Mukashi, mukashi, omukashi...

"Ahhhhh this unrelenting, dust-driven, crack your fingers dry wind has withered my wits, I'm certain" begins this excellent work by Hiromi Goto; she tells a "true" story with interweaving, cross-locking narratives, much like the spider webs that populate her dusty Alberta prairie town of Nanton.

This is a story of three-generations of women (challenging the Japanese patrilineal system of descent, where only the male descendant's story is recognized): there is Naoe, the immigrant grandmother; Keiko, the silent mother who has given up her Japanese heritage to assimilate to white Canada, and Murasaki, the granddaughter, who discovers her voice through the telling of this story.

The main drama of the story, if you can even call it that, comes from the grandmother's sudden departure; Keiko is left depressed and wordless and Murasaki is left to tend to her, opening up space for a slow dialogue between the mother and the daughter. The grandmother's departure may have been a "true" event--one can never know, reality and fiction blend in and are indistinguishable--but granny Naoe's adventures are told in a light and fantastical way; granny Naoe conquers old age through Goto's magical realist touch.

While I was reading Chorus of Mushrooms, I was reminded of Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero. Formal variations in French letters happened because the unified French consciousness was dispersed through some revolution in the 19th century; form is influenced by materialist transformations. Goto's multi-narrative tale is, perhaps, the diasporic consciousness' attempt to find a formal means of expression.

Granny Naoe has not lost her Japanese tongue, and so she is the greater teller of stories in the novel. Keiko, the assimilated mother, is silent; she has lost her ability to express herself and tell stories, as she has forced herself into the mainstream Canadian consciousness in which she stands in a marginalized position. Murasaki-Goto slowly finds her own ability to tell her own stories through the novel.

"I rise from our great purple futon like someone who has been sleeping for decades. Step through the open door. Away from a room filled with the lingering echoes of spoken and unspoken tales.

You know you can change the story."

As she writes these final lines, is the diasporic consciousness born?
 

​This book by celebrated anthropologist Mary Douglas tackles one of the questions that I have a personal interest in: contagion and purity and danger. Lots of fertile ideas for understanding Korean ethno-nationalism, although its ideas have wider applicability. This is a book that is good to read and good to think with.

Douglas is most engaged with scholars in the anthropology of religion. In the first section of the book, Douglas goes back to Henry Taylor, Robertson Smith, Durkheim (and others)--all of whom I am not particularly acquainted with--to extricate some fertile concepts from their previous associations. We are in the presence of a true sholar.

"From this point onwards the anthropologists have been saddled with an intractable problem... an emotional and prejudiced approach to ritual has led anthropology down one of its barrenest perspectives - a narrow preoccupation with belief in the efficacy of rites" (p. 23).

After an overdue clean-up of the theories of the past, Douglas ready to move onto her topics of interest. Dirt, as her famous definition goes, is "matter out of place." It is not an isolated event; "where there is dirt there is system" (p. 44). Dirt (and pollution and contagion and taboo) happens at the interstices, the in-between spaces of cultural categories in symbolic systems.

While these in-between spaces are polluting, they are also a source of danger and power. As Douglas writes, "order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made... disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite... We recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power" (p. 117). An example from contemporary society are criminals: these are individuals who have slipped through the legal and formal structures of society. Now classified abnormal, they are marked polluted and dangerous.

With this example, we can see that the symbolic system and the moral system intersect, although they do not match up completely. These operate in different ways. While moral systems are ambiguous, the symbolic system of pollution are clear cut. Pollution and the potential of subsequent danger operate to deter potential infractions. However, polluting behaviour is not necessarily morally reprehensible, although it may lead to moral judgements.

However, the symbolic system is not only conservative and self-replicating. Dirt--the dangerous interstitial matter--is not only destructive; it can also be made sacred and creative through ritual, its potential power mastered to renew the system. And through the ritual frame, dirt is made known.

Miscellaneous points of interest:

Douglas' analysis of the dietary rules of the abominations of Leviticus are an interesting application; however, in the new Introduction to the book she admits faults in her analysis.

Douglas is not afraid of the term "primitive." As she writes, "I suspect that our professional delicacy in avoiding the term 'primitive' is the product of secret convictions of sueriority" (p. 93). For Douglas, the difference between primitive and modern is differentiation. Economic differentiation leads to differentiation in thought, and modern thought patterns is differentiated because it has freed "itself from the shackles of its own subjective conditions" (p. 98). So primitive throught constructs environments where self and other are not so rigidly separated and the human subject interacts with agential natural beings--this reminded me of post-humanist ethnographic works.
 

I was a little bit worried about this edition. In the Editor's Introduction, the editor criticizes Nietzsche's "gospel of the will to power" as something that has "unleashed bestiality in the name of the sanctity of the animal in man." The translator, translating Nietzsche's Preface, translates "untimely" as an awkward "out of season"--a few pages later, I noticed this sentence: "...a living thing can only be healthy, strong, and /productive/ within a certain horizon..."; I doubt Nietzsche would have used such a utilitarian word as "productive." This book, in other words, was published in the pre-Kaufmann era of Nietzschean scholarship; I was worried that it would be a crude mischaracterization.

I didn't have to worry; this work was an interesting addition to my own knowledge of Nietzsche and provided some truly interesting Nietzschean concepts to think through.

Nietzsche begins with the concepts unhistorical and superhistorical. The beast "lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present ... without leaving any curious remainder"--the human loses his capacity for oblivion as he steps out of childhood and learns what "existence really is--an imperfect tense that never becomes a present" (wow!). A surfeit of history is a burden on man's shoulders, it brings weariness and "forgetfulness is a property of all action." However, it is only by overcoming the unhistorical that the human becomes human--this reminded me of Nietzsche's comment in the Genealogy of Morality (that goes something like this) that it was only through ressentiment and resulting depth that man becomes an interesting animal. So both "the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture," and only by suppressing the unhistorical can the human put history to use for the present.

Nietzsche's "super-historical man" sees "no salvation in evolution ... sees the world is complete and fulfills its aim in every single moment ... the past and the present are one and the same, typically alike in all their diversity and forming together a picture of eternally present imperishable types of unchangeable value and significance"--the super-historical man has achieved supreme wisdom and reads the text of history with the divine key. Nietzsche does not envy this figure; "we will leave the super-historical men to their loathings and their wisdom" he says, "we wish rather today to be joyful in our unwisdom and have a pleasant life as active men who go forward and respect the course of the world."

How to put history for the service of life? Nietzsche identifies three relations man has to history: "in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and desire for deliverance"--these form the three kinds of history, "the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical."

The monumental history is an elitist history, it is a dialogue between superior human beings who form a chain throughout history (this reminds me that one T.S. Eliot quote about the artist and his relation to the past). It inspires those untimely people who strive for greatness by providing them with examples outside of their time. This is a mythic history: "Only if the earth always began its drama again after the fifth act, and it was certain that the same interaction of motives, the same deus ex machina, the same catastrophe would recur at particular intervals, could the man of action venture to look for the whole archetypical truth in monumental history, to see each fact fully set out in its uniqueness: it would probably not be before the astronomers became astrologers again." As such, it is not a history of causes, it describes the monumental "effects in themselves" at the cost of an explanation of the causes.

The antiquarian history is a for the "conservative and reverent nature who looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust"--this is a history for the Chinese peasant as was described in "From the Soil" by Fei Xiaotong--but these conservative spirits run the risk of rejecting everything new for the antiquarian: "if the judgement of a people hardens in this way, and history's service to the past life is to undermine a further and higher life; if the historical sense no longer preserves life, but mummifies it... Antiquarian history degenerates from the moment that it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present." The antiquarian history cannot create life, it can only preserve it, it lacks the creative vitality of the monumental history.

The third and last way, the "critical" way, is also in service of life. It is a retrospective reinterpretation of the past, with which the present can break free of its unchosen inheritance. Through the critical way "we plant a new way of life, a new instinct, a second nature, that withers the first."

With these categorizations Nietzsche analyzes and condemns the study of history in his present; the modern study of history in his time attempts to be a science, an objective manner of seeing--this "excess of history" (p.28) suffocates life. Unfortunately, this post is already too long and I am too tired; I would recommend reading this essay, even if for Nietzsche's provocative writing.