Politics of Leisure and Recreation:

Self-Cultivation in Communities of Learning

Anthro 1612 April 17, 2008

Ethnography of a “Leisured Madam”

有閑マダム 有閑 - Y ūk a n

有 - have閑 - leisure, quietude, tranquility

Salarymen at Work and Play

Upper Middle Class Housewife

Relationship with Public Sphere is through her family

Venerated as MotherEducator of Children

Manager of Household

Wife

Just a Housewife

Three meals and a nap

• Engage in Dalliances

• Immersed in Leisure pursuits

• No Job• Stigma of Wealth• Are they Worthy Subjects?

Objective

Explore Embodied Dance as a form of

Re-creation Self-Transformation

Social Change

• 2. Noh Dance and Song - Tokyo, Suginami Ward

Daytime Occupation of Amateur Noh Dancers

• Women in their 50s, who mainly belong to occupational category of “housewife”, minority are teachers, writers, judges, doctors

What do they Do? Body Sculpting

Endure Rigorous Pedagogy• Arduous Training:– 8 hour days of lessons

– 100s of hours of practice between classes

– Teacher Strict and Reduces Students to nothing

Student’s Testimonial

Tsurumi Sensei (Teahcer) glared at me. ‘Sing, Ozawa-san. Now!’

We sang the first three lines of the kiri section of the song in unison…. Eventually, I felt a sort of shedding of all – of all my thoughts, my pride. I was reduced to a mass of humility and effort as I repeated line after line with her, enunciating and articulating the words of the song.

• High Financial outlay: Lessons, costumes, drums, trips, food, gifts, travel = $30,000

Why Subject Yourself to this Training?

Various responses:

• “I do it to get away from my retired husband.”

• “I wanted a career but never had one. That’s why I decided to become a practitioner of Noh, perform in recitals, and sponsor this ancient art.”

• “The unending spiral of learning helps me feel that life will go on forever.”

• “I dance to preserve my independence in old age. I don’t want to be a burden on my family when I’m in my 80s.”

• “My body is something I can control and keep on sculpting, no matter what befalls me.”

• “Over the course of a life, marriage, childbirth, aging, and many life events befall a woman in this society. Much of it is beyond my control. Noh dance is something that I can incorporate into my body…But I can sculpt my body.”

Cultivating Mushin Nothingness

“I forget myself.”

“My body is the instrument through which I attain a state of nothingness.”

Women’s Dance in All-Male Theater

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTG6N0KFj4

Mushin

• Buddhist Concept• state of consciousness in which thoughts and objects of perception arise and float away without an individual forming an attachment to them

• attained through disciplined embodied practice

American Psychology Flow

• Czikszentmihalyi • Energized, focused, full involvement, and success in process of activity

• “completely involved in activity for its own sake

• Subjective experience of time is altered

• Loss of feeling of self-consciousness

Revisit the Skeptics and Critics:

• Romanticization of Embodied Self-Cultivation –Seduction of physical mastery makes it an opiate

–Social and political problems become recast in individualistic terms•self-cultivation better seen as “diagnostic” of power rather than transformation

Counterargument

- Nothingness: resource individuals develop to move out of oppressive states

- leads to inner change and changed perception of the world even though objective status remains same

- When structures can’t change, individuals mobilize

Two Case Studies

• 1. Pugilism - Chicago South Side

• 2. Noh Dance - Tokyo

Moore’s Stakes

- 1. take seriously what amateur dancers say about their avocation

2. Explore Noh dancing as a form of “re-creation” I.e. transformation of the self and hence transformation in experience of the social structures that oppress and marginalize them e.g. gender asymmetries in marriage and Japanese society