| The central theme of my dissertation is the transformational possibilities of everyday life in contemporary Okinawa. My work explores traditional forms of social organization and genres of ritual and performance in the complicated context of modern Okinawan history. How have Okinawans survived the trauma of war, Japanese colonialism and American occupation? What of their brutally uneven experience of capitalist modernization? What have been the consequences of the powerful efforts to reconfigure their daily lives? I argue that Okinawans have not simply endured these interventions. Rather, they have engaged, contested and changed them in complex and often contradictory ways.; My dissertation is based on two years of fieldwork in Koza or Okinawa City, a community built in central Okinawa along the perimeter of the massive American military installation, Kadena Air Base. I begin with a study of ethnographic comedians active in Okinawa City. These performers weave Okinawan folk humor, Japanese traditional monologues and improvisational routines into sophisticated critiques of capitalist modernity and Japanese nationalism. Chapter Two explores the work of the actor and storyteller Huziki Hayato in the context of the political turmoil that engulfed Okinawa during the mid 1990s. Chapter Three examines the artistic production of Huziki's mentor Teruya Rinsuke and his complicated relationship to minzokugaku or nativist ethnology. Chapter Four continues to explore the dialog between Okinawan popular culture and anthropology with a study of a series of seminars on Okinawan culture and history conducted by Huziki. In Chapter Five, I turn to an investigation of the youth groups or seenenkai from which these performers and their style of performance emerged. In particular, I consider the ritual known as eisaa, the dance for the dead, and its mediation of social relationships. I provide close readings of these performances, focusing on modalities of mourning, memoration and creative activity. In the context of these practices, the contradictions of the present invoke the promise of the past, while forms of the past are drawn upon in order to transform the present. |
