沖縄を舞台にした民俗学と観光 : 言説・表象・自己表象

• 太田 好信

  教育開発研究センター

書誌事項

タイトル別名

• Folklore Studies and Tourism in the Ryukyus : Discourse. Representation・Self-Representation

抄録

This paper is an examination of 'folklore studies' (Nihonminzokugaku) and tourism in the Ryukyus as two distinct forms of representing the Other. Conceived as discourse, the possible forms of utterance or the particular ways of speaking and writing, folklore studies produced the object which they sought to represent. The founder of this discourse, Yanagita Kunio, regarded the Ryukyus as the representation of Japan forgotten a long time ago. In his discourse on the Ryukyus Yanagita attempted not only to criticize the view that the Ryukyuans were "racially" closer to the Chinese than to the Japanese, a view commonly held then by the Japanese, but also to contribute toward Japan's search for national identity by valorizing the marginal. As folklore studies aim to represent the Other, so does tourism. The Ryukyus islands are very popular as tourist spots among the Japanese. Some striking images in tour pamphlets for the Ryukyus may include white beachs, aqua-blue water, and various kinds of tropical fish; all these images allow tourists to visualize the Ryukyus as the places closer to nature by placing themselves on the side of culture. Thus, tourists empty culture out of Ryukyus, while folklorists displace the present Ryukyus to the past; therefore both tourists and folklorists deny the "coevalness" that may unite them with the local people. The Ryukyuans are not only the object but also the subject of representation. In other words, the Ryukyuans now represent themselves nondiscursively in festivals, local museums, songs, comics, etc. But, conflicts may arise in deciding what and how to represent. For example, a manta ray is a creature extremly popular to scuba divers from mainland Japan. Neither economically nor symbolically has this creature ever been important to the local people. When local fishermen caught a manta ray, they found themselves in the middle of controversy spreading even to mainland Japan. Local politicians protested the capture since these politicians wanted to make it a symbol of the area, while fishermen wanted to sell it to the aquarium in mainland Japan, knowing full well that it had never been a creature significant enough to stir controversy at all. This conflict in interpreting the significance of the creature illustrates well that the object of self-representation has been contested; therefore, to borrow a phrase coined by Eric Hobsbawm, this example may be considered a failure in "inventing a tradition." Complex relationships exist now among folklorists, tourists, and local people : folklorists produce a knowledge of the Other discursively; tourists structure their experiences through the medium of non-discursive representations; local people may recreate their own images according to representations historically alien to them. A direction of future anthropological research in the Ryukyus is to give voice to that aspect of the local reality which folklore studies as discourse, touristic representations, and self-representations by local people, all have failed so far to capture : the everyday lives of the Ryukyuans. "But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you... You make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience... to being a person marvelling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other people) have with nature." -Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New American Library, 1988)

収録刊行物

• 北海道東海大学紀要. 人文社会科学系

  北海道東海大学紀要. 人文社会科学系 3 103-118, 1990

  北海道東海大学

詳細情報

• CRID: 1571417126749171840
• NII論文ID: 110000469826
• NII書誌ID: AN10068777
• ISSN: 09162089
• 本文言語コード: ja
• データソース種別:
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