文化の流用(Appropriation),あるいは発生の物語へむけて : 柳宗悦と論争の<場>としての言語
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概要
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This paper is a critical examination of anthropology as a discourse on the marginalized other in the postmodern world. Established as a privileged discourse on the other, anthropology has assumed, since its inception in the early twentieth century, the separation of the observing Western self from the non-Western other, standing passively in the former's gaze. In valorizing the native people, anthropologists have implicitly criticized their own societies, feeling responsible for accurately recording native societies rapidly disappearing due to the influences from the West. This style of discourse on the other can be called, to paraphrase James Clifford, an entropic narrative. Appealing to the "liberal guilt" shared among anthropologists, this narrative mode has become dominant, while remaining almost oblivious to the rapid changes in the political and social conditions of the world. Recent critiques of anthropology focus on the two premises inherent in the discipline since its inception : one is the essentialist argument in separating the West from the rest, the other is the intense drive toward representing in its ethnographic present, a pristine culture devoid of "impure" influences from the outside. Thus, these critiques amount, in other words, to those of entropic narrative. In these critiques the present conditions of the world are viewed as fragmented, refracted, decentered, and deterritorialized : not only capitals but also labor and information circulate around the world. Under these conditions the mass displacement of people is common, the development of hybrid cultures rampant, the creation of cosmopolitan lifestyles ubiquitous. A discourse on the other based on the entropic narrative mode captures these conditions as negative, a decay from the whole. Moreover, this mode represents the people whose cultures have been changing as cultural dupes, depriving them of their subjectivity to respond to the outside influences, however powerful these influences may be. Thus, the entropic narrative mode is a political statement as oppressive as Western-centered theory of modernization. What is needed is, again to borrow a phrase from James Clifford, a narrative of emergence, a mode of discourse capable of interpreting the present conditions of the world, not as decay, but as creation and emergence of new cultural forms. Local people struggle to create their own cultural spaces within the limits and constrains imposed on them from the outside; therefore, such cultural spaces are "cultures" that anthropologists now should strive to understand. Peoples' struggle for their own "cultures is, to "appropriate" one of Levi-Strauss' s concepts, bricolage, a creative effort in appropriating every available means to improvise new cultural forms. In examining so-called "Okinawan dialect controversy" in the nineteen forties, this paper identifies a discourse on Okinawan language and culture developed by Yanagi Muneyoshi as an example of entropic narrative. From this perspective the present day linguistic condition among the Okinawan youth may appear helplessly entropic, since the use of standard Japanese appears to have become hegemonic over 1ocal dialects. But, from a perspective of narrative of emergence, the same condition presents itself, not as decadent, but as productive, since their language is a hybrid of the standard and local Okinawan dialects. Thus, Yanagi' s contribution toward the development of discourse on Okinawan culture is relativised and historici-zed , for his mode of discourse could deny the subjectivity of the present day Okinawan youth on whose language the future of Okinawa depends. From the perspective of narrative of emergence, what was devalued in Yanagi' s view as "impure" seems to provide a clue for studying the Okinawan culture in the late twentieth century.
- 北海道東海大学の論文