What do you think?
Rate this book
Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa
Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā , the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.
Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā , the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.
288 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 2008
4 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 14, 2015
Nelson delivers a masterful ethnography of Okinawan performance that explores how people, confronted with the traumas of the past, can cope with memory and the transformations of daily life.
The fist three chapters largely focus on Fujiki Hayato and his mentor, Teruya Rinsuke. Their theatrical presentations mix traditional and contemporary styles, exposing the relationship between the past and the present. We see the glorification of a lost history and the tools we have to revalue in order to regain subjectivity in a shattered modernity.
The fourth chapter is an interlude, using Takara Ben's poetry as Proust's madeleine: a constellation of images are formed that provoke us to remember the vanishing past and the hometown we never knew. These images of the past interact with present representations of the dead: from funeral rites and family tombs to reconstructed maps of a family's village presented at a public hearing.
The final chapter traces Nelson's experiences with the Sanda Community Center and their annual performance of eisā, a traditional Okinawan dance for the dead revitalized in the postwar. The dance has the power to beckon the dead that reside in our everyday lives, our memories, but also to invoke the spirit of karī, the power to create a communal spirit. This spirit gives us the power to live beyond our lives of capitalist modernity, the grind and toil of daily life, and to aid the realization that people are more than their labor.
Containing glorified memories of a once affluent kingdom, trauma of brutal Japanese colonialization, or the continuing presence of US military bases, the trauma of memory is experienced in many ways in modern Okinawa. We can see it in the bases that refuse to relinquish one's land or in the high-rise hotels of optimistic predictions of capitalist growth. Nelson's ethnography traces how these scars of the past can be worked through in the present. Through creative performance and communal activity, the people of Okinawa, among numerous other communities in the world experiencing similar conditions, can find significant ways to mediate the tumultuous relationship relationship between the past and the present.
The fist three chapters largely focus on Fujiki Hayato and his mentor, Teruya Rinsuke. Their theatrical presentations mix traditional and contemporary styles, exposing the relationship between the past and the present. We see the glorification of a lost history and the tools we have to revalue in order to regain subjectivity in a shattered modernity.
The fourth chapter is an interlude, using Takara Ben's poetry as Proust's madeleine: a constellation of images are formed that provoke us to remember the vanishing past and the hometown we never knew. These images of the past interact with present representations of the dead: from funeral rites and family tombs to reconstructed maps of a family's village presented at a public hearing.
The final chapter traces Nelson's experiences with the Sanda Community Center and their annual performance of eisā, a traditional Okinawan dance for the dead revitalized in the postwar. The dance has the power to beckon the dead that reside in our everyday lives, our memories, but also to invoke the spirit of karī, the power to create a communal spirit. This spirit gives us the power to live beyond our lives of capitalist modernity, the grind and toil of daily life, and to aid the realization that people are more than their labor.
Containing glorified memories of a once affluent kingdom, trauma of brutal Japanese colonialization, or the continuing presence of US military bases, the trauma of memory is experienced in many ways in modern Okinawa. We can see it in the bases that refuse to relinquish one's land or in the high-rise hotels of optimistic predictions of capitalist growth. Nelson's ethnography traces how these scars of the past can be worked through in the present. Through creative performance and communal activity, the people of Okinawa, among numerous other communities in the world experiencing similar conditions, can find significant ways to mediate the tumultuous relationship relationship between the past and the present.
March 6, 2022
One of the most beautifully written ethnographies I've had the pleasure of reading. It is truly a unique and special opportunity to have been able to experience the art of dance how the author did. As a Japan studies student, I found this book to be respectful and open about not only the variety of cultural experiences and identity prevalent in Okinawa, but was also glad to see how the author approached the subject and knew where and how to appropriately partake.
May 18, 2009
Well, it's a sad situation: the Okinawans were caught in the middle of the Japanese and the US during WWII. Atrocities were committed. The Okinawans still have to deal with the presence of US bases. The book navigates a delicate path, and does it gracefully and convincingly. Dr. Nelson looks at what you might call revitalized Okinawan traditions (especially modes of storytelling, dancing, drumming). The book does not evaluate these performances in terms of authenticity (which would actually ignore the historical context), nor does it directly frame them as responses to the horrors of war (which would render invisible complexity and creativity of the Okinawans' practices and ideas). The book is a model of how to do and write ethnography in a situation where people are dealing with a traumatic history. It deftly draws on De Certeau, among others; the theoretical touchstones are integrated lightly into the text, which makes for smoother (easier and more engaging) reading, but may dissapoint people who want to be directed to lots of chapter and verse citations of the theoretical literature.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews