able to eat rice porridge, whereas she could still work, and would recover in a couple of days. Xiao Peng, a very thin woman in her thirties suffering with rheumatisms since the birth of her son in 1995, enjoyed showing me pictures of herself when she was ‘healthy and fat’ (shenti duo hao, duo pang 身体多好、多胖). She saw her loss of weight as an integral part of her illness, and often wished she could eat more and put on weight. For her, being fat meant being strong and able to work; it also meant being less likely to fall ill with colds and flu. Another villager offered a similar case. Aunt Zhang, an energetic and cheerful local woman in her early fifties suddenly fell ill in December 2004 with headaches, aversion to light and ringing in her ears. The aspect which troubled her the most however was her decreased appetite. ‘I always used to eat a lot, now I can only really eat rice porridge, and only two bowls, and then I feel ill’ (5 December 2004). Her lack of energy exacerbated the problem. ‘How can I not worry? Everywhere I look there are things that need doing’ (ibid.). Aunt Zhang felt frustrated at her condition because she ‘had never got ill before’, and was convinced that the most significant feature of her problem was her (relative) inability to eat. Eating and fatness, in other words, were synonymous with well-being and lack of appetite synonymous with illness. This perception of a fat body as equivalent to a healthy body is historically produced by experiences of food shortage. But it also interacts with and is reinforced by present conditions. Many young adults leave rural areas in search of a paid occupation, often as far away as Beijing and Shenzhen (Murphy 2002). This is intended to supplement the meagre income earned through farming, and to face rising living costs (especially of education and healthcare). Yet subsistence agriculture still remains a crucial guarantee of security in the setting created by the unpredictable effects of the market. For those who stay in the countryside then, eating one’s fill remains the bodily sine qua non of farming life, and ‘fatness’, defined as the strength and vitality required to carry heavy loads, continues to be a desirable bodily quality. This is in stark contrast with the experiences and attitudes towards food amongst Chinese children born at a time of relative wealth. A 57-year-old woman caring for her 6-year-old grandson during the summer holidays concluded a recollection of the famine in the 1960s with the comment ‘Our country was so poor’. The child was quick to reply ‘Your country is poor, not mine’ (July 2005). Indeed, as was clear in Lida’s exchange with her grandmother, he could not relate to the experiences of his grandparents, nor to the poverty they described. An edited volume by Jun Jing (2000) offers some poignant examples of generational differences in attitudes to food. Jing quotes playwright Huang Zongjiang’s portrayal of a Beijing family scene. A father reprimands his daughter for her scornful look at steamed cornmeal buns, reminding her ‘You must not forget your class origin’. The girl replies ‘Your class origin is cornmeal buns… 119

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mine is chocolate’ (Jing 2000a: 25; see also Guo 2000). The similarity between the line in Huang’s play and the exchange I witnessed in Baoma is striking, highlighting the extent to which generational differences characterize diverse attitudes to the body and food. As the exchange between Lida, Dajie, Ganma and Dajie’s mother-in-law highlights, the very parameters for what constitutes fatness and adequate diet are inseparable from historical experience, and therefore vary along generational lines. The ideal for those who had experienced food shortage was to eat one’s fill (chibao 吃饱; mainly grains and one basic dish of vegetables and occasionally fat meat). Fostering a healthy ‘fat’ body for them entailed eating roughly 500 g of grain (wheat and rice) per day. Even as they acquired the financial means to afford a more varied diet, Dajie and her mother were not predisposed to invest in it. As far as they were concerned, the present village diet, which included eating meat (mostly pork fat) once or twice per week, was one of relative luxury, compared to their past experiences as they are outlined above. As she put it: ‘We ate simple food, but I still grew to be healthy and fat. Look at all these children eating milk powder, milk, convenience noodles and lean meat every day. And they are still not as energetic as us. That stuff is fake, you don’t know what’s in it. Food from the market is unreliable, it always makes me sick. Once you’ve eaten your fill that’s all you need’ (20 June 2005). A very similar tone was taken by a retired village school teacher who cares for his two granddaughters: ‘I do not feed them milk powder or anything like that, they just eat our own food: vegetables, rapeseed oil, rice. This is a healthy diet’ (12 July 2005). But for Dajie’s daughter Lida, eating was not about eating her fill or maintaining a ‘fat’ body; it was about eating well (chihao 吃好), enjoying her food. Children were often very fussy about food and liked to consume milk and expensive snacks like biscuits and sweets. Although their access to these products remained limited, especially compared to their city peers, children’s desire for and access to commoditized food was far in excess of their grandparents and parents’ experiences. Judged by her own standards then, Lida’s diet, which included pork only once a week and no fashionable snacks and milk products, was one of relative poverty; accordingly she felt entitled to complain that her diet was inadequate. As far as her mother and grandmother were concerned however, it was entirely adequate, because she ate her fill at every meal. The different attitudes to food among these three generations are clearly elucidated with reference to their bodily dispositions. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology (1984), while Ganma’s and Dajie’s attitude demonstrated a ‘taste of necessity’, Lida’s was (comparatively) a ‘taste of luxury’ (ibid: 177). The former, argues Bourdieu, is the outcome of endeavours to reproduce labour power at the lowest cost, as was incumbent upon China’s older generation especially during the famine but also since then. This in turn produced a taste for the most filling and most economical foods. The latter (‘taste of luxury’) is the product of living conditions defined by distance from necessity and by the possession of capital 120

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(ibid). This would certainly accord with the conditions that Lida found herself in, with a relative abundance of foods such as meat, milk and snacks in comparison with her mother’s and grandmother’s habitual diets. Taste in food, Bourdieu maintains, is not the simple product of economic necessity, rather ‘necessity is fulfilled, most of the time, because the agents are inclined to fulfil it’ (ibid: 178). Taste is ‘amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary’ (ibid.). In other words, taste is produced by one’s living conditions in the past and in the present and tends to reproduce itself because it becomes regarded as natural. For Bourdieu, understanding taste as embodied and as linked to the reproduction of class differences shows that class differences themselves are embodied, and materialized through taste. Taste for food thereby depends on class definitions of the body, its strength, health and beauty. Differences noted by Bourdieu between social classes and status groups are visibly mapped across the generational divide in the contemporary Chinese setting (Lora-Wainwright 2006). For the older generation, the importance of eating one’s fill and of fostering a ‘fat’ body went hand in hand, both the product of experiences of food shortage. By contrast, for Lida’s generation, the emphasis lay on eating well, defined through the inclusion of meat, milk and fashionable snacks.

unpacking the generation gap The gap in life experiences between grandparents who had starved in the 1960s and parents who migrate in search of a paid occupation is in itself already great. Even greater is the gap between the generation of grandparents and their grandchildren, who have been brought into close contact by the prominence of migration amongst those in their twenties to early forties. Yet the varying degrees to which parents and grandparents adopt the ideal of ‘eating well’ in providing for young children begin to show that approaching the generation gap as a clear-cut division is at least partly inadequate. Aunt Min presents a clear example of a grandparent who adopted the ideal of eating well in caring for her grandson: Our son is working as a migrant in Shenzhen. We [her and her husband] built this house three times, always on our own, and we carried the building material on our shoulders up the hill [roughly 40 m up from the main village street]. We finished in 2000, and hoped we could rest, but then our son went away to work and we have to look after his son. We had such a hard life that now our health is poor, I get colds (ganmao 感冒) easily, so we want to make sure our grandson grows healthy and does not suffer like we did. So we feed him well, buy him fresh milk and milk powder. First I thought I would buy soymilk, but I noticed my neighbour buys milk powder and her grandson is in such good health. So I started buying him the same milk powder, and some good fresh milk. (23 August 2004) 121

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Evidence of their investment – fresh milk cartons and tins of milk powder – lay across the room, and the child danced in front of the TV, clutching a small milk bottle and screaming insistently for biscuits. Babies up to a year old usually had bulging cheeks and their grandparents would boast about this as evidence of adequate care and provision. Children up to twelve years old often demanded milk and yoghurt drinks, and some were given one or even two small cartons a day (in the latter case, the child’s parents lived in Langzhong city, and bought the milk themselves to bring it to the village). Abundant literature has suggested that the rise of a generation of spoilt ‘little emperors’ is the result of two factors. Firstly, it may be due to a ‘compensation syndrome’: carers who endured hardship and thus were determined to give their offspring every possible advantage (McNeal 1992). Secondly, more recent social policies have also exerted a considerable impact. Along with the economic reforms, the post-Mao period saw the implementation of the one child policy. In time, this brought ‘dramatic speculation concerning changing childhood socialisation … [and exposing] the psychological ill consequences of the onechild-per-family policy on a new generation of single children’ (Wu 1996: 2). This phenomenon has been referred to as the ‘4–2–1 syndrome’ (four grandparents, two parents, one child) giving rise to the formation of xiao huangdi, ‘little emperors’. It entails parents spending a large proportion of their income on their child’s toys and clothes and on books and magazines on child care and development (Davin 1991: 47; Davis and Sensenbrenner 2000; Jing 2000). Albeit more prominent in urban China, this problem was visible at the time of my fieldwork; it manifested in villagers’ investment in various snacks and nutritious products for children, and in their attitudes to children at the table. Typically, the best food was either put into the child’s bowl, or the child took it without much deliberation or apologies for depriving other diners. Those up to six years old were usually unruly at the table, and sometimes wasteful without being scolded for it. Although children’s nutrition may have been afforded primacy before the reform era (before the 1980s), the proliferation of opportunities for consumption in the present allows it to develop in innovative and historically specific ways. Paradoxically, efforts by parents and grandparents who experienced food shortage fostered a taste for ‘eating well’ in young children. It also reinforced amongst children a sense of entitlement to types of food that they are likely to retain as they become adults, and which radically differentiates them from their parents and grandparents. Experiences of past shortage, relative wealth in the present and the implementation of the one child policy have conspired to fashion children who demand more than simply a full stomach. Some parents and grandparents followed the parameters fostered by the rising consumerist economy and defined health no longer on the basis of fatness or eating one’s fill, but also according to new standards of ‘eating well’. Yet not all parents and grandparents adopted these new parameters according to which a healthy child is fostered by milk and other products currently 122

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marketed as nutritious. Indeed, grandparents and parents who have experienced relative food shortage but also relative wealth are not necessarily inclined to make use of their new resources to invest in comparatively expensive food products. Pork, for instance, is widely recognized as one of the parameters according to which ‘eating well’ is defined. An average current cost (September 2007) for this type of meat is 13 yuan per 500 g, which is roughly one third of a daily wage for Dajie’s husband and those with a paid occupation in the nearby city. Dajie and her mother alike are accustomed to having limited access to pork (and meat in general). She recalled that when she was younger, she may have eaten it only once or twice a month, and yet she stressed that she still grew up to be a healthy woman. Based on that experience, she felt no urge to buy meat more frequently. But Dajie’s attitude was not simply formed sometime in the past to later remain unchanged. It is also part of her life trajectory, of how she perceived the recent social changes and the rise of consumerism (Lora-Wainwright 2007). Dajie maintained that eating one’s fill was important, and did not place equal emphasis on eating well. She had come to internalize the historical circumstances which made meat inaccessible, but her attitude was also an active engagement with the environment of the reforms, articulating a sense of scepticism towards a political economy which emphasizes consumption. Home-grown foods, foods over whose content one has more control, constitute for her a healthy alternative to market products (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Fresh pork purchased in the market was seen in this light because, as for other villagers, she was acutely aware that pigs may be fed genetically modified (GM) foods (a recurrent ambivalence phrased in terms of ‘you don’t know what’s in it’). More broadly then, her attitude articulated a scepticism towards recent developments, such as the introduction of fertilizers and GM foods, and of the consumer culture engendered by reforms. For those who endured famine or relative food shortages, eating well as it is defined by children does not necessarily constitute healthy bodies, and conversely the failure to do so does not necessarily make for unhealthy ones. Health is produced through food from the villagers’ own allotment, attesting to their will to withstand the social pressure to consume milk powder or fashionable snacks. Far from accepting the new consumer mentality, those like Dajie articulate competing claims about what constitutes health. As these examples illustrate, modes of engagement with the field of eating are both a product of past experiences and emblematic of one’s life trajectory. Three recurrent claims made by the villagers serve to further unsettle a simplistic decoding of the transition from collectivism to market reforms as wholly positive. The first was ‘pigs now eat better than we used to’. This refers to the fact that in recent years, maize has been farmed to breed pigs whereas it used to be an integral part of villagers’ diet, and one was lucky to be eating maize at all. This claim points to a sense that the present is far better than the past. Villagers however did not blindly polarize a past of deficiency as opposed to a present of indulgence. Indeed, a second, equally frequent claim indicates a level of 123

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disillusionment with narratives of past bitterness and present happiness. As Dajie commented above, ‘we ate simple food, but I still grew to be healthy and fat’. Finally, many noted, much as Ganma did, ‘at least back then we were all poor’. In Judith Farquhar’s recent monograph (2002), a related account emerges to that presented here, in which transformations from the ethics of serving the people to the reformist emphasis on consumerism and their corresponding forms of embodiment have occurred gradually, and the hegemony of Maoism still affects embodied habits in the present (ibid: 10–11). Indeed, if there are clear differences between generations due to undeniable differences in their life experiences, the present is however not seen as an adequate antidote to the past. The current propensity to excess is seen as a reaction to past deficiency but not a simple opposite. Farquhar concludes that ‘only if people periodize and displace hunger and shortage, placing these deficiencies firmly in the past of a discredited state socialism, can they indulge in today’s voracious consumption with a clean conscience and a strong stomach’ (ibid: 136, see also Yue 1999). Findings in Baoma show that villagers were far from regarding deficiency as a feature of the past. Rather, they insisted that their continued material lack was now starkly opposed to the riches of some of their urban counterparts. If anything, locals regarded unevenness to be a growing rather than a waning malaise. Their outlooks indicate some current developments, while also highlighting dissatisfaction with the growing inequalities between rich and poor, between city and countryside. No villager ever expressed a wish to return to the hardships of the past, but they complained that those hardships were not a distant reality for them as they may be for those who benefited more fully from the reforms. Periodizing deficiency and relegating it to the past is a strategy to legitimize the current political economy and emphasize its positive effects over their corollary of uneven development. China’s current leaders are fully aware of the need to face up to rural–urban inequalities. Premier Wen Jiabao’s government work report and the policy plans drawn up as part of the government’s new five year plan (2006–10) were presented to the fourth session of the Tenth National People’s Congress on 14 March 2006 (People’s Daily Online 2006a). The plan stressed the importance of building a ‘new socialist countryside’, by increasing rural investment and agricultural subsidies and improving social services. Amongst its aims is the resolution of two problems villagers were particularly vociferous about: education and healthcare. In response to the first: ‘The nine-year compulsory education in rural areas will be secured by the public financial system starting from this year. The central government will invest 125.8 billion yuan (US$15.2 billion) and local governments 92.4 billion yuan (US$11.1 billion) into the programme’. In response to the second: ‘Starting from this year, both the central and local governments will spend more to construct the rural co-operative medical service system, which is scheduled to cover the countryside by the end of 2008. And a three-level rural health care service network will be established by 2010 to satisfy residents’ needs’ (People’s Daily Online 2006b). 124

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As part of this effort, starting in 2006, all school fees for primary and middle school in rural China have been lifted. Yet, as Baoma villagers complained in April 2007, rural children attending middle school are required to reside in school accommodation and to eat at the school’s canteen. These costs are roughly 500 yuan per term, which is a little more than families used to pay for school fees. But, Dajie commented, ‘The food is disgusting and not nutritious, I have to go to the school gates with some food every now and then, so Lida has a better diet, because she has already lost weight since she moved into the school residence, and she always complains the food does not taste good’. Children’s pervasive answer to the question ‘How’s the food in school?’ was inevitably ‘Really bad (tai bu hao chi le 太不好吃了)’ (April 2007). Villagers explained that ‘schools are like businesses, they want to make money but not to spend any’ (52-year-old villager, April 2007). In ways which resemble Susan Brownell’s findings amongst Chinese athletes (Brownell 1995: 256), villagers felt that schools’ failure to adequately provide for children’s nutrition may be seen as an inadequacy of the state provisions more widely.

Conclusion A micropolitics of how attitudes to the body are produced, and how they work to reproduce or challenge social relations, emerges through a focus on fatness and wellbeing in rural China. My discussion offers the outlines of the interface between the embodied experience of eating and historically contingent social processes and cultural values. The example of intergenerational differences articulated through bodily engagements elucidates that competing parameters for what constitutes health and illness are less given than they are contested, and hold important effects for social relations. Generational identities are in that sense produced through eating practices and attitudes. There are crucial differences between the ways in which people perceived themselves and how they were perceived by those of a different generation. As we have seen with Dajie, the grandparents’ generation accuse those in their thirties and younger of being lazy, and unable to endure hardship. Dajie however argues that her generation has its own challenges, both physical and in terms of lack of funds for education and taxes. Children also refute the claim that their lives are easy, arguing that they have to face difficulties, such as competitiveness and a demanding education system, which older family members have not experienced. These clashes serve to articulate contending claims to authority based for some on the experience of hardship or the proclaimed ability to endure it, and for others on the skills which enable them to undertake tasks which are demanding, but not equally wearing on a physical level. Referring to Michel Foucault and to Giorgio Agamben, Bryan Turner (Introduction) reflects on the relationship between the state’s sovereignty and its power over the individual body. My contribution highlights that corporeal experience is inseparable from the state’s intervention in villagers’ daily lives – whether through policies which resulted in mass starvation, or through family125

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planning directives which impacted on family configurations and patterns of care for children. The examples of villagers in Baoma show that bodies and state policies and the forms of political economy they produce are intimately tied in a variety of ways. Firstly, starvation due to the Great Leap Forward has reinforced a sense that chibao, eating one’s fill, is more important than eating well, and sufficient to produce healthy bodies. Similarly, reliance on agriculture during the collective period has fostered an equivalence between fatness (for which we must read physical strength) and well-being. Secondly, the current shift from subsistence agriculture towards a wage economy has not created a complete break from agriculture, and therefore fatness remains an important asset. Indeed, wage earners also rely on the ‘fat’ bodies of their parents who remain in the village farming and caring for their grandchildren. Present and past, in other words, are combined to reinforce the link between fatness and health. A third observation is that the state’s family-planning policies, requiring families to have only one child, have produced a generation of children who have immensely more resources at their disposal, and carers often willing to invest them. Fourthly, investments in children’s health however do not necessarily conform to the consumerist ideology and rely on market goods ranging from meat to milk powder and convenience noodles. In as much as carers question the desirability and reliability of these products, as did Dajie and the retired schoolteacher, they also actively engage with the government’s emphasis on getting rich and consuming wealth. Lastly, the apparent failure of schools to produce or maintain healthy children may ultimately be seen as part of the state’s wider failure to provide for the health of its citizens. Overall, villagers equating fatness and well-being may serve, paradoxically, as a critique of both the excesses of the present and the deficiencies of the past – a moral commentary on the shifts of the reform period. The past is constituted to speak to the present, while attitudes fostered in the present (such as a rejection of consumer culture) are employed to reconfigure memories of the past. Having emerged from fifteen months of village diet apparently ‘fat’ and healthy by local standards but also severely anaemic, I was alerted to the clashing parameters for health and the inadequacies of local diet as it affected my own body. Indeed, attention to social, cultural and economic contexts indicates that villagers claimed that fat is healthy, because ‘health’ is perceived as the ability to work hard, and ‘fatness’ enabled them to do so. Eating thus is not simply an idiom for expressing social relations and social change; it is also a powerfully embodied reality which villagers shape as they engage innovatively with new fields. If different social groups eat differently, conversely social groups are ‘made’ through eating practices and inclusion or exclusion in shared meals. Local perceptions of health and fatness tell us as much about their bodies as about the social conditions in which they live and have lived, about how selves are formed and relationships reproduced or contested. If, at least for some, being fat still means being healthy, deficiency may not be relegated to the discredited socialist past, but rather perceived as an enduring reality. 126

PART iii T he B ody

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s TATe

7 S eKi J ūrōJi And The J APAnese B ody: m ARTiAL A RTs , K oKutai , And C iTizen –s TATe R eLATions in m eiJi J APAn Denis Gainty

introduction Kokutai – literally ‘national body,’ but variously translated as ‘national polity,’ ‘national essence,’ or ‘national community’ – is generally understood to be a central ideological principle of the modern (1868–1945) Japanese state. Often invoked alongside the ‘emperor system’ (tennōsei) and mytho-historical notions of bushidō, or the ‘way of the warrior,’ kokutai is understood to have been a fluid complex of ideas employed by the state in an effort to guide the behaviour and thoughts of the Japanese populace. In sources from government proclamations in early years of the Meiji period (1868–1912) to legal codes and government publications in the militaristic 1930s, kokutai acted as a sort of catch-all for everything that was to be cherished about modern Japan. While its specific content may have varied with the times, its basic function of capturing that which was good about Japan did not. It is in this context that kokutai is usually discussed, and most analyses more or less agree with Repp’s (1999) contention that kokutai is best understood as a ‘significant ideological construct’ that both ‘define[d] the national identity … (and) legitimize[d] Japan’s military intrusions into other countries’ (ibid.: 244). Fewer authors, as LaFleur (2001) observes, pay attention to kokutai’s specifically bodied nature. However, pronouncements by Meiji government figures such as 129

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Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 echo pre-Meiji writings on the kokutai by authors like Aizawa Seishisai 会沢正志斎 in positing a physical, embodied link between emperor and subjects. These specifically physical visions of the kokutai, along with later interpretations by historians, create together the idea of a kokutai metaphor by which ordinary citizens were subsumed into the great body of the Japanese nation. But as Gluck (1985) has argued, modern Japanese ideologies were a contested and messy business; the definition of the national body was not the sole provenance of Meiji statesmen or Shōwa militarists. In December of 1893, a farmer and sword teacher from Nagano prefecture named Seki Jūrōji 関重郎治 became the first to petition the Japanese Ministry of Education to adopt instruction in Japanese swordsmanship or gekiken as a component of the physical education curriculum in the national public school system. His petitions built on decades of controversy over the place of martial arts in physical education and the role of citizen bodies in modern Japan, and they showed deep concern with the relationship between individual Japanese bodies and the health of an explicitly embodied state. The movement to insert martial arts into the state-sponsored regime for training Japanese bodies – which initially met with disapproval and opposition from most representatives of the modern Japanese state – succeeded thanks in large part to the work of the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association, or Dainippon Butokukai. Founded in 1895 and swelling to over three million members before its dissolution under Allied occupation in 1946, the Butokukai was the single entity most responsible for the definition of modern Japanese martial arts as well as for the inclusion of those practices in public physical education. Thanks to its efforts and those of individuals like Seki, both jūdō and kendō were formally approved in 1911 as middle and normal school elective courses, and in 1918 the Ministry of Education issued a directive approving both for primary school students. In 1931, the Ministry instituted mandatory martial arts classes. Despite the Butokukai’s strong ties to various state structures, the success of petitioners like Seki and the Butokukai points to an important interruption of the coercive, disciplinary kokutai described above. Not only did Seki’s theoretical model of citizen and state envision a significant and active role for individual bodies in the health of the kokutai, but Seki’s and other martial artists’ success in lobbying for the state’s adoption of that model presents us with a practical example of the agency wielded by individual citizens. And this agency was generated not in resistance to, but precisely through the appropriation and manipulation of, state physical education and the kokutai metaphor. In this chapter, I suggest that the example of Seki and the Butokukai and their claims for the bodied, national power of individuals may push against treatments of the modern Japanese body and the kokutai that foreground structural/ideological explanations and emphasize the disciplining of individuals. 130

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I argue that Seki’s vision of the martial body was a complex and effective bid for power on the national stage, structured in part through the appropriation of cultural capital associated with the newly defunct samurai class and articulated through ideas of nationalism that privileged rather than dismissed the work of individuals. Further, I contend that this bid for bodied power, precisely because it is difficult to reconcile with standard interpretations of kokutai and modern Japanese bodies, may suggest the value of other theoretical approaches to bodies in individual–collective relations in order to enrich definitions of body and individual at work in modern Japanese history.

The Kokutai and the Japanese Body Before dealing with the interpretations of state and individual Japanese bodies offered in writings of Seki and the Butokukai, it is useful here to explore how the kokutai metaphor evolved and to cite some examples of how both the kokutai idea and body theory have been presented in writings on modern Japan. While Repp may have exaggerated in his claim that Western authors have ‘rather neglected’ the topic of kokutai (1999: 244), it may fairly be said that most works on kokutai tend to emphasize its coercive nature (Maruyama 1963, Irie 1986) even if multiply defined (Gluck 1985) or fractured (Garon 1986). And to be fair, there exists good reason for casting the kokutai as a tool of the state and its agents. Many Japanese presentations of the kokutai, from Yamaga Sokō’s 山鹿素行 Tokugawa-era writings on society and Aizawa Seishisai’s 会沢正志斎 1825 Shinron to Meiji-era works by government figures and extending through to 1930s government publications, gave a one-sided view of the national body. While each such presentation answers specific questions posed by its historical context, the idea of devotion to the state was a strong constant factor. Moreover, the state was often represented physically by the emperor himself. In Shinron, Aizawa argues that for a government in which ‘the people should be of one mind ... cherish their sovereign ... [and] be unable to bear being separated from him’ (Tsunoda 1958: 91). The notion of attachment to the Imperial body is further developed in Meiji rescripts promulgated by the emperor. In the ‘Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors’ (gunjin chokuyu) of 1882, the emperor tells members of the armed forces that he will ‘rely upon [them] as [his] limbs’ and that they should ‘look up to [him] as [their] head’ (Tsunoda 1958: 199). The somatic relationship between soldiers and Emperor (and, therefore, citizens and state) is striking. Writings by Meiji politicians such as Itō Hirobumi brought themes of kokutai and Imperial body together as well: in 1889, for example, Itō argued against a separation of powers because sovereignty was like ‘the human body’ and ‘based on our national polity (kokutai)’ (Tsunoda 1958: 160, 161). ‘Modern scholars,’ he states in another address, ‘... say that the state is like a human body ... just as one 131

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brain controls the diverse actions of the limbs and other parts, so should one supreme power superintend and control all the other members of a nation’ (Tsunoda 1958: 162). Later developments, such as the promulgation of the 1935 Peace Preservation Law and the Ministry of Education’s 1937 publication and widespread dissemination of the Kokutai no Hongi, or Cardinal Principles of the Kokutai, helped to cement the idea of kokutai as an ideological tool that employed the metaphor of the body to discipline and subsume individuals into the work of the state (Tsunoda 1958: 278–79). The idea of the coercive kokutai fits with general and long-standing trends in histories of modern Japan. Despite the cleavage between modernization and Marxist schools in early post-war histories of Imperial Japan, both took up the idea of tennōsei ideorogi or ‘emperor-system ideology.’ Such histories paid attention to how the state and its agents used ideology to mobilize the Japanese populace, but less to the possibility that the populace itself had a hand in the course of Japanese history. What agency existed is often characterized as resistance to a hegemonic system and therefore outside the normal apparatus of power (Irokawa 1985; Ketelaar 1990). And even when power is accorded to citizens within rather than against the state, ultimate emphasis is often placed on the state’s work in ‘molding minds’ (Garon 1997). Such formulations serve to privilege the work of the state and related systems of power. And despite considerable refinement of this top-down understanding of ideology and its workings, the idea of a power structure that works on passive or resistant subjects rather than consisting of individual agents remains strong; an ideological system of coercion, a dominant state, or a disciplinary episteme often remains the implicit centre around which such new histories are woven. As Platt (2004: 19) observes: ‘The bulk of the scholarship on modern Japan that can be categorized as local history has, ironically, functioned to reaffirm the nation as the proper subject of history’. The kokutai, while less commonly addressed than the ‘emperor system,’ has functioned as a similar focus in considerations of how citizens were mobilized and controlled by the modern Japanese state. This is especially apparent in the historian Irokawa Daikichi’s seminal work on popular history of the Meiji period. As Gluck (1978) describes, Irokawa and his ‘people’s histories’ or minshūshi movement set out to ‘revive the individual as an agent of historical change, to make the people into the subjects’ (ibid.: 26). In this pursuit, Irokawa (1985) wrote on the phenomenon of ‘people’s constitutions’ penned by educated villagers hopeful for the possibility of a new Japan. According to Irokawa, however, such hopes were dashed. Not only was the ‘freedom and people’s rights movement’ (jiyūminken undō) a victim of elite machinations, but the constitutions penned under its auspices seemed unable to break free from the hegemonic work of kokutai and emperor. For Irokawa, kokutai was ‘the very heart’ of the emperor system (ibid.: 247); frequent reference to kokutai in popular constitutions, then, undercut their ‘liberal’ ideals and constituted either ‘political realism’ on the part of authors or their inability to escape a historically-rooted episteme (ibid.: 258). 132

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If the kokutai is a poison pill the invocation of which necessarily subjugates the individual, then Irokawa is correct in damning his constitution-authoring subjects. But in addition to contesting Marxist historiography, as Gluck (1978) argues, Irokawa’s position might paradoxically feed into it; for even as he celebrates their agency, Irokawa is unable to believe that his subjects really could have wanted what they claimed to. Surely, he argues, they must have been forced – knowing or not – into adhering to the kokutai model, for what truly free person would voluntarily ally him/herself with such an antiquated and repressive concept? Here, I think that Irokawa does an injustice to his subjects and his argument; rather than looking for ways in which his subjects’ choices might have made sense – that is, ways in which invocations of kokutai served and benefited them – Irokawa assumes both a negative value for kokutai and powerlessness for his subjects and proceeds from there. As Platt (2004) argues, Irokawa seems trapped by his own assumptions about the binary nature of ‘the state’ and ‘the people,’ and bewildered by the fluidity of actors who seem to exhibit elements of both. The idea of a disciplinary and ideologically laden kokutai wielded by the state seems consonant not only with general trends in Japanese historiography but also with scholarly attention to modern Japanese bodies. Gluck’s treatment of the precise physical performance demanded of subjects reading the Imperial Rescript on Education (1985: 148), for example, is typical of interpretations of physical practice in modern Japan in that attention is paid to the way in which conformity is obtained through bodies. And examples such as Fujitani’s (1994) work on the disciplining of conscript bodies, examinations of (early) modern Japanese sexuality by Pflugfelder (1999) and Frühstück (2003), and Botsman’s (2005) study of punishment in modern Japan each draw significantly on models of disciplinary knowledge through which Japanese bodies were controlled and defined by medical, scientific, military, or penal – that is, specifically modern – modes of thought. In these examples, great care is taken to illuminate the means by which bodies were disciplined – by the state, by ideologies, by a murkily persuasive episteme. Less is said about the possibility of agency experienced by Japanese bodies. This inclination may be attributed largely to the influence of authors such as Michel Foucault on theories of the body and modernity. Works such as his landmark Discipline and Punish (1979b) did much to define contemporary approaches to the problem of modern bodies in society. As numerous critics have observed, however, Foucault’s notion of an epistemic production and maintenance of definitions of body left little possibility for individual agency. Quoting Foucault’s contention that ‘the individual is an effect of power’, Bevir (1999: 65) observes that a ‘hostility to the subject runs throughout Foucault’s oeuvre’. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notions of ‘habitus’ and ‘bodily hexis,’ although arguably more open to the idea of agency, also tend to emphasize the workings of social forces on the individual through embodiment, and not the reverse. Drawing on such modern body theory, analyses of modern Japanese bodies have tended to focus on 133

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the structural, oppressive power of the kokutai and the production of the individual body. The lack of embodied agency discussed in writings on Japanese history serves to reinforce our sense of the imbalance in how agency, whether bodied or not, is understood in histories of the modern Japanese state. But if citizens like Seki and groups like the Butokukai were able to shape the Japanese state through their conception and popularization of body practice, then we are forced at least to modify our notion of how both kokutai and individual bodies might function (and relate) for citizens of modern Japan.

Physical education and martial Arts in Late Tokugawa and early meiji Japan In order to understand the context in which Seki and other advocates of martial arts wrote about bodies, citizens, and the state, it is important to consider how both physical education and martial arts were developing in Meiji Japan. By the time that Seki began his efforts and the Butokukai was formed, significant discussion around the place of martial arts and physical education in modern Japan was well under way. And while the advocates of modern physical education seem to follow a Foucauldian model of scientific and modern disciplinary attention to Japanese bodies, martial arts presented very different dynamics and relationships. Following the Meiji restoration of 1867, Japan’s education system – like much of Japanese society – underwent a process of rapid modernization. And like many efforts at reform during this period in Japan, the education system bore the stamp of a strong interest in Western ideas and technologies. As Tsurumi (1974) cautions, it is crude to render the development of Meiji Japanese education as a two-part process of early infatuation with the West followed by a return to indigenous educational ‘traditions’; similarly, Platt’s (2004) work on pre- and post–1867 education in Nagano prefecture offers a complex picture of the interplay between continuities and cleavages, between structure and local agency, that problematizes neat characterizations of education in Meiji Japan. Nevertheless, missions to Europe and the United States by representatives of the new Japanese government did result in the adoption of textbooks and techniques from American, British, French, and other Western educators, and some of these Western educators were indeed brought to Japan in an effort to bring Western expertise to the new Japanese educational system. So while some pre-Meiji pedagogies and curricular components endured in the new Japanese educational system, there was a perceptible change; this change, moreover, constituted at least an initial turn towards ideas and techniques that were identified as either/both ‘modern’ and/or ‘Western.’ Before the shift that brought young samurai from the domains of Chōshū and Satsuma to power in the name of the Meiji emperor, samurai males had been 134

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educated in hankō, or domain schools. Non-samurai boys or girls who received formal education did so at a variety of institutions, including terakoya, or temple schools, and shijuku, or ‘private academies’ (Rubinger 1982). Physical education, however, was generally limited to training in martial arts, either in hankō for samurai children (and those commoners fortunate enough to wrangle their way in) or in martial arts schools affiliated with a particular lineage or tradition, or ryūha. As Imamura (1951) notes, pre-Meiji physical education was largely directed towards the samurai class and its values. While physical education evolved in the Meiji period into something markedly different from that of Tokugawa times, its reform and development was not initially a concern of the new Meiji state. The new compulsory and universal education system at first treated physical education as an afterthought; shūshin or self-cultivation was ranked six out of fourteen priorities in the 1872 government edict on primary education, and taijutsu or exercise listed next to last, just above singing. The same year, however, an exercise system called shachū taisō or ‘room calisthenics’ and based on the work of a German doctor named Daniel Schreber was developed by the Ministry of Education through its Kaisei Gakkō or School for Foreign Studies in Tokyo (ibid.). The following year, the Ministry of Education-endorsed ‘Plan for Gymnastics’ or Taisōzu, developed at the Tokyo Normal School, was published and distributed by the Ministry of Education, and the two became the basis for the official primary school physical education program (ibid.). The Taisōzu seems to have been similar to an 1872 translation of a French exercise program, the ‘Manual of Calisthenics’ (taisōsho) (ibid.) Schreber himself admitted Swedish influences on his ‘Room Exercises,’ and Imamura (ibid.) notes that parts seem to have been taken directly from the 1862 New Gymnastics of American temperance movement figure and physical enthusiast Diocletian Lewis. With the French-influenced Taisōsho and Taisōzu, then, models for modern Japanese physical education seem to have been steeped in Western sources. Foreign influences were felt through direct contact as well as through writings on physical education. George Leland of Amherst College was tapped in 1878 to head the Meiji government’s new Taisō Denshūsho, or Gymnastics Research Institute (ibid.). At the end of the 1870s, then, physical education occupied more state attention, and foreign influences seemed to predominate in the government’s vision of how to shape the bodies of Japanese citizens. Despite the government’s push for modern/Western calisthenics in the late 1870s, however, martial arts education was informally practiced at some primary and secondary schools, and there were various voices ‘from the field’ calling for their inclusion in the new public school curriculum (Nakamura 1985: 115). One such voice came from Fukushima prefecture, where an unidentified educator said that there was ‘nothing like bujutsu’ (martial techniques) when it came to ‘straightening out a sluggish character and correcting the vulgarity of extravagance’. In particular, the educator continued, fencing both strengthens 135

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the whole body’s musculature and displays Japan’s ‘timeless martial virtue’ on the international stage (ibid). In response both to such advocates of martial arts and to the popularity of institutions like Kanō Jigorō’s new jūdō school, the Kōdōkan (Hurst 1998), the Ministry of Education convened a special inquiry at the new Gymnastics Research Institute in the spring of 1883. This inquiry was an important step in setting forth the Meiji government’s views on martial arts and the body. Representatives of several kenjutsu and jūjutsu schools were invited, as well as both foreign and Japanese medical professionals and educators. The results of the year-plus study were not encouraging for martial artists. Although it was admitted that jūjutsu and kenjutsu both provided opportunities for spiritual and physical improvement as well as practical techniques for self-defense, listed negatives outweighed positives by nine to five. The physical development afforded by martial arts was ‘uneven’, and the actual physical practice was perceived to be dangerous for students. Weaker students could not easily practice with stronger students, as movement tended to be ‘immoderate’, and the practice inevitably fostered a violent and competitive spirit, emphasizing winning and losing to an unacceptable degree. Supervision was difficult, and the space required was significant. And while jūjutsu required only special clothing, the weapons and armour required to make kenjutsu safe presented an added hurdle (Watanabe 1971: 772). In short, a combination of logistical, ideological, and medical/physical objections led the committee to conclude that while martial arts might be acceptable in certain settings, they were inappropriate for inclusion in the regular school curriculum. The Ministry of Education’s findings echo an 1883 exchange in Akita prefecture regarding martial arts in schools. When asked by the head of the prefectural education department to investigate the feasibility of adopting gekiken for primary school physical education, the director of the Akita prefectural hospital responded cautiously. While praising the obvious benefits of exercise, the report held that the danger of injury – primarily concussion (and, over the long term, cerebral hemorrhage) – posed by fencing made it a poor choice for students (Nakamura 1985: 126–27). In both cases, the possibility of damage to individual student bodies was cited as a major reason not to allow the practice of martial arts in schools. And while the Akita doctor’s report was markedly more scientific and modern and the Ministry findings more broadly conceived, both reports betray an understanding that physical education should safeguard the bodies of individual students. Neither report, interestingly, contains language about why those bodies should be safeguarded; that is, there was no discussion of a common good, let alone greater Japanese bodies, in whose service healthy students were needed. The closest to a social basis for physical education policy is the Ministry’s emphasis on equality, evidenced by the assumption that all bodies should be trained equally – weaker and stronger students alike. This lack of reference to the connection of physical education to the nation stands in contrast to the writings of the Fukushima author above as well as to the 136

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writings of Seki and the Butokukai. Other martial arts advocates pushed for a national and even international meaning to martial arts practice as well; for example, Kanō Jigorō’s efforts to transform jūjutsu from a number of mutually exclusive and clannish traditions into unified, modernized jūdō had specifically national and international aims (Inoue 1998). His work both in Japan and on the International Olympic Committee and elsewhere shows his ongoing concern that jūdō should have resonance beyond the bodies of individual practitioners. The modern notion that martial arts connected individuals and nation can be linked to the practice and the imagination of martial arts as an important field of cultural capital, one which had for some time been appropriable and consumable by the general public. The exclusive connection between samurai and the practice of swordsmanship had long been undermined by farmers and merchants who studied martial arts, such as the influential peasant-turned-industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi 渋沢栄一 (Shibusawa 1994), and Hurst (1998: 98) notes a systemic blurring of social boundaries in the arena of late Tokugawa fencing schools. Perhaps more importantly, complementing the actual practice of martial arts by non-samurai was the way in which martial arts were enjoyed by the general Japanese public – were conceived, consumed, and reproduced – as symbol and spectacle. The genealogy of this appropriation of martial arts by commoners extends far back into the Tokugawa era. From works by late–1600s author Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴 and by the prolific playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門 to the centuries-long, multi-media ‘body of cultural production’ (Smith 2003) known commonly by the rubric Chūshingura 忠臣蔵, images of samurai and martial arts that mocked the warrior class, transferred their supposed virtues onto commoner characters, or subverted the political order were produced by and for commoners. This theme of publicly produced and consumed martial arts would find full flower in the Meiji period. Three years before the final law prohibiting swords, the advent of fencing tournaments and exhibitions using bamboo swords, or gekiken kōgyō, had already begun to popularize fencing as entertainment. The gekiken kōgyō movement began in Tokyo in early 1873 with the first public tournament, conceived and promoted by the former samurai and one-time fencing instructor to the shōgunate Sakakibara Kenkichi 榊原健吉. Sakakibara appropriated many elements of the already popular spectacle of sumō, and the new form of entertainment captured national public attention (Nakamura 1994; Hurst 1998). However, editorials in newspapers began to criticize the mercenary nature of such spectacles, noting with distaste the undignified and disrespectful manner in which many spectators behaved (Nakamura 1994: 159–60). An edict prohibiting gekiken kōgyō was issued in Tokyo late in 1873, and similar prohibitions followed in Chiba, Aichi, and Kyoto prefectures. Despite such opposition, gekiken spectacles were allowed to resume in 1877 under another name, demonstrating the back-and-forth nature of the public debate over how and whether martial arts should be constructed and consumed. 137

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Whether through literature, theatre, or public spectacles, the Meiji period saw the further development of martial arts as commonly available and manipulable cultural capital. In both practice and conception, martial arts had for a long time been available to commoners, despite their putative association with the samurai class; indeed, it was exactly that association that made martial arts desirable for non-samurai to consume and control. As a result, unlike the scientific, modern, and Europe-influenced gymnastics advocated by the government, martial arts were a means of conceiving and enacting the Japanese body that were suited to popular agency and that emphasized individual–national linkages. While it is simplistic to cast debates about martial arts in public schools as local Japanese traditionalists striving against foreign-influenced, modernizing Meiji bureaucrats, it is important here to recognize the flexibility and power widely available through the cultural capital that comprised modern Japanese martial arts.

enacting the martial Body: The Dainippon Butokukai and seki Jūrōji While debates around the meaning and merit of martial arts in the context of the modern Japanese state began in the first decade of Meiji, the work to link individual bodies with the health of the state through martial arts began in earnest with Seki’s petitions. Efforts by Seki and others were supported in turn by the creation of the Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association, which formed an important context for working out the physical relationships of citizen and state. The movement to create the Dainippon Butokukai began in 1893, the year of Seki’s first petition to the Ministry of Education and shortly after gekiken spectacles exited the public stage, as a twinkle in the eye of Kyoto tax collector Torimi Kōki 鳥海弘毅. That year, Torimi watched with growing concern the plans for celebrations around the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Heian Shrine, which would open in 1895 to commemorate the 1,100th anniversary of the founding of Kyoto. Recalling the events in early issues of the Butokukai newsletter, the Butokushi, Torimi cast himself as a lone martial voice crying in a wilderness of venality. Torimi at last found a kindred spirit in the wealthy swordsman and sake merchant Konishi Shin’emon 小西新右衛門, and the two began to plan a demonstration of ‘our nation’s budō’ for the groundbreaking (Butokushi 1(2): 38 [1906]). These initial plans were not successful. Torimi wrote that the two realized quickly that the citizens of Kyoto had little interest in their scheme; fearing that a poor job would be worse than none at all, Torimi and Konishi tabled their efforts and watched with dismay as the groundbreaking ceremony in the ninth month of 1893 was celebrated with seven days and seven nights of ‘obscene attractions from first light ... All over the city, music and singing erupted simultaneously on all sides ... [with] disgraceful behavior by young, old, and 138

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everyone in between ... spilling into what should have been the sacred space of the groundbreaking ceremony’ (Butokushi 1(2): 39 [1906]). One imagines that it was exactly such behavior that Torimi was talking about when he spoke of the ‘evils of our times’ that would be rectified by the revitalization of budō. With kimono designer Niwa Keisuke 丹羽圭介 and Kyoto district police captain Sasa Kumatarō 佐々熊太郎, Torimi approached the prefectural governor Watanabe Chiaki 渡辺千秋, who in turn suggested enlisting the head of the new Heian shrine, the prefectural chief of police, and other notable figures. The new Butokukai met officially for the first time in April, and quickly moved forward with plans to expand its goals, its membership, and its funding. By 1909 the group had more than 1.5 million members (Nakamura 1994: 196). The Butokukai opened several versions of a martial arts teachertraining school, settling on the Martial Arts Special School (Bujutsu Senmon Gakkō) in 1912 (renamed Budō Senmon Gakkō in 1919) and was instrumental in supplying instructors for the martial arts curriculum adopted in the 1910s. Torimi’s own description of the founding of the group may help to direct us to the central question of how the group presented the use of martial arts in a national context. For Torimi and for members of the Butokukai, the practice of martial arts by individuals was essential for the success of a nation beset by ‘evils.’ And despite the number of political celebrities who lent their names to the Butokukai’s cause, Prime Ministers Yamagata Aritomo 山県有朋 and Itō Hirobumi among them, the organization relied on grass-roots membership throughout Japan (Nakamura 1994: 193). The practice of ordinary Japanese bodies was the means by which the Butokukai hoped to transform the nation. Moreover, in the 1899 pamphlet ‘Dainippon Butokukai Kiyō’ (‘Bulletin of the Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association’), the organization – already boasting more than 200,000 members – clarified its purpose as ‘promoting the vitality of the state’. This phrase, ‘vitality of the state’, occurred again in a statement of May of that year by the group’s president, Imperial Prince Komatsu, who proclaimed that ‘this organization’s business is to unite every gentleman, to train [their] spirits, and to raise up the state’s vitality’ (quoted in Sakaue 1989: 86; Nakamura 1985). The specific word for vitality, genki, is commonly used in reference to a person’s health, and its presence here is therefore a striking bodying of the state. Thus, the Butokukai’s rhetoric emphasized that the development of martial virtue through practice of martial arts by citizens resulted directly in the health of the state. It is important to note that the Butokukai was intimately connected with organs of the modern Japanese state through its ties to the Army and Home Affairs Ministries and to local police forces, and most histories (Sakaw 1989; Kanaki 1987, 1988; Yasukouchi 1985) have emphasized these connections and generally depict the Butokukai as an example of what Kasza (1995) called ‘administered mass organizations’ that further state aims and help to control the populace. But such characterizations, including Kasza’s distinction between ‘administered mass organizations’ and autonomous groups, tend not only to reify 139

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the either/or nature of the state/citizen duality but to ignore the locally generated reasons and meanings that informed the genesis of the group, its eventual membership of more than three million citizens, and the complexity of the citizen–state relationships that it comprised. It was exactly the question of how martial arts related to citizen and state, and particularly through the bodied nature of each, that preoccupied Seki Jūrōji. In his 1893 petition to the Ministry of Education entitled ‘Kōkoku minpei funki mikomi’ (‘Prospects for mobilizing the Japanese imperial militia’), Seki demonstrated clearly his basic premise of local bodies exerting influence over an embodied state (Nakamura 1985: 128–31). Seki began by fretting that the classical division of literary and martial, or bun and bu, was out of balance in the modernizing Japanese state. Holding that an overemphasis on bun led to the weakening of the Japanese populace, Seki argued that gekiken training would strengthen the bodies of citizens, ensure the protection of family and state, and increase Japan’s international prestige through this showcasing of its martial power, or bui. Receiving no response, Seki again addressed the Ministry of Education with a virtually identical petition in 1894; this, too, went unanswered. Frustrated, Seki turned to the Meiji parliament and continued his petitioning. Although the Diet forwarded several of his petitions to the government for further review, Seki died in 1905 without achieving his goal of placing martial arts in the Japanese public school curriculum. His dreams were posthumously fulfilled, however; thanks to the efforts of other martial artists and Butokukai members, martial arts went on to become fundamental elements in the modern Japanese physical education curriculum. In Seki’s writings, the use of martial arts to connect individual and national bodies is explicitly developed. In his 1893 missive to the Ministry of Education, Seki was in fact arguing not only for the inclusion of martial arts in public schools, but for the importance of martial arts education for the promotion of a strong Japanese military for the defense of the nation. Seki’s argument opens with the theme of bu (martiality), a facet of learning he believed to be sorely neglected in modern Japanese society. While he acknowledged the importance of balancing bu and bun (literary learning), Seki’s petition concentrated on bu. This was not because bu outweighed bun but because, he claimed, of a pre-existing imbalance that threatened Japan. While bun gained strength, Seki lamented, bu waned by the day and the Japanese soul ‘fade[d] on the horizon.’ While citizens enjoyed the fruits of bun such as happiness, unprecedented luxuries, and the fulfillment of worldly desires, he warned that the power of ‘countries such as Russia and England, who are like raging beasts’ threatened the Japanese nation. Moreover, it would not do simply to adopt Western techniques for the strengthening of Japan or for Japanese bodies. For Seki, there was a close match between the dichotomies of West/Japan and bun/bu: ‘Knowing bun and not knowing bu, knowing the essence of Anglo-American techniques but not knowing that Japan’s martial spirit must be developed ... what a dismal outlook for our country’s future!’ 140

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For Seki, martial arts were also a natural pursuit. Man is responsible for guarding the nation, he argued, because man is ‘chief among the ten thousand things.’ Furthermore, he reasoned, this responsibility accords with man’s natural ability to defend himself; ‘the bee has his sting, the mantis his axe – even insects are endowed with tools to protect their bodies. How could it be that humans ... don’t have theirs?’ Martial arts therefore tied the individual not only to the nation, but to universal principles. Interestingly, a similar theme is found in Kanō Jigorō’s 1906 article on jūdō in the Butokukai newsletter, where he emphasizes the harmonious and natural nature of body movement in jūdō, claiming that ‘the movements of jūdō are natural, and the workings of jūdō are suited to natural physiology’ (Butokushi 1(3): 16–18 [1906]). However, while Kanō incorporates this idea of ‘naturalness’ into his modernized, internationalized martial art, Seki is clear in arguing for a natural order that (literally) incorporates Japanese individuals, Japanese identity, and the Japanese state. As the correct training of human bodies had its roots in natural principles, the organization of the nation was itself based in the human body. The waning of military power, Seki warned, was like a ‘weakening pulse in a human body.’ Clearly, Seki saw not only the state but the idea of bu in somatic terms. But if the state is a body, and bu its blood, then what are the citizens? This question is addressed most directly when Seki lists the following four-part formulation of the benefits of gekiken and proper training in bu. First, he said, the study of fencing would allow practitioners to protect their own bodies. Following naturally from this was the second benefit, that practitioners would be able to protect their homes and families. The third benefit was the practitioner’s ability to protect the nation. Fourth and last in the list of positive effects was ‘the development of all our physical power’ for the purpose of ‘restoring health to those who are enfeebled or depressed, encouraging bravery and loyalty, and developing vigorous spirits.’ Here, Seki set forth a logical connection between the training of individual bodies and the resulting security of the nation. For the nation to have a healthy pulse, individuals had to practice martial arts; individuals, Seki argued, held the power to make the national body healthy or well. Far from being mindless cells in the service of the kokutai, Seki saw the choices that individuals make with their bodies as the ultimate arbiters of the nation’s health.

Towards a new Kokutai: metaphoric Bodies, exploded individuals With this in mind, we can return to the question of how the kokutai relates to citizen and state. I argue that the coercion and subsumption of individual bodies by the nation – that is, the typical reading of the kokutai – is at odds with Seki’s framework for individual–state relations. Not only did Seki and others experience and articulate power over the national body, but this power seems to have 141

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translated into ‘real’ results in terms of shaping the practices and policies of the Japanese state. Seki’s use of martial arts is consonant neither with analyses of ideologically laden, hegemonic modern systems that stress social control at the expense of local agency, nor with theories of modern bodies that view corporeality as a disciplining, dominating definition of the individual by an overwhelming social structure. As such, Seki’s case forces us to consider other theoretical approaches to the question of local and state bodies in modern Japan. Here I suggest two broad possibilities for questioning the role of citizen bodies in modern Japan. First, the idea of the kokutai can obviously be approached as a metaphor that uses the image of a body to organize not only notions of the state but the role of citizens within it. But what are the implications of metaphor for describing and determining the relationship between citizen bodies and the body of the state? What kinds of power relationships between individual and collective are implied or available through the generation and maintenance of metaphors, and especially metaphors that concern the body, in ordering the world? Second, it seems obvious that a fundamental premise of modern citizen–state relations is an implicit definition of the individual based firmly in Western modernity and the Enlightenment. Closely linked to this definition of the individual is the possibility of domination of an individual body as a modern method of isolating and defining a coterminous individual subject. Seki and the Butokukai, however, offered the notion of local citizen bodies that are able to exert power over the national body. What definition of individual makes this kind of connection between subject and structure possible? Johnson’s (1987) work on the importance of embodiment in human experience and Lakoff and Johnson’s works on metaphor and embodiment (1980, 1999) may be employed as a useful critique of modern body theory that emphasizes the work of social structures over the possibility of local agency. Seeing the Cartesian legacy of mind–body duality as responsible for the lack of imagination (both literally and figuratively) in Western theories of rationality and meaning, Johnson suggests that human perception and human structures are based on pre-propositional bodily experience. Such experience is expressed importantly through metaphor, a fundamental building block for epistemology that precedes and colours a subsequent overlay of logic and rationality. Johnson’s critique of the objectivist ‘God’s-eye-view’ of human experience is strikingly similar to Bourdieu’s attention to a naturalized, objectified system of dominating structures. However, by focusing on the physical body as a source of and not merely a canvas for thought and meaning, Johnson’s model challenges the essentially outer/social genesis emphasized in Bourdieu’s ‘bodily hexis’ (1977: 93). Where Bourdieu hopes to cast light on the processes by which ideologies are imprinted on the body, Johnson suggests that individual bodies can, through their work in generating metaphors, effect semantic shifts and therefore social change. We have seen above how the kokutai metaphor has been interpreted as an ideological framework, a deliberate and coercive representation of a 142

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simultaneously somatic and social reality envisioned and advocated by a totalitarian state. While such an interpretation leaves little room for Seki’s understanding of how individual bodies affect the body of the nation, Johnson’s work on metaphor presents a striking parallel to at least some elements of Seki’s model. In both cases, local embodied experiences are understood as powerfully active in the generation and maintenance of the collective; the structure can be understood as an effect, a projection, of the individual’s embodiment. It is important to note that such post-phenomenological treatments of metaphor, while reversing the outside-in power vector implicit in analyses that view individual bodies as constructed through and by social structure, do not in themselves open a space for local agency. While the intimate and personal experience of embodiment may be the primordial soup from which socially active metaphors spring, and while martial artists’ own bodies may have formed an important source of the kokutai metaphor, it does not necessarily follow in an application of Johnson’s ideas that this process was under the conscious control of Seki and members of the Butokukai when they wrote about the intersection of martial arts with the work of the state or about the physicality of the nation’s martial virtue. But even without teasing out the extent of local agency, the metaphoric nature of the kokutai allows us to use ideas such as Johnson’s to propose a fundamentally powerful role for individual bodies that interacted with it. Moreover, this is not to say that the idea of a local, embodied genesis for the kokutai metaphor renders structure irrelevant; we must ask whether some local bodies are more equal than others, and whether the ordering of such inequalities by social structures might point to exactly the deterministic structuralism against which Johnson’s work contends. Johnson’s idea of the body as a source of metaphor, perception, and social structure is largely silent on issues of gender; similarly, while numerous contributors to the Butokukai’s publications wrote on ‘bushidō for women’, such attention seems to be secondary to the organization’s main concerns, and both the national body envisioned by Seki and the Butokukai and the versions of the kokutai proposed by the government were implicitly male. But just because Seki and the Butokukai offered a national body that was adult, male, ethnically Japanese, physically able and practicing martial arts – to cite only a few assumptions – it does not follow inevitably that only male, adult, ethnically Japanese, et cetera individuals were constructing and influencing the kokutai. We must consider the possibility that alternate versions of the kokutai existed through and within other local experiences, that our limitation here is simply one of data, and that other discourses might reveal radically different but equally important and effective national bodies. The problem with a Johnsonian kokutai, then, may not be the idea of a universal-metaphor-generating local embodiment, but the logistical impossibility of accounting for the multiplicity of individual kokutais that are created by the experiences of millions of individual Japanese bodies. We cannot say how corporeal/individual/phenomenological metaphors are usefully mixed. However, 143

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it may be that the intractability of multiple perspectives for the purposes of a historical meta-narrative itself serves as an important corrective to structure-heavy interpretations of modern Japanese history and of the work of modern Japanese bodies in negotiating citizen–state relations. But there is another theoretical move that we can make; if individuals are so resistant to historiography’s efforts to capture them except as subjected to a larger narrative, and if the question of resolving the individual–collective duality presents such a knotty problem for social theory generally, this problem is to a large extent resolved – or at least changed – if definitions of individual and collective usually operating in Japanese historiography are themselves questioned. Two useful approaches from cultural anthropology address exactly this issue. In Nancy Munn’s (1986) study of gifts and reputation in the Papua New Guinean society of Gawa, she argues that the individual actor has recourse to selfdefinitions and agency that extend physically and temporally beyond the typical boundaries of the individual. Munn’s work offers the possibility of a self that can be deliberately created and exteriorized because of its fluid relationship with a larger social context. While not radically destabilizing the self–society pair, Munn nonetheless interrogates typical individual–collective boundaries by arguing for a self that is consciously transmitted through gifts or other media and which can therefore not only influence social interactions elsewhere, but literally exist in/as those interactions. Against Althusser’s (1971) wave of the hand that communicates and fixes the identity of performer and observer, rendering both as objects of power, Munn’s version of the same beckoning gesture might attend instead to the individuals who exert themselves through that wave. We are reminded that a ‘wave’ can be, simultaneously, a gesture of the hand and the process by which energy borrows form from as it gives form to the pliable physical world through which it moves. Munn calls this the ‘extension of spacetime,’ which she describes as the ‘capacity to develop spatiotemporal relations that go beyond the self, or that expand dimensions of the spatiotemporal control of an actor’ (Munn 1986: 11). Working in Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern (1988) uses the idea of the ‘dividual’ to push even harder against the dualities of individual/collective and structure/agency. Strathern uses the term to describe a social agent who both embodies society and its tensions and, like Munn’s actor, can project parts of him/herself through acts, gifts, or symbolic items or events which then act elsewhere in society. ‘The single actor,’ Strathern writes, ‘can be imagined as a social microcosm ... [and] by contrast, the kinds of collective action that might be identified by an outside observer ... often presents (sic) an image of unity’ (1988: 13). Unlike in the Western individual–collective model, in which ‘the one is regarded as modifying or somehow controlling the other’ (Strathern 1988: 13), the designation of discrete entities called ‘society’ and ‘individual’ is problematized. Such a model would therefore propose not simply that individuals can act powerfully in (or on) society, but that speaking of an individual’s actions 144

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is synonymous with speaking of society’s actions, and that to delineate one or the other misses the point. The full implications of either model are beyond the scope of this chapter; nevertheless, they provide a suggestive framework for reconsidering how Seki, Torimi, the movement toward martial arts in education, and all of modern Japan might be understood to interrelate through bodies. The explosion of the individual described by Munn and Strathern goes beyond simply making a place for the agency of Seki, Torimi, and every modern Japanese citizen in shaping the state; it may in fact question the necessary assumptions of ‘agency’ in a historical framework. This is a radical answer to the question posed above regarding the role of individual citizens in Seki’s version of the national body. The entity called ‘individual citizen’ is not part of the larger social body, like a cell; instead, its relationship to the social body might be something like that of a tiny but powerful Corsican twin. As with any ethnographically derived models, we must exercise caution in assuming the universality of theory over the divides of space, time, and culture. Munn and Strathern are careful to locate their own work in their respective contexts, and attend carefully to gender and other distinctions. While the work of anthropologists like D. Kondo (1990) and social psychologists such as E Hamaguchi (1985) on the intersubjective nature of Japanese selves may suggest at least some points of contact between Munn and Strathern’s subjects and modern Japanese, to apply Munn’s space-time or Strathern’s dividual to Japanese male martial artists in the late 1800s veers close to assuming the possibility of universality in theories of culture and society. In much historiography, however, the idea of a universal, modern/Western definition of individual seems already to be active if relatively unexamined. In any case, the sin of universality seems at least no greater a violation than to ascribe some kind of Orientalist particularity to the modern Japanese version of self and society (or, for that matter, to ascribe peculiarity to ‘exotic’ societies such as those examined by Munn and Strathern). One might just as easily note that, as Johnson contends, it may be instead that a Western exaggeration of individualism, resting on a forced Cartesian duality of body and mind, is itself a peculiar approach to understanding humans and their histories, and one ripe for critical attention in any context. In any case, Johnson’s work on embodied metaphor offers a model that is strikingly consonant with Seki’s writings on local and national bodies; in both cases, a metaphoric state body derives its meaning and power from the embodied existence of citizens, and state-level structures are seen to be dependent on rather than/as well as generative of individual bodies. Similarly, the idea of a local social actor exerting influence through – and literally existing in – patterns and interactions typically relegated to the level of state or structure is evident in Seki’s notion of how changes in local citizen bodies directly influence the body of the state; and just such an unbounding of the individual, an explosion of the 145

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individual body, is described in the works of both Munn and Strathern. By reversing the domination of individual by structure and challenging the accepted binary of individual and collective, these models may offer at least the beginning of a different reading both of Seki’s work and of the bodied relationship between citizens and state in modern Japan. Beyond introducing and interpreting the work of Seki and the Butokukai in shaping modern Japanese bodies, this consideration of martial arts and modern Japanese bodies is intended to encourage closer attention to prior and future applications of modern body theory – and indeed other normative assumptions of modernity – to ‘modern’ Japan. By examining the specific case of the movement to introduce martial arts into Japanese schools, this chapter asks how the arena of corporeality can allow for new readings of agency and power that move beyond ideology and episteme and that challenge fundamental assumptions about the proper framing of historical inquiry. For to invoke ideology, or hegemony, or any dominant social structure – even in order to posit resistance against it – is often to re-inscribe a system of power and control that is pervasive not only in the lives of historical subjects but in the interpretation of historians. At the very least, such framing ideas must be carefully defined before being employed, as in Platt’s (2004: 15) interrogation of different interpretations of ‘hegemony’ in the analysis of Meiji education. Without such care, interpretive models of hegemony and ideology run the risk of becoming, ironically, commonsense notions that ‘go without thinking’ – that is, act very much like ideologies – in the minds of historians. Similarly, to invoke the disciplinary-body models of authors like Foucault without great care is to render questions of embodied agency and subjectivity hobbled, if not lying dead, at the starting bell. Bio-power, habitus, and bodily hexis are interpretive schemes with obvious and proven value for uncovering and understanding the work of state, society, and even individuals; as I have argued here, however, Seki’s use of the body demonstrates that such schemes carry certain assumptions that may be worth challenging through theoretical frames that attend more carefully to the possibility of local power and local agency. It may be that Seki, Torimi, and other martial artists in Meiji Japan were subject to disciplinary pressures and a coercive kokutai; but to leave the matter there does a disservice to the richness of their understandings and manipulations of their bodies and their world, and that should not be dismissed. Modern Japanese citizens, and their bodies, deserve our closer attention and our greater respect.

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8 T he s ACRed And The s AniTARy: T he C oLoniAL ‘m ediCALizATion ’ oF The F iLiPino B ody Julius Bautista with Ma. Mercedes Planta

Over the course of Philippine history, the spiritual and physical state of Filipino bodies influenced the interaction between colonial subjects and the authorities who ruled over them. Both the American and Spanish regimes imposed political, economic and social changes that encouraged a revision of people’s ideas about their own corporeality. These revisions were enacted through highly regulated and regimented prescriptions and proscriptions relating to both spiritual and physical demeanour. The task of this paper is to trace the scope of these imposed normatives of conduct, and to determine how they manifested the broader ethics and agendas of the colonial regimes that ritualized and institutionalized them. The general issue this paper seeks to address is: how was the ‘native’ body forced to contort itself to the vocabularies and agendas of two colonial regimes in the Philippines? How were these normatives deployed in written form? Michel Foucault’s influence on contemporary Philippine social theory has been considerable enough to inspire a significant literature on the surveillance, regulation and administration of colonial bodies. Works such as that of Mojares (2003), Salman (1995), Anderson (1992) and Ileto (1988) discuss the vicissitudes of Filipino bodies within increasingly sophisticated institutions of doctrinal and medical regimentation. Inspired by Foucault and, though less explicitly, by the somatic theories of Marcel Mauss, scholars have found reason to argue that Filipino bodies are discursively constituted not just through religious doctrine but also through the requirements of colonial medicine and penology. A distinctive trend in many papers on ‘the Filipino body’ is to argue that the body itself is a 147

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canvas on which is inscribed deeper structural arrangements of power and knowledge; arrangements that manifest relationships of domination and subordination beneath the more ‘formal’ administrative or religious policies of colonial regimes. Filipino scholar Resil Mojares astutely notes, however, that with all this focus on the wider matrices of power and knowledge, ‘not much attention is given [to] less dramatic transformations in the everyday minutiae of bodily practices and how these interweave with the perceptions and actions of persons in the social field’ (2003: 172). Mojares invites us to consider the effect of colonial regimes on a level that was more intimate and mundane: how, for example, were Filipinos retaught to bathe, dress and groom themselves? What kind of table manners were they asked to observe? This paper argues that a response to Mojares entails a discussion of the extent to which the Filipino body was made to adhere to a new set of ‘rituals of piety’. This is a concept that describes the range of everyday bodily activities and passivities that, when observed, determined a specific kind of ‘moral’, ‘proper’ or ‘cooperative’ subjectivity. This involved a reformatting of habits, demeanour and countenance so that the body may be aligned towards the general ethic of the ruling regime. What, for example, were the norms of social etiquette Filipinos adhered to, even outside the surveillance of priests or colonial authorities? What new medicinal routines were they made to conduct before going to sleep so as to ensure a healthy functioning body, even when there was no doctor present? The significant aspect of these rituals is their normativity – that they are introduced and imposed directives to which Filipino bodies were subjected as an execution of the colonial mandate. While the main aim of this paper, therefore, is to make a more detailed analysis of the everyday minutiae of such ‘rituals of piety’, we also aim to maintain, at least as an underlying principle, the Foucauldian concern with how relations of colonial power become inscribed in personal rituals of intimacy, obedience and subservience. It is not our intention here to suggest that the body was the most important political focus of colonial regimes. Rather, we suggest that the body can be used as a heuristic in which the wider character of colonial and anti-colonial regimes can be understood. While scholars such as Mojares (2003) have already engaged in detailed analysis of the everyday practices of the body during the Spanish period, we aim to extend the analytical gaze further across time to reflect the directions towards which Filipino bodies were forced to bend. As our second section will show, there are interesting differences between the body as conceived in both Spanish and American colonial regimes. By discussing these two periods as a comparative project, we suggest that what Turner (1997a) describes as the ‘medicalization of the body’ can find expression in a South-East Asian context (ibid: 29). The medicalization of the body is a process in which religious notions of ascetic practice and piety were gradually supplanted or replaced by secular medical and physiological regimens. The general trend of secularization in 148

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Western societies, according to this theory, can be described by a resemblance between the roles of clergy and medical practitioners. In the Philippines, we can see this movement in the very transition between two colonial administrations: from an Iberian missionary concern with the regulation of the body’s religious well-being to an American concern with the regulation of the body as an essentially medical unit. In both regimes, written manuals were used to deploy ideals of ritual or sanitary purity and piety. As our title suggests, we seek to trace the discursive movement from a ‘sacred’ to a ‘sanitary’ milieu – terms which embody the moral and ethical agendas of the Spanish and American colonial regimes respectively, and which describe the very transition of the Philippines towards secularization and modernity.

The ‘native’ Body as Canvas Before ‘rituals of intimacy’ can be discussed in the context of specific colonial regimes, it is important to survey the Filipino body in its ‘native’ state; that is, before the imposition of either forms of hegemonic colonial control. Both Spanish and American policies towards the regulation of Filipino bodies were generally framed in the rhetoric of promoting a regime of cleanliness, either through spiritual purification or disease prevention. The implication here is that Filipino bodies were inherently in need of a cleansing that only the purveyors of colonialism could provide. Yet it is significant to note that even early Spanish accounts of the customs of Filipinos are replete with descriptions of the people’s good health and meticulous hygienic practices. Sixteenth-century observers such as Pigafetta (1524) and early seventeenth-century observers such as Chirino (1604) thought native bodies noteworthy for their refinement and focus on physical cleanliness. What we consistently find in such depictions is a pleasured, cleansed, decorated and indulged native body. Moreover, the native will to hygiene and cleanliness is consistently depicted as a personal habit observed of one’s own volition. This suggests that even according to Spanish standards of physical cleanliness, there was nothing inherently ‘unclean’ about the native body before the imposition of their Western rituals of piety. Chirino observes: From the time these islanders are born, they grow up in the water … They bathe at any hour without distinction, for pleasure or cleanliness … and on coming out of the bath, they anoint their hair with sesame oil mixed with civet ... [T]hey bathe squatting down almost sitting, with the water up to their neck, taking the greatest care not to be visible even if there is nobody who could see them … In each house they have a water jar at the door and whoever goes up, whether from the household or an outsider, takes water from there to wash his feet before entering … They do this with great facility, rubbing one foot against the other and the water runs through the house floor, which is all bamboo like a very tight grating. (Scott 1994: 116)

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Bathing, observes Chirino, is not a chore determined by the conditions of a hot and harsh environment. There is, on the contrary, a sense of luxurious excess in natives’ technologies of care; depicted in the native use of local herbs and flowers for perfume and other superfluities. What, then, was it about the native body that needed colonial intervention and reformation? What sorts of changes did the Spanish clergy envision in their attempts to re-inscribe native bodies? We shall see in the discussion below that as the inheritors of medieval Christian morals, Spanish clergy were concerned not with an inherently uncleansed physical body, but with instituting reforms that sought to modify the body in a sentimental and moral sense. Faced with the momentous task of aiding civic administrators in a strange and often hostile environment, Spanish religious mandate became intertwined with the colonial imperative of managing bodies as religio-administrative units. It is with these sentimental and moral impositions on the body, manifested as they were in written form, that this initial section is concerned.

The spanish Regime: Turning Away From the native Body In the Spanish colonial regime (1565–1896), administrative control depended largely on the role of the clergy who prescribed that the body’s physical upkeep must correspond with certain codes of religious piety and spiritual purification. These prescriptions, often relating to intimate aspects of personal hygiene and social etiquette, were deployed not just from official channels but, as we shall see, through manuals, gazettes and written codes of behaviour as well. In this section, we seek to discuss how Spanish missionaries promoted what have been termed ‘rituals of intimacy’. They are ‘intimate’ because they had to do with very personal technologies of bodily upkeep, over many of which colonial authorities did not have full surveillance. They are ‘rituals’ because these acts are defined by the expectation of repetitive and prolonged observance, which were codified and institutionalized in the literature and doctrine of the missionary orders. Rituals of intimacy, therefore, included not just formal acts of religious piety, such as personal and community worship, confession, conducting of the sacraments, observation of rituals and so fourth. These also included normatives for grooming, decorum, directives of proper moral behaviour, all of which the native was expected to perform and administer upon the self in the private realms of mind and body. In a broader sense, Spanish rule sought to bring about a significant reinscription of the body through a reformatting of physical geography. Through a program of reduccion (reduction), people of various discreet settlements were rounded up into larger cabecceras (population centres). The centripetal force of the cabecera consisted of the staging of festivals in the name of a patron saint in order to entice natives into settling within it. Having the Church and government 150

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house at its centre, the new territorial order sought to impose a mode of living where all ideas about piety originated from a single, clearly identifiable source. The cabeccera had at its apex God and the Spanish King to whom all those living within its boundaries were devoted. This entailed a profound transformation of Filipino ways of life whereupon their immediate and past loyalties to animist spirits were discouraged and actively dispelled. Natives were, as Mojares observes, ‘taught to be turned steadfastly towards God, to avoid the present, to regard the things of the world as ‘dream’, ‘smoke’ or ‘wind’ as, in the political sphere, they were to be bound to the Spanish realm in acts of civic disobedience, casing away the brute instincts of their former state’ (2000: 10). The transformation of physical geography was extended towards arresting the native’s ‘brute instincts’ to comply with a Judeo-Christian sense of piety. It was an explicit attempt at reformatting internalized norms of behaviour, in order to rediscipline their bodies according to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The cabeccera was the framework by which ‘urbanism’ had become closely identified with ‘humanity’, ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. Correspondingly, those ‘unreduced’ bodies living outside the scope of the newly defined political centres were labelled and treated accordingly: as ‘savages’, ‘pagan’, ‘bandits’ who may well have been ‘wild’ and not quite human. This demarcation engendered by the reduccion was vital to the propagation of the colony in light of a persistent insurgency and recalcitrance to its project. The notion of town centre as a fixed and clearly bounded unit of domination is problematized by the secret practice of native agency, particularly in places where Spanish civic jurisdiction did not extend. The continued relevance of babaylanes (spirit mediums), albularios (‘faith’ healers) and other ‘assocaciones illicitas’ (illicit associations) throughout the Spanish regime is testament to these modes of resistance. The works of Ileto (1979) and Rafael (1988) are notable examples of scholars who have written about technologies of Filipino resistance to the religio-civilizing missions of the Church. Though we do not engage in a detailed analysis of resistance in this paper, the observations made here must be seen in relation to a wider corpus of works that discuss native Filipino recalcitrance to the colonial project. In addition to these patterns of resettlement, a corpus of missionary texts prescribed how various modes of personal and bodily piety were to be observed. The earlier examples, called catons, were simple lists of how one ought to behave and were typically included as an appendage to prayer books and confessionals. Eventually, catons became published on their own as manual de urbanidad (manuals of urbanity) which was a fairly common genre in the colonial Philippines from as early as the sixteenth century. Small enough to place in one’s pocket, these compact volumes were typically designed to be in one’s possession at all times – itself an imposed change to the body’s physical posture and comportment. The manuals were more than just a reference guide in times of crisis. They were meant to be read time and again, even in repetition, to ingrain how Christian doctrine should be manifested as somatic habit and practice. 151

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Scholars such as Mojares (2003) have conducted insightful analyses of such manuals and what we seek to do here is build upon those insights. In this paper, we focus on a manual written in Bisaya which Mojares has analysed. This manual was written by Father Pedro de Estrada, S.J. in 1734 and published under the title Lagda cun suludnun sa tauong Visaya sa Pagcamaligdon ug sa mga maayong gaui sa ngatanan nga mga cahimtang sa Nang quinabuhi/hinusay sa usa ca pareng Agustino Calzado sa Sugbu. ‘Lagda’ is a Visayan term meaning ‘manners’ or ‘codes of behaviour’. This particular volume is a book of about eighty pages, containing twenty-two chapters which saw numerous reprints in 1746, 1850, 1865 and 1893, suggesting its widespread popularity and use (Zaide 1990). In describing manuals such as the Lagda, we discover as much about the vicissitudes of missionary and colonial agency as we do about the bodies they sought to regulate. What do these manuals say and how did they attempt to reformat the native body?

The spiritual Reformatting of the native Body Manuals such as the Lagda did not only mandate a mere adjustment of behaviour and attitude. It required the suppression of the body’s most natural impulses, as though doing so were merely matter of will and initiative. One is asked, for example, to: ‘Endeavour not to cough, to spit, or do anything else that will cause noise and disturb others attention from the mass’ (Estrada 1734: 266); ‘If you see something that surprises you, just turn around to look at it. Do not open your mouth wide in wonder like a crocodile catching flies’ (ibid.: 264); ‘If you are talking with your superiors, do not make fun of them. Control yourself from yawning, making noise with your throat, spitting or stretching yourself before them. Do not make noises, do not fix your hair, do not pick up things and break them into little pieces because it will distract your attention to them’ (ibid.: 276). The body that is depicted in these directives is one that is inherently inclined towards undesirable natural habits. Native bodies, moreover, are defined by the unreflective impulse to act upon and appease them. The urge to cough, the urge to scratch, the urge to gape at something surprising are impulses that, while natural, are transgressions of ethical and social normatives. What the Lagda is assuming, therefore, is a human righteousness that is dependent upon the native’s success in overcoming a body that is predisposed towards leading one away from the ideal of civilized behaviour. Yet it is not merely a matter of inhibiting or conquering these bodily functions. The alternative to suppressing one’s natural impulses and urges is equally undesirable. Natives are expected to strike a precarious balance between two undesirable extremes of behaviour. For example, natives are ordered: ‘Do not use perfume because you will be suspected of being a person of easy virtue. On the other hand, do not tolerate unpleasant body odour because you will be loathed and avoided by others’ (ibid.: 273). Similarly: ‘You should not wink nor look from the tails of your eyes, nor stare at anybody. Most 152

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of all, you should not glare at people as if you are suspicious of them. Do not affect a pensive glance either, because this is a characteristic of lunatics’ (ibid.: 273). One’s posture, movement and demeanour had to be regulated according to the expectations of a pious other. The precariousness of this situation, however, is that even the absence of any kind of movement also carries the possibility of breaching ideal behaviour. If we think of a body that attempts to be faithful to these directives, what one might imagine is a body that is constantly preoccupied with balancing between two extremes of natural inclination and moral piety. The body that the Lagda conjures, therefore, is a highly regulated entity that is subject to rules of movement, posture and behaviour. For example, natives are ordered: ‘Keep your head straight, your body still and your feet together (ibid.: 267); ‘Do not indulge in joking as it may sometimes verge on the indelicate’ (ibid.: 269); ‘On the table: If the one beside you needs anything, let it be known by the waiter. Avoid talking with anybody, asking question, or looking around or moving too much’ (ibid.: 272). It is as though movement itself is inhibited, unless that movement is entirely directed towards the fulfilment of very specific (though sometimes contradictory) norms of behaviour. Yet this balancing act implies the (almost comic) possibility of misinterpretation. Pushing the undesirable ‘naturalness’ of the body even further is the (unnecessarily) vitriolic simile, that typically accompanies the mandated codes of behaviour. These similes are often in reference to an animal or an element of nature. The clear implication here is that these codes of behaviour are meant to take natives away from the state of nature to which they are normally inclined to adhere. On Conduct of a Child in School for example, natives are instructed: ‘Don’t be like a ‘dalansiang’ [a native bird] chatting with other children, on the other hand, do not just sit quietly but make use of the time by reading or writing because a person without any knowledge is like the rafter only of a boat’ (ibid.: 268). Yet for all the Lagda prescribes about how people should behave, it is a text that says a lot about its author. On the one hand, the references to flora and fauna indigenous to the local environment suggest the Friar’s intimacy with the geographical milieu of those he is addressing. In a sense, it is the friar’s own indigenization – having lived in the colony for several years – that justifies his authority to regulate the native’s most intimate ways of life. On the other hand, however, this reveals much about the frustrations, desperation and failures of the friar in acquiring native compliance. It is as though the Lagda is a progression of thoughts and afterthoughts – a sigh of desperation from a friar who was hopelessly overwhelmed by the mission which he had been given. The manual in this sense is not a mere utility towards the friar’s mandate, but an attempt to negotiate the tribulations it presents. The penning of the manual was an act that duplicated the friar’s physical efforts in the pulpit by codifying the messages that he so often (and hopelessly) repeated to no avail. One wonders whether the friar found writing the manual cathartic. 153

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Indeed, the manual is the friar’s attempt to gain access and control natives during moments which he cannot survey – at night, at the waking hours, when he is not watching. Natives were expected to follow it during these times, most importantly. Reading a great deal of the manuals, we can observe the assumption of the writer’s absence. On Conduct During Bedtime, for example, natives are instructed: If you wake up in the middle of the night and you are troubled make the sign of the cross, call the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and say ‘Help me my God and give me strength right away. Help me Blessed Virgin Mary so that my body and soul will be clean and I will not be ashamed to face the judgement of God.’ In the morning follow the instructions given in this book. (ibid.: 283)

While the manual insists upon a consistent adoption of its tenets, the sensation that one gets from reading it is to wonder if the friar himself is acting in this way. There are also sections of the Lagda which shift the gaze towards the writer himself, and the regulatory body which he represents. We get the impression that by the act of writing the code, the friar himself seems exempt from that which he preaches. The sheer simplicity of such directives expresses an audacious assurance of the moral legitimacy of Spanish rule and of the Spanish friar as the dispenser of that rule. The contradictory nature of its mandates suggests that they were produced at random, conjuring images of a friar who sat thinking about the entire spectrum of native transgressions and writing them out without contemplation of possible misinterpretation. It also suggests the friar’s utter belief in his moral authority and the expectation of native compliance. If this message is unclear, it is incumbent upon the native, not the friar, to ensure strict and absolute compliance. The overall impact of these prescriptions is a directive asking natives to turn away from the body, treating it as both a site of temptation and deliverance. Even though the directive involved practices that required bodily adjustments, the spirit of it is that the body is a temporal vessel of both sin and the possibility of salvation. It dictates the proper use of one’s senses inasmuch as the senses are naturally inclined towards sin and misbehaviour. For such, only a certain form of penance, one ‘that is painful to the body’, can provide adequate redress. In this sense, the body itself was the site which presented an opportunity to access the divine. Indeed, Christ’s own corporeality facilitated the deliverance of man from his own destruction. However, as the Lagda demonstrates, the body was also a vassal of sin which had to be isolated and regulated from temptation. The rituals of intimacy promoted through the use of manuals of urbanity aimed not so much at the cultivation of secular, ‘modern’ citizens, as though attempting to foster mirror images of European urbanity, rather the aim of the manuals was to produce medieval Christian bodies disciplined in spirit and physique. ‘Urbanity’ in this respect is a misnomer. The native body was contorted towards a ‘turning away from the world’ or a ‘turning away from the body itself ’ in preparation for an afterlife defined by an ethereal (not corporeal) existence. So 154

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in a way it did not matter so much that the native body was initially refined and clean, as observed by early Spanish observers. For this kind of native cleanliness was not mediated by Christian shame and moral subservience. It was a flamboyant, irreverent and even lascivious kind of cleanliness which transgressed the expectations and norms of medieval Christian piety. The reformatting of the Filipino body, therefore, was one of a spiritual, not corporeal, state. While the manuals maintained their prevelance and currency throughout the Spanish colonial regime, by the nineteenth century the world of the Catholic rituals of piety was beginning to unravel. This came in the context of the rise of an increasingly cosmopolitan local elite called ilustrados, many of whom were the direct beneficiaries of the colony’s participation in global capitalism. It is among the financially empowered ilustrado class, versed in both Spanish and local vernaculars, that the nationalist movement against the Spanish regime gained increasing momentum. Manuals such as the Lagda were common enough to attract parody from such nationalists as Marcelo H. del Pilar, who himself published a number of Tagalog pamphlets ridiculing friars and attempting to foster mistrust of them. One such example of this was the enumeration of the ‘Commandments of the Friar’: The Commandments of the Friar are ten: 1. Worship the friar above all things 2. Do not be so rash as to cheat him of what are called his fees 3. Celebrate a feast to the friar on Sundays and Holydays 4. Give your body as security for the costs of burial of your father and mother 5. Do not die if you do not have enough money to pay for the funeral 6. Do not commit adultery with his wife 7. Do not share in his stealing 8. Do not accuse them even if you are made out to be a liar 9. Do not refuse him your wife 10. Do not refuse him your goods

To an extent, this usurpation of the manner and form of the Lagda was an indictment on the native himself who had been, for over three centuries, so utterly consumed by the directives of the Catholic manuals of urbanity. But more importantly, parodies such as these underscored the eroding legitimacy of the friars by making explicit their abuse of power and authority. Anti-clericalism was a sentiment that defined and propelled the spirit of anti-colonial movements at the turn of the century. It also laid the foundations for the establishment of the Philippine Independent Church which was to significantly undermine the legitimacy of the Catholic Church throughout the Philippines. Instrumental, as they were in fostering the docility of native bodies, Spanish friars had to eventually face the prospect of the manuals turned against them by the colonial subjects they had sought to guide. Ironically, it was the ilustrado class’ attainment of a kind of European ‘urbanity’ that led to the conditions in which the very legitimacy of friar authority came to be challenged and eroded. 155

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It can be argued however that ilustrado anti-clericalism did not become fully consummated with the onset of the American regime. While seeking secular reform, if not outright independence, the propaganda movement was articulated in terms that politicized the friars’ defilement of the Filipino body (specifically the female body). The novels of nationalist Jose Rizal were poignant precisely because they were about the abuse of the native body, such that Spanish transgressions became a metonymy for the rape of the Filipino nation, articulated in feminized terms. Filipino anti-colonial and anti-friar sentiment alone, however, did not result in the defeat of the Spanish regime. In 1898, American colonialism, which came in to force after the ceding of the archipelago, denied the full consummation of the nationalist movement against Spain. But while the Church undoubtedly played a huge role in the development of Filipino identity, what happens when the Church no longer becomes the sole arbiter of the day-to-day lives of natives? It will be seen in the next section of this paper that the ‘American Way’ of contorting the Filipino body differed in some important respects from the Spanish. The point this paper will make at this juncture is that the transition between colonial notions of the Filipino body was not sudden and abrupt. It was, rather, mediated by the nationalist movement of the nineteenth century which manifested itself in ilustrado parodies of manuals of urbanity, among other forms of nationalistic subversion. The transition between colonial regimes in the Philippines demonstrates how the medicalization of the body was associated with ideas about the moral management of Filipino bodies. Under the American mission (1899–1946) the body was seen as a ‘unit’ that was to be administered through secular, scientific policies of personal hygiene, bacteriology, public health and sanitization. At the forefront of this endeavour were American doctors, health workers and colonial officials who largely believed that their own medical ideas and practices were immediately transplantable to the tropical colony. As the need for rationalization and legitimization of Empire went along with the need to promote and maintain health in the colony, colonial medical officials had to grapple with local realities and either fit them or adjust them not only to their own informed medical views but also to the bigger project of colonial state building and governance. What Turner observes as a general trend in Western history can be observed in the Philippine case: ‘Put simply, the doctor has replaced the priest as the custodian of social values; the panoply of ecclesiastical institutions of regulation (the ritual order of sacraments, the places of vocational training, the hospice for pilgrims, places of worship and sanctuary) have been transferred through the evolution of scientific medicine to a panoptic collection of localized agencies of surveillance and control’ (Turner 1987: 37–38). We may ask at this juncture, however, why it would be the American doctor and not the American Protestant missionary who would take the role of the Spanish friar? In this paper, we argue that the doctor was in some respects in a better position than the Protestant Missionary considering the nature of the 156

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latter’s relationship with the Spanish clergy towards the turn of the twentieth century. This is to say the tenacity of the Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines undermined the position of the Protestant mission as arbiters of rituals of piety in ways that did not extend to medical health practitioners. In the end, the Protestant effort was generally unsuccessful in the Philippines, having converted only 1.3 per cent of the population (Shirley 2004: 39). There was also something specific about the Protestantism – for example, that it did not inspire awe and its ceremonies did not focus on colourful festivity – that undermined its position against that of Catholicism, in which such activities were at least tolerated. Doctors and colonial health administrators promoted sensibilities that did not, at least on the surface, conflict with the strictly ‘religious’ or doctrinal directives of the Catholic faith. In other words, it was in the very secularity of the medical arena, represented strongly by field medics and sanitary officials, that American colonialism gained ground on regulating social values and forms of piety. It is to this scenario that we shall now turn.

A new order When American forces entered Manila they were not only faced with the prospect of being an emerging colonial empire with an outpost in the Pacific. What struck them were the conditions in the Philippine capital after they entered it in August 1898. Crowded with refugees, Manila suffered from critical food and water shortages. Garbage that had accumulated during its siege littered the streets, which were already flooded for lack of drainage. Lepers were roaming the streets, begging in the markets, or earning a living, which included the handling of foodstuffs in grocery stores (Heiser 1988: 169). Reeling from the aftermath of the Spanish defeat, about five thousand Spanish soldiers were interred in Manila hospitals (Foreman 1890: 540, 621). As the Philippine capital became an ‘open territory’, ‘emigrants from all parts of the world flocked thither like flies in search of honey’ (De Bevoise 1995: 41). According to Ken de Bevoise, when the United States troops entered Manila ‘prostitutes from every corner of the earth literally raced the Army’. The Manila Times announced the arrival of dentists, doctors, lawyers, excursion directors, barkeepers, commercial agents, comic-opera troupes, hustlers, prospectors, and missionaries (7, 13 June; 3 August; and 28 September 1899; See also De Bevoise 1995: 41). Overnight, Manila was transformed into a ‘circus’. Burton Hendrick of the New Haven Morning News relates how the Americans witnessed the insane roaming freely because Manila had no asylums for them. According to him, mental patients were tied to posts and poles under nipa houses, or the traditional Filipino houses, which also served the purpose of housing domesticated animals such as chickens, dogs, and pigs (United States National Archives Records Administration, Bureau of Insular Affairs Record Group 350, Entry 95, Folder 3465-A). Hendrick also describes the lack of proper burial places so 157

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that osorios or bone piles that Filipinos sometimes kept as souvenir items were scattered all over, because the living relatives of those who were dead were not able to pay the rent for the sepulchres (Ibid: 718. See also Heiser 1988: 113). The health problems that confronted the American colonial government during this time were mostly sanitation problems and epidemic diseases (United States Philippine Commission Vol.1 Part 2 1999–1903: 310). In the early reports of the Philippine Commission, these health problems were classified as those: a) common to temperate countries such as bubonic plague, cholera, leprosy, and smallpox; and b) common to tropical countries such as beriberi, diarrhoea and malaria (Ibid. 1900–1903: 310). The state of public health conditions in the Philippines shocked American colonial officials. Victor Heiser, Commissioner of the Board of Health, referring to the free movement of ‘diseased’ individuals, described how the attitude of the Filipino public ‘fluctuated between a great horror of it, amounting almost to panic, and the greatest callousness’ (Heiser 1988: 37). Dean Worcester, former member of the Philippine Commission appointed by President McKinley to investigate the general conditions in the Philippine Islands, and eventually Secretary of the Interior, expressed his disgust, describing such conditions as ‘shocking in the extreme’ (Ibid. 1988: 9). As the Americans grappled with the organizational and logistical requirements of the Philippine–American War, and the anti-imperialist debate in the United States, the public health conditions in the country presented a means to justify America’s imperialist venture. At the height of Western colonialism in the twentieth century, medicine became an essential part of the self-image of ‘civilizing imperialism’ and a significant ideology that justified ‘empire’ (Amrith 2006: 8). David Arnold (1988: 1–26), for instance, argues that Western medicine enabled British colonial rule to regulate its Indian subjects through the demonstration of its superiority over local knowledge and medical practices in terms of controlling epidemic disease, such as cholera. Megan Vaughan in her study of colonial Africa shows how medicine and its associated disciplines constructed ‘the African’ as an object of knowledge (Vaughan 1991: 8). In the case of the Philippines, the conception and establishment of American medicine and public health became a means that was intended to erase the doubts that divided the American nation. Born in the midst of the brutalities of the Philippine–American War and the anti-imperialist debate in the United States, the American colonial public health system was made to serve America’s ‘civilizing mission’ (See Anderson 2006: 2). Reynaldo Ileto in his article ‘Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines’, for example, also shows the military origins of American medicine and public health and how ‘the image of the conquering soldier soon became transformed into that of the crusading sanitary inspector’ (Lowe and Lloyd 1997: 110. See also Anderson 2006: 2). According to Ileto, the ‘perceived’ blessing of public health, in particular the American campaigns against cholera in the years 1899–1901, were in fact ‘continuing acts of war’ meant to subdue Filipino revolutionary troops (Ileto 1988: 127). 158

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Nevertheless, the rhetoric of ‘civilizing mission’ sanctioned a re-ordering of Filipino lives in terms of new hygiene and health practices. It also promoted a new set of habits and values that were largely played out in the barrios (small villages of initially about 50–100 families), or local villages which became secular ‘laboratories of modernity’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 4–5). Propagated through the public school system as the main purveyor of the new ‘gospel of public health’, set bodily regimes incorporated into everyday life supplanted the church and religious instruction which were the main focus in the Philippines during Spanish colonial times. Caught in organizational concerns as well as competing ideologies of different interest groups, the diffusion of American medical beliefs, practices, and discourse became a means for the expanding American bureaucracy in the Philippines to regulate and discipline the bodies of their Filipino subjects.

The ‘gospel of Public health’ Towards the end of the nineteenth century significant developments in modern medicine and public health were achieved. David Arnold for instance, identifies Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine in 1790 as the first signal of man’s potential to master disease (Arnold 1988: 12). J.Z. Bowers adds that the smallpox vaccine was a European feat that was successfully brought to and implemented in European colonies (Bowers 1981: 17–33. See also Arnold 1988: 12). This helped bolster European notions of cultural and technological superiority. Philip Curtin, in the meantime, cites the germ theory of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur towards the late nineteenth century as having revolutionized medicine. According to him, the germ theory also encouraged the ‘systematic collection and dissemination of knowledge’ in the area of health’ (Curtin 1989: 104). By the nineteenth century, the principal focus of medicine and public health was preventative action through sanitation. Both in the metropolis and in the colonies, governments endeavoured to provide potable water as well as eliminate foul odours from sewage and refuse, which were considered important factors that caused epidemics. Manuals were also written which offered practical advice not only on how to be healthy but also on how to preserve health and survive in the tropics, with an emphasis on public and later on private hygiene. These manuals held out the promise of surviving a ‘foreign environment’ and the hope of living a good life in the tropics. Seeing the tropical environment as one of the most daunting in European colonizing efforts, Professor of Hygiene J. Lane Notter, noted: The climate of a country has a most important influence on the health and character of its inhabitants. It therefore requires careful study by those who, having previously lived in temperate zones, are suddenly transferred to a tropical country: and whose very change of environment necessitates a perfect knowledge of many rules and precautions, if they desire to maintain a standard of health at all commensurate with what they 159

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naturally expect to enjoy at home: as well as to ward off those diseases, the result of deteriorations of the functions of the body, which are the effect produced by long residence in tropical countries (Curtin 1989: 104).

James Johnson’s Influences of Tropical Climates on European Constitution, published in 1813, became the first ‘manual’ of its kind for the British colony of India and underwent several editions until 1861. The years beginning 1861 to 1903 witnessed a spate of publications that offered advice on how individuals could protect their lives. Henry King’s The Madras Manual of Hygiene, published in 1875, for example, specifically details the ways in which the health of Europeans could be preserved in the Madras Presidency. Almost two decades later William Ewing Grant’s The Indian Manual of Hygiene superseded King’s in terms of scope and detail. Curtin explains how Grant’s work covered a range of information intended to ‘survive the tropics’ such as domestic architecture, ventilation, nutrition, as well as the design of a modern sewage system (Curtin 1989: 104). While these works became standard guides on living in the tropics, however, these works are primarily concerned with the health and welfare of the Europeans in their various colonies. David Arnold, for example, reproduces a colonial official’s letter to the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore towards the end of the nineteenth century which provides an insight into how colonial officials actually viewed the local people’s health: Why on earth should we go on spending scores of rupees on a thankless task … Let the natives have the advice and attendance of their professional ‘hakims’ and be happy and contented, and when the plague has killed half the population of India and spent itself, then perhaps the native will perceive [sic] the force of the saying: Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat [Those whom God has a mind to destroy, He first deprives of their senses] (Arnold 1988: 156).

Meanwhile, in nineteenth century Batavia, there were no colonial initiatives to improve the living conditions of the Batavians. Norman Owen relates how colonial suburbs were established with their own conveniently located artesian wells without access for the local population (Owen 1987: 201). Conditions in the Philippines were quite similar when the Spaniards established their own enclaves or ciudades Espanoles. As in other colonial states, it was only when health became entwined with a utilitarian logic of labour productivity and commercial success that colonial governments started to pay attention to the health of the local population. According to Warwick Anderson: ‘Native bodies were increasingly recognized not simply as the body of the Other, but more importantly perhaps, as the body of the worker, or the body of the future worker’s mother. These were bodies to be studied, surveyed, disciplined and, when necessary, reformed to ensure their efficiency as parts of the emerging world system’ (Anderson 2000, quoted in Cooter and Pickstone 2000: 235–45. See also 160

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Amrith 2006: 9). In the case of the Philippines the American colonial public health system not only secured health in the colony for economic purposes. Glossed in imperial rhetoric as a ‘civilizing mission’, it allowed the Americans to secure colonial rule through the creation and establishment of varied social relations, institutions, and ‘bodies’. At the forefront of this endeavour were American doctors, scientists, and public health officials who largely believed that they could transport their own medical ideas and practices to the colony. As the need for rationalization and legitimization of empire went along with the need to promote and maintain health in the colony, colonial medical officials had to grapple with local realities and either fit them or adjust them not only to their own informed medical views but also to the bigger project of colonial state building and governance. Therefore, the imposition of new ways of life in response to state health regulations as part of ‘government service’ were actually meant to shape a people and landscape – Filipino bodies and their geographical space – in order to reduce what colonial personnel saw as the colony’s chaotic, disorderly, and constantly changing social reality into colonial visions of order. This becomes more significant as the American occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century came at a time when significant development in modern medicine and public health came into being. Most Filipinos, from the general perception of the Americans, lacked education and were naturally suspicious and sceptical as to the efforts of the Board of Health. In particular, according to E.C. Carter, Commissioner of Public Health in 1902, the greatest obstacle to improving the conditions of the ‘native’ was the ‘native’ himself (E.C. Carter 1905: 65). Americans also generally believed that the unsanitary habits of the majority of the population could be traced to a certain extent to racial customs and the attainment of a lower degree of civilization, although they also considered the pathogenic environment of the Philippines. Racial habits, according to the Americans, however, could not be immediately done away with, even under the best of conditions; but it was possible to gradually modify and improve them through education of the younger generation. Instructions to all primary schools were then mandated to include elementary principles of personal hygiene, house sanitation, and the causes of, and measures for the prevention of, transmissible disease (Ibid 1905: 74). In describing the early efforts to promote public health, for instance, Victor Heiser, Director of Health from 1905 to 1915, remarked, ‘the ultimate success of health work in the Philippines would depend upon the degree of education of the masses and that the best hope there lies in a sound school health program’ (Victor Heiser 1930: RG1.1, ser.242, box 1, folder 8, RAC). Teachers, for example, compiled a health-index for every child in their class: ‘a healthy child would possess a “well-formed body”, “clean and shining hair”, “a clear skin of good colour”, “ears free from discharge”, “a voice of pleasant quality”, and “an amiable disposition”’ (Bureau of Education and Philippine Health Service 1928: n.p.), 161

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among others. More elaborately, the instructions of the Bureau of Education on how to be ‘healthy’ prescribed that: ‘Every child must be weighed once a month with height measured at least twice a year’, and (ibid.: n.p.) goes on to note: If anything was amiss the teacher was expected to report it to the local health officer. It was also the duty of the teacher to instruct pupils to care for themselves and to put into practice both in the school and at home miscellaneous health principles … Children must be taught of the dangers of raw vegetables, impure water, poorly ventilated houses, a sedentary way of life, and deformed posture. Every child was enjoined to carry a clean handkerchief, drink at least a cup of milk every day, sleep between 10 and 12 hours each night (under a mosquito net), bathe daily, wear shoes, wash hands before eating, never touch food and defecate fastidiously. The construction of a toilet, either in his own home or that of a neighbour, should be a project for each seventh-grade boy (ibid).

Compliance with the standards and requirements of the state and medical authorities popularized through the educational system prescribed the means for a person to be ‘healthy’, and the inability to meet these health standards could render one ‘unhealthy’. Since it was also perceived that it was impossible to change the way parents reared their children according to how American medical officials thought they should be reared, domestic science subjects were incorporated into the school curriculum, because in educating the school children, the educational system, in the larger sense, was also educating prospective parents. Domestic science skills were incorporated into the curriculum of all-girls schools under Home Economics, which included cooking, laundry, sewing, weaving, needlework, housewifery (sweeping, dusting, etc.), and specific issues of infant care. Interest in domestic science education and its function in training young women as wives and mothers coincided also with a wider interest in hygiene, sanitation and education. For example, the construction of latrines were part of school projects and their success was later on attributed to school children who encouraged their use among their parents. In being able to comply with these new ‘doctrines of health and hygiene’, Filipinos were made to conform to a totally different lifestyle, one that colonial medical officials sanctioned. What the Americans emphasized, in a sense, was behavioural reform, which also meant that they became compliant, docile, and manageable subjects. In the final analysis, an exploration of the Filipino ‘body’ in this context allows us to look beyond basic state activities such as health initiatives and public welfare and health campaigns. More importantly, it allows us to look into how these state activities were actually the ways and means by which the colonial regime attempted to extend its reach, as American colonial officials sought to undertake colonial state building and governance.

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From sacred to the sanitary: The Transition of the Filipino Body The contribution of this paper to the discussion of the Filipino body has been to analyse how the agencies of colonial regulation were manifested in the minutiae of social life. This process can be seen by juxtaposing Spanish manuals of religious piety with American directives of public health and hygiene which, as we have seen, had also been deployed through the use of manuals and gazettes that promoted the ‘gospel’ of sanitization. The relationship between code, practice and embodiment that is a central theme in this volume finds strong expression in the Philippine example. As a few other chapters in this volume demonstrate, the features of the colonial Filipino body can be seen through the codes – both religious and civic – that sought to contort its form, dictate its movement and regulate its habits. There are, in this respect, some general comparative statements that can be made. Through manuals of urbanity, the Spanish missionaries geared the native population towards the anticipation of a heavenly afterlife, while American health policy geared native bodies towards this-worldly notions of health, which were, in turn, motivated by the fear of death and physical contamination. American medical practitioners suggested that all native bodies could achieve the common ideal of bodily ‘wellness’ if they observed certain rituals and submitted to the former’s medical and physiological expertise. The body under the Spanish regime, on the other hand, was not subjected to this kind ‘rhetoric of equality’. Instead, people were taught to align their sensibilities towards an ideal that could only be achieved when they died. For there was an inherent irony in Christian notions concerning the body – that the rewards of the physical and spiritual upkeep of one’s body could only be attained when the body itself expired. The rewards of religious piety, therefore, were ones that were perpetually deferred and subject to the doctrines of Christian soteriology. Aside from divergences between colonial regimes, some intersections can also be traced. Both regimes crafted their religious/ideological systems according to physical segregations and population control. In other words, both Spanish and American notions of the native body became manifested in physical geography. Ideas about the condition of the native body determined the geographical boundaries that demarcated settlement patterns. For the Spanish, the policy of reduccion alienated those who were not of sound mind, body and spirit. As an attempt to define correct religious behaviour, Manuals of Urbanity had the effect of domesticating aspects of a person’s character and comportment that did not correspond to doctrinal ideals. Those who resisted the civilizing/Christianizing mission of the colonial enterprise were relegated to the peripheries and the margins of ‘civilized’ society. For the Americans, the sanitary barrio segregated those who were deemed ‘uncontaminated’ or ‘clean’. But also, those outside American settlement patterns were those recalcitrant to the civilizing/sanitizing mission. This suggests that rituals of intimacy in both regimes were, in practice, 163

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exclusionary measures that created and demarcated physical space for the purpose of defining circles of intimates and outsiders. While this paper has touched upon how this transition between regimes was mediated by the nationalist movement, its main thrust has been to invite discussion on ways in which this gradual process of transition can be seen in the regimes of intimacy Filipino bodies were made to observe. This paper has considered how the ‘medicalization’ of the body – a European phenomenon since the thirteenth century – has found two distinct forms of expression as a specifically colonial project in South-East Asia. It is conceptualized as a foray into a broader analysis of the Filipino body within the ideological milieu of colonialism by describing the colonial Filipino body in a state of flux across hegemonic regimes.

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9 And R eLigious C onTesTATions oveR The B ody: h ook s winging And The P RoduCTion oF n ew h umAn s uBJeCTs

s TATe

Santhosh Raghavan Nair

introduction Academic discussions broadly analyze the human body not as an autonomous entity of the subject, instead they examine how everyday existence and manifestations of the body in its myriad forms are the products of much deeper and broader social processes and cultural meanings. The everyday existence of the human body across cultures has also raised enormous interest among scholars on the question of inflicting violence or pain on the body. The practice of inflicting pain on the human body, through a number of torturous practices at various social settings, has been studied from numerous angles. Veena Das (1995) observes that sociologists can understand the practice of inflicting pain on the human body through two categories. In the first, pain is understood as the medium through which society establishes its authority over the individual. Thus numerous modes of initiation rights, prevalent in both modern as well as traditional societies, often subject the novice to severe physical pain, and this pain can be explained as a procedure through which society accepts and adopts an individual as a complete member. In the second category, pain is the medium available to an individual through which a historical wrong done to them can be represented. Violence inflicted on the body at the time of social conflict becomes the symbol of representation through which such aggression and atrocities are 165

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remembered and preserved. This chapter investigates questions regarding the infliction of pain on the human body as an expression of religiosity, and a set of contestations that follow such infliction of pain. It analyses these questions in the context of exploring how the prohibition of such infliction of pain on human body is a part of a wider story of the creation of a new sense of self. The advent of colonial modernity in its diverse manifestations and colonial localities offered extremely powerful and clear frameworks to deal with and administer many of the ‘inhuman and barbaric customs’ of the native population. The visible discomfort of colonial sensibilities with many of these customs eventually resulted in creating powerful discourses which deemed these actions and rituals incompatible with modernity and eventually attempted to suppress them. Given this background the chapter specifically focuses on a controversy that emerged in 2004 in Kerala, the southernmost state of India, regarding the ‘appropriateness’ of a religious ritual called hook-swinging. This ritual involves the suspension of a devotee’s body from two or more iron hooks pierced through the skin which are hung on the end of a long wooden pole that is elevated from a wooden scaffold. After presenting the ethnographic context of this ritual and the ensuing controversy, the chapter engages with the discourses that made this ritual a controversial and debatable one. These discourses, primarily espoused by the state and the Hindu reformists, utilizing the rationality of modern medicine, problematizes the infliction of pain on the body and deems it ‘barbaric’ and ‘inhuman’. The tendency of despising and then attempting to prevent the traditional customs and rituals that appear ‘barbaric’ and ‘inhuman’ by the state, espousing the rationality of European modernity, has a long history. The history of colonial rule is also the history of the desperate attempts of the colonizers, especially the British, to prohibit a number of customs that challenged the ethical and moral foundations of European sensibilities. The chapter looks at these dominant discourses that were raised during colonial times as well as against the ritual of hook-swinging in 2004 in Kerala, and suggests that there are striking similarities between the opponents of the ritual and their forms and rationale of opposition. Drawing on Foucauldian insights to understand these discourses as disciplinary regimes to create docile bodies and new human subjects, I examine the encounter between such European disciplinary discourses and native traditionalism, and the unfinished project of creating new human subjects. Critically examining the Foucauldian notion of an overarching presence of disciplinary structures, the continuous existence of the ritual of hook-swinging till 1987 and the attempt to revive it in 2004 show how the subjective agency of the local community resists these overarching disciplinary structures.

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hook-swinging: An ethnographic note What is examined here is a controversy related to the practice of ‘hook swinging’ in Puthen Kavu Bhagavati Temple in Eranakulam district of Kerala. The deity of Puthenkavu Bhagavati Temple in Elavoor is Bhagavati, who is also know as Bhadrakali. Bhagavati is the predominant Hindu deity in Kerala and this cult is associated with both the Sanskritic goddesses of the greater pan-Indian Hindu tradition and the local village goddesses associated with fever. The goddess Bhagavati is conceived of as primarily benevolent and powerful and also a chaste virgin and a caring mother (Caldwell 1999). Obeyesekere (1984) argues that the Bhagavati cult of Kerala must be the earlier form of the Pattini cult of Sri Lanka. Using historical and anthropological evidence, he establishes that Buddhist and Jain settlements were prevalent in Kerala before the eighth century A.D. He depends heavily on Induchudan (1969) to prove this point by showing that Kodungalloor Bhagavati Temple, one of the most ancient and famous Bhagavati temples of Kerala, was originally a Buddhist shrine. The worshipping patterns of these Bhagavati temples (mostly in the form of kavu – grove temples) are characterized by blood sacrifice and similar ‘little tradition’ worshipping patterns (Fuller 1992; Gopalakrishnan 1963; Osella and Osella 2003). As a religious ritual, hook-swinging had attracted the attention of administrators and scholars right from the mid-nineteenth century. J H Powel, in an article written in 1914, provides a very elaborate account of the conduct of hook-swinging that he observed in person and also as described by other scholars. On the basis of these accounts he argues that hook-swinging is the vestige of human sacrifice (Powell 1914). Among contemporary scholars Oddie (1995) provides one of the most extensive accounts of the practice of hook-swinging in nineteenth-century India, and he describes it as a practice involving the suspension of the body on hooks and some kind of movements which may increase pain or stress, such as the act of being swung in rotation, bounced or simply lifted or lowered several times in succession. He maintains that the ritual was practised across the Indian subcontinent, especially in Bengal and in south India. A substantial section of his book is devoted to examining the regional variations in conducting this ritual, and the colonial effort to suppress the practice. While describing the regional variations, he points out that hookswinging in Bengal was strongly affected by the idea that pain and self-torture were pleasing to Siva, one of the trinities of Indian mythology, whereas in many other parts of the subcontinent the swinging ritual seems to have been encouraged by the ancient idea of blood offerings and human sacrifice, the ritual being more of a symbol or substitution for the offering of life itself (Oddie 1995). According to the accounts of British officials and scholars cited by Oddie and Powel, hook-swinging was very much in practice all over south India. Powel (1914), quoting L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, provides a vivid picture of the regional variation of the ritual in Kerala, where the ritual is performed to obtain 167

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the blessings of Bhadra Kali. In Kerala, the ritual of hook-swinging where the weight of the entire body is placed on the hooks attached to the body was in practice till 1987 in Elavoor Puthankavu Temple, which was famous across Kerala for conducting hook-swinging in this manner. A number of temples in southern Kerala conduct a similar ritual where the body weight of the performer is supported by a rope or a piece of cloth, and a pair of small needles is pierced through the skin in a symbolic manner. The myth associated with hook-swinging in Kerala is also about human sacrifice. This myth is very much alive in the popular memory of Elavoor, the place where the temple is situated. According to the myth, the local chieftain of the area had a divine revelation in his dream, asking him to conduct human sacrifice to placate the goddess of Elavoor temple who was believed to be presiding over the entire kingdom. Accordingly, he started the practice of human sacrifice once a year by hanging his countrymen on a wooden scaffold in front of the temple. The victim’s body used to be left on the scaffold to be devoured by the ghouls of goddess. The practice was continued until a traumatized mother of a victim ardently prayed to the goddess to spare her son. It is believed that the goddess appeared in the form of an oracle and pronounced that the sacrifice should be stopped for ever and was to be replaced by hook-swinging, that is, the man would be hung on iron hooks pierced through his back skin and that he would be retrieved from the scaffold alive, not leaving him to die there. In the Elavoor temple, hook-swinging is considered to be the most important and powerful offering in the temple and it is conducted once a year in the month Meda (tenth day of the rising of the sun in the meda/mesha month, falling at the end of April). Devotees offer hook-swinging to the goddess for various purposes and a majority of the devotees do this to overcome barrenness. Though any person, irrespective of caste, can offer this ritual to placate the goddess, the act of hanging can be performed only by a member of the Nair caste. So most of the people who sponsor hook-swinging as an offering to the goddess do not actually perform it themselves, but contact the temple committee so that they, in turn, can arrange for a Nair from the village, who has either undertaken the ritual earlier or is willing to take up the ritual, to perform it. Generally, the offerer enters into an informal contract with the performer by providing both monetary and non-monetary benefits such as new cloths, oil for body massage, etc. After agreeing to this contract, both the offerer and the Nair go to the temple and undertake a forty-one-day vow implying some austerities including celibacy. The performer is then given a sword as insignia to let everyone in the village know that he is under a vow to undertake the ritual. He also needs to visit the temple every day and is prohibited from leaving the village till the ritual is performed. The performer undergoes body massage in the last twenty-one days of the period of austerity, using special oil made of three herbs. This is to make the skin on his back more flexible and separate it from the muscles. On the day of the event, the performer is escorted into the temple courtyard by a procession of devotees who carry him on their shoulders. This procession is 168

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welcomed at the entrance by the temple oracle who appears in a trance. After conducting certain rituals inside the temple, the performer is led to the wooden scaffold which is traditionally used for hook-swinging. This scaffold is made of teak wood and one end of the pole, where iron hooks are attached, is lowered with a lever and the performer is brought just below this end. While a village elder pierces the back skin, the performer is given a combination of betel leaves and areca-nut to chew and bystanders blow hard on his ears. Once the hooks are fixed, he is elevated to a height of almost thirty-five feet by lowering the other end of the lever. Immediately after this, the scaffold is taken on the shoulders by a group of devotees who run three times around the temple. On the completion of the third round, the scaffold is laid on the ground and hooks are pulled off from the performer. Soon he is made to run around the temple thrice. Turmeric powder taken from the Bhagavati’s idol is applied on the wounds and they are wrapped with a cloth. During the night, his back is massaged and blood clots inside the skin are squeezed out. The wrapped cloths will be removed on the seventh day of the ritual by which time the wounds will have healed.

hook-swinging Controversy Though hook-swinging was legally prohibited during colonial times, the ritual continued in the Elavoor temple till 1987 as the most important offering to the goddess. The uniqueness of hook-swinging in Elavoor lies in the fact that while performing the ritual, the hooks pierced through the skin support the body weight of the performer, whereas in a number of other temples of this region, the performer is tied to the pole with a cloth, and two very small hooks are pierced on the skin in a symbolic manner. In 1987, regional newspapers brought out articles on hook-swinging in Elavoor temple, depicting the practice as a ‘primitive’ and ‘cruel’ custom. Mathrubhoomi, a leading vernacular newspaper, carried an editorial describing hook-swinging as a barbaric and reprehensible custom based on blind beliefs. The paper exhorted the local people to come forward and eradicate such disgusting acts (Editorial, Mathrubhoomi, 28 April 1987). Most of the criticisms that appeared in the press against hook-swinging were on the grounds that it was inappropriate for a ‘progressive’ society like Kerala. Though the report did not evoke any response from the local community, Swami Bhoomananda Thirta, a Hindu ascetic who is the president of the Hindu Navodhana Prathishtan (Hindu Awakening Movement) decided to carry out an awareness campaign against this ritual. Hindu Navodhana Prathishtan was established by the Swami to eradicate ‘blind beliefs’ and to enlighten people about the ethical religious practices of Hinduism. On 30 April 1987, the Swami announced a Sudhikarma Yathra (purificatory march) to Elavoor to convince the people about the ‘barbaric and criminal act’ and enlighten them about the ‘true’ Hindu practices. Following stiff opposition from the local people against the 169

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Swami’s intervention, his march to Elavoor was stopped by the police on the day of the ritual. He was taken into custody by the police as they feared that his campaign against the ritual would infuriate the villagers, and it might threaten the maintenance of law and order. Due to this controversy in 1987, the ritual was conducted with police protection, as there was an overwhelming demand from the villagers to conduct the ritual. Once the hook-swinging was conducted, the temple committee convened a meeting of the devotees and representatives of different Hindu organizations to discuss the controversy, and the future course of action. The opposition of the Swami and the scathing criticism from the media regarding the propriety of conducting the ritual influenced a substantial section of the devotees and it was decided in the meeting to bring about ‘timely changes’ in the ritual. The suggestion of ‘timely changes’ emerged from the argument that hook-swinging may not be appropriate for a modern society and it portrayed the village in a poor light. Moreover, an astrological session was performed to understand the desires of the goddess regarding the continuation of the ritual. The session revealed that hook-swinging could be replaced by poomoodal, a ritual in which the idol of the deity in the sanctum sanctorum is completely covered with floral petals. Since then poomoodal has been conducted as the most preferred ritual of the temple. It is important to note that soon after the replacement of hook-swinging with poomoodal there was an alleged shift in the nature and quality of the deity. Successive astrological sessions revealed that the goddess Bhagavati was transformed into a more benevolent deity, shedding her violent and ferocious character. Now she is a deity who does not display her wrath by unleashing dreaded diseases, and instead showers blessings on her devotees. This shift in the quality of the goddess, from a malevolent fearful deity who required hook-swinging and animal sacrifice, to that of a benevolent goddess who needed to be loved and worshipped but not to be feared, is extremely significant here. These new developments also point to the underlying processes through which Sanskritized high-caste religiosity gradually eroded the ‘little tradition’ articulation of religious practices. A new temple committee which assumed power in 2000, following fresh elections, thought of reviving hook-swinging. After considerable deliberations, the committee announced that hook-swinging would be revived and conducted in 2004. This decision was apparently justified by a fresh astrological session conducted by the committee which came up with a number of revelations. According to these revelations, the goddess was in a state of distress, and the affairs of the temple and hook-swinging need to be performed to placate her. The revival of hook-swinging was projected as a solution to please the goddess, which would ensure the overall well-being of the villagers. This announcement by the temple committee that they intended to revive the ritual created serious disagreement, as a section of the villagers objected to the revival. Opponents argued that an ‘old inhuman custom’ that had been abandoned years back due to the intervention of more ‘enlightened’ leaders and representatives 170

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of Hinduism should not be revived. Many of them even questioned the authenticity of the astrological session and alleged that it was concocted. They argued that the motive behind the attempt to revive hook-swinging was to make money from the large number of visitors who would throng the temple to watch this spectacle. This allegation was dismissed by the temple committee who stood by the veracity of the astrological session and proceeded with the preparations to conduct the ritual. The committee identified both the devotee who was to offer the ritual and a traditional performer from the village to carry out the hook-swinging. While the temple committee went ahead with these preparations, representatives of those who opposed the revival of the ritual formed a ‘Poura Dharma Samithi’ (Peoples Ethical Committee, PDS). They submitted a memorandum that had been signed by one hundred people to the district collector, the administrative head of the district, urging him to prevent the revival of hook-swinging. They alleged that ‘the attempt to revive hook-swinging is to revive [a] barbaric and cruel custom that is unacceptable for a civilised society’ (Memorandum to the District Collector submitted by Poura Dharma Samithi). The campaign initiated by the PDS did not get the mass support from the village, as a majority of the villagers were in favour of reviving the ritual. In their petition to the District Collector, the PDS provided a graphic picture of hook-swinging and explained the horrendous way of conducting this ritual by piercing the skin, which results in a copious flow of blood. It also asserted that the present temple committee was trying to protect a tradition that created ‘pain and horror in the minds of viewers and hence such a practice cannot be accepted by any civilised society’ (pamphlet printed and distributed by PDS). Subsequently, in a pamphlet distributed by the PDS, it argued that the goddess, who had been elevated to the position of an auspicious and sublime deity, had to have obeisance offered with only auspicious rituals and offerings. Piercing the human flesh with iron hooks and animal sacrifices were meant for the malevolent goddesses and Puthenkavu Devi was now not a malevolent but a benevolent deity (ibid.). As a part of the campaign, the PDS contacted Swami Bhoomananda and requested him to initiate another campaign to prevent the revival of hookswinging. After receiving assurance from the PDS that the people of Elavoor would join him to oppose the revival, the Swami initiated a widespread campaign against the proposed revival. As a part of it, he sent petitions to the Chief Minister of the state, the District Collector, and set up a continuous media campaign against the ritual. He convened several meetings of various Hindu organizations and ascetics to harness support against hook-swinging. On 11 March 2004, the Swami wrote to the District Collector and the Superintendent of Police urging them to stop the temple committee from conducting hook-swinging, which was scheduled to be performed on 23 April 2004. Meanwhile, the person assigned to undertake the ritual started observing penance. To strengthen the campaign, the Swami convened a meeting of Hindu organizations and leaders and passed a resolution describing hook-swinging as 171

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‘barbaric’ and demanded an immediate intervention from the government. The meeting was attended by the office bearers of many Hindu organizations and ascetics of different Hindu religious orders of Kerala. The Swami took a pledge in the meeting that he would begin a Vivekodaya Yathra (journey to instil wisdom) to Elavoor one day before the day of the hook-swinging and would prevent the ritual at any cost. He affirmed that the ritual could be carried out only by trampling over his body. Meanwhile the temple committee proceeded with preparations and they demolished the sanctity wall built outside the sanctum sanctorum of the temple to facilitate the carrying of the wooden scaffold. In order to find a solution, the District Collector convened several rounds of meeting with both the parties to resolve the issue, but in vain. By then considerable media exposure had attracted widespread attention to this controversy. On 20 April 2004, as a part of his Vivekodaya Yathra, the Swami reached Elavoor but was prevented by the local people from entering the temple. His attempt to address the gathering was disrupted by constant shouting and howling by the devotees who thronged the temple premises. Subsequently the police arrested the Swami fearing a deterioration of the situation and took him out of the village. Speculation grew with media reports that the situation in Elavoor was extremely volatile, with both the groups sticking to their positions. On 22 April 2004, the night before the scheduled day of the ritual, the District Collector issued a ban order at 1am and directed the RDO (Revenue Divisional Officer) and the Superintendent of Police to confiscate the scaffold and arrest all the concerned parties. A huge police consignment arrived at Elavoor at 3am with a trailer lorry, and policemen entered the temple and shifted the scaffold into the trailer. All the concerned people, including the temple committee office-bearers and the performer were arrested and taken away to the police station. This police action at night was not anticipated by the villagers and they were taken totally by surprise. The next morning a huge protest meeting was organized by the villagers within the temple compound and all the local administrative representatives were kept as hostages for a long time, and they were released only after long negotiations. But all these protests did not yield any result as the performer and the scaffold were already taken away by the police. All the arrested people were released on the day after the scheduled day of the ritual, and the wooden scaffold was shifted to a nearby police camp to keep it in safe custody. Since then the temple conducts only poomoodal and the ritual of hook-swinging has not resurfaced.

despising hook-swinging: The discourses of Brahminic Reformism and the modern nation state The controversy regarding the ritual of hook-swinging at Elavoor and the unfolding of events that resulted in police action requires a careful analysis to understand much deeper discourses regarding the human body, especially what is 172

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located within the domain of religion. Many of these discourses present us with the myriad debates regarding the ‘propriety’ of inflicting pain on one’s own body to express religiosity. In Elavoor as well, the overall debate regarding the propriety of such a custom revolved around the question of subjecting the human body to pain, and using the body in pain as a public spectacle. The local villagers who traditionally performed this ritual to placate the goddess encountered the argument that such a practice was inhuman and barbaric. In spite of the resistance put up by a majority of the villagers, these discourses succeeded in preventing the ritual. Hence it is necessary to problematize these discourses and understand them better. As mentioned earlier, the most systematic and effective campaign against hook-swinging was carried out by Swami Bhoomananda Thirta. It is necessary to understand the arguments of the Swami, because, on this issue, he represents the underlying discourses of Hindu reformism. He defines his responsibility to intervene in the issue of hook-swinging on the grounds that lokasangraha (enlightening the world or showing the right path) is his karma. ‘Given lokasangraha ever since my 23rd year, when I find society relishing to tread the wrong path with vengeance, can I be mute?’ He assumes the responsibility as ‘an ascetic to sense the transgression and misconduct of the society and striving with zeal to set them right, restoring the society to its righteous safe guards and moorings’ (pamphlet printed by Swami Bhoomananda). Two of the most commonly used terms to describe hook-swinging in his campaign are ‘barbaric’ and ‘criminal’. The major arguments of his opposition to hook-swinging are the following (ibid.): Hook-swinging is an insult to the doctrine of Bhagavat Gita, it utterly violates all scriptural, sober religious and devotional standards, it is criminal in nature, retards the efforts to disseminate cultural and heritage values as well as Hindu Dharma effectively, the ritual is anti Hindu and anti National, and finally it is reprehensible for an enlightened society like Kerala (Interview on 12th May 2005).

According to him, Bhagavat Gita, the supreme scripture of the Hindus, does not allow any devotional practices that hurt devotees. He unequivocally declares that Hindus have only one tradition and that is the scriptural tradition and everything else is an aberration. Such a view on Hindu religious practices is an inherent component of almost all high-caste, Brahminic, reformist discourses. As most of these reformist movements represent Brahminic views on religiosity that derive the legitimacy of any religious custom and practices of worship only from the scriptures, the popular religiosity of non-Sanskritic forms practised by a community is completely rejected. He did not see any justification for the religiosity of the patterns of worship of the ‘little tradition’ especially nonBrahminic forms. Animal sacrifices, a common form of offering in most of the lower-caste, ‘little tradition’ temples, were, according to him, only to fill the 173

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devotee’s stomach and there was nothing devotional or religious about it. He says ‘if you want to slaughter, you slaughter the animals in the slaughter house but not in the temple’(ibid.). He rejects these ‘sacrilegious traditional abuses’, claiming the authority as a religious head to do so. According to him, the right and ability to distinguish a proper religious custom from an abused and a corrupt practice and to intervene to stop that practice comes from him being an ascetic and a dharmic guru (religious/moral teacher). Describing hook-swinging as a criminal act is the second significant strand consistently appearing throughout the Swami’s campaign against hook-swinging. This criminality is alleged and established on the ground that cruelty and pain is inflicted on the human body. This view is articulated by arguing that Elavoor is a unit of the Indian state and that hook-swinging is against the law and therefore, criminal in nature. It is significant to note that though he claims the superiority of the scriptural forms of worship over the local forms, he presents these scriptural forms too as subordinate to the law of the land, that is the legal system of India. Throughout the campaign he urges the government to initiate legal action against this crime. ‘In a state where slaughter and even maiming animals and birds are prohibited by the law, how can a human being be maimed at all in hook-swinging?’ (Interview on 12th May 2005). On a question about the rationale of the age-old religious practices being regulated by criminal law, which has a recent origin in colonial modernity, he affirms that the law has to be of prime importance. ‘A human being is first a citizen, only then a religious person. The law of the land should govern every form of religious practices. There is no limit to which the law can and should be able to regulate the religious practices’ (interview on 12th May 2005 with Swami Bhoomananda). It is significant that along with Brahminic Hinduism, the Swami also depends on the modern rationality of the legal system to criminalize hook-swinging. On the other hand, even though the modern state is equally categorical in despising the ritual, the articulation of such an opposition is different. In the Elavoor episode the state discourse on the contentious issue of hook-swinging can be analysed by examining positions adopted by district officials. Right from the beginning of the controversy, the District Collector had initiated several rounds of meetings with the conflicting groups to arrive at an amicable solution. Temple committee members allege that the collector behaved in a highly partisan manner opposing the conduct of ritual. They felt that it was as though he had made up his mind to stop the ritual. The only record for understanding his official position in this matter is to examine the ban order he proclaimed on 22 April 2004. In his order banning this ritual, he provides a background of the issue of hook-swinging by pointing out five factors: • The term of the temple committee had expired and they have no right to manage temple affairs. • Poura Dharma Samiti, the citizens initiative against Hook-swinging from Elavoor had opposed hook-swinging as inhuman and criminal. 174

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• The District Medical Officer (DMO) says that there is a possibility of bleeding, secondary infection and even death. • Hindu organizations have opposed hook-swinging on the contention that it is a barbaric, inhuman and illegal ritual which utterly violates all scriptural, sober religious and devotional standards and it violates the sanctity of the temple precincts. • The Superintendent of Police, who is the district head of the police force, has reported that the Hindu organizations have threatened to stop the ritual using physical force and the situation can lead to the deterioration of law and order. After making these as the background points about the hook-swinging he further states that: [F]rom the forgoing, I, Gnanesh Kumar IAS, the district magistrate of Eranakulam district, am satisfied that if directions are not issued to prevent the conduct of hookswinging there is likely to be injuries to the person/s that are hung from the scaffold as a part of the ritual of hook-swinging. There is likely to be danger to human life, health and safety and there is distinct possibility of public tranquillity getting affected, since directions have to be issued to ensure immediate prevention and speedy remedy of the situation and since there is no time left to serve pre-decisional notice on different affected parties, I am constrained to pass ex-parte order under section 144(2) Criminal Procedure Code. (District Collectors Order 22 April 2004)

The order gives clear instructions to the police to confiscate the wooden scaffold and to arrest all the concerned people and thereby prevent the ritual from being carried out. The rationale of this order is founded on a number of factors, as is evident from the proclamation. Prior to reaching this decision, he had sought reports from the District Medical Officer and the Superintendent of Police. These two reports give a number of reasons, on different grounds, showing why hookswinging should be prohibited. While the police report highlighted the possibility of violence and deterioration in the law and order situation, the medical officer’s report highlighted the health hazard associated with this ritual. The District Medical Officer’s report first provides a short description of the conduct of the ritual explaining all important procedures and finally concludes by following remarks. ‘Strictly speaking there is risk to the health in the following ways:’ • There is a chance of bleeding from the part of the pierced skin; • There is a chance of giving way of skin pieces and fall from a height causing injury and death; • As a later complication there is a chance of secondary infection causing septicaemia and death; • Failure of the machinery may cause death. • Sir, there is a probability of complications and appropriate decision may be taken considering the law and order problem that may arise. (District Medical Officer 2004)

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This is the report used by the District Collector as a rationale to pass his order prohibiting the conduct of hook-swinging. A close reading of the major arguments and the justification for banning the ritual of hook-swinging reveals the interconnection of a multitude of discourses which try to give a new meaning and definition to the human body and what constitutes proper religiosity. Here, the dominant Hindu reformist discourse and the discourse of the modern state merge together, as the state, represented by the District Collector, spoke the same language as the high-caste reformer. The Collector very judiciously also adopted the third discourse of modern medicine to give a scientific and rational justification to his ban order by showing how such a ritual is medically disastrous. Western medicine constitutes an integral part of the most celebrated and trusted exemplification of the overall European development discourse (Nandy 1998). Western medicine is used by the state, here in Elavoor, as the most powerful and authentic apparatus to judge the propriety of a custom. Modern medicine with its epistemological sensibilities founded on Western rationalities sees hook-swinging as dangerous to health. Bleeding and the possibility of septicaemia are shown as the basic stand to declare hook-swinging as being ‘risky and possible for complications’. The local knowledge of massage on the body of the devotee and its role in keeping the skin flexible, and the application of turmeric powder on the wounds are dismissed solely on the basis that they do not stem from the Western epistemology of health science. Similarly, the fact that all the people who undertook hook-swinging in previous years had not developed complications due to this practice is completely overlooked and rejected. Here, medicine becomes a legitimizing principle for the state. Similarly, the voluntary nature of the act of hook-swinging and the subjective agency of the performer behind such an act is dismissed unproblematically. Such dismissal emerges from the modernist position which projects the consenting subject’s experience of pain as mere false consciousness, a fanatical commitment to outmoded beliefs which invites forcible correction (Asad 1998: 285–308).

disciplining the Body: The Foucauldian insights and the unfinished story of Creating new human subjects As it is evident, the Elavoor episode is a broader story of attempts to control and civilize a number of important elements of human subjectivity, including that of religiosity, body, cruelty, public display of pain, etc. An analysis of such attempts provides fruitful meanings only when they are examined in a historical perspective, probing the genesis of such attempts. Numerous studies of the history of colonialism in India have thrown light on the ways in which Western dominance in India was also dominance over the intellectual and ethical/moral spheres of Indian society, with a mission to civilize Indian society and culture. 176

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These studies also shed light on the complex negotiations and dynamics involved in such a difficult task. These studies provide striking parallels between the prominent discourses regarding similar incidents during colonial times and the contemporary episode in Elavoor. The views of Mani (1999), Oddie (1995), and Dirks (2001) illustrate how the colonial government saught and almost reflected Brahminic claims over the authenticity and propriety of issues like sati (immolation of widows) and hook swinging. On the issue of abolishing the practice of sati, Mani (1999) examines the official and native elite discourse on sati. She refutes the popular notion that British were forced to abolish the practice of sati because of its barbarity and their horror of the burning of women. She observes that this notion was only a minor theme in the larger colonial discourse. In her view the legislative prohibition of sati came into existence as a result of the interaction of the colonial state with the elite discourse of the native Hindus who were invariably Brahmins. The interaction of the colonial state with the reformist ideas of the native elites and intellectuals was one of the major and significant elements of the governmental rationality of the colonial state. It was in fact governing the subjects in and through their own categories. ‘Brahminic scriptures are increasingly seen to be the locus of this authenticity so that for example the legislative prohibition of sati becomes a question of scriptural interpretation (Mani 1999: 88–126). The encounter of the present study of hook-swinging in Kerala with the lokasangraha reformist discourse of Swami Bhoomananda Thirta and the reasoning behind the banning of the public ritual by the district administration has striking parallels with the reformist reasoning behind the abolition of sati in the early nineteenthcentury Bengal. In his analysis of ‘hook swinging’ in the Madurai region of Madras presidency, Dirks (2001) narrates how the colonial state prepared its ground intellectually in the form of creating a new anthropology of the colonized to govern Indian subjects. In the process of anthropologization of colonized society, it brought the conceptual distinction between religion and custom, religion and ritual, private faith and public exhibition of ritual, coercion and voluntary involvement in the ritual. The colonial state had problems and objections to public infliction of pain on the human body and the coercion to perform the ritual of hook swinging because it could become a threat to the moral foundation of the British rule. The colonial state was worried that hook swinging would spread all over once it became clear that the government did not intend to prevent it. (Dirks 2001: 157)

According to Dirks, hook swinging was a particular problem to the colonial state not just because of its alleged barbarity but also because this barbarity took place in public space. ‘Officials were horrified not only by the event itself but also by the public character of the spectacle, which was disturbing both to their self representations and to public order’ (ibid.: 153). 177

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In a similar vein, Oddie also argues that ‘for European critics, hook-swinging was a practice which illustrated the “otherness” of Indian society. This society was in their view not only alien and inferior, but something an aberration – the criteria for what was normal, natural and rational being reflected in European rather than in Oriental thought and practice’ (Oddie 1995: 137). Analysing the cultural and context-specific meanings of torture and cruelty across different settings, and in an attempt to show that the modern human-rights language of despising torture is highly problematic and ambiguous, Asad discusses the colonial attempts to prevent and prohibit many of the barbaric and inhuman customs of the colonized cultures (Asad 1998). He observes that the historical process of constructing a humane society was been aimed at eliminating cruelties. This was carried out vigorously in the colonial societies in the attempt to make the colonial subjects more civilized: ‘in the attempt to outlaw customs the European rulers considered cruel, it was not concern with indigenous suffering that dominated European’s thinking, but rather the desire to impose what they considered civilised standards of justice and humanity on a subject population, that is, the desire to create new human subjects’ (Asad 1998: 293). The proposition that the prevention of cruelty and the attempt to the abolish infliction of pain on the human body are a part of deeper and broader attempts to redefine human beings and to create new human subjects is inspired by the theoretical arguments of Foucault. Through a series of studies he showed how various discursive formations in history have succeeded in controlling and creating new forms of human subjectivities. In his work on the history of sexuality, Foucault shows how the sovereign’s right either to kill or not to kill in the Classical period is transformed into and reduced to one among many forms of power to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it (Foucault 1990). This period of transition, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he explains as the evolution of power over life into two poles; one centred on the body as a machine, revolving around its disciplining, increasing its usefulness and docility, the other focused on dominating the species body, that is, the population. He points out: ‘…there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio-power”’ (Foucault 1990: 140). Using this concept of bio-power and governmentality, Foucault explains how dispersed forms of power acting through various disciplines and institutions have defined and constructed human bodies and made them docile. The argument of Asad that the prohibition of cruelty on the body is ultimately an attempt to create new human subjects who are civilized enough and whose bodies are docile is according to the Foucauldian argument the exhibition and operation of the disciplining forms of power in human history. Hence, the state which uses the language of European modernity to describe and despise hookswinging in India by legitimizing the versions of modern medicine on the ill178

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effects of the ritual on the human body is an important element of the discursive form of power which creates human beings with docile bodies. Foucault’s theory of power through its various manifestations at the microlevel provides a picture of an overarching structure of power in which human subjects are permanently entangled. Critics argue that the body is presented as entrenched within a number of disciplinary mechanisms and the body appears as the passive site where these disciplinary forms of power are enacted, enforced and experimented upon. McNay points out that despite Foucault’s theoretical assertion that power is a diffuse, heterogeneous and productive phenomenon, his historical analyses tend to depict power as a centralized, monolithic force with an inexorable and repressive grip on its subjects. In The History of Sexuality, bodies are ‘saturated’ with disciplinary techniques, sex is ‘administered’ by a controlling power that ‘wrapped the sexual body in its embrace’ (McNay 1992: 15). This interpretation of power by Foucault which refuses the possibility of subjective agency has come under severe criticism from feminist scholars. Dews observes that the result of the annulment of the materiality of the body is that power loses all explanatory content and becomes a ubiquitous metaphysical principle because it has nothing determinate against which it operates (Dews 1987, quoted in McNay 1992: 152). Similarly, Rose argues that by positing bio-power as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social realm, the history of law, the history of knowledge, the history of all social institutions is reduced to the simple effects of an all-pervasive bio-power (Rose 1984, quoted in McNay 1992: 44). Keeping these strands of criticism in mind, the present analysis examines the question of the overarching operation of multiple discourses and power structures in the Indian context which wanted to create docile bodies and more civilized subjects by prohibiting torturous and cruel customs like hook-swinging. It is important to note that the efforts to suppress these ‘barbaric’ and ‘inhuman’ customs in India dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. This ‘civilizing mission’ essentially revolved around the question of abolishing a number of traditional religious practices that subjected the human body to extreme form of pain and torture. Through several agencies, which include the powerful state, reformist Hinduism, modern medicine and a multitude of other agencies, which epitomize the power/knowledge nexus, these discourses aimed at the production of new human subjects. There are also striking similarities between the arguments raised against rituals like hook-swinging in the early nineteenth century and in the hook-swinging controversy that was enacted in Elavoor in 2004. The similarities are striking because the opposition to the ritual emerged from a similar combination of the state and Hindu reformism and on both occasions this combination spoke in an identical language: the language of European modernity. In other words, these discourses have been active in Kerala for the last one and a half centuries promoting and trying to create a more modern and civilized citizen-subject. This aspect is even more significant considering the fact 179

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that Kerala is widely considered as one of the states which has achieved the highest rate of ‘progress’. The communist movement, the Christian missionaries and social reform movements, etc., contributed to the formulation of a dominant notion of modernity in Kerala in which religiosity also was defined in a specific manner (Muralidharan 1996). The analysis suggests that the initiative of the village community in Elavoor to revive the ritual of hook-swinging and the overwhelming support that it received from the local community seriously questions the overarching presence of these instruments of power. A wide variety of ‘cruel rituals’ in which the human body is subjected to extreme forms of pain are still prevalent in many of the local communities even though these are legally banned. The meanings attached to these rituals by the subject population and especially by the devotees who undergo the pain are something that the modern and legal rationality could not comprehend and control completely. Even now the ritual of hook-swinging is conducted every year in a number of places in South India. Ultimately how far have these discourses succeeded in controlling and making human bodies docile? How do we understand these instances of communities and human beings defying the overarching designs of these discourses? What do these instances tell us about the possibility of human agency and the limits of these discursive structures? Going back to the arguments of Foucault, in his later writings he provides a more refined argument, which addresses the issue of resisting these power structures and allows for the possibility of human agency. McNay points out that there is a clear departure for Foucault in his later writings, especially in the third volume of The History of Sexuality, the book The Use of Pleasure, and in his last few interviews. She points out that this departure does not need to be seen as a contradiction or reversal of his earlier views, which refuted the subject, but are to be seen only as a refinement and modification of his early arguments (MacNay 1992). In these writings he delves at length into the possibility of the self who has a certain degree of agency. With a shift in emphasis from the body to the self, Foucault is able to attribute a certain degree of autonomy and independence to the way in which individuals act, especially in the ordering of their day-to-day existence: ‘I am interested … in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patents that he finds on his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (Foucault 1988: 11). This refashioning of his conception of the subject implies a subject with agency which, though not an autonomous entity, is not completely decided and determined by the structures of the society. This subject engages in negotiations and wrangles within these structures and disciplining forms of power to express its own terms of existence. The continuous practice of a number of ‘illegal and barbaric’ customs across the country and the very recent attempt of reviving the 180

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ritual of hook-swinging point to the fact that in spite of decades of official as well as formal disciplining, human beings refuse to be reduced to docile bodies. The creation of ‘new human subjects’ is still an unfinished project, partially allowing people to live in this world with their own definitions of what it means to be a ‘body’, and what they understand by ‘cruelty’ and ‘torture’.

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The Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm 1994) played out in China but it more importantly played out on Chinese women. As the country was transformed from an empire to a communist state, China evolved from a culture that emphasized feminine beauty in the shape of the ‘three-inch golden lily’ (bound feet) to an era where they wore gender-neutral, male to be more precise, clothes. The human body has been the site of ‘national, global and democratic processes’ as Bryan Turner (2006b) has pointed out. This could not have been more obvious for Chinese woman as their bodies became the battleground of the communist revolution and women’s liberation. The communist regime used feminism, a new political theory, to rally support and legitimize its rule; the regime also used ballet, a new performing-art genre, to school its old-and-new female citizens. Revolution and liberation were projected onto the female body and in the steps and stances of communist ballet. They helped to spread the gospel of feminism and transform Chinese women, thus writing an important chapter in the history of dance, Chinese feminism and communism. The past three decades have seen rapid growth in the study of the body in both the humanities and social sciences (Turner 2006c). While anthropologists emphasized the body as a system of cultural representation, sociologists focused on the ‘lived body’ in their effort to understand social interaction and experience. These two contradictory and yet complementary frameworks have given birth to a third approach that focuses on embodiment rather than the body itself. The study of dance has also come of age with more conferences, publications and the establishment of academic sub-disciplines. Some code and encode the grammar 183

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of dance (Williams 1991; Foster 1986, 1995); some decipher its gendered nature (Hanna 1988; Burt 1998); some trace its general history and theory (Carter 1998; Thomas 1995, 2003; Kant 2007); some tell personal experiences (Li 2003); while others highlight the changing nature of dance in the age of postmodernism and globalization which comes with the idiosyncrasies of nationhood, race and identity (Spencer 1985; Taylor 2001; Buckland 2006; Wulff 2007). However, these frameworks were generated in the West by mainly studying the Western body. Is the body in Asia and China similar or different? Would it hold up or challenge Western-generated paradigms? The problem of applying Western theory on Asian polity and society has surfaced before; but it seems acute in the study of the body. Entry-level research students who work on China could easily ask: is foot-binding to be understood as the body as code, experience or practice? The answer can be that it encompasses all three paradigms. Foot-binding had been a code of feminine beauty for centuries in China; it literally was the ‘lived’ body as women suffered bodily mutilation and pain; and it certainly lent itself to the understanding of embodiment as the ‘performativity’ of bound feet can be seen from the ways in which women dressed, walked and carried themselves as a result of the bound feet. In addition, bound feet exposed one’s social status and boosted female upward social mobility as men preferred and would pay dearly for the ‘three inch golden lily’. The body in Asia in general and the body in China in particular will undoubtedly enrich the global debate on the body; but it will also problematize these existing frameworks based on the study of Western bodies as this chapter and volume amply demonstrate. Leaving aside the issue of Western theory and its applicability to non-Western cultures, this chapter explores Mao Zedong era ballet, a subject virtually no one has explored until now except for a short online article by Rosemary Roberts (Roberts 2008), to test the hypothesis of social constructionists, the applicability of ‘lived experience’ and the case of embodiment. A brief account of the women’s revolution and liberation, and communist art theory, will help situate this study in historical and theoretical perspective.

Bourgeois genre and Communist Theory Western encroachment in the late nineteenth century did not just give birth to reform and revolution that ultimately overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911; it also facilitated the influx of Western ideas, sciences and art genres as China began a long and still on-going march from empire to nation. The process set traditional China against the modern West; many, not just the elite, could see China’s backwardness, one example of which was women’s oppression in the form of foot-binding and the practice of polygamy. Dr Sun Yatsen issued decrees against foot-binding immediately after he became President of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912; but many did not listen to him as the practices continued. As the 184

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decade moved forward, China seemed to have gone backward as the country disintegrated into regional rule or warlordism. This had disappointed many who thought the Sun-led revolution would save China. Electrified by the Russian Revolution and humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, students and intellectuals led the May Fourth Movement, also labelled the New Culture Movement. The radicals emerged to found the Chinese Communist Party or CCP in 1921. The CCP knew their appeal to and their need for women; more so did the young Mao Zedong. Thus began a long love affair between the CCP and Chinese women. The CCP would help educate and liberate Chinese women; it also used them to consolidate its power and maintain its legitimacy. Mao explained to Chinese women that they had been oppressed by the ‘three big mountains’ – family, society and feudal ethics. To overthrow these mountains, women must join the communist revolution. Despite its radical nature, many women, not just the lower classes, joined the communist revolution from its foundation. This would intensify in Yan’an as the CCP found a stronghold and built a rudimentary government at the end of the Long March in 1936. Large numbers of left-wing and patriotic students, artists and intellectuals, women among them, fled to Yan’an at the outbreak of the Japanese War in 1937. The CCP experimented with feminism and they were relatively successful as they learned how far they could push before the social conditions were ready for radical change. They would carry women’s liberation to new heights after 1949 when they secured mainland China. Not only were women educated side by side with their male classmates and worked shoulder by shoulder with their male comrades but also they were paid the same, which mattered a great deal, and enjoyed more benefits. Female workers, drivers and athletes emerged to occupy new social roles; as did female professors, doctors, and party secretaries. Female Red Guards would take the lead in beating teachers and destroying relics during the Cultural Revolution. They were among Chairman Mao’s most loyal followers. Militant feminism reached its zenith but the women’s liberation movement seems to have vanished after Chairman Mao died in 1976. The late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) elite first brought ballet to China (Zheng 2007, 256–62). It remained associated with privilege until the 1910s when China’s intellectual and artistic elite hunted for Western ideas, science, and art genres in their effort to save China from Western aggression and Japanese ambition. Ballet began to spread in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin where foreign troupes came to perform. This was ‘L’Age d’Or de la Bourgeoisie Chinoise’ when ‘new dance’, as ballet and modern dance were labelled, began to appear in Chinese dance theatre. ‘New dance’ injected new blood into Chinese dance; it gave birth to first-generation ballet choreographers and dancers. Wu Xiaobang (1906–1995), the founding father of Chinese ballet, returned to China in the early 1930s after years of studying in Japan. He was ready to put his studies to work by the time the Japanese War broke out. The war did not stop Wu; neither did it stop the spread of ballet. Instead, it gave him an opportunity to 185

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shape China’s new dance theatre as he was joined by young patriotic overseas Chinese who had come to their ‘motherland’ to help fight in the war against Japan. Dai Ailian (b.1916), born in Trinidad and trained in the Royal School of Ballet in London, was one. Wu and Dai, the founding mother of Chinese ballet, would be instrumental in the spread and branding of communist ballet. These were China’s first generation choreographers and dancers; they mounted a national campaign against the Japanese invasion with their weapon – new dance, or ballet. Wu Xiaobang (1979, quoted in Yu 2004: 19) explained why he did so in his interview: I introduced modern dance to China because I wanted to use this new style to expose the evils of the feudal system. New dance is a new language without sound; it is a very vivid language and it can be used to mobilize and encourage the ordinary people. Like a wild storm, it can flare up the anger in people’s heart and it will sweep away those obstacles: old thoughts, old belief, old customs and old power that stand in the way of science and democracy.

This was the rhetoric and spirit of the New Culture Movement which believed that what made China a sitting duck of imperialistic aggression were its age-old cultures. Wu explained that the ‘new’ meant that he and his fellow compatriot artists stood on the side of the so-called ‘labouring people’, and they opposed feudalism and imperialism. Wu founded a school in Shanghai to train ballet dancers and staged public performances. Wu, Dai and their fellow new dancers embedded antifeudalism, anti-imperialism and patriotism in a nutshell, in the steps and stances, turns and jumps of their new dance works. They toured the country with their repertoires; they exposed ballet to the general urban society; they lit the fire of nationalism among the young, the urbanites and the moderates. They enjoyed patronage from wartime national leaders like Madam Sun Yatsen. Yu Ping, mainland dance historian, believes that their work focused on two major issues: enlightenment and patriotism. They exposed and educated the ordinary Chinese about China’s backwardness and the threat from imperialists. They dug deep into people’s conscience to mine their love for and their obligation to their motherland – that is, to take up arms and fight the Japanese. Enemies in other ways, the moderates or Nationalist intellectual artists and the radicals or their Communists counterparts shared one strange bedfellow during the Japanese war – patriotism. While moderate intellectual artists like Wu stayed in cities, their radical counterparts joined the CCP in Yan’an, the beacon of hope for many. The CCP hammered out their strategy, experimented with their ideals and waited for their opportunity in the battle for China. They learned to rule from the Yan’an decade; they also developed a powerful propaganda machine that would help win the hearts and the minds of Chinese people, not just the left-wing and patriotic intellectuals and artists. Mao himself set out to define what communist literature and art should be in several lectures. ‘Talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and 186

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Art’ (Mao 1942) was delivered on 23 May 1942. It laid out the guideline for the making of communist arts and literature which served as a yardstick until Mao died. Art historians have conveniently dubbed the art produced from 1942 to 1976 ‘Mao Zedong era art’, which I have now extended to ballet. Mao began by asking two questions: ‘Whom do we serve with our literature and art?’ and ‘How do we serve them?’ He quoted Lenin to say that communist literature and art should serve the ‘tens of millions of labouring people’, that is, the workers and peasants or the proletariat. He pointed out that the language and sentiment of many literary and artistic works produced in Yan’an did not serve the interest of the labouring people and facilitate their struggle against feudalism and imperialism. This in other words was why the ‘Talk’ was conceived and delivered to begin with. Mao’s razor-sharp eyes had detected something vital to the survival and future of communist rule. He would turn artists into workers, some slaves, for the CCP’s propaganda machine, to win the labouring people. Although progressive and patriotic, the CCP’s first generation writers and artists to whom Mao addressed were Wu and Dai’s peers. Many came from well-to-do families that had supported their studies abroad or in cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai. What they learned, whether abroad or in China, was classic in nature and bourgeois in origin. Neither Chinese nor Western classic literature nor art had taught them much about class struggle and women’s oppression. Gender equality and class struggle were not part of the literary and artistic heritage, Chinese or Western. In other words, they did not know how to express themselves because they did not live the lives or speak the language of the labouring people. It is natural that their works, literary or artistic, betrayed their bourgeois nature and elitist origin. Chairman Mao criticized them and the fact that they did not feel, think, and write or create for the labouring people. How could they when they were only sympathetic and had nothing in common with them? That is why the Chairman himself embraced the task of enlightening and moulding the CCP’s first generation writers and artists. The Yan’an doctrine as the talks came to be known would dictate art and literature until Mao died in 1976 whereas the Yan’an generation would shape the future generation of communist writers and artists to come as Mao desired. Having exposed their limitations and problems, Mao went on to elaborate in detail on how they should serve the labouring people (Mao 1942): Our literary and art workers must undertake and finish the task of shifting their stand; they must gradually move over to the side of the workers, peasants and soldiers, that is the side of the proletariat, through the process of going into their midst and their practical struggles, and through the process of learning from Marxism and society. Only in this way can we have a literature and art that are truly for the workers, peasants and soldiers, a true proletarian literature and art. Communist literature and art must serve the interest of the labouring people.

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To do so, Communist writers and artists had to breathe among the labouring people, feel for them and re-create them in art. This would become Mao’s most powerful weapon in the decades to come as waves of bourgeoisie artists, writers and intellectuals, especially during the Cultural Revolution, were sent down to remote villages to live and work among the labouring people so that they would become re-educated and serve their interests. Like water, the labouring people would, it was intended, help the artists and writers to swim. Mao further elaborated on the important relationship between labouring peoples lives and ‘literary and art work’ (ibid): The life of the labouring people is a gold mine of raw materials for literature and art. They are materials in their natural form, materials that are crude, but most important, fundamental and rich; they make all literature and art look pale by comparison; they are an inexhaustible fountain of source for art and literature. They are the only source, for there is no other.

There is a certain level of truth to Mao’s words, as all arts and literature draw their inspiration from real life and raises above it; the only difference was that he favoured the way of life of the labouring people and discriminated others. It is ironic that when the CCP’s political platform was so anti-bourgeois and anti-imperialist, the art genres they used to drive their message home were nothing but bourgeois and imperialist in origin. Did the brilliant Mao realise that? He went on (ibid): Life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plateau; they should be more powerful, more concentrated, more categorical, they should be closer to the ideal, and therefore more general than actual everyday life. Revolutionary literature and art should create a variety of characters out of real life and help the labouring people to move history forward.

This was the political origin and theoretical context of communist literature and art. Like God’s words, these verses gave direction to first and future generations of communist literary and art workers. It dictated the perspective, scope and nature of their works until Mao died. Chinese communist literary and art theory were laid out by the CCP’s ideologue in 1942. I have branded it Chinese communism as it is a combination of classic Marxism and Chinese nationalism; hence communist ballet would bear the hallmark of both class struggle and antiimperialism. Though no ballet works was produced in Yan’an, dance musicals were popular in the CCP wartime capital and other communist-occupied areas. Communist dance musicals and new dance theatre headed by the Wu–Dai dynamic duo lifted the spirit of many during the Japanese War and comforted many more, even though it was ephemeral. China’s first-generation choreographers and dancers injected anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism into their works; they set the example and standard for later works to come. Two different camps of intellectual artists shared one stage during the war; patriotism 188

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was what made that possible. Their ‘strange’ relationship would be both consolidated and compromised at times when many from the Wu–Dai camp stayed with the CCP in China after 1949. As nation building gathered momentum in the 1950s, so did the development of ballet. Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian and a few others would be instrumental in the creation of Mao Zedong era ballet. The National Dancers Association was founded in 1949 with Dai as Chair and Wu as Vice-chair. The Beijing Academy of Dance was founded in 1954 with Dai as its first Master and Dean. The 1950s gave birth to a new generation of choreographers and ballerinas, many students of Wu and Dai. Between 1957 and 1960, the Academy mounted La Fille Mal Gardee, Swan Lake, Le Corsaire and Giselle with the help of such Russian artists as O.A. Yealina. This did not escape the eyes of the Ministry of Propaganda who believed that revisionist and bourgeois influence were still the main danger of Chinese literature and art. The Ministry called for a meeting in January 1964 much like the one Chairman Mao called in 1942. The Ministry emphasised that musicians and dancers must make their works more revolutionary, more Chinese and more ordinary, that is they should revolutionize, ethicize and socialize (Wang & Long 1999: 268). Chinese literature and art, ballet in this case, should reflect the life and serve the interests of labouring people as Mao had first emphasised in 1942. This was how new dance became Mao Zedong era ballet or how Swan Lake became Red Girls’ Regiment, choreographed and first performed by the National Song and Dance Ensemble which became today’s National Ballet, in Beijing in 1964. Chairman Mao himself attended the performance on 8th October 1964; so did nearly all the Political Bureau members and their wives. Mao and the leaders received and took pictures with the choreographers and dancers afterwards; his brief comment to them on the stage was affirmative and definitive (Yu 2004: 82): ‘The revolution is successful. You are going in the right direction and the dancing is very good.’ A peasant boy from the countryside who had never seen a ballet before, Mao sounded like a dance critic. The Ministry’s spokesperson Long Peiying was full of praise (Yu 2004: 83): ‘what pleased us is that they used the expressive and special techniques of ballet brilliantly; it successfully portrayed the two revolutionary heroic characters: Wu Qionghua and Hong Changqing’. Red Girls’ Regiment became the model for other revolutionary ballets and Peking operas which appeared in the first half of the 1960s as if to set the tone for the Cultural Revolution to come. ‘National dance genre has always been fractured by both regional and global politics. A national ballet culture was typically a state project’ (Turner 2006b). This was obviously the case with China as Chairman Mao himself, his wife soon and the Ministry of Propaganda steered and controlled the project. This would be the case with many other nations as they struggled to assert legitimacy, statehood and identity. Russia is a great example as Elizabeth Souritz has pointed out (Souritz 1990). Russian ballet enjoyed state patronage despite widespread poverty and a cash-strapped economy. Red Girls’ Regiment and the associated genre of communist 189

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ballet was indeed the CCP’s national project and it had been a political project from the beginning. It was a marriage of communist artistic innovation and classic ballet, the expertise for which was furnished by the Wu-Dai and Russian camp. How did bourgeois artists make Mao Zedong era ballet? How, in other words, did they turn Swan Lake into Red Girls’ Regiment? Composed of a Prelude, an Interlude, and Six Acts, the story is set in the ethnic Li area on Hainan Island, China’s largest island off the coast of Guangdong province.

‘Choreographing history’: The mao zedong way The ballet’s Prelude, ‘Escaping Tiger’s Mouth [the Landlord’s household] Full of Hatred’, opens with the beating of slave girl Wu Qionghua, chained to a pole in the prison, by her master, the Landlord Nan Batian (which can be translated as Tyrant of the South, Roberts 2008), as punishment for her escape attempt. Nevertheless, she escapes again and runs furiously to the forest; the Landlord finds her again, beats her to near death and leaves her to die in a tropical thunderstorm. Act One, ‘Changqing Points the Way and Qionghua Runs for the Red District’, details how Hong Changqing, Party Secretary of the Red Girls’ Regiment, and his guard Pang, miraculously find Qionghua dying in the forest. They save her and point her in the right direction – the Red Girls’ Regiment camp. Act Two, ‘Qionghua Condemns [Landlord Nan] and Joins the Red Army’ takes place in the camp where Qionghua tells her story to a crowd who have shared her fate and arouses the fighting spirit of the regiment and villagers. Here she joins the Red Army and begins a new life. Act Three, ‘Collaborating to Storm the Landlord’s Nest in an Evening’, highlights the regiment’s attempt to catch Landlord Nan and his thugs when he celebrated his birthday. Qionghua does not know the army rule and tries to shoot Nan at first sight. The attempt fails as a result. Act Four, ‘The Party Nourishes Heroes when the Army and the People Are Family’, describes how the Party Secretary Hong teaches Qionghua that the communists are fighting to eliminate the foe of the entire labouring people, not just her personal enemy; their goal is a landlord-free country where the oppressed like her will become the masters. This is a much higher level of political awakening for the former slave girl. She changes her name from Qionghua, ‘good flower’ to Qinghua, ‘Cleanse China’. Act Five, ‘Holding the Enemy Fire at the Mountain’s Entrance’, unravels the second attempt at destroying Landlord Nan. Hong holds the enemy fire by himself so that his comrades can pass. This is followed by the Interlude, ‘Chasing after the Enemy with the Force of Landslide and Tidal Wave’, with spectacular fighting on stage. Act Six, ‘Marching On Following the Footsteps of Martyr’, ends with Hong’s death and the successful destruction of the Landlord Nan and his militia. Qinghua leads the heroic fight because she is no longer fighting for herself but for the liberation of the entire labouring people. She ultimately takes over the job of Changqing and leads the 190

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Red Girls’ Regiment to more heroic battles in order to liberate China from the landlord class. The politics of the Red Girls’ Regiment, especially the issues of race, ethnicity and gender, are obvious. The story takes place in an ethnic village, not Chinese. The CCP is there to liberate them, the women in particular; but they are also there to teach them the noble goal of the communist revolution. Han and male chauvinism did not die even with the ideologically-driven and progressive communists. The Girls’ Regiment was led by a male Party Secretary. Why so? The message is that women cannot lead, as seen in the case of Qionghua who puts personal bitterness ahead of the Party’s greater goal when she tries to shoot the Landlord without order. The first three Acts focus on Qionghua or the suffering and ignorance of the poor and the rest on Changqing – the male Party Secretary, the leader or saviour of the oppressed. Artistically Red Girls’ Regiment was a Chinese innovation inspired by classic ballet and it was a visual sensation. The study of the body has been on the whole too theoretical and hence often divorced from empirical data as Bryan Turner (2006b) has pointed out. Here I shall let the pictures speak the ‘performativity of artistic practices’. All figures are taken from the theatre program issued for the May 1970 and 1971 performances by the National Song and Dance Ensemble in Beijing and printed by the People’s Press.

Figure 10.1: (Prelude) Qionghua chained and beaten (1970 production).

Figure 10.2: (Prelude) Qionghua chained and beaten (1972 production). 191

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The opening scene (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2) where slave girl Wu Qionghua is handcuffed and chained to a pole in the prison yard and beaten by her Landlord shocks and immediately captures the audience; it exposes the evil of feudal oppression and the suffering of Chinese women. Yet another failed escape attempt had led to this brutality. Chaining in this real fashion had never been part of a ballet vocabulary; this was, in other words, an innovation. Her bloodstained clothes and scar-covered body indicate the level of beating, hence the brutality of the Landlord. Her angry eyes and unyielding posture indicated her resentment and resilience. Qionghua’s bodily disposition is the habitus of the Chinese labouring people (Bourdieu 1977). Habitus is ‘an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted’ (Bourdieu 1977: 95). Put simply by Richard Jenkins, it is a ‘habitual or typical condition, state or appearance, particularly of the body’ (Jenkins 1992: 74–75). Qionghua’s bodily state is a result of and response to the Landlord’s brutality; it in other words is ‘acquired’ due to oppression and resistance. It can be ‘generative’ as she is subjected to more beating and more rebellion. The slave girl’s bodily appearance is thus ‘objectively adjusted’ by the evil feudalistic world into which she was born but refuses to accept. This kind of bodily disposition exposes the suffering and struggle of the labouring people in general and women in particular; it is the habitus of the proletarian which the choreographer has skilfully exposed for further manipulation. Bourdieu fractured bodily disposition into the smallest decimal ‘hexis’: the ‘deportment, the manner and style in which actors “carry themselves”: stance, gait, gesture, etc.’ (Jenkins 1992: 75), to help us better see and understand what habitus can embody. Qionghua’s hexis can be seen from her fiery gaze, and the unyielding posture in which she holds up her body despite being handcuffed and chained. This is the hexis of the labouring people personified by the suffering of women; and it helps us see her anger and feel her pain. Her beaten corpse embodied women’s oppression and the suffering of the labouring people. The gaze and posture of the chained Qionghua exposed the evil of and condemned feudalism; it called for revolution and justified women’s liberation. It lent legitimacy to a communist revolution led by the CCP. Keen observers would notice the enormous difference between the two pictures. The first image (Figure 10.1) is a 1970 version. Qionghua looks thin, her blood-stained and torn blouse real, the entire aura raw and the impression original. The second picture (Figure 10.2) is a later production. Qionghua, the slave girl looks fair and well-bred, with her smooth elbow skin, the blood-stained and torn blouse obviously well-made, the aura illusory and the impression unnatural. This is a common problem in performing art as there is often a gap, sometimes huge, between the text or the code or choreography and the actual performance. ‘A performer is not simply a vehicle through whom the artist speaks, but genuine artist who must make their own interpretation of the music and the 192

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dance score’ (Turner 2006b). The gap between the text or and score and the object or performance could not be more obvious than in the comparison between the two heroines. The first production was indeed the product of an era that has gone forever. To build on Turner’s critique of Walter Benjamin’s argument (Turner 2006b), not only can dance, unlike other genres of art, not be reproduced; each act and performance likewise cannot be reproduced. Removed from the fanaticism during the height of the Mao era, later, specifically post-Mao productions lost its originality and the aura associated with an era of revolutionary zeal. Mao Zedong era ballet personified women’s suffering in its most original and authentic form when artistic ingenuity married political engineering. It was the product of an era that gave birth to a genre ‘resistant to mechanical reproducibility’ (Turner 2006b). Communist ballet choreographers and dancers breathed tremendous performing power or ‘performativity’ into their works because they themselves were the

Figure 10.3: (Act One) Qionghua escapes again and runs to the forest. 193

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product of that era and the makers of that genre. Only when one has lived through that peculiar time and steeped in its peculiarity can one convey the essence of that time so profoundly. Audacious and original, Red Girls’ Regiment spread the gospel of feminism and Chinese communism. The brilliant and furious mid-air jump, illustrated in Figure 10.3, with tightened fists, projects Qionghua’s determination and destiny. She manages to escape again and runs to the forest where she can hide herself. Taken from the classic ballet repertoire, the jump was another Mao Zedong era innovation, as were the tightened fists in the background of the red dress and the dark opening, dramatizing her escape and hastening the climax. Not only that, its technicality far exceeded conventional ballet leaps. One cannot find such rebellious vocabulary in the traditional Chinese dance dictionary, but ballet provided the grammar with which communist choreographers could compose new words and phrases. Like communism, ballet provided a new solution to the old problem whereas the old problem itself left room for innovation. In her analysis of what she called ‘Women Writing the Body’, Elizabeth Dempster argued that ‘modern dance is not a uniform system, but a corpus of related though differentiated vocabularies and techniques of movement which have evolved in response to the choreographic projects of individual artists’ (Dempster 1998: 223). The project here is women’s liberation and the artists are none other than Chairman Mao himself and his fleet of Yan’an doctrine – educated choreographers, not women themselves. Richard Shusterman has pointed that in the study of the body, many have failed to pay attention to ‘an ephemeral experience of a dance gesture’. In other words, ‘no sympathetic attention is given to the phenomenological dimension of lived experience, its power of meaningful, qualitative immediacy, and its potential for the transformation of attitudes and habits’ (Shusterman quoted in Turner 2006b). This mid-air jump lasted no more than a few seconds; yet it became one of the most definitive ballet poses due to its difficulty and brilliance. Sinicized and highly politicized, Mao Zedong era ballet transformed Chinese dance theatre as it spoke the language of communist-led women’s revolution and liberation. This daring and groundbreaking pose reveals the physical nature or the athletic vigour of communist ballet dancers; it revealed the liberated nature of Chinese woman. The ultimate potential, as Shusterman notes, is the transformation of attitudes and habits (ibid). This picture is one of the most widely circulated and recognized in China today; it has touched millions and come to categorize women’s revolution and liberation. The ‘lived experience’ of this jump suggests a communist or political, if not entirely Chinese, phenomenology peculiar to Maoist China. How did the dancer feel? Did she feel liberated? This will take another kind of research. Like the jump itself, the phenomenon of puritan revolution was short-lived in the Mao Zedong era, from 1942 when Mao gave his speech at the Yan’an Forum, some would say from 1949 when the CCP began to rule mainland China, to 1976 when he died. It thrived with its own unique revolutionary language for an eager audience and 194

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Figure 10.4: (Act One) Party Secretary Changqing points the way.

schooled many. The Mao Zedong era phenomenology, which manifested in all forms/genres of literature and arts, deserves systematic study. Used as the cover of many propaganda works, the scene from Red Girls’ Regiment reproduced in Figure 10.4 conveys the essence of Mao Zedong era art. Communist Party Secretary of the Red Girls’ Regiment Hong and his guard Pang have saved slave girl Wu Qionghua when she lays dying in the forest; they hand her a silver coin which she has never possessed before and point her in the right direction – to the East, or the Red Girls’ Regiment camp to be more precise, and gave her the means to arrive there. The human body has ‘an immediate capacity to express sacred values, sexuality and power’; this is Turner’s three dimensions of dance, ‘the religious, the sexual and the political’ (Turner 2006b). And they are amply illustrated here. Only the CCP led by Chairman Mao can lead the labouring people to overthrow the landlord class and become masters of their own life and destiny. Only men can lead the way as Qionghua was saved, supported and soon enlightened by men. Turner (2006b) further elaborates his theory of embodiment in his work: Traditional societies harnessed the body to express the sacred authority of the group or society, and hence there is a close relationship between the body, the sovereignty of a king, and the notion of sacredness…there is always a necessary relationship between the sovereignty of the king and control over the sovereignty of the individual body… Since the body expresses both sacred and sexual power, this control involves sovereignty 195

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over sexual and religious expressivity. The power of the body is expressed performatively in dance, and it is in dance that the sexuality and potency of the body is ritually expressed.

The political dimension is explicit here – the CCP personified by Chairman Mao is the king with sovereignty; but even more explicit is the sexual dimension. Although the communists advocated the ideal of men and women as equal, it was still men leading or supporting women in the end, which can be seen from the entire story. In other words, the Chinese communists did not escape the enduring tradition of male domination despite their anti-feudal and egalitarian trajectory. Rosemary Roberts has correctly critiqued this gender aspect (Roberts 2008) and concluded that that women’s ‘new roles were to remain within a broader framework of subordination to masculine hegemony’. The communists were in this case also Chinese; they could not have escaped from the long-held philosophy that male was superior to female. Radical as it might have sounded, communist’s feminism did not and could not escape the confines of Confucian tradition. ‘The dancing body was an expression of the order of society as orchestrated through the body of the king’, as Turner concludes. Chairman Mao is the saviour of the labouring people; he saved Qionghua, a ritual that leads the labouring people like her to the kingdom of the communist where she would soon obtain salvation as the story unfolds. The costumes and colours of the dancers address and showcase Turner’s three dimensions as well. The choreographer must have gone to live and breathe among the ethnic Li people in Hainan as Chairman Mao dictated in 1942, and reproduced their real life on stage. Not only that, he/she skilfully integrated indigenous Li fashion into ballet gear – another innovation indeed. All three of the dancers wore peasant if not entirely southern ethnic clothing, excluding Qionghua’s shoes which remains classic ballet gear throughout. Hong and Pang had traditional Hainan bamboo hats on their back. Women’s trousers in southern China tend to have wider legs due to the hot weather. Qionghua’s wide trousers and the red colour highlight her centrality and destiny, hence the role of the CCP and revolution. They spread like a red flag and move like a fire when she is in motion; this visual sensation helps dramatize her story and builds up the climax. The colour of Wu’s jacket is subtle; yellow had been an imperial monopoly; only emperors could wear yellow coloured fabrics/clothes and accessories. The CCP regime is the new imperial power despite its egalitarian origin and disguise. The colour of Wu’s guard is that of plain blue, indicating his working class or labouring people origin. ‘The body is a powerful medium for expressing social values’ or in other words ‘the aura of the body was embraced by national movements to embody national values’ (Turner 2006b). Communist choreographers and dancers participating in the production of the Red Girls’ regiment (Figure 10.5) seem to have finally fulfilled what Mao had envisaged in 1942 and the Ministry of Propaganda dictated in 1959; they have finally come to understand and serve the interest of the 196

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Figure 10.5: (Act Two) Qionghua joins the Red Girls’ Regiment.

labouring people. A mass theme and group dance are common and necessary in classic ballet; it was no exception with communist ballet. Qionghua arrives at the camp of the Red Girls’ Regiment. She tells her story to an audience who shares her life and destiny; like them, she takes up arms and joins the Red Army. The scene is perfectly realistic, with the regiment and its peasant militia volunteers standing behind her against the Red Army flag and two banners that read: ‘Catch Nan Batian Alive’ and ‘Down with the Landlord and Divide his Land’. Only by joining the Red Army led by the CCP can the labouring people and suffering women liberate themselves and build a nation where there will be no landlords. Like a saviour, the CCP saved and transformed slave girl Qionghua into a Red Army solider. It in other words not only liberated the labouring people but also helped them become the master of a new country. This, seen in the 1960s when the ballet was choreographed and staged, was in theory a reality. Having liberated the labouring people and established the People’s Republic, the CCP set out to build a communist nation where women were to play an important role. ‘Dance played an important part in the emergence of nation states and the process of modernisation’ (Turner 2006b). Red Girls’ Regiment portrayed Qionghua’s journey from slave girl to revolutionary soldier and ultimately the Party Secretary of the Regiment. The CCP-led revolution signalled the arrival of a new era and the emergence of a modern nation state with a different language, that of class struggle and women’s liberation. Ballet became a tool through which the CCP regime communicated these ideals and idiosyncrasies since it is basically a body language that can be made easy to understand. Dance was a better form of communication and education than reading since most of the labouring people did not read. 197

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Figure 10.6: (Act Four) Qionghua swears her allegiance to the CCP.

The role of dance in the making of a nation is brilliantly illustrated here. As Alexander Carter puts it: ‘The relationship between dance and its socio-historical context is complex, for dance does not simply “reflect” the value systems, customs and habits of a society but actively constructs them. It produces as well as reproduces; speaks about society, and to it’ (Carter 1998: 193). The suffering, rebellion and liberation of Qionghua served to ‘reflect’ the power of communist ideology or ‘system’ made possible by the new art genre in its sinicized and politicized form. Her body and its transformation became the best weapon the CCP could use to claim its mandate and legitimacy. Her turns, jumps, steps and stances helped project a new ideology and consequently helped shape new women and build the new nation. The only irony however, regardless of whether the choreographer, the dancer or Chairman Mao himself realized it or not, is that this was achieved by the most bourgeois form of art. Communism is a language; it spoke through Mao Zedong era ballet and in the vocabulary of women’s revolution and liberation. As I have emphasized elsewhere 198

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(Zheng 2007), Chinese ballet enriched the language of dance and the vocabulary of ballet. The gestures and movements of the Red Girls’ Regiment unveil a most brilliant innovation (Figure 10.6). This gesture shown is one that is familiar to nearly everyone from the Mao era. The slave girl has now changed into Red Army uniform, changed her name from Qionghua which means good or jadelike flower to Wu Qinghua which translates as Cleanse China as she swears her allegiance to the Communist Party by raising her right hand above her head. Her deportment is undoubtedly classic ballet but the fists, like those in Figure 10.3 in the escape scene, seem to tell the entire story. Tightened fists, an innovation of Mao Zedong era ballet, came to signal fortitude and resolution. She wears authentic Red Army summer uniform, not even a slight alteration due to ballet, except again the shoes which are now changed to the same colour as the uniform. This sinicized and highly politicized pose transcends women’s revolution and liberation; it points to militant feminism under the leadership of the CCP where women needed to acquire a new mentality and body language, which Qinghua epitomized. Qinghua has now acquired a new habitus, to use Bourdieu again; she has acquired a new bodily hexis or, in the words of Jenkins again, a different ‘stance, gait, gesture, etc.’ with which she carries herself (Jenkins 1992: 75). The tightened fists lead us to ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1979: 97–105), that is, ‘the ways in which from society to society [people] know how to use their bodies’. Although Mauss’s work was concerned with the cultural differences of the various societies, political difference takes centre stage here where communist choreographers were clearly preoccupied with the liberation of women and how to project that onto the female body through a classic ballet stance with revolutionary innovation. Yan’an doctrine – brainwashed choreographers certainly knew how to exploit the female bodies.

Figure 10.7: (Act Five) Qionghua drills with the Regiment.

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Figure 10.8: (Act Five) Qinghua drills with a fellow comrade.

Qinghua looks righteous and purposeful, unrecognizable from the slave girl before. The pose exemplifies her magic transformation; it effectively projects the power of feminism and communism through the metamorphosis of her body, and therefore the intimacy between women’s liberation and the communist nation. Mao Zedong era ballet shares grammar with classic ballet; but it has produced its own vocabulary. Susan Leigh Foster has studied the gap between objectivist and reflexive dance: ‘Whereas objectivist dance has laid bare the conventions governing representations to allow the body to speak its own language, reflexive choreography works with these same conventions to show the body’s capacity to both speak and be spoken through in many different languages’ (Foster 1986: 188). With the grammar of classic ballet, Maoist choreographers created new words and spoke the language of women’s revolution and liberation in Red Girls’ Regiment. In the scenes illustrated in Figures 10.7 and 10.8 Qinghua drills and fights with her fellow comrades. Revolutionary women have replaced slave girls as white swans transformed into red swans; she finally kills her personal and the labouring people’s enemy – Landlord Nan Batian. The oppressed triumph over the oppressor; but this is only possible under the leadership of the CCP in general and Party Secretary Hong in person. Qinghua becomes the Regiment’s leader after Hong’s heroic death and carries on liberating millions of women like them. The use of rifles and grenade was a daring move as holding the rifle or throwing the grenade, despite the fact they were not real, could tip the body’s balance, as they are bulky if not weighty. Yet the act of aiming and shooting are seamlessly integrated with classic ballet steps, turns and jumps. The athletic quality of their bodies, fit to shoot and throw grenades like men, showcases the ‘lived experience’ 200

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and further demonstrated the liberated nature of women during the time of the revolution and then in the 1960s. Elizabeth Dempster believes that the woman’s body has become ‘a medium and vehicle for the expression of inner forces’ (Dempster 1998: 224); that ‘inner force’ is vigorously displayed here. Dempster continues: ‘The modern body and the dance which shapes it are a site of struggle where social and psychological, spatial and rhythmic conflicts are played out and sometimes reconciled. This body – and it is specifically a female body – is not passive but dynamic, even convulsive.’ This is obvious with the Red Girls whether they were drilling, fighting or relaxing. The transformation of a woman’s body through vigorous training and fighting leads us to Michel Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ and ‘technologies of the self ’ or disciplinary regimes. Women’s revolution had been one of the CCP’s platforms since its foundation; it enabled them to win the support of Chinese women as the story of Qinghua tells. It justified the communist revolution and lent legitimacy to their continued rule in the phase of nation building. It more importantly helped them control women – governmentality with Chinese characteristic. In other words, women’s liberation provided a most important platform through which the CCP claimed their mandate and maintained their legitimacy. On the other hand, women’s revolution and liberation were ‘Technologies of the self ’, again with Chinese characteristic. Chinese women can help liberate themselves; but they have to participate in the revolution in order to achieve liberation like Qinghua has done. This disciplinary regime of women’s liberation served both the interest of the CCP and women themselves. It materialized in communism and feminism; it helped liberate Chinese women; it also put them, their bodies to be more precise, at the mercy of communist rhetoric and practice.

Conclusion How did the labouring people perceive Red Girls’ Regiment in 1964 when it was first performed and throughout the Cultural Revolution when it became a household name given that they helped shape its nature and content even though some of them might not have been aware of that? Did they think that the choreographers and dancers were serving their interests as Mao had dictated in 1942? Many Workers Unions held meetings in order to establish the reaction of the labouring people. The Guangzhou (Canton) Workers Union convened one (Yu 2004: 81) after the ballet toured the city and it was attended by choreographers and dancers themselves. The response from the workers was overwhelming. They didn’t understand at all the meaning of Swan Lake but they really appreciated the Red Girls’ Regiment; it suited their taste. The white swans made them feel dizzy but the Red Girls taught them about class struggle and energized them. Communist or sinicized ballet, under the personal guidance of 201

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Chairman Mao and the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda, had finally come to serve the interest of the labouring people. The female bodies in the Red Girls’ Regiment transmitted the new code and culture of communist feminism; it inspired not just women but also men. The energetic dancing showcased ‘the lived body’ of Chinese women during the revolutionary Mao era. There is however an enormous difference between the various productions, let alone the difference between Mao and post-Mao productions. How does that complicate the case of embodiment? Bryan Turner has discussed Walter Benjamin’s famous article ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’, which argued that in the age of technology, art becomes reproducible and it is therefore removed from its original setting, losing its aura. Turner’s expansion of this line of thought is that ‘dance is peculiarly resistant to mechanical reproduction, and hence its auratic qualities appear to survive into secular modernity’ (Turner 2006b). To build upon the Benjamin–Turner dialogue, I would argue that each performance is resistant to mechanical reproduction as the political, artistic, material and individual background of each performance and the performers change over time. The Mao Zedong era production embodied oppression, revolution and liberation; this was crucial to the regime and spoke to millions. Removed from the Maoist era and setting, the post-Mao production bears no revolutionary fervour; instead it has become a matter of nostalgia for the Mao generation and a relic, sometimes a laughing stock, for their children who were not fed with a diet of class struggle and feminism. Red Girls’ Regiment was a ‘state project’; it was subjected to the dominant political ideology and enjoyed state patronage at a time of economic hardship. Artistically, it ‘enriched the language of dance and the vocabulary of ballet’ (Zheng 2007: 256–62). With the expressions of classic ballet and Maoist innovation, it speaks to a communist phenomenology in China. In its politicized and sinicized form it exposed women’s oppression, justified revolution and supposedly delivered liberation; in doing so it highlighted the absolutely important role of the CCP in the building of a communist utopia. The CCP and its fleet of artists had successfully ‘choreographed’ a history that gave them a mandate and legitimized their continued rule (Foster 1995). As Helen Thomas has argued, dance, in this case Mao Zedong era ballet, ‘elucidates not only how dance is understandable as a feature of the socio-cultural context of its creation, but also how it constitutes reflexively a significant resource for understanding that context itself ’ (Thomas 1995: 30). Red Girls’ Regiment lays bare the making and ‘context’ of Chinese feminism and the communist nation state. Moreover, it has remained a national project. As a Mao era classic, it was performed at the grand opening of the world class National Theatre, standing next to Tiananmen Square, in November 2007. It continues to serve the CCP in the post-Mao era.

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Julius Bautista is an ethno-historian whose research focus is on Roman Catholic discourse and practice in the Philippines. He received his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from the Australian National University in 2004. At the National University of Singapore, he is co-appointed as a lecturer in Religious Studies at the South-East Asian Studies Programme and as visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute. His co-author Mercedes Planta is assistant professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman. She recently received her PhD from the National University of Singapore after completing a dissertation titled Prerequisites to a Civilized Life: the American Colonial Public Health System. susan Brownell is professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. In 2007–2008 she was a Fulbright Senior Researcher at the Beijing Sport University, researching the 2008 Olympic Games. Since 2000 she has been a member of the International Olympic Committee’s selection committee for the postgraduate grant offered by the Olympic Studies Center. Her first book, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic, was based on her experiences as a Chinese college athlete when she won a gold medal in the 1986 Chinese National College Games. Her second book, Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China, provides the historical and cultural context for an in-depth understanding of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She is the English translator of He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream, the biography of China’s senior sports diplomat and member of the International Olympic Committee. She is also co-editor, with Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, of Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, and editor of The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Race, Sport, and American Imperialism. monika dix received her doctorate in the Asian Studies Program of the University of British Columbia in 2006. She has been a visiting researcher at Gakushūin, Chiba and Kokugakuin University (Japan), and at SOAS, University of London. She has received grants and fellowships from the Mombushō, Japan Foundation, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and 203

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Cultures. Presently, she is visiting assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where she teaches pre-modern Japanese literature and classical Japanese. Her research focuses on the inter-relations between text and image, especially representations of women in the religious tradition. Recent publications include ‘Ascending Hibariyama: Chūjōhime’s Textual, Physical, and Spiritual Journey to Salvation’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 19 (2007), 95–108, ‘Writing Women into Religious Histories: Re-reading Representations of Chūjōhime in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives’ (PhD Dissertation, 2006), and ‘Chūjōhime no honji ni okeru tekisto to imeji no kankei’, in Ii Haruki, ed., Nihon bungaku to hon’yaku no kanosei (Kasama Shobo, 2004), 189–194. denis gainty is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University. His work is grounded in early modern and modern Japanese and World History, through which he investigates how body practice and discipline, especially in physical education and martial arts, constitute an important medium for negotiating individual-collective relations in modern nation- and empirebuilding. He received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and lives in Decatur, Georgia with his wife and children. Jörgen hellman is a teacher and researcher in social anthropology and wrote his thesis (1999) about cultural politics in Indonesia during the Suharto regime. The thesis followed a student theatre in Bandung and their efforts to navigate their contemporary political landscape by way of theatre. He has continued to work in the same area of West Java but since shifted focus to religious practices and is for the moment engaged in a research project that focuses religious bodily practices such as fasting and local pilgrimage. A first publication Ritual Fasting on West Java: Empowerment, Submission, and Control focusing on fasting practices is available from Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Junko ishiguro is a Research Fellow in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. She received her PhD from the University of Kent in 2006 for her thesis ‘Embodying Femininity: Students, Magazines and Japan’. She previously worked as an editor for journals in Japan, including the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and has taught Sociology at the University of Kent. Her current interests include: feminist theory; the representation of East Asian women in popular culture in post-colonial Asia and the formation of subjectivity by their audiences; embodiment; power, politics and the construction of national identity by memory through the body. Dr Ishiguro is now working on papers addressing racializing the body in Japanese popular culture and transnational identity, and glamorising the ageing body.

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santhosh Raghavan nair is currently working as Assistant Director in Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Mangalore University, India. He is completing his PhD in Sociology from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. His PhD dissertation examines the role of religious organizations and identity formation among Muslims of Kerala, South India. His research interests include ethnic mobilization, identity politics, Islamic identity, social exclusion and globalization. Bryan s. Turner was professor of sociology at Cambridge University (1998–2005) and in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2006–2008). He is currently Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting professor f sociology at Wellesley College. He published The Body and Society in 1984 and with Mike Featherstone founded the journal Body and Society in 1965. He has also taught medical sociology, publishing Medical Power and Social Knowledge (1987), and the sociology of religion, publishing Religion and Social Theory (1983). He edited the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006). His current research interests include women and piety in Southeast Asia, Roman Catholicism and politics in Asia, and popular religion and globalization. Anna Lora-wainwright is University Lecturer in the Human Geography of China at Oxford University’s China Centre and Centre for the Environment. She holds a B.A. in social anthropology and an M.A. in Chinese studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies. In 2006, she obtained a Ph.D. in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford University, where she also held a lectureship in modern Chinese studies. Her field research and papers have been devoted to lay attitudes to health in rural Sichuan (China), healthcare provision, rural development and social inequalities, and the relationship between environment and health, especially with reference to diet and to cancer. In 2004–2005 she was visiting research fellow at Sichuan University, with funding from the Leverhulme Trust. sonja van wichelen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University (2007–2009) and will be joining the Pembroke Center at Brown University as a postdoctoral fellow for the academic year 2009–2010. She obtained her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation Disputing the Muslim Body: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Indonesia will be published by Routledge in 2010. She also co-edited the volume Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and is working on a manuscript together with Marc de Leeuw provisionally entitled Transformations of Dutchness: Liberalism and Tolerance in a Nervous Society. Her research interests broadly focus on cultural politics in the age of globalization and engage with issues of religion, gender, transnational adoption, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. 205

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zheng yangwen received her PhD from the University of Cambridge (King’s College) in 2001. She taught/researched at the University of Pennsylvania (2002–04) and National University of Singapore (Asia Research Institute 2004–06) before joining the University of Manchester in 2007. Her publications include The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge University Press, 2005 with Italian translation published by UTET in 2007 and Korean translation published by ECO-LIVRES in 2009) and ‘Swan Lake to Red Girl’s Regiment: the Sinicisation of Ballet in China’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She co-edited Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (with Anthony Reid. National University of Singapore Press and University of Hawaii Press, June 2009), Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity (with Charles J-H Macdonald. National University of Singapore Press, October 2009), and The Cold War in Asia: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (with Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi. Brill USA, March 2010).

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B iBLiogRAPhy Abu-Lughod, L., 1995, ‘Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt’, Social Text 42 (Spring), 53–67. ———. 1998, ‘Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, in L. Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton. Adkins, L., 2004, ‘Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender?’, The Sociological Review 52 (2), 191–210. Adrian, B., 2003, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry, Berkeley. Agamben, G., 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel HellerRoazen), Stanford. Ahmed, S., 2002, ‘Racialized Bodies’, in M. Evans and E. Lee, eds, Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. New York, 46–63. Alter, J.S., 1992, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India, Berkeley. ———. 2000, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism, Philadelphia. ———. 2005, Asian Medicine and Globalization, Philadelphia. ———. 2006, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy, Princeton. Altman, D., 1996, ‘Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities’, Social Text 48, 77–94. Althusser, L., 1971, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (NotesTowards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster), New York, 127–86. Amanah. 2002. ‘Kata Selebriti Soal Jilbab’, 13 December–9 January. Amrith, S.S., 2006, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–1965, London. anan (Women’s Magazine in Japan), 5 June 1974 ———. 20 June 1974 ———. 5 March 1975 ———. 20 April 1979 ———. 21 May 1979 ———. 11 May 1980 ———. 1 February 1981 ———. 5 February 1982 ———. 13 June 1986 ———. 18 May 1990 ———. 9 October 1998 (Figure 2) ———. 24 November 2000 (Figure 1) ———. 26 November 2000

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224

i ndex A Aa Gym or Abdullah Gymastiar, 82 abangan (nominal Muslims), 81 Adapt (tradition), 61, 70 Ageing, 17 Aizawa Seishisai 会沢正志斎, 130 albularios (‘faith’ healers), 151 Allah, 68 Al-Farabi, 5 Al-Ghazali, 5 Al-Sayyida Zaynab, 4, 14 Alter, Joseph, 30–31 Amanah (Muslim women’s magazine), 88 American Protestant missionary, 156–57 American regime, 147, 156, colonial government 158 American Way, 156 Amida, 50 anan (Japanese women’s magazine), 104, 106 Anti-clericalism, 155 Ars erotica, 2 Asian phenomenology, 23 ‘assocaciones illicitas’ (illicit associations), 151 B babaylanes (spirit mediums), 151 ballet, introduction to China 185–86 Barlow, Tani, 29 barrios (small villages of initially about 50–100 families), 159 Basketball culture, 36 Beauty ideology, 97 Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, 37–38 ‘being decent’ (in post War Japan), 103 Bengal, 167

Benjamin, Walter, 193, 202 Bhadra Kali, 168 Bhagavat Gita (supreme scripture of the Hindus), 173 ‘bio-power’, 178 ‘blind beliefs’ (Kerala, India), 169 Bodily disposition, 116, 192 Body culture, 23–26, 28, 39, in China, 36, in Taiwan and Japan, 33 Body ratio, 106, 108 Body techniques, 25–26 Body in different religions and Confucianism, 15, 32 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 26, 60, 120–21, 133, 142, 192, 199 Brahminic Hinduism, 174 Buddhist sect in Kamakura period, 48 Bureau of Education and Philippine Health Service (Philippines), 162 bushidō or ‘way of the warrior’, 129 C cabecceras (population centres), 150 catons, 151, CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 185–88, 195–97, 202 Cheyne, George, 9 Chie Nakane, 3 China, 2, 5, 12, 16, 24–26, 28, 33, 35, 113, 116, 120, 122, 124–25, 183–84, 188, 191, 194, 202 Chinese body, 34–35 Christian teaching, 18–19 Civil and Military Gazette, 160 Civilizing mission, 151, 158–59, 161 cleanliness and whiteness as godliness’, 82 ‘Commandments of the Friar’, 155 225

Index

Communism, 183, 188, 194, 198, 200–01 Confucian revival, 31–32 Confucius, 3 Cruelty (on the body), 174, 177 Cultural imperialism, 23, 99 “cultural representation”, 6 d Dai Ailian (Aileen Issac Tai), 186, Dai-nihon hokkekyō genki 大日本法華経験記, 44 Dainippon Butokukai or Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association, 130, 139 Dakwah movement, 78 del Pilar, Marcelo H., 155 Demonic woman, 52, 54 Department of Religious Affairs (Java, Indonesia), 62 Disciplinary power, 105 District Collector (Kerala), 174–75 District Medical Officer (Kerala), 175 ‘doctrines of health and hygiene’, 162 Dōjōji engi emaki 道成寺縁起絵巻, 43–44, 54 Dragon King’s daughter, 49 Dualism, 9, 32 e East-West dichotomy, 27 Eating one’s fill and eating well, 122–23 Eichberg, Henning, 25, 33 Elavoor Puthankavu Temple, 168 Elias, Norbert, 26 Embodiment, 7, 105, 115, 142 Emperor-system ideology, 132 Empowerment, 59, 75 emptiness (J. mujō 無常), 57 “English malady”, 9 Eranakulam district (Kerala, India), 167 F Fasting (Islam), 60–61 see also puasa, different kinds, 71 ‘fat’ body (China), 113, 119–20 Father Pedro de Estrada, S.J., 152 Feminism, 183, 185, 194, 196, 199, 202

fencing, 130,135–37, 141 Filipino body, 147–48, 155–156, 162 Fitness boom (Japan), 104 “Five Obstructions” (J. goshō 五障), 49–51 Food shortage (China), 116–18 forty-one-day vow, 168 ‘4–2–1 syndrome’, 122 French legislation prohibiting headscarves in public schools, 85 Foucault, Michel, 2, 29, 60, 105, 133, 147, 178–80, 201 g Gangyō 元暁 (Korean monk), 46 gekiken, 130, 140–41 Genki or ‘vitality’ of the state, 139 Genkō shakusho 元亨釈書, 44 Gishō 義湘 (Korean monks), 46, 50, 56 Globalisation, 23, 31, 98–100, 109 goddess Bhagavati, 170 Goffman, Erving, 103 Great Leap Forward, 126 gyakuen 逆縁 (reverse karma), 55 h Habibie (former President of Indonesia), 62 Habitus, 7, 26, 92, 133, 192 Hadiths, 69–70 Hahn, Tomie, 10 Haj (pilgrimage), 66, 78, 86 Halal, 91 Hall, Stuart, 98–99, 102 Heidegger, Martin, 20 Heiser, Victor (Commissioner of the Board of Health), 158 henjō nanshi 変成男子, 49 Hexis, 4, 133, 142, 192 “hidden image” (J. hibutsu 秘仏), 56 Hindu diety, 167, organisations 170, 171,175, reformism 173, 176, 179, reformists, 166 Hindu Navodhana Prathishtan (Hindu Awakening Movement), 169 hōben 方便, 56 Homosexuality, 19–20 226

Index

Hōnen 法然 (Japanese Pure Land patriarch), 50 Hong Changqing, 195 Hook swinging, 168–69 Hwang, Dong Jhy, 27–29 i Ilustrados class, 155 Imperial body, 131 India, 1, 2, 4, 20, 166–67, 174, 176, 179 Indian Manual of Hygiene, 160 Indian Mythology, 167 Indigenization, 153 Indigenizing a Western body, 108 ‘Indo’, 88 Indonesia, 2, 5, 14, 19, 60, 61, 62, 77, 79, 82, 86, 88, 90 Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, 81 Indonesian women, 76, 77, 91 Influences of Tropical Climates on European Constitution, 160 Informants (of fasting in West Java), 66 Inneke Koesherawati, 86–88 Irokawa Daikichi, 132 Islam, female modesty 19, fasting 70, 76 Islamic attire, 82, 84, 85, 87 Islamic banking, 90 Islamic magazines 88, literature 90 Islamic organisation, 76 Islamic patriarchy, 75 Islamic politics, 78 Islamic revival 77, revivalism 85 Islamic scarves, 80 Islamic womanhood 82, 86, Islamist women 85 Islamist, movement 78, 81, 83–84 Islamization (Indonesia), 77, 90, Islamised 91, of consumer culture 91, 94 Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文, 130, 139

Japanese Buddhism, 9, Buddhist ideology 47, on female body 48, 53, 57 Japanese female body, history 98, 100, 103, 105–07, 109 Japanese setsuwa 説話 (medieval), 43, 54 Japanese women’s magazines , 97–98 Japanizing the Western body, 109–10 Java (West), 59, 61–62, 64, 70, 74, 76 Javanese mysticism, 63 jilbab (tight or new veiling), 77, 83, jilbabisasi 86–87 jūdō, 130 k KAMMI (Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union), 78 Kampungan (traditional loose veiling), 77 kebaya and sarung (traditional female costumes in Java), 76 Kegon engi emaki 華厳縁起絵巻, 43–44, 54 keinginan (knowledge or desire), 64 kendō, 130 Kerala (southernmost state of India), 167 kerudung (traditional female head covering in Java), 76 kesaktian (also kasektèn in Javanese) or power, 59, 65 Kleinman, Arthur and Joan, 30 Kokutai or ‘national body,’ 131–32 Kompas, 80 Konishi Shin’emon 小西新右衛門, 138 Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集, 44 Koran, 69 Kuan Yin, 4 Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 32

J Japan, 2, 3, 5, 6, 20, 25, 33, 37, 43, 49, 51, 58, 98, 100, 104, 130, 132, 134, 142, 146 Japanese body, 98, 106, 108, 130, 133, 136, 138, 140, 143, 146 227

L Lagda (Visayan term ‘manners’ or ‘codes of behaviour’), 152–55 Lin, Yutang, 26 ‘little emperors’, 122 ‘lived experience’, 194, 200 “living organism”, 6 Longevity, 16 Lotus Sutra (J. Hokkekyō 法華経), 45, 49–50

Index

m Madras Manual of Hygiene, 160 Manila Times, 157 manual de urbanidad (manuals of urbanity), 151 Mao Zedong, 35, 114, 117, 185, 187–89, 194, 198, 202 Martial arts (Japanese), 130, 136–37, Special School (Bujutsu Senmon Gakkō), 139 Marx, Karl, 25 Mathrubhoomi (leading vernacular newspaper in Kerala), 169 Mauss, Marcel, 26, 147 McClintock, Anne, 2 McKinley, President of the United States, 158 Medical anthropology, 30–31 Megawati Sukarnoputri, 81 Meiji era, 100, 129, 134 Mencius, 3 Metaphor, 130, 131, 132, 142–43, metaphoric 141, 145 Ministry of education (Japanese), 135–36, 140 Ministry of Propaganda (Chinese), 189 Mojares, Resil, 148 Moral hygiene, 82 Mosque movements, 75 Muslimness, 77, 84, 90 n Nafsu (bodily needs, desires, impulses), 64, 68 Nair caste, 168 Native body (Philippines), 149, 154–55, 160–61, 163 New Haven Morning News, 157 New Order, image 89–90 ngélmu (knowledge), 63 Nichiren sect (J. Nichiren-shū 日蓮宗), 48 Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle, polis and hexis, 4 Nirvana (state of enlightenment, 57 Niwa Keisuke 丹羽圭介, 139 Non-dualism, 57–58

Non-normative body, 104 Noor (Muslim women’s magazine), 88 o Olympic education, 36 On Conduct During Bedtime, 154 On Conduct of a Child in School, 153 Orientalism, 27–29, 37–38 Orwell, George, 1 ‘Other’ and ‘otherness’, 2, 101, 178 P “passions are none other than enlightenment” (J. bonnō soku bodai 煩悩即菩提), 57 Patriotism (China), 186 Pattini cult (Sri Lanka), 167 Philippine Independent Church, 155 Philippines, 4, 14, 19, 149, 151, 155, 158, 161 Physical education (Japan), 135 PKS (Prosperous Justice Party), 78 Polis, 4 Political Islam, 76, 78, 80 Politics of presence, 84 Poomoodal (Kerala, India), 170 ‘Poura Dharma Samithi’ (Peoples Ethical Committee, PDS), 171 Prester John, 16 Prince Komatsu (Japan), 139 Puasa (fasting in Javenese), 60–61 Public health, 156, 158–59, 161 Pure Land sect (J. Jōdo-shū 浄土宗), 48 Puthen Kavu Bhagavati Temple, 167 Q Qi, 34 R Racialized Other, 101 Ramadan, 61–62, 66, 70 Red Girl’s Regiment, 12, 189, 201 reduccion (reduction), 150 religion, 4, 14, 18, 48, 63, 76, 83, 85, 91, 173, 177 religiosity, 173 religious awakening (J. hosshin 発心), 50

228

Index

religious ritual, 166, religion and ritual 177 Review of Asian body literature, 29–32 Ritualized behavioural practice, 103 ‘rituals of intimacy’, 150 ‘rituals of piety’, 148 Rizal, Jose, 156 rohani (piety), 67 s Said, Edward, 2, 27–28, 79 samsara (J. rinne 輪廻), 57 santri (devout Muslims), 81 Sasa Kumatarō 佐々熊太郎, 139 sati (immolation of widows), 177 Scientia sexualis, 2 Sea of veils, 79 Seki Jūrōji 関重郎治, 130, 140–41 Serpent-woman, 45, 50, 58 ‘sex bomb’, 86 Sexed body, 3 ‘sexploitation’, 87 shachū taisō or ‘room calisthenics’, 135 Shantao 善導 (Chinese Pure Land patriarch), 50 shari’ah (Islamic law), 64, 70 Shinran 親鸞 (founder of the True Pure Land sect), 50 “Sick man of Asia”, 37 Sister Tutut or Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, 78 Siva, 167 ‘small face’, 105–06 Social Darwinism, 25 Spanish, regime 147, 149, 151, 155, 163, clergy 150, 157 Spencer, Herbert, 25 state and ‘state project’, 13, 139, 189, 202 Sudhikarma Yathra (purificatory march), 169 Sunnah (the orthodox path of the Prophet), 70 Sun, Lung-kee, 32 Supremacy of the white western standard of beauty, 101, 106–107 Sutra of Amida (Skt. Smaller Sukhāvativyūha Sutra, J. Amida-kyō 阿弥陀経), 48,

Sutra on the Meditation of the Buddha of Infinite Life (J. Kanmuryōju-kyō 観無量寿経), 49 Sutra on the Teachings of Infinite Life (Skt. Larger Sukhāvativyūha Sutra, J. Muryōju-kyō 無量寿経), 48 Swami Bhoomananda Thirta (Hindu ascetic in Kerala), 169, 173–74 T Tai-chi, 26 Taisō Denshūsho or Gymnastics Research Institute, 135 Taisōzu or ‘Plan for Gymnastics’, 135 Taliban women, 79 Talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, 187–88 Taoism on sex, 16 “technologies of the self ”, 2 ‘three-inch golden lily’ (bound feet), 183 Time (J. Ji-shū 時宗), 48 Tiyu, 25, 35–36 Torimi Kōki 鳥海弘毅, 138 True Pure Land (J. Jōdo shin-shū 浄土真宗), 48 Turner, Bryan S, 34, 104, 156, 192, 195–96 v Veiled women, 79 Veiling, history 76, politics 84, 92 Virgin Mary, 4, 14, 61, 154 Vivekodaya Yathra (journey to instil wisdom), 172 w wadah (body in Javanese), 64–65 Watanabe Chiaki 渡辺千秋, 139 Well-balanced body 98, 106 West Java, 64 Westernized body, 98, 107–09, 111 ‘white’ or ‘whiteness’, 81 see also santri, 83 ‘white Western/American aesthetic’, 97 Women’s liberation, history in China 184–85 Worcester, Dean, 158 Wu shu, 28, 38 229

Index

Wu Qionghua, 192 Wu Xiaobang, 185

yin and yang, 3 Yuasa, Yasuo, 31–32

y Yan’an, Forum 186, 194, doctrine 187, 199 Yealina, O.H., 189

z Zen sect (J. Zen-shū 禅宗), 48 Zenmyō 善妙, 46, 50–51, 54, 56, 58

230