8 - 10 JULY 1999
LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS
Ghosts and Modernity in East Asia
The conference 'Ghosts and Modernity in East Asia' brought together scholars who presented and discussed findings on spirit and ghost beliefs in contemporary societies in East and Southeast Asia. The conference agenda emphasized ghostliness, spirit-related commerce, haunted spaces, and modernity. Nearly twenty people offered a presentation. The sixteen scholars who met hailed from China (1), France (2), Germany (2), Italy (1), Japan (4), the USA (1), and the Netherlands (5). The party included young researchers as well as mature and senior scholars. They brought new material bearing on beliefs in spirits and ghosts in societies in Asia in the late twentieth century.
By JAN VAN BREMEN & JOHN KNIGHT
The workshop was opened by the conveners who reviewed the research agenda. Three papers on Japan followed. Jan van Bremen (Leiden University) called attention to new secondary death rites in Japan focused on posthumous life-course rites, taking ghost marriage as an example. Mary Picone (CNRS) discussed the visualization of ghosts. Her starting point was early modern woodblock prints. Then she moved to modern spirit photographs and late-modern spirit videos, each medium a new means to represent the immaterial. John Knight (IIAS) mapped out haunted places in a modern community in rural Japan. The day closed with two presentations on Korea that paired money and ghosts. Based on extensive fieldwork, Antonetta Bruno (Naples University) presented a minute analysis of the monetary transactions taking place between humans and spirits in a shamanistic rite. She made the theoretical point that in Korea no separation exists between a spiritual and a commercial realm in ghostly business, as Marcel Mauss would have it. Boudewijn Walraven (Leiden University) examined concepts of ghosts and ghostliness in Korean culture. He examined popular books written by ritualists at the time of the severe financial and economic crisis that hit the country in the 1990s.Lisette Gebhardt (Munich University) opened the second day with a well-informed analysis of the upsurge of images of Japan as a country abounding with mysterious places in the mid-1980s. She identified the different stakeholders as spiritualists, scholars, and writers. They made discontented ghosts a notable business in the prosperous urban society in the late twentieth century. Takanori Tamura (Religious Information Research Center, Tokyo) presented a paper on the religious aspects of computer-mediated communications and manifestations of spirit and ghost beliefs found on the Internet in Japan. Believers stay in touch with the centres of their cults, take part in rites, visit shrines, and touch holy objects. Elmer Veldkamp (Leiden University) traced the trends and transformations in the memorial services for the release of non-human souls. In the last three decades the souls of animals and pets, including digital pets, and objects like tools, including plastic tools like bank cards, have been the object of ritual treatment. These two papers explored the new social space that is developing in cyberspace. It is noteworthy that this ultimately scientific domain, finds ritualists and their clients among the first users and inhabitants.
Two presentations featured early modern Japanese representations of the supernatural. Willem van Gulik (Leiden University) analysed images of the supernatural in the graphic arts of early-modern Japan. Barre Toelken (Utah State University) and Michiko Iwasaka (Bremen Hochschule) presented ghost pictures from the collection of a Tokyo temple founded in 1883 to pacify the souls of those who died in the mid-nineteenth century political movements that lead to the establishment of Japan as a modern nation-state. These pictures illustrated the various classes and forms of Japanese ghosts and spooks, haunted places, and motives for ghostly behaviour.
Noboru Miyata (Kanagawa University), the Guest of Honour, opened the final day with a paper on the phenomenon of the grotesque in modern Japanese cities, calling it the 'folklore of fear'. He discussed liminal spaces and themes in urban ghost lore rife among the young, especially women. Mass-produced articles like video tapes are believed to carry occult messages. It is difficult to understand modern trends in the culture of the weird without studying urban youth culture, and the atmosphere of unease which followed on the collapse of the soap bubble economy. at the age of 63, this great scholar, anthropologist, folklorist and historian, died prematurely and unexpectedly on 10 February 2000. A multicultural urban society was analysed by Gilbert Hamonic (CNRS) in his study of new haunted places in the modern city-state of Singapore. In Singapore old places are called dirty and haunted in contrast to clean places which are new. Ghosts help to negotiate identities. They are losing their ethnic names and give rise to trans-ethnic ghosts such as 'ugly ghosts', symbols of Singaporean identity. The inclusion of Singapore brought into play the Southeast Asian and Oceanic influences in insular East Asia. Virgil Ho (Hong Kong University) closed the morning with a highly valuable and original presentation of rites at memorial tombs, erected for revolutionary martyrs, heroes, and dignitaries in Canton in the early twentieth century. These practices may be taken as examples of imperfect modernity that allowed the spiritual realm of spirits and ghosts a place in an atheistic state.
Two papers concluded the workshop. Shigekazu Morikuri (Osaka University of Foreign Studies) reviewed Japanese concepts of death as they relate to the other world, abortions, brain death, and the annual festivals for the dead in the context of urbanization, industrialization, consumption, and times of disaster. Jeroen Bokhoven (Osaka University) examined relations between ghosts and memorialism in Japan based on his current fieldwork. His paper focused on the treatment that the recently dead receive from their relatives to prevent them from haunting the living. He argued that there is a strong tendency towards the memorialization of the recently deceased.
All this provided plenty of meat for discussion. The nationalization of ghosts, the links between ghosts and memory, collective representations of ghosts, and the merits of folk and scientific taxonomies featured on the agenda. Common points were found in the vengeful ghosts that appear as models of (East) Asian ghostliness. But comparisons also showed contrasts. In Japan ghostly images are widespread in the popular press, but not so in Korea. The suggestion a conference volume be prepared and published found favour. Finally, the occasion was welcomed as an opportunity to celebrate the end of the three-year term that John Knight spent as a Senior Research Fellow in the International Centes for Asian Studies (1996 to 1999) where he worked closely with the Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies and other institutes in Leiden University. *
Dr Jan van Bremen, Leiden University
E-mail: vanbremen@let.leidenuniv.nl
Dr John Knight, Queen's University of Belfast
E-mail: j.knight@qub.ac.uk