| This dissertation examines Ainu women's strategies within the cultural revival movement to revitalize visual and material culture arts, and to reintroduce traditional cultural practices to contemporary lifestyles. I contend that Ainu women's cultural work, while articulated in an apolitical register, provides symbolic leverage for the Ainu rights reclamation movement, advancing Ainu indigeneity claims against Japanese homogeneity. Through adapting historic practices, including embroidery, bast fiber weaving, and basketry, contemporary Ainu women re-work ancestral values. Through these practices, women craft themselves as agents---symbolically, socially, and discursively---to contest legacies of colonialism and discrimination that have marginalized them from majority Japanese society. I elaborate the contexts wherein women, and not men, are compelled to engage in material culture production, including embroidery workshops, state-sponsored programs, tourist market production, and museum replica-making.;Ainu activists draw from a U.N.-influenced discourse of indigeneity to transcend the nation-state, employing transnational moral arguments to shame the Japanese state into ethical treatment of: internal minorities. Under the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (1997), the state has claimed Ainu culture as national heritage; however, detractors criticize this law as co-opting sovereign cultural identity, and reinforcing Ainu marginalization. Nevertheless, I argue that Ainu women are capitalizing on Promotion Act initiatives to generate economic stability, symbolic capital, and to re-invent themselves as indigenous. By embodying cultural and social reproduction through clothwork, women envision themselves as practitioners and creators of communitarian genealogy, i.e. these practices allow them to create linkages with ancestors, gods, and the Ainu Diaspora across Japan.;Based on eighteen months of ethnographic and museum research from 2004 to 2005, in Hokkaido, Japan, I demonstrate how local engagement with global indigenous discourse has empowered women to negotiate questions of authenticity and to recuperate themselves as Ainu, despite historical ruptures. More generally, this research advances anthropological analysis of relations between material objects, their human producers, and cultural practice. I describe how objects are forged as containers of indigenous subjectivities, and show how cloth is invested with sentiment, memory, and ancestral intention. Ainu cultural productions are also political projects fostering global solidarity with an international community of persons claiming indigeneity. |
