2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
An Anthropological Study on Pollution Concepts among the Societies in the Japanese Archipelago
| Project/Area Number |
14510341
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
文化人類学(含民族学・民俗学)
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| Research Institution | Japan Women's University |
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Principal Investigator |
SEKINE Yasumasa Japan Women's University, Faculty of Integrated Arts and Social Sciences, Professor, 人間社会学部, 教授 (40108197)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2002 – 2005
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| Keywords | pollution / impurity / community / vertical community / horizontal community / urbanization / modernization / cremation |
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| Research Abstract |
Findings of the four-years research project on 'An Anthropological Study on Pollution Concepts among the Societies in the Japanese Archipelago' are summarized in the following three major conclusions.
1. The Tendency toward Disintegration of Community and Individualization
Pollution concepts were observed to have deeply embedded in community-based human relationships, as noticed from the today's progressive disintegration of community ties. This observation brings out that there are at least two levels of adoption of pollution concepts today, that is, the pollution concept getting redundancy on the fact of weakening community interactions and ties, and the pollution concept getting stationed at an individual level regardless of such a disintegration of community ties. Pollution concepts were conceived and proposed in the beginning as a folk knowledge, and they were introduced as a cooperative device for coping with unavoidable risks normally occurring in a life cycle of the individuals.
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However, the contemporary regard and appeal for individualization makes such pollution concepts as unnecessary and useless, and each individual is thus left to face the challenges of the risk and develop a device for challenging the risk in her or his own way. This situation today either leads to revitalization of traditional knowledge or helps maintaining the fragmented traditional knowledge superficially.
2. Differentiation between Vertical Community and Horizontal Community and their Entanglement
It is observed, during the field work on the study of pollution concepts, that every society is characterized with a dominant hierarchical or vertical ideology of 'pure-impure' getting superimposed on the egalitarian or horizontal indigenous communities. However, it is interesting and indicative to note that the vertically-imposed ideology fail to build up the confidence of the entire society, and that it rather ironically and paradoxically produces the horizontal "common-ground" ideology (though not so structured) by using and reusing resources drawn both from dominant ideology and indigenous cultural stocks. This fact may draw our attention towards the positive dimension of 'pollution' that may not be easily subjected to the interpretation from the viewpoint of 'pure-impure' ideology.
3. Modernization and Urbanization : A Decisive Influence derived from the Spread of Cremation
This conclusion may plausibly be related to the first one. Cremation seems to permeate in the recent days into the system of burial or the system of having the custom of allowing a dead body for weathering and of collecting its bones. It came into Japan as a Buddhist ideology, and so naturally it must have spread among the ruling class in the beginning. And in contrast, most of the ordinary people of the Japanese archipelago had followed traditional funeral styles until the Second World War. Accelerated by the rapid acceptance and spread of modern consumerism, this folk funeral practice got quickly replaced in the central parts of Japan after the War and in its peripheral areas after the end of 20th century, with the system of cremation and packaged-funeral associated with Buddhism. This transformation reflects the dynamic and creative notions of the pollution concepts, thereby driving out the original connotation of pollution to the poor notion of 'impurity'. Nonetheless, such a packaged way of managing the risks of the life cycle may not rescue the modern men and women from their mental meanderings of turmoil. Thus there seems to be an urgent and greater need to consider the discarded wisdom of folk traditions for compensating the defects and the failures of modern thinking and practices. Less
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