Bodily Cultivation as a Mode of Learning in Diverse Cultures

R ESEARCH A RTICLES
Bodily Cultivation as a Mode of Learning
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 72 3-122009
Introduction:
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
Shuenn-Der Yu
The human body is not to be viewed simply as the passive recipient of cultural imprints, still less as the active source of natural expressions that are clothed in local history and culture, but as the self-developable means for achieving a range of human objects... [Asad 1997, emphasis by the author]
Almost all cultures recognize that placing bodies in certain cultural programs is a way of achieving religious and spiritual goals (xiuxing ), cultivating moral and emotional virtue (xiuyang ), or simply transposing ideas into bodily practices (shijian ). Fasting, meditation, vegetarianism, and qigong come readily to mind when bodily cultivation is discussed. But rather than highlight these obvious examples, which are habitually associated with Eastern cultures, this special issue will examine culturally driven bodily practices, including proper ways to walk, sit, sense, and gesture, which may appear trivial in their repetitions, but are often endowed with rich cultural meanings and considered key in the learning and cultivation of values and virtues. Those practices generally perceived as art forms (e.g., tea ceremonies, bonsai, music performances, calligraphy, sphygmology) at first glance may not seem to have direct ties to the physical body because they stress as a primary goal the cultivation of emotional poise and temperament (yiqing yangxing ). In these cases, bodily cultivation is considered a channel for learning, manifesting, developing, or shaping cultural concepts and ideals. In this issue, the authors define bodily cultivation in a broader sense, so that cultural learning encompasses exercise, nurturance, and physical training as special modes of concept construction.
The authors do not focus on mind-body dualism/interaction, a popular analytical topic for over two decades, or on contrasts between East and West, differences that have probably been over-exaggerated, especially in terms of bodily cultivation. Instead, we direct our attention to how diverse forms of bodily cultivation have been adopted for purposes of internalizing cultural ideas, morality, and knowledge, whether they involve intentional designs or unintentional programs, professional or amateur training, spiritual or secular in orientation, or mundane or hedonistic/ascetic principles. Our goal is to explore how the body plays a part in the processes of cultural learning.
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology

Inspiration from Eastern Traditions

While bodily cultivation can be observed in most cultures, those in Asia provide a broad range of theories deserving special attention. Yuasa (1993:18) believes the most important question in Eastern body-mind theory is, How does the relationship between the mind and the body come to be through cultivation? This question, which stresses what does it come to be instead of what is the relationship between X and Y, emerges from an experiential assumption that mind-body modalities change in step with cultural forms of training or cultivation. Kasylis (1993) further notes that most Asian traditions do not assume a sharp distinction between body and mind. Accordingly, there are no Asian equivalents for the relational theories developed in the West, including parallelism (mental and somatic events accidentally coinciding without causal relation), reductionism (mental events are actually bodily events or vice versa), and interactionism (bodily states both influence and are influenced by mental states, or one state affects the other but not vice versa). Many Asian traditions stress mind-body integration through cultivation rather than searching for constant and unchanging interrelationships. Hence, Asian philosophers view mind-body disconnects as issues of practical dysfunction rather than philosophical import. The key precept in Asian traditions is the need to achieve (rather than discover) unity between mind and body. Bodily cultivation is considered key to this task. Take Confucianism for example. The following statement from the Confucian classic Da-xue (Great Learning) is perhaps the most often quoted comment on xiu shen (literally, cultivation of the body): From the Son of Heaven down to the commoner, all should take self-cultivation as the foundation ( ). Although the literal translation of xiu shen emphasizes the body, classical texts, for example, Lun-yu and Meng-zi , make it clear that aspects of both mind and body must be considered when discussing the term. Thus, xiu shen is
often brought up in discussions of xiu de (cultivating virtue) and vice versa. Kasylis points out that Confucian teachings do not contain specific distinctions between mind and body cultivation; instead, they encourage integration through the training of both (Kasylis 1993). When specific methods are mentioned, the bodily aspect is clearly part of the discussion. For example, despite their divergent views on whether man is born good or bad, Mencius and Xunzi both stress either cultivating qi (yangqi ) or regulating qi (zhihqi ) as the key to obtaining wisdom and virtue. The classics often equate qi with the body (Yang 1993)in other words, both Mencius and Xunzi stress the embodiment of cultural concepts and values and the nurturing of social personhood through bodily cultivation. More tangible examples can be found in Confucian teachings on gestures, physical movements, and the regulation of sensuous perceptions and pleasures. In his instructions of Confucian principles for the very young (yangzheng yiguei ), the Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi made bodily practices a major focus, including ways of walking (e.g., holding back when accompanying elders), sitting (e.g., refraining from occupying too much space), dressing (e.g., tightly fastened hats, clothes, and shoes), and practicing calligraphy (e.g., properly proportioned strokes). Encouraging youth to renounce indulgence in sensuous enjoyment and giving advice on regulating ones senses have been stressed since Confucius and highlighted in various Confucian instructional principles. These rather tedious teachings, called lijiao (teaching of etiquette), were designed to help students internalize Confucian concepts. If we disregard the social and political implications of what Foucault (1979) called body politic and focus only on the aspect of Chinese xiu shen, it is possible to recognize how important a mode of learning bodily cultivation has been the Confucian tradition, not to mention Daoist and Buddhist traditions, which take xiuxing their main focus. Based on this view of cultural learning, ones consciousness (of perceptions) is not learned in a ready-made, packaged fashion through a process often called enculturation by anthropologists, but a quality that emerges and becomes more articulated and extensive through ones experiences and processes of cultivation (Johnson 2000). Body and mind are considered to enrich each other during processes of cultivation. Also, body is not regarded as merely the source of individual sensations and universal desires that may be disruptive of culture; when cultural ideals are incorporated in practices, it becomes key to the internalization or manifestation of those ideals. The authors of the articles herein address two issues. First, Chinese and other Asian (especially Japanese) conceptualizations of bodily cultivation perceive it as central to nurturing morality, cultural values, thought, and aesthetics, rather than epistemology, thus inspiring us to seriously reconsider the past research emphasis on the problem of mind-
Introduction: Bodily Cultivation as a Mode of Learning
body dualism that is in fact derived from a Western problematic. An Asian approach offers the benefit of examining how body and mind augment one another in cultural processes, as opposed to finding static body-mind interrelationships on which to build theory. Second, whether one prefers using the term enculturation, socialization, embodiment, or learning, acquiring culture frequently entails diverse forms of bodily cultivation. The importance of this cultivation underscores Blochs (1985) idea of how culture is not (as some anthropologists have suggested) simply handed down from previous generations. Cultureand other anthropological ideas like collective representation, cognition, and ideologyis neither an unexplained given nor a product of non-individual transformation processes outside of complex learning actions. Instead, the role played by bodily cultivation suggests that cultural learning involves a complex mix of long-term processes that proceed in a piecemeal fashion. Individual cultures have bodily cultivation practices that are viewed as taking a full lifetime to accomplish (or, for Buddhists, several lifetimes). In other words, ones personhood is not endowed by culture, but achieved through cultivation, and the much-stressed and deeply analyzed rite of passage is but a small part of this unending process. Other deliberate programs as well as the mundane, everyday kinds of bodily cultivation that should be taken into account are brought into sharper focus in this special issue.
A Brief Review
Bourdieus conceptualizations of habitus and body hexis (bodily orientation) arguably come closest in Western anthropological terms to the Chinese theories discussed above. He notes how routine, everyday bodily practices allow children to acquire habitus without going through discourse or consciousness but passing from practice to practice. Cultural schemes become embodied through ways of walking, standing, speaking, holding a knife in the right hand, and the like. These robust habits are transformed into permanent dispositions in dialectic relations between body and space, as well as between embodiment and objectification. In Bourdieus (1977) words, habitus is the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world (1977: 89). Bourdieu does recognize a role for the body in the process of inhabiting the structure of the world; he nonetheless considers body hexis as a form of realizing a political mythology and thus predominantly configured by social structures (Hoy 1999). For Bourdieu, bodily practice does not play an active role, but is merely a vehicle for internalizing cultural cosmology.
The authors in this issue argue that bodily practices play a more important role than Bourdieu allowed, not only in learning processes, but also in the construction of cultural ideas. Recent anthropological studies of human senses are providing new insights. Similar to Mausss (1979) argument that the human body is culturally invested, the anthropology of the senses stresses the importance of exploring the cultural dimensions of sensory experiencessometimes referred to as the dynamic constitution of embodied senses. If cultures are recognized as ways of sensing the world, as David Howes (1991) proposes, ethnographers must learn how to use and combine senses in accordance with the preferences of the cultures we study so that we actually make sense of them (1991: 8, emphasis original). Paul Stollers (1984) apprenticeship in hearing is another demonstration of how learning to develop the senses is key to understanding other cultures. His Songhay sorcerer master once told him, You look, but you do not see. You touch, but you do not feel. You listen, but you do not hear... But you must learn how to hear, or you will learn little about our ways (1984: 560). Stoller used his field experience to re-examine the Western epistemology that conceives/perceives the world in terms of space rather than sound. In this issue we will emphasize that for both researchers and the subjects of their research, practicing how to hear and cultivating hearing competence play central roles in learning ways of life. For it is the practiced ear (or eye, or mouth) that remembers and interprets sounds, fills cultural content with embodied experiences, and allows one to understand the cultural meanings of sounds that are heard. Similar studies regarding the cultivation of memory and sensibility in acquiring knowledge are found in the literatures of other disciplines. The professional vision of archeologists (e.g., Goodwin 1994; Grasseni 2007), the tactile diagnostic skill of physicians (e.g., Kuriyama 1999; Rose 1999), and the skilled touch of healers (e.g., OMalley 2004) all stress cultivation of the senses as one portal to knowledge. Along these lines, Mei-ling Chien develops the ethnographers ear. She emphasizes that without the intensive training of ones senses, the ethnographer cannot develop the body techniques and sensibility to acquire understanding and cultural knowledge. In other words, all of the authors in this issue consider the body as playing a central role (as opposed to acting as a simple conduit) in the acquisition and exercise of cultural knowledge. That is, enculturation is achieved in the acquisition of techniques or improvement of competencies derived from the cultural programs of bodily cultivation.


The papers that make up this issue of Taiwan Journal of Anthropology were prepared for the workshop entitled Bodily Cultivation () organized by Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in September 2006. The contributors come from different disciplinesanthropology (Mei-ling Chien, Chi-Fang Chao, and ShuennDer Yu), Chinese literature (Liang Ting) and religious studies (Yi-Jia Tsai), and our papers clearly reflect these individual backgrounds and disciplinary characters. The aim of the workshop was to explore the diverse roles of bodily cultivation in social and cultural processes; the five papers that form this special issue focus on learning and embodying cultural ideas and values. The contributors take on diverse topics, from dances in Okinawa, tea tasting and the tea ceremony in Taiwan, Daoist cultivation ideas and Christian asceticism, to the ethnographers own fieldwork. They elucidate a few key themes: the nature of bodily cultivation as a mode of learning, body technique and learning categories of bodily experience, aims and processes of bodily cultivation, movement and the embodiment of cultural ideas and history, and so on. The first paper, by Chi-Fang Chao, stresses that body movements and the practice of dance are important vehicles of Okinawan, and specifically Taketomian, history and sociality. She demonstrates how dances, folk and classical alike, are learned not only through standard training but more importantly by means of body movements learned from childhood. It is only through this kind of life-long bodily learning that certain forms of habitus are acquired that allow islanders to perform their dances in the proper manner. In the process of learning and performing dances, islanders also establish gender and class body habitus as well as a local identity. The second paper, by Shuenn-Der Yu, analyses the cultivation of body techniques in tea tasting and the aesthetics of performing the tea ceremony in Taiwan. Through his long-term participation in the activities of a Taipei tea club called Julu , Yu is able to document how the expert opens the world of tea tasting to novices and, in turn, how students sensually learn the techniques of tea tasting through repeated practice. He argues that what makes the learning process possible is not only the lectures by which students learn to associate tea production knowledge with experiential categories of tea tasting, but also the development of sensual discrimination via physical techniques by which students learn to identify categories of fragrances, colors and key flavor notes of different kinds of tea. Furthermore, Yu also tries to interpret how the cultural (Taiwanese) concept of elegance becomes embodied in the performance of the tea ceremony through repeated practice. In conclusion, Yu stresses that bodily cultivation is an important
mode of learning, and competence is an issue not to be ignored by anthropologists when discussing cultural learning. Mei-ling Chien takes on the ethnographers own experience in the field as an example of self-cultivation. She points out that her long-term fieldwork, with its repeated exposure to sounds of daily and ritual activities, offered the best arena in which to practice hearing, to cultivate her ethnographers ear. In the case of the late-night knocking on windows in the Miao village where she worked, the ethnographer experienced how such sounds changed from being strange, rude, and meaningless to a natural and meaningful social voice laden with human value. This cultivation process does not stop at the ethnographers learning to hear the content or sonic patterns of the late-night knocks; her hearing experience also links various personal emotions and furthers the transformation of these emotions as related to her identity as a fieldworker. Her paper presents a clear demonstration that going through culture shock in the field is not only a rite of passage but also part of a long-term process of cultivating the researchers senses, emotions, and self-identity, and it examines this process in a way seldom seen in anthropological literature. Ting Liangs paper analyzes the Lao Tzu to present Daoist cultivation theory. He points out that shen embraces both the physiological body as well as the psychological self, thus Daoist xiu shen involved cultivating both body and mind. Ting argues that Daoist xiu shen, as exemplified in the Lao Tzu, is not based in a Confucian moral appeal, nor on the notion of disciplined bodies, but on the very exercise of relaxing the conceptual classification system (also called wuming , namelessness) and dissolving our attachment to bodily desires (also called wuyu , desirelessness). Tings paper clearly demonstrates that Daoist xiu shen aims at the integration of body and mind, and it is through the dialectic relation between the two kinds of effort (wenming and wenyu) that the ideal Daoist state is achieved. Yi-Jia Tsais paper brings together Athanasiuss hagiographical text on the life of Antony and Tao Yuan-mings poem Peach Blossom Spring to create an inter-textual reading of Christian ascetic life. She uses four dialectical threads of disclosedness/ inaccessibility, similarity/difference, unmindfulness/discrimination, and exile/sociality to analyze the Daoist world ideal and Christian ascetic practice and to explore how exemplification of the desert ascetic is accomplished by various techniques. Through a close textual examination of the intertwining religious ideas of renunciation, Christ imitation, redemption, and resurrection as well as religious practices of fasting, solitude, fighting with demons, and performing miracles, Tsai concludes that the body was considered a transformable medium in Athanasiuss practice of religious cultivation. The new humanity was not an abstract religious ideal; it needed the body to be accomplished.
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Tsais paper contrasts in an interesting way with Tings. While Daoist cultivation theory, exemplified in the Lao Tzu, emphasizes relaxation of conceptual structures as key to reaching the state of desirelessness, Athanasius chooses to face the desire directly by way of ascetic practices.

Acknowledgements
Contributors to this special issue would like to express our gratitude to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and Academia Sinica for research funding and to the Institute of Ethnology for supporting our 2006 workshop.
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Reference
Asad, Talal 1997 Remarks on the Anthropology of the Body. In Religion and the Body. Sarah Coakley, ed. Pp. 42-52. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, Maurice 1985 From Cognition to Ideology. In Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches. Richard Fardon, ed. Pp. 21-48. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel 1979 Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Vintage. Goodwin, Charles 1994 Professional Vision. American Anthropologists 96(3): 606-633. Grasseni, Cristina,ed. 2007 Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. New York: Berghahn Books. Howes, David, ed. 1991 The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hoy, David C. 1999 Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. Gail Weiss, and Honi F Haber, eds. Pp. 3-12. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Don Hanlon 2000 Body Practices and Consciousness: A Neglected Link. Anthropology of Consciousness 11(3-4): 40-53. Kasylis, Thomas P. 1993 Inrdocution. In Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice. Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Pp. xi-xxii. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kuriyama, Shigehisa 1999 The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Mauss, Marcel 1979[1935] The Notion of Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology: Essays. Marcel Mauss, ed., Ben Brewster, trans. London ; Boston : Routledge and Kegan Paul. OMalley, John 2004 Body as Teacher: The Roles of Clinical Model and Morphology in Skill Acquisition. In Healing by Hand: Manuel Medicine and Bonesetting in Global Perspective.
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Kathryn S. Oths, and Servando Z. Hinojosa, eds. Pp. 131-156. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press. Rose, Mike 1999 Our Hands Will Know: The Development of Tactile Diagnostic SkillTeaching, Learning, and Situated Cognition in a Physical Therapy Program. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31(2): 133-160. Stoller, Paul 1984 Sound in Songhay Cultural Experience. American Ethnologist 11(3): 559-570. Yang, Rurbin 1993 Daolun [introduction]. In Zhungguo gudai sixiangzhung de qilun ji shentiguan [theories of qi and concept of body in Chinese ancient thoughts]. Yang, Rurbin , ed. Pp. 3-62. Taipei: Chuliu Publisher . Yuasa, Yasuo 1993 The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy. Shigenori Nagatomo and Monte S. Hull, trans. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

The Transformation and Progression of Cultural Beings through Dancing
Dynamic Embodiment:
Graduate Institute of Dance Theory, Taipei National University of the Arts
Chi-Fang Chao
This paper reflects on the notion of embodiment by emphasizing its socially bound nature, exemplified in the ethnographic study of dancing among people living on Taketomi Island in southern Okinawa. Following Farnell and Varelas notion of dynamic embodiment (2008), which conceives the moving body as a cultural way of being human, and Japanese philosophical notions such as field of relation, I analyze the process of embodiment in dancing within Taketomi communities, which leads the islanders through different categories of cultural beings, from uchina (the Okinawans), odoriko (the dancers), to yaninchu (the family). Through my consideration of this dynamic embodiment, I suggest how the significant transformative process of being Taketomian can be realized through bodily practice such as dancing among both native islanders and newcomers, as well as the nature of self-socio existence in a unique cultural world. Keywords: dynamic embodiment the body, dance, Taketomi Island, minitsukeru ,
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their critical and professional opinions.
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Ever since the notion of embodiment was posed and its paradigmatic value noted by Csordas (1990), scholars have explored various transformations centered on human beings bodily experiences and their cultural implications (e.g., Davis 1997). The popularity of the embodiment concept also brings in a new question: Is embodiment homogenous? Does the complexity of sociality also make its mark on how people are embodied? How might it do so? More specifically, are we talking about the same thing if the experiences are those of a ritual healer and a disco dancer? This paper reflects on these questions by considering embodiments socially bound nature.

Anthropological Studies of Dance and the Body

Even as a highly identifiable institution (Spencer 1985) in both ethnographic and visual senses, dance has nevertheless been relatively invisible in anthropological research, perhaps due to its conceptual and methodological impediments (Gell 1985; Hanna 1979). In addition to reflecting the humanist traditions of early anthropology (Boas 1972[1944]; Evans-Pritchard 1928; Radcliffe-Brown 1964[1922]; Turnbull 1962), research on dance partakes in collisions in the social sciences between mind and body (Farnell 2000), between experiencing the other and self (Polhemus 1975),1 between popular discourses and academic issues (Hastrup and Hervik 1994; Turner 1996), and between ethnographic fact and representation.2 A central locus of these collisions has been studies of the body. Among the earliest reflections on anthropologys lack of interest in the body is Polhemus (1975) comment that anthropologists discovered the body among others. This observation on conceptual ethnocentrism was later echoed by sociologist Turner, who claimed that the rise of study of the body responded to the speedy materialization of and consumption in Western societies. His statement declares study of the body to be a socio-historic subject (Turner 1996). In her introductory article in Embodied Practices:
I am clearly aware of the inherited nature of the production of anthropological knowledge (Fabian 1983). Most prominent scholars writing on dance from an anthropological approach have had their own experiences of dance, including Keailinohomoku, Kaeppler, Hanna, Williams, Farnell, Gore, and myself, while pursuing ethnographic investigation in the worlds of others. Some key reflections about representation come from visual anthropology. The use of visual media as a way of recording, interpreting, and presenting the ethnographic data has relocated dance to cultural contexts that emphasize its highly visual aspects. Discussion of relevant issues can be found in Hughes-Freeland (1991, 1992, 1999).
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Feminist Perspectives on the Body, Davis (1997) notes the sociological argument that the vast interest in the body inside and outside academia reflects changes of late modernity. The body craze not only corresponds to current socio-cultural conditions, but also to broad theoretical developments inspired by feminism since the 1980s. From her primarily feminist perspective, Davis acknowledges Foucaults groundbreaking contribution to understanding the body as object of processes of discipline and normalization, as well as a metaphor for critical discussions which link power to knowledge, sexuality, and subjectivity (Foucault 1978, 1979, 1980, 1988, cited in Davis 1997: 3). Postmodern critics further assert universal grand narratives concerning the body and debate its position as a reference point in a world of flux and the epitome of that same flux... [and] the site par excellence for exploring the construction of different subjectivities or the myriad workings of disciplinary power (Frank 1990, quoted in Davis 1997: 4). According to the postmodern view:
The enormous diversity in the appearance and comportment of the body in different cultures is also used by social scientists as an argument for social constructionism. Cultural variation in embodiment and bodily practices show just how untenable the notion of a natural body is, making the body an ideal starting point for a critique of universality, objectivity of absolutism. [Davis 1997: 4]
Dynamic Embodiment: The Transformation and Progression of Cultural Beings through Dancing
For social scientists, the sheer diversity of the body among different cultures warrants attention, but for anthropologists it is rooted in the epistemology of the discipline itself (Douglas 1966, 1973). Anthropologists often reflect on how meanings and practices surrounding the body differ from culture to culture. In his inspiring thesis written from a comparative perspective, Mauss (1973) did not pursue the issue of body technique from a symbolic-structural standpoint-the influential paradigm at that time on both sides of the North Atlantic. He observed and highlighted the dynamic disposition habitus, and, instead of treating the body as structurally mediated the way Douglas did, gave the body a certain social agency. His concept of habitus refers to a set of dispositions and generative schemas that incline people to act in certain ways (Farnell 2000: 399). Adopting Mauss idea, Bourdieu (1977) described habitus as:
...a principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cognitive and evaluating structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world:
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this principle is nothing other than the socially informed body, with...all its senses.3 [Bourdieu 1977: 124, italics original]

According to Bourdieu, the socially informed body (with its capacity for a generic habitus schema) also carries tacit but practical knowledge.4 Knowledge comes from understanding. In addition to anthropological and sociological enquiries, linguists who used to explore language as a representation of mind also turned to the body for human understanding. Johnsons (1987) theory of embodied meaning delves deeper into the semantics of understanding:
Imagination is central to human meaning and rationality for the simple reason that what we can experience and cognize as meaningful, and how we can reason about it, both depend upon structures of imagination that make our experience what it is. On this view, meaning is not situated solely in propositions; instead it permeates our embodied, spatial, temporal, culturally formed, and value-laden understanding. [Johnson 1987: 172]
Johnson argue for the embodied root of human rationality, while, from a phenomenological point of view, Merleau-Ponty delineates the process of knowledge achieving by linking the self (the knowing subject) to the world, which is mediated through the bodys motion:
The bodys motion can play a part in the perception of the world only if it is itself intentionality, a manner of relating itself to the distinct object of knowledge. The world around us must be, not a system of objects we synthesize, but a totality of things, open to us, towards which we project ourselves. [Merleau-Ponty 1999[1962]: 387]
These senses include the bodys tastes and distastes, its compulsions and repulsions...in a word, all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses-which never escape the structuring action of social determinism-but also the sense of the balance and the sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense of propriety, the sense of humor and the sense of absurdity, moral sense and the sense of practicality, and so on (Bourdieu 1977: 124). It is noteworthy that Bourdieus notion of habitus has been criticized as lack of agentive power by replacing rules with dispositions (Farnell 2000: 403).
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It is interesting to note how the social and humanistic sciences, or different knowledge systems, have been gradually embodied in the twentieth century. Unavoidably, the study of dance has benefited from the interdisciplinary interest in and the fruitful debate about the body, since it is in dance that humans are most creative with their bodies, declaring tacit knowledge and enacting imagination that is embodied and culturally formed. To explore the body in dance, of course, requires special attention to the moving body.
From the Body to the Moving Body

While study of the body has inspired interdisciplinary interest, the literature review above shows that in most cases the body is analyzed as an intact entity, not a moving agent. Explorations of the body that moves, inspired by the phenomenologist MerleauPonty, constitute a key philosophical lever against the Cartesian dualism that splits body from mind.
Our body, to the extend that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only geometric synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world. [MerleauPonty 1999[1962]: 388]
Merleau-Pontys body that moves and constitutes the cultural world has been influential among scholars (Csordas 1990; Farnell and Varela 2008) and has resulted in an internal objection to Cartesian philosophy, a revolution (Farnell and Varela 2008). Farnell and Varela have reviewed anthropological and sociological explorations of the body and coined the term first somatic revolution, which challenges disembodied theories of human actions-framed as practices, discourse, and embodiment. For them, scholars such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Jackson (1983), and Csordas (1990), who recognize the bias sustained by Cartesian dualism, nonetheless themselves retain a residual positivism and mentalism (Farnell 1996: 312). In Lakoff and Johnsons argument, this occurs by their importing an image schema to the body, and in the Jackson-Csordas paradigm by distinguishing embodiment as a somatic, and therefore alternative, approach to the semiotic (Farnell 1996; Farnell and Varela 2008). Both approaches emphasize talk of the experienced body from a subjectivist lived standpoint (2008: 218), in which the mover as agent is still unacknowledged.
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Following views from the new Realism and Semasiology, Farnell and Varela propose a dynamically embodied social theory, which they term the second somatic revolution.
Neither minds nor bodies intend, only people do, because as embodied persons they are causally empowered to engage in social and reflexive commentary with the primary resources of vocal and kinetic systems of semiosis provided by their cultural ways of being human. [Farnell and Varela 2008: 221, italics original]

Farnell and Varela support Merleau-Pontys proposal that consciousness is in the first place not a matter of I think, but I can. They accordingly claim that a theory of dynamic embodiment is a theory of moving being, which emphasizes:
...the embodiment of the doing and not simply the feeling of that embodied doing. The upshot of this special theoretical focus is the understanding that human physical being is moving being. It is in this precise sense that it can be said that paradigm of dynamic embodiment stands today as one way to realize the full significance of Merleau-Pontys philosophy of embodied consciousness. [Farnell and Varela 2008: 221, italics original]
To relocate the agency in the person, especially the person who moves constantly, Farnell and Varela conjoin the often-separated explanations-the somatic paradigm and the semiotic one-of human action:
The embodiment of agentive persons enables them to use their physical beings (or to use themselves)-via the acquisition of techniques, skills, and rules-to move meaningfully throughout the worlds of nature and culture. [Farnell and Varela 2008: 220]
Bodies that Move as Dancers: Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Besides Farnell and Varelas call for reflection on the Western philosophical tradition that will shift the perspective of analysis on the body, another track of inquiry highlights the benefits of an anthropological approach, that is, to explore the concept and practice of the moving body cross-culturally. In this section, I discuss the ethnographic
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analyses of dance in Java and Japan respectively, for their alternative cultural schemes that both sustain performance and differ from Western Cartesian ideology. As Hughes-Freeland has shown in her study of Javanese court dance, issues such as rationality and morality can be tackled by means of a moving together of reason, emotion and body (Parkin 1985: 142, quoted in Hughes-Freeland 1997: 55). She examines the Javanese court dance and argues that:
...performed movement is a form of self-control which constitutes a sociologically particular Javanese version of the way of knowing oneself and others; in other worlds, it refers to a sense of consciousness formulated as an aesthetic morality. [Hughes-Freeland 1997: 59, author emphasis]
Hughes-Freeland shows that the study of techniques of the body generates discourse and argument which provide important cultural reserves of understanding and orientation for philosophical abstractions... (1997: 56). In the case of Javanese court dance, it mainly lies in the paired concepts of lair-batin. Examining their etymology,5 she argues that:
Everything has a mutual, relational aspect, expressed metaphorically as a brick in its casting mould. This Javanese two-in-one category transcends Western categories of ideal and real, and confounds simple dichotomies such as mind-body, with considerable implications for Javanese explanation of performance. [ HughesFreeland 1997: 57]
Furthermore, not only does the lair-batin category transcend the body-mind dichotomy, the Javanese concepts of self (aku) and body also embrace the personal and socio-centric self which cannot be separated. Where lair-batin is incommensurate with a mind-body dichotomy, aku is incommensurable with a self-society-other distinction. These indigenous terms and conceptions show that categories for understanding human experiences favour complexity and boundary breaking, and suggest that a Javanese field of consciousness is not commensurate with, say, the English one in an individual mode. In sum, Javanese semantics of the body do not allow a separation of self from embodied self. In
Hughes-Freeland (1997) explains that, in Javanese, lair means birth, by extension the physical body and the exoteric conditions arising from ones birth, and concerns rules imposed by others, such as status, physical desires and so forth. On the other hand, batin is the esoteric, questing, transformative and creative inner-self, and usually refers to self-discovery. Both are equally real in terms of human experience (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 57).
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both language and performance, the Javanese recognize the self as a heterogeneous field of forces and potentials ... and not as an individual entity... (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 56). Exploring the practical dimensions of dancing, Hughes-Freeland identifies how the lair-batin concept is conjoined with the term rasa, which is at the peak of hierarchical cognitive vocabulary that constitutes the self. A Sanskrit term, rasa invokes sense making; it makes the natural world cultural by informing social practice pervasively.
It is the self-body-experience coordinates of consciousness which goes beyond field of art but bring perception, cognition and behavior in performance. [HughesFreeland 1997: 58] As an education of rasa, dance movements become mechanically right only after

a dancers rasa is right, when the process is one of control and engagement of the lair-batin. [Hughes-Freeland 1997: 60]
Hughes-Freeland shows how the exploration of dancing opens up questions leading to the corporeal cultural philosophy of a people, that is, the embodied knowledge of self and existence. Examining the embodying process of dancers, how their bodily practices are transformed into dance, contributes to the methodological as well as philosophical consideration (Kaeppler 1972, 1985) of anthropological concerns with cultural ways of being human. These are not only directed toward the concept of self, but also toward ideas of the world, as explicated in Valentines study of Japanese dance:
Japanese concern with the fleeting moment is often concern about, and regret for, the passing show. Its fleeting aspect is regarded not only as especially worthy of attention and as contributing to its beauty, but also as a cause for sorrow. The acknowledgement of transience in Japanese poetry, for example, is often accompanied by a sense of melancholy concerning the passing of seasons and brevity of human and other life. Furthermore, the recognition of transience should not be taken to imply the lack of desire for performance: one may at the same time appreciate transient phenomena and yet wish to make them, or ones experience of them, last as long as possible. In the case of Japanese dance, the fleeting moment may be extended to savour it at length. A brief episode may be dwelt upon in the flow of slowly developing movements, or the moment may even be frozen, as seen most obviously in the mie and less dramatically in the poses struck where pauses intersperse Japanese forms, both classical and non-classical. [Valentine 1998: 266267, italics original]
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The pause-the mie in Kabuki-has become a highly refined skill that prevails among the performance of Japanese dancers. It is also a dynamic embodiment of a spatiality and temporality unique to Japanese culture. To pause does not mean to stay in place but to make a space for time. The flow of dancing can therefore be viewed as combining metaphorical concepts of space and time in a way that the viewers experience of moment-tomoment existence is modified by manipulation of the performers presence against the normal scale of space and time in order to meet cultural-in this case, Japanese-preferences. Japanese dancers do not separate the somatic from the semantic, and this notion is rooted in their philosophy of the body.
Japanese Notions of the Body and the Field of Relation

In the following section I will focus on the Japanese concept of body-mind and its relationship to selfness, and how it is refined in the practice of art. This discussion will concentrate on Yuasa Yasuos argument, which is based on a Japanese philosophy rooted in Buddhist beliefs, and Watsuji Tetsurs concept of ningen (human beings).6 Yuasa Yasuo observes that a major tenet in the Japanese theory of the body is shinshin-ichi-nyo (mind and body as one). This expression first appears in the writings of the Zen priest sai (or Ysai , 11411215) in the Japanese Middle Ages. At that time it indicated both internal meditation and external action moving towards the ideal condition of body-mind. The concept of shin-shin-ichi-nyo has been used in bodily practices as diverse as Judo and Noh. Yuasa further links the essence of meditation and practice by saying that in Ty (the Eastern World) bodily training without the training of character is considered evil. Therefore, in the past martial arts were a moving form of meditation. Meditation has the same aim of training of mind (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 19). In comparing Japanese theory and contemporary Western thought such as Merleau-Pontys notions about the body, Yuasa notes essential differences:
In this paper, I modified the Hepburn system to transcribe the Japanese or Okinawan vocabularies into Roman alphabets by using - (the macron) over long vowels to clarify pronunciation, except for widely used English terms such as Tokyo and Noh. To reflect the situation in Japan and Okinawa, I also attach Chinese characters since they are still largely used for literacy.
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The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty explains that body has a double character, being both the subject and the object. It can be said that this releases the tension between

body and mind and makes them unite. The unity of body-mind is not, however, seen in the Eastern tradition. Furthermore, it is the inseparability of body and mind ... that should be argued...The answer to questions such as what is called body, [as well as] what the mind-body relationship is, concerns the character of ningen (human beings). [Yuasa 2007[1990]: 20] 7
The term ningen has been explored by the philosopher Watsuji Tetsur (, 18891960) as a specific approach to the world of human beings. Alienated from Heideggers emphasis on the temporality of individual and collective existence, Watsuji focused on the spatial dimension of the existence of human beings. Ningen, originally from Buddhism, referred to the world of human beings. To understand this world, Watsuji focused on the dimensions of aidagara (relation). The root of Aidagara, aida , denotes the existence of physical space. In Watsujis argument, the field of aidagara means the field of life in which various meanings of the living world interrelate. What is called relation is, according to Watsuji, the broadening of subjective space (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 30~31). The existence-in-relation hence implies existence in life-space. As human beings, we cannot exist in space without our bodies. The embodied I occupies the space of here and now and exists (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 33). The temporal and spatial occupation of here-now as existence has become a major theme in Japanese aesthetic thought and is expressed in performing arts as shown above by Valentine. Not only the presentation of art, but also Japanese theories of performance are alienated from Western techniques of the body. Yuasa further identifies and promotes the major premise of Japanese epistemology: that real philosophical knowledge cannot merely rely on theoretic thought. Through taidoku (to master through the body) or tainin (to realize through the body) a person is able to know. The process of shiugy (practice) pursues the drive of the complete mind-body to reach for real knowledge (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 21). Originally from a philosophy established by the famous Buddhist priest Kkai (774~835), shiugy means reversing the way of understanding the world that is rooted in our daily experience. It aims at cultivating the understanding we gain from the position of the self s being-in-the-world. (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 204). Shiugy means to modify the mind according to the form (katachi) of the body. The consciousness yields to the body.
In this section, quotations from Yuasa (2007[1990]) are my translations from the Japanese.
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This idea of practice has reached beyond religious thought to influence the theory of art in Japan. Taking the aforementioned shin-shin-ichi-nyo as the example, its practice implies achieving the uplifting condition where, for a skillful dancer, there is not even the slightest disconnect between his mind and bodily movement on stage (Yuasa 2007[1990]: 26). In this way, the practitioners realize the inseparability of body-mind in the process of training, which enables them to experience the loss of the bodys weight as an object contradictory to the movement of the mind (Yuasa 2007[1990]).8 As a whole, both the Javanese and Japanese theories of embodiment and performance have provided us with fruitful insights regarding the social theory of body, that is, the body as existence in the field of relation. The above literature on cross-cultural explorations of the body, however, also poses a noteworthy point in terms of epistemology. Both the Javanese and Japanese examples point to elite theories, whether in the Jogyakarta court or from Japanese Buddhism. How have such elite contemplations been realized in diverse groups of people or different social institutions in different cultural worlds? As Polhemus defines it, dance is the stylized, highly redundant schema of a peoples overall physical culture, which is in itself the embodiment of that particular peoples unique way of life-their culture in the broadest sense of the term. Dance is the metaphysics of culture...a liqueur, which is distilled of the stuff of culture (Polhemus 1993: 8-9). I shall now turn to how dance on Taketomi Island in southern Okinawa constitutes a dynamic embodiment that leads people to transformation across the cultural categories established by social boundaries.
Viewing the Okinawan Society and Culture through Dancing

What is the field of relation among Taketomian people? We can most meaningfully break this down using local terms that refer to various groupings and levels of collectivity: uchina (the Okinawans), odoriko (a Japanese term literally meaning dance kids), and yaninchu (members of the same family). In Okinawa, dancer is neither an occupational nor an achievement-linked designation. Although there are professional
The Taiwanese Ya-Yueh (the Ya Music) exponent Chen Yu-Hsui has described a similar personal experience of dancing the Korean court dance, in which there was a short moment that her body seemed disappeared. While she sensed that, her body moved automatically as if she did not have to memorize the dance. Later when she told a senior Korean court dancer of this special experience, she found out that the latter had shared similar experience. (Chen 1994: 6)
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dance masters called shish , the term odoriko refers to a social and temporal status of social actors (now mostly females) who qualify by virtue of a unique system of recognition and evaluation. The social process by which a general uchina becomes an odoriko involves more than professional instructors and has broader implications. This process in fact reflects religious, economic, and political dimensions that underline core Okinawan cultural values. The transformation of the dancing body along the identities of uchina, odoriko, and yaninchu sheds light on how cultural knowledge and practices are polished, and sociality enacted. Among these three terms, uchina and yaninchu are Okinawan vernaculars, while odoriko is a Japanese term. The mixed use of both indigenous and Japanese terms in this paper points to the complicated status of Okinawa due to its political history. A prefecture of Japan today, Okinawa, a series of islands between Japan, China, and Taiwan, enjoyed a long period of autonomy before 1879. By the end of the fourteenth century the unified Kingdom of Chzan (which later changed its name to the Ryky Kingdom) had been established on the main island of Okinawa and would dominate the whole area by the late fifteenth century. In due course, the Sh Dynasty arose and achieved great prosperity due to its pivotal location and possession of an excellent international harbor that transshipped goods among China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Its location, however, had also doomed it to struggles with the neighboring superpowers, China and Japan, from whom the kingdom absorbed broad and long-term cultural stimuli.9 The main castle of Shuri, a World Heritage site since 2000, is located in Naha, the capital city, and symbolizes these influences perfectly (Chao 2001; Kerr 1958). The kingdoms tribute to China
From China, the Okinawan people adopted Chinese characters, the bureaucratic system, the lunar calendar and zodiac, and many animistic customs specifically in southern China with which Okinawan people built close relations through study and mutual migration. On the other hand, Okinawa and Japan share intimacy in their languages, which are believed to come from the same origin, although one Germany linguist has described to me that their difference is as large than that between German and English. In addition, Japanese influence can be seen in the styles of buildings and other crafts. Buddhism was also imported to Okinawa by way of Japanese monks.
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officially ended in 1879 when the modernized Meiji government formally annexed Okinawa and made it part of Japan.10 One critical social and political issue that confronts the peoples life in contemporary Okinawa is self-identity, which links all sorts of discourses, practices, and struggles, ranging from language and cultural preservation, recognition of artistic styles, interpretations of history, and even the US air base controversy. As a culturally unique but politically subordinate population, Okinawans have striven to negotiate the complicated flow of powers. Their categories of collectivity and self-identity are manifested even in the most creative aspects of cultural live, such as singing and dancing. They contribute significantly to contemporary ethnographies of Okinawa, which are produced multivocally and thus unavoidably contested. Most Okinawans nowadays use standard Japanese in their daily communication. In the realm of traditional performing arts, such as songs and dramas, their own local vernacular prevails. The co-existence of both languages is not mere syncretism. It shapes deeply interwoven and sometime mutually contested narratives, or the battlefield of memory (Nelson 2008). It would be nave to underestimate the Japanese influence in Okinawa and the complexity caused by it. It is, however, also overly simplifying to hypothesize that Japanese nationalism has changed Okinawan culture in any consistent way. As scholars have noted, songs and dances are still thought of as most representative of Okinawan culture (Sakihara 1987). By focusing on dance I hope to reveal the Okinawan struggle for identity in a way different from, say, a study of language and history, and in addition to convey a sense of dynamism to the notion, discourse and practices of the body and self. To reflect the colonized reality on Okinawa and facilitate my argument, I will use the Japanese notions such as minitsukeru (to attach to the body), a term used to evaluate a dancers progress and embodying techniques, to examine how the process of embodying transforms the performed self through culturally patterned bodily practices. Minitsukeru can also be defined as making a dance ones own, an explanation of it provided by one of my informants in Taketomi. Among the main issues addressed below are how Okinawans strive to make a dance their own and what aesthetic and social ef-
10 Annexed is the term used by the US historian Kerr (1958). The Japanese give a different account of this historical process. It has been called Ryky shobun (the disposition of Ryky) which was an elaborately planned three-stage maneuver, carried out between 1872 and 1879, that transformed the kingdom into a Japanese prefecture. Accordingly, when the US governments control of Okinawa, which was started after the Second World War, ended and Japans governance resumed in 1972, this transfer was called returning () in Japan.
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fects can be achieved through the dance process. Dancers (odoriko) are conceptualized here as a category of social agent. I will also focus on the social recognition of dancers and the transformative process of self-identification most dancers go through in contemporary society. These observations are based in my fieldwork trips to Taketomi Island between June 1993 and October 2009.11 Taketomi is a small island at the base of the coral reef that spreads under some of the southern Ryky Islands. The Ryky Islands, located between Japan, China, and Taiwan, are four groups of islands, from north to south: Amami , Okinawa , Miyako , and Yaeyama . The Amami Islands are administered by Japans Kagoshima and Okinawa prefectures. The geographical location of Okinawa and its extremely limited fertile land has historically contributed to its political subordination; the historical course of its contacts made Okinawa the recipient of multiple cultural influences (Hokama 1986: 8). Until it absorbed those cultural influences from its controllers, China and Japan, the core component of Okinawan society was a belief in utaki or on, the sacred grove. Belief in utaki/on combines animism and the belief in sacred places. In Okinawa, religious belief was closely related with the notion of female superiority and institutionalized in priestess offices that were structurally parallel to those held by male chiefs for the centuries prior to the united Ryky Kingdom. The sacred grove structure was legitimized in an origin myth in which two sibling gods, Shinerikyo and Amamikyo, were sent from heaven and gave birth to three children: a son who became the first king, a daughter who became the first priestess, and a younger son who became the commoner. The name Amamikyo has been traced to both the northern island group of Amami and an ancient class of Kysh fishermen called amabe (Hokama 1986). According to the anthology of songs known as Omorosshi (weed paper of thoughts), priestesses were the first to dance in front of shrines to communicate with the spirits. This practice of dancing with spirits later became institutionalized in the kings palace, where males took over the duty of singing and dancing for the gods. Okinawan royal artists such as Tamagusuku Chkun created a genre of classical dance in the eighteenth century. Those performed to entertain Chinese ambassadors were categorized as ukwanshin udui. (dances of ships that carry honorable officials). During this period, sacred and secular dances and their dancers were distinguished, with
11 In addition to a whole-year-round fieldwork from 1998 to 1999 that accomplished my doctoral research, I have been visiting the Island during various ritualistic occasions in the past 15 years, which accumulated approximately to hundreds of days altogether.
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performances of each the exclusive domain of males according to social divisions within the aristocratic system. The male monopoly of classical dance as a part of elite culture lasted until 1879, when the Japanese annexed the kingdom and the aristocracy was eliminated. From that point forward, trained performers were forced to teach and perform publicly in order to earn a living. Soon dance performances were being presented in commercial theatres, and folk elements such as faster music and popular themes were added. Those who survived the transition recalled the strict training aristocratic artists had received. With the gradual popularization of bushi uta (versed songs accompanied by the three-string lute) and dance performances came increased female participation. A dance instructor from Taketomi Island once explained that females at first were not allowed to dance publicly, although some continued to study and dance in secret. According to Kamei (1988), females often danced to entertain officers from the Ryky Kingdom who were assigned to the local administrative offices. Many of these performers became mistresses of the officers, but with few exceptions, they did not accompany those men at the end of their posting. For this reason, many local dances still portray scenes of separation between an aristocratic male and a local female. Females were able to openly learn and perform the dances after World War II, and today become the large majority of both professional and amateur dancers. Since dancing is now considered a significant element of social gatherings such as birthday and wedding celebrations, some dancers are able to devote themselves to dance full-time, a change that has sharply altered social networking and mobility for women in contemporary Okinawa.12
Taketomian Dancers: Contested and Negotiated Identities

The Okinawan dance as a cultural system embraces different genres including the ritualistic, the classical (), the folk () and modern creative dances ().13 In addition to holding meaning in terms of style, these categories also reflect the social composition of hierarchies among different groups of social actors. For instance, the
12 One occasion from which dance is excluded is the mourning period. 13 This classification system has been provided by Yano (1988). I shall argue, however, that it is largely an artificial system for a specific purpose rather than an indigenous categorization, and hence these categories cannot be seen as mutually exclusive. In Taketomi even dances in the biggest annual ritual are mixtures and juxtapositions of different genres.
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inhabitants of Taketomi, a tiny coral island with few natural resources, have maintained a strong tradition of dances brought by various Okinawan immigrants and exiled elites prior to the Japanese annexation. Therefore, dance practices in Taketomi are uniquely embedded in Ryky history.14 Although island culture includes certain southern elements (e.g., the customs of tattooing and eating betel nut), Taketomian oral tradition suggests a clear northern connection. According to one legend, a Taketomi clan is described as being descended from a Japanese soldier from the Hei family () who escaped to Okinawa after losing a battle in the late twelfth century.15 However, the generally accepted story among Taketomi islanders is that six chiefs migrated from Okinawa and Amami to their current home approximately six hundred years ago, bringing with them all of their clansmen and ancestral spirits.16 The name Taketomi comes from the name of one of the chiefs, Takanedono. The chiefs, who are said to have imported important agricultural and iron casting skills, are still worshipped by their descendants and can be viewed as the cultural importers who made the island Okinawan. Parallel with the male chiefdom is the office of female priestess. Until very recently, all tsukasa (priestesses) were chosen from these six mutuya (houses of origin). The relationship between the six legendary chiefs and the six on (utaki is called on in Taketomi) they built was identified following the archaeological excavation of abandoned village sites. It is now believed that the six earliest immigrant groups were in a state of constant rivalry due to the scarcity of water, land, and other resources. The exhaustion of the wells is thought to be the primary reason for which villages were abandoned over the past six centuries. The clans eventually merged into two large groups, Hazama (in the northern part of the island) and Naji (in the southern part). Approximately thirty years ago, the Hazama village had grown so large it further divided into two partsAinota and Innota. Todays Taketomian public affairs are mostly decided by the residents of the three villages, who elect a leader called kominkanch (chief of the kominkan [citizen center]) once every two years. Since the leader comes from one of the three villages, the other two elect their own representatives (shji). These three main and a number of sub-chiefs are charged with handling all public affairs.
14 Archaeological evidence shows that Miyako and Yaeyama, together called Sakishima, the forward islands, present different cultural aspects from those of northern Okinawa, and this supports the idea of influences from southern China. 15 Similar legends about the left heir of Hei family and his fleeing to the southern islands can be heard on other islands of Okinawa. 16 These oral traditions include the prayers of the priestesses, which are in the archaic form of dialect.
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Taketomians still divide themselves into six groups of clan children called ujiko, with clan assignment decisions made immediately after a persons birth. The principle by which individuals are delegated to clans is straightforward, but there are deviations under certain circumstances. Most children automatically become part of the ujiko of their parents on. If the parents belong to different on, sons attend the fathers on and daughters the mothers. On occasion all children inherit their fathers place with one exception, the oldest daughter. Rules can also be bent for reasons such as sickness or natural disasters (Yamashita 1992). Muyama represent religious sub-groups among villages and families, and below muyama there are the categories of on of individuals. Year of birth determines the on one serves, based on the Chinese zodiac system of twelve animals and their celestial directions.17 Some on are served based on specific events in the past, such as a member of one family having saved the life of a member of another family. Every Taketomian has to worship in at least six on: two personal on according to year of birth, one or more family on, one clan on (muyama), and one related to some special personal attributefor example, occupation. It is not unusual for a Taketomian to have seven or more on. The on system and associated ritual practices are major features of Okinawan religion (Lebra 1966). Every kami (on god) has a specific function, such as protecting travelers, ensuring good crops, protecting fishermen, watching over fire, exorcizing illness, bringing prosperity, granting wisdom, and so on. Even the six major ancestral spirits (muyama) are bestowed with specific functions. This system constitutes a universe in which Taketomians stand at the center. One of the dance masters in Taketomi described the relation between the on kami and ningen in the Taketomian context:
Those Taketomians who migrated to Tokyo became Tokyoians and are not like Taketomians anymore. Here, you have the on surrounding you, and the gods protect you. If you live here, you are surrounded by the on and the gods. Then you become a Taketomian.18
In addition to the traditional socio-religious system, multi-layered social organizations penetrate all aspects of Taketomian social life beyond the family: kominkan manage island-wide affairs; shraku are oriented toward tribal affairs; and on/ujiko cut across tribal boundaries to organize clans along genealogical lines. There are dance repertoires that
17 See Ouwenhand for a clear explanation of this zodiac system of directions (1985: 8-9). 18 Quoted from Interview transcription.
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correspond with each of these shraku. Taketomians are allowed to dance together at all-island celebrations such as a school anniversary, but they never exchange repertoires performed for traditional rituals. Being a Taketomian dancer means being categorized according to subgroupsprimarily tribessince for all practical purposes, the community is sustained by cooperation (utsugumi) among the three tribes. Taketomis largest annual ritual, tanadui , provides the best opportunity for examining dancer categorization. Tanadui (to get the seed) is a nine-day ritual complex held on auspicious days in the ninth or tenth lunar month. It is rooted in the centrality of harvest for the continuity of a patriarchal and hierarchical society. Although a ritual of the same name can be found throughout Okinawa, in Taketomi it is more clearly embedded in local history and the micro-politics of the villages and families. The most remarkable event is the two days of performance that feature nearly seventy drama and dance programs. Every year the priestesses and village heads gather to confirm the precise dates for tanadui events. Since the island no longer relies on agriculture for subsistence, religious and political leaders choose the dates based on other practical reasons and the Chinese zodiac sixty-day cycle the islanders follow. Two dates met all the requirements in 1998, one in October and one in December; the earlier date was chosen because of warmer weather and the fact that performances would fall on a weekend. In 2000 the ritual was held in November because of concerns about hot weather on the other dates (in September) and proximity to other events such as kitsugansai (the ritual of tying wishes to the deities). Performers are decided upon and dance rehearsals begin one month before the ritual. The program, which is also divided among the three tribes, consists of all the classical pieces a Taketomian is expected to know. Thus, the first criterion in choosing the program is the concept of tradition. To the present day, mostly classical and more ritualistic Taketomian dances and dramas are those performed at tanadui. A Taketomian once told me, as we watched a newly composed dance performed to music composed in a new style by a young local musician, that it was regrettable this dance could not be performed at tanadui, even though the song was very popular and the dance was acceptable in terms of quality. To agree on a program for tanadui is to agree on what represents Taketomian culture. Even more challenging is deciding which dancers should perform specific pieces. One shish (dance master) said, You can almost tell if the dance will succeed or fail once you know who the dancer is. If an instructor is not able to arrange suitable dancers for each dance, he cannot be called a shish. Since few islanders are professional dancers, making appropriate selections for certain pieces entails prolonged negotiation centering on ability and availability. Some female villagers hesitate to participate; mothers of young babies are excluded because of their duties, as are those who have recently ex-
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perienced the death of a relative.19 I heard stories of older children interfering with their mothers desire to participate even though their fathers were supportive. Single women, married women without children, widows, and other women who have never married are always among the first to be considered as performers. However, the task of selecting performers is becoming more difficult as the population gets smaller, mostly due to the movement of young people off the island. The pressure to choose increases due to the personal pride many islanders take in the dances. Such pressure can lead to tension between performers and organizers. One villager complained that she had to perform seven pieces in one day, with some costume changes so complex that in one case she had to wear one costume underneath another. Taketomians have responded to the shortage of personnel by reducing the age limit for performers and allowing younger boys and girls to participate. Owing to the fact that the repertoire of established Okinawan dance has a hierarchy in which specific dances are performed by specific age groups or characters, it is not difficult to select suitable pieces for the young. However, their availability is in turn limited by school and extracurricular activities, especially among junior high school students. If they do participate, it is usually for only one or two pieces that may be practiced after school hours. People moving to the island from other areas serve as another source of performers. Continuing in-migration is moving the geographically independent island closer to the other worldIshigaki, Okinawa, Tokyo, and so on. New arrivals appear motivated to acculturate to Taketomian life, meaning that distinctions between Taketomians and non-Taketomians are becoming increasingly difficult to draw but are still under constant negotiation. For those who have moved off the Island, their status can be very complex, especially in terms of performing traditional arts in the more urbanized framework. All dance instructors on Taketomi at one time or another expressed concern with how professional dance teachers, mainly in Ishigaki, have rearranged dances from the islands repertoire for stage performance. These indigenous instructors, who were amateur but had inherited knowledge and status in the island milieu, viewed themselves as protecting a tradition at risk of change and misrepresentation by their professional counterparts, despite the fact that many of the professions were themselves Taketomians. On one oc-
19 The rule is becoming flexible and context-driven. In the case of tanadui, it is strictly observed that a villager in mourning is not allowed to perform. On other occasions, however, a compromise may be possible and it is up to the individual to decide what to do. For instance, conventionally villagers do not dance if there has been recent death among their relatives. In one case a female villager was still invited to perform, but she refused at first. To persuade her, the organizer said Your relative loves dance herself. She will be considerate.
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casion I heard a villager complained that a dance teacher who had moved away from her village was using hand movements from the traditional repertoire in contemporary choreography. Most of the villagers I spoke with insisted that dances performed during the rituals should not be performed on stage, even by Taketomians. For practical reasons basically, there are not enough islanders to support two intensive days of performances in-migrants and professional dance teachers with Taketomian origins are being accepted as legitimate tanadui performers, with their programs set to reflect the villages they came from. Outside of tanadui, regular performances of drama and dance are limited to current island residents. Outsidersin-migrants not of Taketomi originhave only very recently been viewed as a supplemental source of performers. In addition to outsiders married to Taketomians and schoolteachers who are transferred to the island, a significant number of newcomers are showing an interest in Taketomian culture.20 In addition to pursuing that interest to work in local guesthouses or act as tourist guides, some are making an effort to learn traditional skills such as weaving, samisen playing, and dancing.21 Locals are happy to have the extra help serving food and donated labor for social activities. After a time, outsiders may become so immersed in their daily Taketomian lives that it is difficult to distinguish them from locals. Whether or not that welcoming attitude should be extended to tanadui participationconsidered a cultural display of the islands collective history and an occasion for the public examination of the dancers collective identityis an ongoing debate among villagers.
Kachiashi: Cultural Body, Natural Technique

Okinawans like to say that their children learn how to dance before they learn how to walk. Most Okinawan children have many opportunities to witness bodily expression in different forms. In the case of Taketomians, children experience physical movement in dances or dramas performed at annual religious rituals, weddings, birthday celebrations, and many other social gatherings and rites of passage. Most Taketomian children are
20 According to Japanese official policy, the teachers and civil servants are transferred to different regions or positions every three years, to avoid bureaucratic corruption. 21 Samisen is the three-stringed lute brought to Okinawa, and later to Japan, from China. Traditionally, the body of the instrument was covered with snake skin, which distinguished the Okinawan samisen from the Japanese ones. Due to the scarcity of snake and the expense of repair, this cover has been replaced by artificial skin and old snake skin samisen have become quite valuable.
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encouraged to perform in front of others; their culture provides an encouraging environment reminiscent of that depicted by Mead (1928) in Samoa. From the beginning of life, familycentered acculturation contributes to the particulars of the childrens movements. Any time young children hear a samisen being played, they begin to imitate the adults by twisting their wrists. Whenever children perform this kachiashia movement pattern consisting of a loose form of wrist motion accompanied by stepsthey always get appreciative applause from adults. Kachiashi is now considered characteristic of Okinawan performance. It is most frequently performed as the finale of a group dance at social gatherings. The samisen musicians play a certain melody at a fast tempo, and the dancers begin twisting their wrists. Everyone has her or his own style of kachiashi. Some dancers give displays of ecstasy as the tempo speeds up toward a final climax. For most Okinawan children, kachiashi is their first lesson in Okinawan movement, so that by the time they become toddlers, they are able to perform it naturally whenever they hear the right music. Outsiders often hesitate to practice kachiashi in front of others. I have heard residents from Tokyo with several years experience playing shamisen and dancing in the Yaeyama style describe kachiashi as the most difficult movement in Okinawan dance. On many other occasions Ive heard similar comments from in-migrants to the Taketomi, including wives who are not of Taketomian origin; in other words, they have neither the disposition nor the habitus of children born and raised on the island. A dance instructor I interviewed described the difference in terms of a Taketomian body:
The population is decreasing, there are only a few island people left. But there are many girls who are marrying in from outside. They dont know anything about the culture of the island. They havent heard the music before, they havent seen dance like this before. As adults they have hard heads; its not easy to teach them. However, the second or third generation children who are born here, they have listened to the music since birth, and their movement (ugoki) is the same as the island people. They are the same as the island children. When they are taught to dance, they remember it in their bodies, not in their heads.22
But even some native Taketomian children are having trouble learning to dance due to outside influences. Until very recently, teaching children to dance wasnt considered necessary. One adult told me a story that I heard from many others: When I was three, I
22 Quoted from Interview transcription.
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started to dance in the yard, while I was playing. Children always learned when they were playing. Taketomians generally agree that the best way to embody a dance is through repetitive bodily practice. As villager who used to teach dance stated, Kids can learn very quickly, even with music that they are not familiar with at all. The first, second time, maybe they ask Huh? Huh? But by the fourth time they can do it. According to another dance master, however, this natural process of learning to dance is being challenged:
You see, now the children always play with computers after school. They do not move anymore. Geino [performing arts] have become specialized. It was never specialized in the past, every child copied what it had seen the adults doing. They

stepped into dance easily, there was little to be taught. Now you have to teach them everything, from the very beginning! 23
A generation gap is also appearing in terms of attitudes toward authorityincluding dance teachers. Almost all of the village-based instructors I spoke with commented on this difference when describing their own learning experiences and those of the younger generation:
In the past, it was more difficult to be chosen as a dancer who could perform in the tanadui. Simply learning to dance was a big occasion, you had to make a big effort to convince a teacher to teach you. We had to prepare plates full of delicious foods, and our parents would lead us to the teacher and bow very honorably. Nowadays the situation has changed greatly. The younger generation does not appreciate your effort. It is like youre not giving them something but begging them to learn. 24
The issue goes beyond who has the appropriate body for dancing. From the viewpoint of contemporary Okinawans, physical training is only one small part of embodying dance, especially classical dance. As another instructor explained it, the lack of soul has made dance instruction more difficult:
The body (karada) of a human being is the same as its form (katachi). In it there is the soul (tamashiI). If there is no content (nakami) in it, then its empty (kara).
23 Quoted from Interview transcription. 24 Quoted from Interview transcription.
35
Therefore, when the human being is dead, the body is empty (kara da). 25
This statement sounds like another body-soul dichotomy. This arises from the subtle variances of Japanese. The Japanese language contains two major representations of the body: karada and mi , both considered indigenous Japanese vernaculars. Karada usually refers to the physical dimension of the body, such as karada no choshiga warui desu, which means the condition of the body is bad. On the other hand, mi refers to the body in a more holistic way, such as expressed through the term minitsukeru, to attach to the body. Minitsukeru not only describes a physical ability, but also the whole body as a perceiving and moving agent as in dancing. The term nakami (the main body, the content) also points to the substantial nature of the body, without which the form cannot sustain. The body, if only its physical dimension is emphasized, becomes empty or machine-like for the spirit to occupy. Beside this abstract conceptualization, people in Taketomi also developed a system of anatomical metonyms. The head (atama ) is a locus of intelligence (e.g., memory). The heart (kokoro ) is for affection and feelings, as in the phrase, we humans speak different languages, but we have only one hearta metaphor for co-operation and sharing often heard in Taketomian discourses. Limbs are considered the most important body parts and the first signs of human existence. Accordingly, a villager will tell a visitor, When a baby is born, only after its hands (te ) and feet (ashi ) are seen to be normal can the parents relax. The movements of the limbs are also the primary means by which odorikos mastery of dance is measured. When Taketomians pray to their kami before a performance, they always pray for no mistakes with hands and feet. When describing how dancers cooperate, Taketomians use expressions such as their hands are matching or their feet do not match. Still, dance also involves other parts of the body, and so the term minitsukeru is always emphasized by dance instructors. Minitsukeru highlights the multi-sensory characteristics of kinesthetic experiences (e.g., seeing, listening, practicing, and remembering) that are associated with different body parts. Minitsukeru is considered the final goal of this multi-sensory process. The term tamashiiclearly a Japanese conceptcan be translated as soul or spirit, depending on the context. One of the strongest applications of this term occurred during the late period of Second World War, when Japanese Kamikaze pilots will-
25 Quoted from Interview transcription..
36
ingly sacrificed their bodies to prove their patriotism and to be rewarded in the afterlife; hence it carries a sense of transcendence and immortality, which is often seen as opposed to the corruption of materiality. The idea of a Taketomian tamashii is promoted whenever villagers find it necessary to reinforce identity and unityfor instance, during competitions. The Okinawan instructors use of the Japanese concept of soul is more a comment on changing social relationships, rather than the real essence of the body. This particular concept has a strong Japanese connotation and emphasizes a special Japanese idea of the relation between spirit and physique as discussed above. It has been broadly applied across the performing arts such as Japanese dance: students must still perform many services for their mastersserving tea, cleaning the floor, and the likebefore they are considered ready to start training. The purpose of such actions is to ensure that the dancers souls, the content of the body, meet highly valued ethic/aesthetic standards. Foucault (1991 [1977]) has commented on this discipline of the body as a micro scheme of a power-oriented machinery:
Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those [that] one supervises, trains, and corrects, over children at home and at school, the colonized This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. [ Foucault 1991 [1977]: 29]
According to Foucault, the non-corporal soul is nonetheless a realitythat is, a soul inhabits a person and brings that person to existenceitself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy, the prison of the body ( Foucault 1991 [1977]: 30). Foucaults notion is applicable to examining general body disciplines in Taketomian daily life, and dancing specifically. The natural technique of a young Taketomian child expresses the transmission of collective memories, blended with a restrained and colonized history embodied over many generations. As Butler (1990) observed:
As an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other
37
words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation. [Butler 1990: 272, italDynamic Embodiment: The Transformation and Progression of Cultural Beings through Dancing
ics original]
Akamma: Dancing and the Technique of Self/Selves

One important technique in Okinawan classical dance involves order and control, marked by stable beats of medium speed. This is true even though following an ordered time was never a feature in the original style of Okinawan popular dance, which emerged from communal situations such as social gatherings after agricultural labor, rituals, and recreation. Using kachiashi as an example, the continuous hand movements are performed at a rubato tempo, so the form of expression is free. It is still popularly performed among many Okinawans at various social occasions. A Taiwanese who has been living in Ishigaki for fifty years described kachiashi dancing this way: They look like they are crazy, these Yaeyama people. If people hear the sound of a samisen on the street, they immediately gather and start dancing. Another aspect of Okinawan dance practice is gender ideology, which is not only reflected in labor divisions in performance, but also internalized in the gendered world of the dance. Okinawan presentational dance is exclusively a character dance. As a dancing body, the performer always carries gendered property, with gendered features manifested in a classification system that includes dances for youth, males, females, and the elderly. Gendered movement in Okinawan dances can be analyzed in terms of foot positions and movement quality. For instance, male dancers usually stand in an open positionthat is, with legs opened shoulder-width and the feet turned out. This position is never seen among female dancers, who instead hold their feet in a T position whenever a static posture is presented. A second example is the Akamma bushi, which is performed by both males and females. At many celebrations I have watched men and women dancing Akamma bushi together as the opening piece of a performance. The man usually presents his arms in a manner that implies a greater quality of opening compared to the constraint shown by women. Male dancers also punctuate each movement, while females emphasize stability and flow. Other gendered differences in Okinawan dance are either subtle, abstract, or a combination of the two. When asked to explain the difference between male and female dances, one teacher replied:
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Well, the female dance is elegant. You must express femininity (onarashisa). To

be the character is to dance beautifully, because it is the female dance. Moreover, the gaze of the dancer is not raised. It must be lowered a bit. Even when it flows upward, keep it as gentle (yasashii) as possible. That is the difference. In the male dance, the performer must be magnificent (dd). If a piece is not danced magnificently, it does not become a male dance. 26
Divisions between female and male bodies on the stage are especially pointed in classical dance performances. Here it will be useful to clarify the different genres of dances practiced in Taketomi, such as the classical and the folk. Each took shape under different historical and social conditions and therefore manifest a very different class habitus. Briefly, the first genre consists of presentational dances, including Okinawan and Yaeyama dances. With roots in the court tradition, Okinawan classical dance has its own specific habitual body. The presentational dance in Yaeyama was developed by government officials who received aristocratic training. This training was influenced by Chinese Confucianism in that it emphasized such skills as reading and writing, literature, music, and dance. It was through training of the body that virtues such as obedience and selfcontrol were achieved. The training of the body was apparently aimed at producing the virtue of loyalty, which was critical to the survival of the kingdoms hierarchical structure. The most extreme example is the Kin Rui (the Kin School), in which the concept of loyalty was expressed through twenty-two different bodily gestures. Movement speed is also considered a characteristic that distinguishes classical from folk dances, with the latter done at much faster tempos. Thus, divisions between classical and folk dance genres reflect codes rooted in the habitual bodies of various social origins: between male and female and between aristocrats and peasants. These divisions have both synchronic and diachronic implications: they mark differences among groups co-existing in the same period, and they reflect a totality of notions inscribed on bodies from the past that can only be memorized in bodies of the present. The re-enactment of dances that carry specific habitual memory becomes the commemorative ceremonial (Connerton 1989). Participants simultaneously appropriate or moderate their notions of the body, all of which bear historical and social inscriptions that are separate from those of their predecessors.
26 Quoted from Interview transcription..
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Taketomians find themselves crossing various social boundaries to embody categories of movements that they do not usually practice. However, the outcome of this process leads to achievement that blurs aesthetic and cultural merits and attracts younger apprenticeseven those who are new to island life. The practice of representing specific characters in dance makes manifest the transformative process of minitsukeru. What is embodied is not only the form and technique of a cultural bearer, but also a special Taketomian selfnote the number of new Taketomians attending modern private dance institutes. The institutionalization of local dance extends its cultural practice into a wider social process, in which dancing as a technique of self/selves (Hughes-Freeland 1998: 3) is magnified. I would like to use my own experience as an example. When I first expressed an interest in Yaeyama dance to someone I had just met, she told me, You must learn akamma bushi, shimanutuli, and kunara. These three dances, which are a type of initiation for dance students, are thought to contain all the basics of Yaeyama dances. Those basics objectify a set of procedures that prepare dancers for entry into the world of Okinawan dances, a world of practice that demands more time and concentration than most non-professional dancers can afford. Beginners in private dance institutes usually start with a walking practice called oriashi (folding the feet), an obvious Japanese influence in classical Okinawan dance. To facilitate this flowing movement, which is favored in Japanese classical dance and was adopted by Okinawans, dancers need to keep their waists (the locus of gravity) low throughout the dance, while arms are held to form an arch to the front. Being able to assume and hold this position is considered prerequisite for a dancer. To help new students practice this posture, they are often given fans to use as props. None of the positions can be considered natural insofar as daily physical actions are concerned; therefore doing them correctly demands considerable practice and concentration. My own experience of learning the beginning piece of akamma bushi revealed the need to constantly maintain self-control and restraint to achieve the ideal posture and movement. The effort required is so great that by the end of the first week of class I suffered acute backache. I was not alone in this experience: one Taketomian admitted that she was not a good dancer because she could not keep her waist low, an action that she described as tiring and even painful. The process of mastering basic postures can be viewed as a ritualization process in which social agents manipulate their bodies to interact with their outer environment to create a differentiation that they consider significant. Dancers are usually strong in terms of their ritual commitment, in the sense that enacting ritual means acceptance of an obligation and established conventions (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Rappaport 1999). In the disciplinary system of professional Japanese dances, acceptance of obliga-
40
tion and commitment to convention are considered pre-requisitesas mentioned above, new students often perform daily chores for their masters until they are considered ready for training (Sellers-Young 1993). Hughes-Freeland (1997) offers an elaborate theory of Javanese dancing in which the socio-centric Javanese consciousness connects movement, manners and identity and in which values within performance are congruent with those applied to general social performances. Accordingly, dance movement is not simply a stylization of everyday movement but a sample of other movements, enacted at a number of removes from them. She suggests that the Javanese consider dance movement a moral practice leading to the possibility of socialization into the proper Javanese way of behaving (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 57, 59). To a degree, these ideas have resonance in Okinawan society. Okinawans also favor self-control during social interactions, and therefore can be defined as sociocentric. Okinawan society values the performing arts, and to practice indigenous dance is to be socialized as a good Okinawan. This attitude can be traced to an aristocratic past, as in the Javanese case, wherein dancing is a form of self-control that constitutes a sociologically particular Okinawan way of knowing oneself and others (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 57). As one dance master in Taketomi commented, dancing help her connect with others well. Javanese dancing is supported by an elaborate system of cultural philosophy, of which there is no equivalent among Okinawans. Nevertheless, the Okinawan technologies of self/selves are revealed from the process of embodied movementthe process of learning dances for professional purposes magnifies a transformation of self-other relationships in terms of a dancers physicality and mentality. In todays professional studios, dancers no longer dance for gods or kings. Moving before large mirrors, the dancers see only themselves. Movements are based on self-measured space rather than in relation to others. As a Taketomian dance master forcefully argues, to achieve perfect presence, dancers must adjust their movements, some as subtle as raising an eye, according to their individual physicality. The selfness of the dancer is strongly perceived during the continuous process of learning (see SellersYoung 1993 for the Japanese case). As noted above, the classical style features an economy of movement; in some dances it seems that the performers are not moving at all. These dances are based on the Japanese cultural aesthetic of ma (space in time), which highlights the presence of the body instead of its movement. This style of dance is considered extremely difficult, therefore only experienced and advanced dancers are sanctioned to perform it. In addition to skillful self-control, these dancers must maintain a balance between the energy of the movement and their static presence. The beautiful presence of the dancer is achieved though the careful measurement of time and space by a confident self. Self-control, self-
41
balance, and measuring space and time are all critical social skills in Okinawan society, mostly learned not by verbal transmission, but by the embodiment of particular forms of movement. In the process of learning these movements, the technologies of self/selves advance, accompanied by the formation of a consciousness, the aesthetic morality (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 55).
Conclusion: From Odoriko to Yaninchu

Just a few weeks before my fieldwork ended in 1999, I went to Ishigaki to observe a Sunday morning class in a dance studio. Several young women were breast-feeding their babies during a break; two of the baby girls had been born around the time of tanadui, which had been held several months prior. Hence, these women had not been expected to perform during the ritual. The students all lived in Taketomi, although none of them had Taketomian origins. Only one student was single and without any dependents, but during the previous year, five of the other women had given birth. Many of my informants expressed pleasure at this exciting increase in population, saying, Now we have more odoriko for tanadui! The class had been specifically organized for these mothers, who were encouraged to bring their infants. Otherwise, it would have been very difficult to attend training that required regular attendance. Their practice was encouraged by an older woman who used to be the dance instructorshe wanted these young women to embrace the dances and prepare for future tanadui performances. Starting with the basic akamma bushi, some of the young mothers showed great potential, and concentrated as hard as they could on the teachers instruction. The instructor understood the students motivation because she had also in-migrated to become the wife of a Taketomian. As she nudged her students through the repeated process of akamma bushi she told them, During the first time, you listen carefully. Then the second time you watch. Think over the movements the third time. Then the fourth time you can do it. What impressed me the most was the role that the dance instructor played during the practice. She sometimes helped hold the babies while supervising their mothers movement. She would also comment on the babies, noting their close resemblance to their parents, a comment based on established social relationships. Regarding the mothers, they not only gathered to dance, but also to exchange accounts of their lives and experiences as new Taketomian wives or mothers during breaks. In the process of physical study they become recognized as odoriko (dancers), and solidified their mutual identity as yaninchu (family), substantially and metaphorically.
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The social recognition and processes of embodiment among dancers in Okinawa are linked on several levels. Dance achieves a dialogic and dynamic interaction between the individual and the social through physical enactment in a culturally meaningful way. In the absence of metaphysical systems of knowledge and movement techniques such as those found in Noh theatre or the European ballet, Taketomian dancers constantly polish their self-techniques through their connections with people broadly considered their yaninchu. Striving to become a odoriko entails pursuing an evolving categorization of self-identity and social recognition. The achievement of minitsukeru transforms dancers and equips them with techniques that can be applied socially as well as on stage. By dancing in the corporeal dimension, the social agent accomplishes aesthetic achievement and the transformation of physicality and mentality. How does anthropology benefit from studies of the body? Unlike anthropological studies of other fields, the body has an existence itself. It is not social construction or ideational realization of other cultural domains such as economy, politics, religion, law, art and so on. It has an autonomous presence, even though Western philosophers have tended to ignore it in favor of its representation. One fact we cannot escape from is that the body is owned by everyone, including the researcher and the researched. Interaction, reading, and signifying the body necessarily construct intersubjectivity between the researcher and the researched, who are brought into each others fields of relation, in which no [human being] perceives except on condition of being a self of movement (MerleauPonty 1968: 257, quoted in Farnell and Varela 2008: 216).
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Chi-Fang Chao Graduate Institute of Dance Theory,

Taipei National University of the Arts 1, Hsueh-Yuan Rd., Beitou District, Taiwan 11201 chifangchao@gmail.com
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Farnell Varela uchina odoriko yaninchu minitsuleru
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Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge; New York : Cambridge University Press. 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Richard Nice, trans. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990 Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos 18: 5-47. 1993 Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology 8: 135-156. Csordas, Thomas J., ed. 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, L. Hubert, and Dreyfus Stuart E. 1999 The Challenge of Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. Gail Weiss and Honi F. Haber, eds. Pp. 103-120. New York: Routledge. Elias, Norbert 1978 The Civilizing Process : The History of Manners. Edmund Jephcott, trans. Oxford : Basil Blackwell. Featherstone, Mike 1982 Body in Consumer Culture. Theory, Culture and Society 1(2): 18-33. Goodwin, Charles 1994 Professional Vision. American Anthropologist 96(3): 606-633. Grasseni, Cristina 2007 Introduction. In Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. Cristina Grasseni, ed. Pp. 1-19. New York: Berghahn Books. Hanks, William F. 1991 Foreword. In Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, eds. Pp. 13-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2000 The Inside Story. American Anthropologist 102(3): 620-629. Holland, Dorothy, and Naomi Quinn 1987 Culture and Cognition. In Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds. Pp. 3-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jay, Martin 2002 That Visual Turn: The Advent of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture 1(1): 8792.

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Koris, John Michael 2007 Introduction. In Embodiment in Cognition and Culture., John Michael Koris, ed. Pp. XIII-XXII. Amsterdam, NLD: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kuriyama, Shigehisa 1999 The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Lako, George, and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lave, Jean 1988 Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993 The Practice of Learning. In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds. Pp. 3-32. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss, Marcel 1979[1935]The Notion of Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology: Essays. Ben Brewster, trans. London; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Oths, Kathryn S., and Servando Z. Hinojosa, eds. 2004 Healing by Hand: Manual Medicine and Bonesetting in Global Perspective. Walnut Greek: Altamira Press. Pfeifer, Rolf, and Josh Bongard 2007 How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence. Cambridge, MassMIT Press. Plath, David W. 1998 Calluses: When Culture Gets under Your Skin. In Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan. John Singleton, ed. Pp. 341-351. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Mike 1999 Our Hands Will Know: The Development of Tactile Diagnostic Skill-Teaching, Learning, and Situated Cognition in a Physical Therapy Program. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31(2): 133-160.
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Shweder, Richard A. 1984 Anthropologys Romantic Rebellion against the Rnlightenment, or Rheres More to Thinking than Reason and Evidence. In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, And Emotion. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 27-66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoller, Paul 1984 Sound in Songhay Cultural Experience. American Ethnologist 11(3): 559-570. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn 1997 A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch 1993[1991]The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Bodily Cultivation and Cultural Learning:

The Art of Tea
Shuenn-Der Yu
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
In this paper I use the example of mastering the art of tea, or chayi, in a Taipei tea group to illustrate how the body acts as a mode for cultural learning. I argue that the body is not only an agent for experiencing, but also a key factor in the embodiment of cultural concepts. How such concepts are learned is strongly connected to ones ability or sensibility in experience and performance, both of which are acquired through culturally determined forms of bodily cultivation. Eorts to master chayi serve as concrete demonstrations of how bodily sensations, values, meanings, and cultural knowledge become internalizedan important step in the process in which such knowledge is transformed into social and cultural agency. Keywords: cultural learning, bodily cultivation, tea, art of tea, bodily elegance
Cultivating the Ethnographers Ear
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao Tung University
Mei-ling Chien
Throughout the history of anthropology, fieldwork has stood at the center of our discipline. In this article I argue that fieldwork not only produces anthropological knowledge, but also engages the ethnographer in cultivating specific bodily experiences, personal emotions, and the professional self or identity. I will discuss my ethnographic apprenticeship, studying Miao (Hmub) courtship in a village in Guizhou, to recount my sense of learning and understanding human experience and social construction in that cultural context. By reflecting on my bodily cultivation during fieldwork, especially the processes of listening and writing, both key experiences of a field ethnographer, I explore how the interaction between what I heard and wrote during my observations transformed my internal understanding of both the specific culture and my self. It was not simply the content or sonic patterns of late-night knocks on windows that inscribed meaning, but the hearing experience that linked personal emotions and transformed them as they related to my identity as a fieldworker. That knocking made it possible for me to move from a sense of culture shock, fear, and dislocation to one of familiarity and sympathy with the emotional worlds of young Hmub girls. Keywords: senses, bodily cultivation, apprenticeship, fieldwork, Hmub
I am grateful to Fangf Bil Hmub villagers; to Shuenn-Der Yu, Chi-Fang Chao, Wei-Wen Zhong, Jude
Lam and two anonymous reviewers for their support and valuable comments.
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Would I be able to relive those feverish moments when, notebook in hand, I jotted down second by second the expressions which would perhaps enable me to fix those evanescent and ever-renewed forms? I am still fascinated by the attempt and often find myself risking my hand at it. [Lvi-Strauss 1992 [1955]: 62] But what of the ethnographic ear? [James Clifford 1986: 12]1

In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lvi-Strauss more than once mentions his field experiences with Indians in Brazil, experiences that linked him emotionally and intellectually to his identity as an anthropologist. Those fieldwork descriptions have not always earned accolades from peers and colleagues, but as an ethnographer who has also experienced cultural learning during fieldwork, I can attest that I am still touched by Lvi-Strauss vivid accounts of trying to find a place in his mind to explore human knowledge in the context of changing indigenous cultures. We are still witnesses to the enormity of his effort: 6,000-plus drawings and copious field notes from multiple Brazilian field trips, all in support of the data, observations, and hypotheses he offered. This paper will consider my own ethnographic apprenticeship while studying Miao (Hmub)2 courtship in a village in Chinas Guizhou Province. I will explore how the interaction (or lack thereof ) between what I heard and wrote during my observations transformed my internal understanding of both this specific culture and my self. I will also examine the issue of whether the record that flowed from my pen truly reflected the reality captured by my eyes and ears, and if not, what I missed. Many times during my fieldwork I asked myself what to listen for and how to hear it. Like many anthropology graduate students, I had little training in listening and hear-
The term ethnographic ear was first used by Nathaniel Tarn (1975). In describing his experience of doing fieldwork in a multi-lingual community he wrote: It may be the ethnographer or the anthropologist again having his ears wide open to what he considers the exotic as opposed to the familiar, but I still feel Im discovering something new in the use of language here almost every day. Im getting new expressions almost every day, as if the language were growing from every conceivable shoot (ibid: 9). I am using the Eastern Miao romanization for Hmub terms, in which the final consonants are not pronounced but indicate tones.
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ing beyond learning the importance of transcribing interviews. Most graduate training focuses on a combination of watching and speaking with study participants. Despite the lack of formal training in listening, I had no choice but to practice hearing/listening techniques, especially when my study focus shifted to nighttime courtship practices. While analyzing my field notes, I unexpectedly discovered that they conveyed a mix of detailed visual and aural descriptions, which sparked my realization of the importance of auditory cues in Hmub courtship, as well as the methodological challenges and epistemology of cultural fieldwork. That recognition has led me to examine how my Hmub experiences might fit into current discussions of the senses in anthropology, the technology of self, and ethnographic apprenticeships.
Senses
According to Paul Stoller (1989), it was through his long-term apprenticeship learning Songhay spirit possession rituals that he discovered the centrality of sound in understanding cultural sentiment:
One afternoon in 1970 in Tillabery, the haunting cries of the monochord violin drew me over a dune to witness my first ceremony of Songhay spirit possession The sounds of these instruments so impressed me that I continued to attend possession ceremonies in 1971 In 1977 I began to learn about the sounds of spirit poetry in the village of Mehanna. Two years later I was invited to join in the Tilaberi possession troops as a servant to the spirits Throughout this myriad of experiences, my teachers continually focused my attention on the sounds of possession. [Stoller 1989:101, emphasis added]
However, Stoller also noted that sound dimensions are more often than not ignored in current Western anthropological sensory training. We learn how to interview and observe, but focusing on sounds or voices associated with events and determining how they fit into the ethnographers observations and interpretations of a local culture are overlooked as teachable skills. Still, Stoller and others remind us that the senses employed in anthropology or ethnography should be more diverse, that tone and sound are invaluable for describing and interpreting local cultures. If we are fortunate, we learn through our own apprenticeships the lesson Stoller learned in his work: that paying attention to sound helps ethnographers make sense of local meanings by engaging the communication and interaction of bodily senses.
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The Technology of the Self


Foucault (1988: 18) uses the term technology to address the means through which individuals are trained and modified. He lists the four major kinds of technology as production, sign systems, power, and the self (ibid.). After insist[ing] too much on the technology of domination and power, he expressed new interest in the technology of the self, and used the historically contiguous relations between the expressions know yourself and take care of yourself as a departure point to show how relations between care and self-knowledge were constituted in Greco-Roman and Christian traditions (ibid.: 19-20). Foucault argued that it was due to different forms of care in relation to the self that different forms of self exist (ibid.: 22). According to his analysis, writing in the Greco-Roman tradition was an important device in the invention of the concept of taking care of the self (ibid.: 27). Examples include taking notes for re-reading, writing treatises and letters to help friends, and keeping notebooks for reflective study (ibid). Thus, the practice of writing is now intimately linked with taking care of oneself. In the same work he uses Marcus Aureliuss letter to Fronto in 144 or 145 A.D. to illustrate interrelations between self and body through the constant practice of writing unimportant daily details (ibid.: 28-30).
Cultivation and Apprenticeship: The Legacy of Foucault, Stoller, and Castaneda

In line with Foucaults and Stollers positions, I will focus on my attempts to account for what I heard through the act of writing. Just as taking care of ones self emerges from the activity of writing about unimportant everyday details in a letter or journal, my experiences in cultivating my ear and adjusting my perceptions occurred through the process of writing about field experiences in my notes and in a diary.3 I use the term
Although the purpose of this paper is not related to the historical development of writing technologies and the change of the practices and attitudes toward self in a specific historical and spatial context, there are two reasons for me to consider and follow the Foucaultian notion on the relations between techniques and self. First, both are related to the transformation from orality to literacy; second, both examine how certain psychological experiences as well as bodily ones emerge from a specific technique (writing).
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cultivation 4 because it expresses the idea of conscious and continuous pursuit and of something internal being trained and modified, which I view as analogous to Foucaults technology of self. In the context of field ethnography, I examine how the technique or ongoing practice of writing affects bodily cultivation, and how it opens a door to selfdisclosure and to learning how the sense of hearing is used in other cultures. An analogous concept, that of apprenticeship, is discussed by Stoller (1987) and Carlos Castaneda (1998[1969]). Ethnographers generally consider themselves students or like childrenlearning other cultures through their fieldwork. Few make explicit use of the term apprenticeship in ethnographic practice. Stoller (1987) describes his two apprentice experiences as learning the perspective of a Songhay individual and the perspective of a ritual specialist. The first experience occurred during the early stages of his fieldwork, when he encountered frustration from what he felt were misleading responses from Songhay villagers to survey questions. He then received advice from a village friend: You must learn to sit with people, Monsieur Paul. You must learn to sit and listen (ibid: 11). Stoller acknowledged feeling ambivalent about his professional identity as a fieldworker and taking a passive approach to learning Songhay ways. However, the practice of sitting and listening proved key to his acceptance as a qualified Songhay person, to have acted and have become a person in the village (ibid.: 17). Stollers (1987: 21-41) second fieldwork apprenticeship benefited from Songhay sorcerers. Following an intensive period of memorizing ritual texts and praise poems and of procuring folk medicines, he experienced intense internal conflict between his roles as a sorcerers apprentice and anthropologist:
Djibo immersed me in memorization. So busy was I with the memorization of texts that I did not have time to figure out what they meant, let alone how they corresponded to the vagaries of Songhay culture. I worried that I was failing in my mission as an anthropologist. [Stoller 1987: 38]
Another example is Castanedas (1998[1969]) description of his apprenticeship under the guidance of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named don Juan, who forced him to give up
According to Gove et al. (1986: 552), to cultivate means to improve by labor, care, or study, bring to culture, civilization, refinement to cause to grow by special attention or by studying, advancing, developing, practicing, publishing. Merriam-Webster (1984: 203) states that cultivation is often preferred to culture because it suggests the continuous pursuit of culture and self-discipline which accompanies such pursuit, rather than its achievement, and therefore more modest and often more appropriate.
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his Western way of thinking and adopt certain practices in order to learn and understand the reality of the Yaqui world. According to Castaneda,

In don Juans system of beliefs, the acquisition of an ally meant exclusively the exploitation of the states of non-ordinary reality he produced in me through the use of hallucinogenic plants. He believed that by focusing on these states and omitting other aspects of knowledge he taught, I would arrive at a coherent view of the phenomena I had experienced. [Castaneda 1998[1969]: 10]
Castaneda encounters considerable challenges in his efforts to refrain from professional methods that his Indian mentor forbids, including interviews, observations, and systematic note taking. Still, field notes played a significant part in his internalizing the sensual experiences of the Yaqui Indian and understanding their worldview, disclosing his subjective perception of the experience and revealing the content of don Juans belief system. Although Castaneda never extends his discussion to the link between writing and his Yaqui cultural apprenticeship, several times he states that writing notes after calming down from extreme sensual experiences allowed him to examine those experiences more closely. Before discussing the importance of careful listening as a primary field technique, I will describe my training in cultural anthropology research methods at Taiwans Tsing Hua University and present a brief analysis of how sounds and/or voices play an important role in the daily and ritual lives of upland Hmub villages, especially their central position in ritual courtship behavior. In this paper, sound (non-linguistic construction) means a system of symbols for communication (Feld 1982)for instance, the sound of a person knocking on a door or window. Voice will refer to a linguistic construction by social persons, such as human conversation or other forms of dialogue (Keane 2000).
Learning and Experiencing Anthropological Methods

I began my ethnographic training in the early 1990s. Through course work, reading, and seminar discussions, I built an understanding of what was required for fieldwork: learning new languages, drawing maps, performing censuses and/or genealogies, doing interviews, participating, observing, writing notes, and perhaps also keeping a diary. At that time, H. Russell Bernards Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (1988) was one of the most popular titles on this subject. My copy was never far away, either during my course work or at a field site where I did ethno-medical research involving the Ami
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indigenous group living in Hualien County on Taiwans east coast (1992-93). In chapters 7-13, Bernard discusses data collection-participant observation; taking and managing field notes; structured, unstructured, and semi-structured interviews; questionnaires and surveys; and direct, reactive, and unobtrusive observation. All these methods of obtaining information emphasize visual perceptions. The terms hearing and listening to rarely appear in Bernards text. Specific listening techniques are rarely, if ever, discussed in anthropology classes, but I believe it is possible to teach accurate listening techniques when addressing such processes as transcribing, translating, categorizing, describing, and interpreting both verbal and nonverbal auditory messages or signals. Under the influence of my professors and Bernards text, standard observation, interviewing, and participation procedures were my primary tools during my Ph.D. fieldwork on Hmub kinship in eastern Guizhou (1998-2000). My initial focus was on village social structure; I conducted a census of more than 300 households and created pedigree and genealogical records for each family using information gathered in semi-structured interviews.5 I also collected kinship terms used by native Hmub speakers and recorded the actual use of those terms in everyday and ritualized settings. In addition to supporting my understanding of personal relationships in the village, these data helped me learn marital concepts described by my informants, observe marital realities, and determine where the two converged and diverged. My explorations of the interplay between personal emotions and social institutions (marriage, courtship etc.) gave me abundant opportunities to try new ethnographic procedures and techniques. During my fieldwork I lived in the home of a girl named Ghaif Wangk, a 20-yearold who was unmarried. At first, her family made arrangements for me to sleep on the second floor, but since the second floor room was next to the granary, I asked to sleep in their daughters room. We spent a great deal of time together, and we eventually started to call each other Sister. She taught me the Hmub language, assisted me with translations, sang and dictated Hmub songs and stories, and helped me with my interview data. The amount of time I spent with her over fifteen months allowed me to understand her experiences and moods, her views on marriage and emotions, and occasionally her views on local gossip. Through her I gained acceptance as a young girl according to local tradition.
According to Barnard and Good (1984), pedigree means the recording of basic demographic data on household members (name, age, marital status, birth, etc.). The term of genealogical records refers to consanguineal and affinal relations among households, families, and lineages.
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Listening to the Sounds of Late-Night Rituals


While working in my village, I discovered that I needed to take a different approach to my research. In a growing number of situations I realized that if I did not make an exceptional effort to listen to the sounds and voices that one could hear in the dark of night, I was in danger of missing out on critical aspects of Hmub social life and misinterpreting Hmub courtship and marriage customs. The following example is from my field notes at the beginning of 1999:
I heard the cocks crowing two or three times in the darkness. I still struggled to get up at 5 oclock in the cold early morning. At 6 oclock, I decided to observe the calling of ghosts for a new house. I woke up Ghaif. Ghaif s mother said that a person with a new house had called the ghosts a few days before. She also said there were some households in Si-Zu (the fourth hamlet in the village) calling ghosts, but she did not know which ones. Ghaif suggested that we go outside to take a look. We didnt wash our faces before leaving, simply took flashlights to go out at dawn. Ghaif said there was noise somewhere there on the slope, but I heard nothing. I followed her to Si-Zu on the slope. As we approached, another person came toward us. After listening to Ghaif s statement, he told Ghaif which household was holding the ceremony. I sensed that he was laughing. Later we found out that he was the ghet xangt (the ghost master, or shaman and ritual specialist) who had just finished calling the ghosts and was on his way home.
My field notes, whose contents record my nervousness and anxiety as a fieldworker, especially my fear of losing an opportunity to observe ritual activity, point to the importance of hearing. My nervousness can also be explained by my unfamiliarity with hearing the unique sounds and auditory patterns of Hmub rituals. I could not predict the duration of a ritual and had no idea what was being signaled by the sounds I heard.6 Many of the ritual activities in the village (e.g., rituals for protecting households, for healing, even wedding ceremonies) took place without obvious signs being given by villagers other than the members of the household experiencing the ritual. I remembered thinking
In this article I do not use different terms to distinguish the phenomena of noise or sound. The term sound is used here for conveying any non-verbal linguistic signs, which can be heard and can be identified as the indexical signs to meaningfully local context of the Fangf Bil Hmub village: e.g., the occurrences of household rituals, the start of wedding ceremonies, or the initiation and practice of institutionalized flirting and courting activities.
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upon my arrival in November of 1998 that I-the only outsider living in the villagewas excluded from the circle in which news was shared regarding ritual activities. Later I learned that I wasnt so special in this regard: villagers themselves were not necessarily aware of the scheduling of rituals in their own neighborhoods, let alone households in other hamlets. Still, many villagers told me, If you want to know where a ritual is being performed, just carefully listen to the sounds [chanting by the ritual specialists]. However, sorting out the abundance and diversity of auditory signals pointing to ritual activities was a challenge for me, the new apprentice. I needed contextual information from the type of hearing that I was accustomed to in my everyday life. During my fifteen months of fieldwork I learned the social meanings of specific sounds and voices: the chanting of shamans indicated healing or household rituals; the sound of fireworks meant celebrations for a new year or a wedding ceremony, but sometimes also signaled someones death; and the enthusiastic rapping on doors or windows by parallel cousins at midnight indicated that a wedding was to take place early that morning. But it wasnt until late in my fieldwork that I recognized I had been living in the midst of these sounds and voices since my arrival in the village. Only at that point could I commit myself to exploring the late-night auditory dimensions of Hmub courtship. To understand the relationship between marriage and courtship outside the kinship structure and village marital system, my second fieldwork focus was eroticism and its emotional contexts. By examining institutionalized courting activities I arrived at an understanding of the emotional world of the vangt (young people), as defined locally.7 While researching courting activities, however, I experienced methodological and ethical conflicts, which increased my sense of how the sounds and voices I heard were significant to my interpretations of Hmub courtship culture. I was already the mother of two sons when I conducted this research, making me lok (old) in the village, and therefore excluded from courting activities. But despite my status as a married mother, the villagers still regarded me as a young girl, perhaps due to my status as a student and the clothes I wore, which were similar to those worn by local
Vangt and lok are the opposite terms, which could be translated as the meaning of young and old people. The social markers in defining these two terms are marriage as well as being a parent. Any male or female adult without the martial and parental status will be considered as vangt. Generally, the people involved in daily courtship are the vangt, but on the occasions of festival courtship activities and singing antiphonal songs, there are lots of old people participating in them.
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girls8 who accompanied me during my fieldwork. For this reason I had greater freedom to participate in and observe courting activities, which take the form of gatherings by groups of young males and females or one-to-one courtship at night outside the windows of young womens rooms. I was a direct participant in the group gatherings, but an indirect listener to the late-night conversations, filling in the details in later interviews with the girls being courted. I learned that courting activities could be very open-having some features of ritualized performance-but at times they could be very private and personal. Without the assistance of the girls who accompanied me and their willingness to share their romantic emotions and experiences, I never could have understood the content and value of institutionalized courtship in the minds of individual participants. The Hmub term for courtship is iut fub, literally wandering in the village. However, I never heard the term used in day-to-day conversation among villagers because it implies sexuality. Instead, in daily conversation people used expressions such as at zot (play for fun), lof vud (take a rest), god (get together) and niangt (sit down). Iut fub is an indispensable part of Hmub social life.9 It entails special temporal and spatial arrangements and a special classification system for identifying individuals. Iut fub can take place on any night, since elders and children go to bed very early and the village becomes very dark and quiet. At some point one hears loud whistles (kot ghait) followed by footsteps and talking in low voices. These are the sounds of the boys (dat vangt) setting off to court girls, with boys from the Tang family (zix Tangf ) going to the Zhang family (zix Zhangb) household and vice versa. When the footsteps stop, one hears the sound of a boy knocking on a girls window as an invitation to talk. Depending on the status of their courtship, the conversations may be quiet and gentle; if several boys visit one girl, the conversation can grow loud and be punctuated by laughter. Groups of courting boys search for corresponding groups of girls-which isnt very difficult, since the girls talk and laugh loudly in the wooden houses where they gather. Around midnight, these groups break up and conversations become one-to-one, a situation called ib laik del ib laik (one likes the other). Such conversations may continue deep into the night, with the only true deadline for stopping being cocks crow at daybreak. Additionally, intimate body contact is quite common in Hmub flirting culture. A partner is permitted to put his hands on his girls
Married Hmub mothers usually wear traditional clothes; most young unmarried women or married women without children wear pants and coats bought from the outsidee.g., summer blouses or sportswear and winter woolen sweaters. In Han characters, you fang or yao ma lang refer to courtship activities among the Eastern Miao in Guizhou, and tiao yue or tiao hua chang refer to courtship activities among the Qing Miao or Hua Miao in central and western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan.
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shoulders, waist or legs. Flirtatious or intimate physical contact between men and women is acceptable at the appropriate time and place for iut fub. The old people will scold the young if they disobey the rules. Moreover, only when girls and boys are together in a group can an individual openly engage in flirtatious intimate physical contact. In other words, if there is one boy flirting with a group of girls, they can only sit around the hearth and talk; but if there are two or three boys flirting with five or six girls, the boys can flirt with the girls next to them. If physical contact goes beyond the accepted norms, however, the other participants will intervene. Such inappropriate behavior indicates that the boys look down on the other girls present.
An Experience of Listening in the Field

As I noted in an earlier excerpt from my field notes, sound is related to calling ghosts. Sound is also a central index pointing to occurrences of courtship. In fifteen notebooks I wrote voluminously on what I had heard about Hmub courtship activities. Those notebooks contain evidence of my learning to recognize the importance of knocking on a window late at night. The following entry was written in January 1999, during the early stages of my fieldwork.
I hurriedly returned to my fieldwork today, knowing that there will be a building of a new house and ghost-calling ritual tomorrow. By the time I finished discussing expenses with Ghaif s father, it was 9:30. In order to get up early (the calling was to begin after second cocks crow), and feeling tired anyway, I went to sleep early. Both Ghaif and I fell asleep quickly I was awakened by knocking sounds. I thought it was dawn, but discovered it was only about eleven oclock after looking at my watch. The knocking came at different tempos and had different beats. (It occurs to me that if I have the chance, I should record these.) I was awake by that time, but wanted to sleep. The knocking sounds continued. Ghaif woke up as well and said to the boys outside, Nat youl. Det dak youl! (I hear you, but I do not want to come [to the window]). She said these sentences two or three times, sounding a little bit angry. Later she told me that it was because they knocked too loudly. The knocking sounds did not stop immediately, but ceased after a while. We gradually fell asleep.
This excerpt conveys my initial feelings about and experience of the late-night knocking. These sounds usually woke me up unexpectedly; sometimes the knocking was so loud that it frightened me, and sometimes it occurred too many times in the same eve-
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ning. It was a long time before I stopped feeling ambivalent about the knocking, which struck me as impolite since the noise interrupted my sleep. At the same time, my very reason for living in this village was to study Hmub courtship, and I came to recognize that these unwelcome signals were a part of my subject, and that they carried cultural and symbolic significance. Every time a girl hears knocking, she recognizes the knocker by the tempo, speed or volume of the rapping. To an outsider like me, such knocking all sounded similar, but to the girls of the village it conveyed subtle or minor variations. Special knocking strategies can be identified. For example, using a special pattern, such as knocking the first three times softly at normal speed, then a pause, and knocking three times again, much louder or quicker, etc., may be arranged by the girl and boy who are courting each other regularly. Girls especially look forward to the knocking of their sweethearts (ghat mal ghob), but sweethearts are not the only knockers. In fact, knocking is mostly done by affines. Thus, what girls usually do is to differentiate between the knocking of a common affine of the same village and that of a stranger from the outside. I began to categorize non-verbal sounds by linking them with specific personal relations-boyfriends, affinal cousins, friends, and strangers. At first, the rhythm and frequency of the knocking all seemed alike, and I assumed that it was all by the same boy who was interested in Ghaif. I later understood that the sounds were in fact made by several different courting boys. I started to pay much closer attention to these late-night events. Almost every morning I would talk with Ghaif about the previous nights visitors and write about our discussions in as much detail as possible before planning my schedule for the day. Most of my questions concerned the identities of the visitors, their consanguineal or affinal relations, and the content of their conversations. The knocking eventually became an index for understanding late-night courting practices, and I learned that where I had perceived no differences between knocks, local village girls recognized a diverse range. This gave me an important opportunity to feel institutional courtship through listening as opposed to seeing or gaining knowledge from the explanations of informants. Ultimately, and with Ghaif s help, I was able to not only establish a musical and social view of late-night knocking, but also to complement it with values associated with interpreting what I was hearing. For example, I learned from Ghaif that if more than a couple of nights passed without someone knocking on her window, she experienced feelings of loneliness and sadness. She therefore generally looked forward to the late-night knocking, even though she never knew who the visitor would be on any given evening. While I never analyzed the knocking in terms of pattern, frequency, volume, etc., hearing the sound assumed a position of value in my fieldwork. Experiencing the knock-
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ing first-hand created a link between emotions and knowledge of Hmub courtship. For Hmub girls, the sound of knocking is a clear indication of courtship. Parents and other family members usually ignore the sound (or pretend to), regardless of its volume, frequency, or timing. However, girls feel a need to respond and must deal with the emotions tied to it. Most girls feel excitement when they hear knocking. In its absence, they may recite Sent feb lel, bib lok yaf (So quiet and cold like winter, how lonely we old ladies are), revealing a sense of desolation and perhaps concern that they will not find partners. This sensitivity explains the facility of Hmub girls to recognize their visitors by their knocks. Girls feel emotionally safe and confident about opening their windows at the familiar knocking of an affine, but may feel uncertain or even frightened at an unfamiliar sound and therefore refrain from opening their windows. It was not the specific content or patterns of late-night knocking that produced meaning for me, but the aural experience that created links among various kinds of emotions. The transformation in my personal emotions from culture shock, fear, and strangeness to a familiar and regular daily experience was dramatic. Toward the end of my fieldwork, it wasnt unusual for me to not notice these late-night sounds and to sleep through even vigorous knocking. I learned that the sound was for the most part considered friendly and a practical symbol relevant to a collective core value of the village: maintaining its kinship system. This transformation of my emotions made it possible to understand and sympathize with the emotional world of the village girls, and to recognize how the experience of being awoken in the middle of the night enriched their lives. By focusing on auditory cues, I was able to rethink the relevance of such events to my understanding of Hmub courtship culture. I also was able to consider my own subjective experiences of hearing and feeling the emotions of Hmub girls during courtship, as well as my growth from an ethnographer experiencing culture shock to one feeling at ease in my fieldwork.
Being an Apprentice Fieldworker Once Again

I was not a complete novice in fieldwork when I started my Hmub research, but the need to hone a new skilllisteningto collect ethnographic data resurrected feelings of unease and uncertainty I had felt during my first project in Taiwan. I lost some of my confidence and the ability to feel at home as a trained fieldworker. Outside the standards of observation I was familiar with, the need to understand the meaning of unrecognized sounds and voices in the context of Hmub courtship created a level of anxiety and uncertainty that threatened my identity. Culture shock clearly played a role in generating these
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feelings, but more importantly for this discussion was the immediacy and the impact of hearing verbal and nonverbal sounds without confirming or supporting visual information about my perceptions of self and my sense of place. The following quote from Bull and Back (2003: 7) underscores the difference I felt between knowing the world and self through seeing and through hearing:
In vision, subject and object appear as transparent. Implied in the objectification of the world through sight is the control of that world. Yet if, as Bishop Berkeley notes, Sounds are close to us as our thoughts, then by listening we may be able to perceive the relationship between subject and object.

In other words, if I (as subject) merely perceived the phenomenon of Hmub courtship (the object) through visual observation, then relations among the data, methods, and my identity as a fieldworker became transparent, thus removing any space for rethinking the process and fully experiencing my Hmub courtship fieldwork. However, my hearing previously unrecognized late-night knocking sounds and courtship conversations in the absence of familiar standards of observation created anxiety and uncertainty while simultaneously providing an immediate channel for feeling where I was, who I was, and what I was encountering in the village.
Cultivating My Ear
Even though I convinced myself to depend on hearing as an additional data collection method, the contents of my field notes still reflect uncertainty in my ability to make full use of auditory sources of information. Part of the reason was my belief that seeing is believing, which echoes Erlmanns (2004: 20) observation in Hearing Cultures: Audiocentered forms of social practice cannot in themselves be construed as alternatives to relations of power thought to be anchored in vision, surveillance, and mass-mediated forms of visual production and consumption.10 Still, I had to write down my observations to achieve the goals of preserving and intellectually integrating what I had experienced. In addition to recognizing the semantic messages produced by writing, it was by exploring the material level of writing in the field that I learned how writing also helped
10
I am grateful to one anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to Maurice Blochs recent work, Truth and Sight: Generalizing without Universalizing (Bloch 2008).
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me make sense of what I had heard. As ethnographers we are trained to record data and write them down as notes. During my Hmub courtship project I did not use a tape recorder to capture the late-night knocking, in large part because the voices and conversations were frequently subdued, and (except for the knocks on Ghaif s window) advanced recording techniques would have been required to record knocking at other houses. Another problem was ethical: courtship activity, especially at night, is more private and personal than almost all other public activities in Hmub society. Using a tape recorder (or camera) would have introduced a degree of intrusion and threat into the private zone of nighttime courtship activity. I therefore reverted to recording what I heard with pen and paper. Most ethnographers recognize the need to write extensively in the field, and believe that their work benefits from meanings and information that is written down and submitted to later analysis. However, the act of writing-that is, the writing process and its materiality-has not been scrutinized to the same degree as the process of collecting data and recording it. As my experience in Guizhou shows, writing in the field is multifunctional-in other words, it is also associated with bodily experiences. Christina Haas (1996: 24) is one of the few scholars to specifically comment on the materiality of writing from the aspect of its technology and transformation-from the heft of the manuscript and the feel of a new Blackfeet pencil, to the bright, wired-up, whirring box and clicking keyboard on the desk. Hass has also found that there is a sense problem with text for writers making the transition from pen-and-paper to computer. For example, I have to print it to get a perspective on it, or I dont have the intimacy I need with my text on the computer (ibid.: 120, original emphasis). The text senses are described as spatial, living, or moving objects (ibid.). I believe there are two types of writing materiality: technological and time consumption, and both create certain resonances in my body. Hass (1966: 24) notes that writing is made material through the use of technologies, and writing is technological in the sense and to the extent that it is material. During my Hmub fieldwork, writing was very material in the technological sense: I used my old Mont Blanc pen to write down everything I observed and heard in hardcover notebooks, page by page, volume by volume. Since there was no bookstore in the village, I tried my best to conserve paper by writing field notes in small versions of Chinese characters and English letters, and made attempts to romanize my transcriptions of oral Hmub speech. Second, although I had a laptop computer, electricity was intermittent and I mostly wrote my field notes or diary entries in a labor-intensive and time-consuming manner with pen and paper. Sitting and writing for long periods of time usually brought some physical discomfort, but once a regular routine was established, my writing-like meditation or exercise-helped me to
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deal with my emotions of anxiety, uncertainty, and/or confusion that came from being in another culture. I felt safe in the visible accumulation of notes. The repetitive act of writing contributed a great deal to my practice in focusing on sounds and voices and the social meanings they have for the Hmub. Verbal and non-verbal sounds may be perceived, encoded, and decoded by different cognitive processes, but both convey social meaning and emotions among Hmub youth. I therefore consider them sound/voice units similar to the Chinese concept of shengyin (voice and sound) for descriptive and analytical purposes. It was important to record aural tones and to transform them into words and sentences-concrete data for safe storage in my notebooks. The literary theorist Walter Ongs idea on the movement from orality to literacy provides a basis for extending our understanding of the relationship between ear work and hand work. According to Ong, writing is the most monumentous of all human technological inventions (Ong 1982: 72), translating sound into space and transform[ing] the human life world (ibid.: 85). In other words, Ong believes the interdependence between hearing and writing is exposed as a return to the superiority of the visual sense. More or less parallel to Ongs theory, ethnographic training entails a hierarchy of bodily experiences and resonances. Sight is usually at the top of that hierarchy, while hearing holds a much lower position. In this paper I have tried to express how transposing heard experiences and felt resonances into writing allowed me to use multiple senses to understand how the Hmub invent and perceive their courtship culture. Two additional layers of experience can be pursued further. First, parallel to Foucaults technology of self, I experienced the cultivation of self via the specific technique of writing. In addition to feeling safe in the visible accumulation of my field notes, I trained and grew through my regular and extensive writing practice. This bodily cultivation experience became evident in the transformation of my emotional world of self and identity as I increasingly internalized my field experience as an ethnographer. This process is partly in line with Vygotskys notion of mediational means, the theory that writings transformative efficacy is both material and symbolic at the same time (Hass 1996: 225).11
11 Influenced by the Marxist principles and Engles historical materialism, (Russian theorist Levy) Vygotskys theory of mediation helps us to see tools, signs, and technologies as spatially and culturally distributed systems that function to augment human psychological processing(Hass 1996: 17). According to Hass, Viewed in this way, then, technologiesin particular, literacy technologiesare themselves complex systems that might fruitfully be studies genetically, in the Vygotskian sense (ibid.).
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The second layer concerns verification of the meanings of non-verbal sounds. Like Stollers (1987, 1989) insights, my point is that learning how to hear, understand, and interpret non-verbal sound is an important skill that has been neglected in our field. Stoller is one of several anthropologists who have demonstrated that recognition of the force of auditory cultures is largely absent in Western traditions, and perhaps the sound of knocking in a Hmub village is not sufficiently exotic an example. Still, those night-time sounds might carry different meanings in my own culture, so I had to learn anew and consciously practice listening skills crucial to carry out the research. The experience of hearing linked various emotions (e.g., disclosing the emotions of Hmub girls being courted), while the act of writing allowed me to reflect on and make sense of the knocking and its associated conversations, events, and participants. Through writing I was able to attach social and emotive value to the sounds I heard and to understand the social and emotional lives of Hmub youth.
Concluding Remarks
The processes of emergence and transformation of self identity and the bodily experiences of ethnographers in the field are rarely noted beyond textbook references to culture shock and its accompanying symptoms of loneliness, homesickness, and depression. Its symptoms may have far-reaching implications regarding the quality of data and its value within the larger social settings perceived by ethnographers. How I cultivated my ear through the practice of listening and writing and how I navigated the transformation of senses, emotions, identity, and professional self during my fieldwork bring into sharper focus how the bodily experiences may combine to make the ethnographer a keener perceiver of events. Those experiences all contributed to my transformation as an ethnographer and a self, as well as my knowledge of Hmub courtship, a phenomenon that complements Foucaults (1988: 18) ideas about the technologies of self:
which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.
Listening carefully allowed me to also experience my knowledge of Hmub courtship. The late-night knocking on windows, an audio-centered form of social practice (Erlmann 2004: 20), revealed to me the institutional, formal, and collective features of
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Hmub courtship by its sense of aural immediacy (ibid.), which led me to then categorize the sounds I heard. In analysis elsewhere (Chien 2009) the long-term and shortterm effects of premarital and extra-marital flirtation, I interpreted Hmub courtship as an emotional zone of great value to young villagers. Here I emphasize how that courtship can be better understood by adding data gathered by careful listening. But as Erlmann (2004: 18) observes, this raises the question of what kind of ears are needed to gather and sift through the sounds of everyday life, to pick up all these sounds adrift, these echoes, reverberations, hums, and murmurs outside or in between the carefully bounded precincts of orderly verbal communication and music? This aspect of ethnographic methodology deserves further attention so it may be better integrated into our repertoire of skills for understanding the communities we study.
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Feld, Steven 1982 Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foucault, Michel 1988 Technologies of the Self. In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Pp. 16-49. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Gove, Philip Babcock, et al., eds. 1986 Cultivate. In Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. P. 552. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, INC., Publishers. Haas, Christina 1996 Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Keane, Webb 2000 Voice. Linguistic Anthropology 9(1-2): 271-273. Lvi-Strauss, Claude 1992[1955] Tristes Tropiques. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Penguin Books. Merriam-Webster, ed. 1984 Cultivation. In Merriam-Websters Dictionary of Synonyms, P. 203. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Ong, Walter J. 1982 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Stoller, Paul, ed. 1989 Sound in Songhay Possession. In The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Pp. 101-122,163. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes 1987 In Sorcerys Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarn, Nathaniel 1975 Interview with Nathaniel Tarn. Boundary 24 (1):1-34.
Mei-ling Chien Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao Tung University 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., Hsinchu, Taiwan 30010 mlchien@faculty.nctu.edu.tw
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10617 lighting@ntu.edu.tw
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Bodily Cultivation and Namelessness in the Lao Tzu
Liang Ting
Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University
This article discusses Laozis concept of namelessness (wuming ) and his theory of bodily cultivation. The issue of bodily cultivation in ancient China is an issue of self-cultivation (xiushen ) and is an important one in Chinese culture. Laozi proposes the very interesting idea of namelessness as the key to self-cultivation. Laozi considers that the worst problems in life come from desires; hence, the aim of self-cultivation is to diminish desires to reach the state of desirelessness. Since desires derive from colorful, tangible objects, Laozi believes that the way to obtain a state of desirelessness is through cultivating mindful namelessness. As objects obtain objective existence and become sources of desire through the process of naming and dierentiation, Laozi argues that stopping the process of naming (to reach namelessness) would result in the non-dierentiation of objects and thus desirelessness. Keywords: Lao Tzu, self-cultivation, body, namelessness, name
Reading a Saints Body through the Intertextual Encounter between a Christian Ascetic Life and Daoist Utopian Writing
Desert and Spring:
Department of Religious Studies, Fu Jen Catholic University
Yi-Jia Tsai
This paper juxtaposes Athanasiuss hagiography of Saint Antony and Tao Yuan-mings poem Peach Blossom Spring to create an intertextual reading of Christian ascetic life. I use four dialectical threads-disclosedness/inaccessibility, similarity/ difference, unmindfulness/discrimination, and exile/sociality-to analyze the Daoist world ideal and Christian ascetic practice. This intertextual strategy allows me to explore how desert asceticism is exemplified in various techniques, as well as how religious ideas and physical experiences are intertwined. The primary goal is to examine how religious ideas of renunciation, Christ imitation, redemption, and resurrection are embodied in the practices of fasting, solitude, fighting demons, and performing miracles. The meanings of the ascetic, perfect, redeemed, and social body are also discussed. I suggest that body is not only the medium for transcendence, it also constitutes the site where culture is reflected and rewritten. Keywords: asceticism, bodily cultivation, The Life of Antony, Peach Blossom Spring, comparative studies
Funding for this project was provided by the Thematic Research Program of Academia Sinica. I owe much to the members of the Medical and Body Experience Research Team for their insights and support. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments. The ideas of this project were inspired by a course taken from Professor Edith Wyschogrod while I was a graduate student at Rice University. I am deeply grateful for her intellectual insights and encouragement.
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Introduction: Textualization of Body and the Embodiment of Text

Asceticism, a time-honored and cross-cultural phenomenon, has long attracted both popular interest and intellectual concern. As Wimbush and Valantasis (1995) point out, asceticism has been the subject of historical studies, exegetical studies, ethnographic studies, theological studies, and even psychological and psychiatric studies (ibid.: xix). While the early scholarship focused on particular religious traditions, cultural systems, historical periods, exemplary individuals and texts, or particular behaviors (ibid.: xix), more recent work crosses disciplines, fields, and religious traditions. According to Wimbush and Valantasis, Scholarship on asceticism reflects the late twentieth-century humanist emphasis on comprehensiveness of scope and sophisticated engagement of a number of methods and approaches. (ibid.: xxi) Valantasis characterizes this new trend as the perspective of the theorist who understands asceticism as a large and pervasive cultural system and locates it at the center of cultural, social, and individual engagement in every sphere of cultural expression (ibid.: 544).1 Accordingly, asceticism is not only a unique mode of religious practice that informs religious ideals, it is also a force that constructs cultural parameters.2 In this essay Id like to explore how the disciplined body of the ascetic constitutes an essential arena for the performance of religious ideals and how the bodily cultivation of the ascetic becomes a potential site for reflection and rewriting of culture. Athanasius (298-373 AD), author of The Life of Antony, is considered a central figure of fourth-century Christendom. As a spiritual master, theologian, and bishop of Alexandria, he devoted his life to opposing the Arian heresy. In his account of Antonys life-one of the very first and by far the most important work of hagiography (Harpham 1987)-Athanasius tells the story of an ascetic hero who devotes himself to the pursuit of holiness by living a strict solitary life in the Egyptian desert. Its narrative of saintliness has exerted tremendous influence on Western ethics and spirituality, and is a key resource for the study of early Christian asceticism. Scholars have noted a close connection between ascetic practices and the reading and writing of texts, activities that play a crucial role in ascetic beliefs and practices

1 2
Valantasis regards Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Geoffrey Harpham as the three primary ascetical theorists of the twentieth century. According to Yus introductory essay of this volume, bodily cultivation is considered a channel for learning, embodying, developing, or shaping cultural concepts and ideals.
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(Krueger 1999). Desert ascetics ongoing ruminations about scripture were an important vehicle of their transformation and holiness (Clark 1999). In other words, the Scriptures and hagiographies contained exemplars ascetics could consider and model, thus transforming their own lives through the unremitting act of reading and writing. Their desire to embody these texts was the primary source of their compelling spirituality. With a saints narrative serving as the basis for transformation (Clark 1999 cited in BurtonChristie 1993), an ascetics life could itself be regarded as an edifying text (Krueger 1999). Or we can say that the ascetics intermingled with the exemplars by weaving their lives into the texts they read. This corresponds to the Latin etymological meaning of intertextuality: to intermingle while weaving. According to Flood (2004), the ascetic self shapes the narrative of its life to the narrative of its tradition; the formation of the ascetic self involves both the eradication of subjectivity and voluntary acts of will. If we transpose Floods understanding of this process to the framework of reading and writing, we can say that ascetics eliminate the very notion of authorship but become the active readers who quote the texts actively. The strong link between ascetic text and ascetic body beckons a more material reading of text, one that raises issues of social power and cultural interests (Clark 1999: 373) displayed in the textualization of body and the embodiment of text-ideas expressed in Changs (2006) juxtaposition of text-textile-texture-textuality. According to Chang, these words share the Latin origin texere textum, meaning to weave, to twine together. Accordingly, text is analogous to textile, with their respective textures woven by open flows of signification. An ascetics reading of a text and transformation of the self can therefore be regarded as a trans-linguistic movement of read and written ideas. This trans-linguistic movement cannot be analyzed from a system of significations that may be authoritatively identified and isolated as a distinctive semiotic phenomenon (Asad 1993: 165). While Asad proposes in his study of ritual and discipline in medieval Christian monasticism that reading is a product of social disciple and the text a product of disciplined performers who discourse with one another in historically determinate ways, in this essay Id like to propose that the desert ascetics practice of reading texts and creating texts is embodied in processes of exemplification based in various techniques. Importantly, this exemplification does not result from the inscription of religious ideas, rather, it is the bodily experiences themselves that make the realization of religious ideas possible. In the West, during the classical and Christian eras, the body was characterized as threatening and dangerous, something that needed to be controlled and regulated by cultural processes. This perspective stems from ancient Greek culture and was intensified in the Christian theology of evil that characterizes human beings as fallen creatures (Turner 1987: 20-21). The body as flesh therefore requires the discipline of meditation, fasting,
Desert and Spring: Reading a Saints Body through the Intertextual Encounter between a Christian Ascetic Life and Daoist Utopian Writing
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and sexual abstention to achieve the purification and maintain the life of the soul. Following the growing dominance of Christianity in the West, ascetic attitudes set the tone of Western culture and gave birth to the more general ethic of world mastery that constitutes the essential project of modernity (1987: 22). In a similar vein, Harpham argues that asceticism is not only the particular set of beliefs and practices that erupted into high visibility during the early Christian era, it also refers to certain features of the Western culture (Harpham 1987: xi). For Harpham, culture and asceticism exist in a distinct dialectical relationship. Taking the early Christian desert monks as an example, he suggests that their radically anti-cultural forms (e.g., withdrawing and remaining isolated in the desert, inflicting morbid deprivations and torture on themselves) are entirely incompatible with communal life or the family structure; nevertheless, they brought Book to the Desert, and served as apostles of a textual culture in the domain of the nature (ibid.: xii). In other words, the asceticism of desert monks problematized their home cultures. Its ability to problematize makes asceticism a vital pursuit:
The durability of asceticism lies in its capacity to structure oppositions without collapsing them, to raise issues without settling them Asceticism neither simply condemns culture nor simply endorses it: it does both. Asceticism, we could say, raises the issue of culture by structuring an opposition between culture and its oppositeasceticism is always marked by ambivalence, by a compromised binarism. To contemplate the ascetical basis of cultureis to recognize that an integral part of the cultural experience is a disquiet, an ambivalent yearning for the precultural, postcultural, anticultural, or extracultural. [Harpham 1987: xii]
Furthermore, Harpham regards the ascetic imperative as a transcultural structuring force that manifests in every culture and articulates each cultures urge for transcendence (ibid.: xiii). Harphams suggestion sheds light on the desert ascetics reading texts and creating texts: If we consider their practices a way to raise issues of culture and express a yearning for transcendence, we can then ask what ambivalent binaries their asceticism raises and how it problematizes culture. Accordingly, by considering the text The Life of Antony as an urge to transcendence and saying otherwise than culture, we can examine those dialectic binaries and how they are grappled with through the embodied practices of Christian asceticism. To this end, I adopt the strategy of reading The Life of Antony through another text. I will juxtapose it with the analogous Peach Blossom Spring, a work by the Chinese poet Tao Yuan-ming (365-427 AD). My goal is not simply to place the two works on the same level-for example, to compare the meaning of other-worldliness in early Christian and
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Chinese cultures or the transcendental qualities of desert and springtime images. Rather, the juxtaposition here is intended to be productive in generating the relationship between these texts and the play of difference (Gill 1998: 284).3 In this intertextual environment we can begin to explore the dialectic binaries in The Life of Antony. These two works obviously have very different content and genresone is a Christian hagiography and the other a poem of the Chinese utopian hermit tradition. Yet I believe the two are related in terms of their dynamics of void and longing that constitute the basis of both ascetic practice and the poets writing process. By making them two,4 the one (Peach Blossom Spring) is able to recall the other (The Life of Antony) and to resonate with it (Freud 2007). In the following, I will explicate the dynamic of void and longing in the former and show how this work recalls a similar dynamic of The Life of Antony.
Void and Longing in Peach Blossom Spring

The author of Peach Blossom Spring, also known as Tao Qian, was a minor official who renounced public life and became a recluse. He practiced dao (the Way) and wrote many famous poems on nature and solitude. His Peach Blossom Spring combines poetry (thirty-two lines) and fictive prose about a fisherman who unmindfully enters a world of peace and tranquility inhabited by villagers whose ancestors had fled the chaos of the Qin dynasty in antiquity. After vividly depicting a happy and carefree society, the narrative ends with Tao addressing the inaccessibility of this ideal world and expressing his admiration and longing for it. This work has been credited with initiating a tradition of utopian literature in China, and the Chinese term peach blossom spring is now considered a synonym of utopia. As a revered literary achievement, Peach Blossom Spring still attracts research attention, with some scholars analyzing it as a political fable having critical connotations
Gill explores how juxtaposition constitutes an important comparative strategy for Jonathan Z. Smiths study of religion. According to Gill, Juxtaposition is more than placing two things in adjacent spaces. Juxtaposition is a placement that implies relationship. Juxtaposition is the necessary precondition to comparison. It demands comparison. An effective juxtaposition engages a tension among the items juxtaposed, a tension that raises questions not easily answered. In an engaging juxtaposition there is movement back and forth among the elements. An interplay (1998: 284). According to Cirlots Dictionary of Symbols, two stands for echo, reflection, conflict and counterpoise or contraposition; or the momentary forces of stillness in equilibrium (Cirlot 1962: 221).
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for contemporary society and others emphasizing its philosophical and religious meanings. For example, Tsai (2005) has classified traditional interpretations of the work into three categories: fairyland, historical narration, and interior space. She goes on to note that its themes of reclusion and hermitage are still being mined by those interested in a comparative study of Eastern and Western pastoral literature and mythology. To say that Peach Blossom Spring presents the image of a Chinese utopia does not comport with the contention that there is stable utopian content in an unchanging Chinese mind. While the happy and carefree conditions depicted by the poet certainly look Daoist or Chinese, the ideal world of this work is not something static or uniform that can be extracted in a content analysis of the work; it is instead an event that takes place during the reading process. Liao (1985) claims that to understand how Peach Blossom Spring makes such experiences possible, one must consider the prose and poem as a no-thing that does not necessarily point to any specific reference, thus allowing readers to fill in the blanks of the work and to appropriate it for themselves. Liao extracts three elements of aesthetic structure in reading this work: longing, lacking, and exile. In the beginning of the prose portion, Tao Yuan-ming notes the specific period (Tai-yuan) and place (Wu-ling ) where the fisherman (the main character) comes from, thereby creating a sense of truth for the reader. Upon reading poets cinematic description of the fishermans tour, it is very difficult not to become entrapped in this fictive world. Tao uses images in the manner of a film director, and the reader finds it easy to become the fisherman who rowed upstream, unmindful of the distance he traveled, and who suddenly confronts a different world. Tao employs the most ordinary images to create a sense of wonder and strangeness: the scenes are not unfamiliar to readers, nor are the villagers depicted as aliens or celestial beings. The differences between this village and the outside world arise from a sense of familiarity, and Tao never directly mentions what those differences are. Left unsaid, they constitute part of the no-thing aspect of this work and foreshadow the loss that occurs later. Furthermore, this different world is apprehended by the unmindful and undifferentiated mind of the fisherman; when he later attempts an intentional search for the world, he loses it forever. The reader experiences the same anxiety and disappointment triggered by the paradox: the ideal world is hidden to those who know of it and try to find it. The poets admiration and longing for it only deepens the readers sense of loss. Kwong (1994) considers the works verse complementary to its prose-not repetitive but variant in focus, structure, and means of expression. While the prose describes the fishermans experience in an impersonal and objective tone, the sense of loss at the end of the prose injects a more personal and interpretive voice. The poet begins with an account of why the villagers retreated from their earlier stations and then draws an
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admiring portrait of their new world-a tax-free agrarian economy and pre-calendric culture. Tao writes that those who live in this world have no need of clever contrivance. This utopia is characterized by inaccessibility: it is viewable for short glimpses, but remains absolutely separate from the fishermans world. Acknowledging that inaccessibility, the poet expresses his longing in an emotional voice:
May I ask you who wander within the realm, Can you fathom what lies beyond the dust and noise? I would like to tread the light breeze, And fly high to seek my fellows. [Kwong 1994]
This yearning voice contrasts with the final line of the prose: Since then there has been no one interested in trying to find such a place. In his translation and analysis, Kwong points to the ambiguity of both the prose and poem, asking why a utopia so squarely down-to-earth in character remains so inaccessible:
The tension between visionary longing and historical consciousness explains the presence of two voices, one that finds utopia in nothing more exotic than a sublimation of everyday reality, and the other which gauges its chance in the contemporary milieu. And while the historical voice has the last word in the prose, it is the visionary one that takes the poem to a crescendo, yearning for a society [in which] the dilemma that has long agonized humanity will not be solved but dissolved. What the lyric voice registers is a hope that the ordinary ideal which has turned almost other-worldly might still be realizable, if only a more innocent form of social organization could be found. The one ending on a subdued and the other on a romantic note, the two parts give contrastive rings that attest to the complexity of the poets sentiments. [Kwong 1994: 54]
Similarly, Tsai (2005) also recognizes the tensions in this work by noting that the easy and peaceful depiction of the ideal world implies a bleak sense of tragedy (2005:2829). Yang (1998) also proposes that The Peach Blossom Spring is both utopian and antiutopian. In other words, it is a work about the appearance and the deconstruction of the utopian world. Following the logic of desire and void, Peach Blossom Spring reveals four dialectical threads: disclosedness/inaccessibility (of the ideal world), similarity/difference (between the fishermans world and the ideal world), unmindfulness/discrimination (of the fishermans state of mind), and exile/sociality (of the poets state of mind). Because the dynamic of void and longing informs ascetic practice as well as the poets writing pro-
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cess, I will apply these same dialectical threads in my analysis of the saints biography in the hope that the meeting of these two texts can reveal an otherwise invisible dimension shared by both (Flood 2004).

Disclosedness/Inaccessibility: The Ascetic Body

Antony was described as being different from other children in his inclinations. As a boy, he could not bear to learn letters, but once he started attending church with his parents, he quickly began paying attention to the readings, [and] carefully took to heart what was profitable in them (Athanasius 1980: 30-31). The first real change in his life occurred when he considered a biblical message as God talked directly to him. Antony was between eighteen and twenty years old when his parents died, and soon afterwards he heard a biblical passage, If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. He immediately gave his possessions to local townspeople, keeping just a few items for his younger sister. Later, after hearing a passage proclaiming Do not be anxious about tomorrow, he gave away his remaining possessions and devoted himself to the life of an ascetic. Whereas Tao Yuan-ming longed to tread the light breeze to find his ideal world in the fabrication of language, Antony lived his life according to a book he had read and heard with his heart. The world of the peach blossom spring was built with words, but they could not replace the real world that the poet inhabited-and that gap was the source of the poets longing and loss. In a like manner, letters were only letters for Antony before they were inscribed in his heart. As a person shaped by a particular relationship with the word of God (Brakke 1998), Antony can be considered the product of his unceasing efforts to overcome the distance between the flesh and the word. When Antony first left his village, he imitated the ascetics who lived nearby. At that time there were many local primitive ascetic congregations, but rather than join one of these, he moved away and established a relationship with a senior ascetic. In the beginning he practiced what might be called a standard form of asceticism, but he gradually moved farther and farther from the community of humans. He finally settled in the Egyptian desert to practice fasting, maintain vigils, and sexual abstinence, and later he even retreated to a group of tombs to preserve his solitude and his pursuit of holiness (Chadwick 1958). These three major practices manifest the two basic components of ascetic life, anachrsis (withdrawal) and enkrateia (self-control) (Ware 1995)-both of which have negative and positive connotations. Withdrawal expresses both escape from the social
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and cultural order and a return to an original and uncorrupted bodily state. Self-control is aimed at conquering instinctive urges, but is also viewed as involving violence to our natural appetites as well as their transfiguration (Ware 1995: 4). Using hunger as an example, Brown (1988) notes that in Antonys time, residents of the Egyptian desert and the land surrounding it were constantly under threat of starvation, therefore the practice of fasting has much more cultural and social relevance than sexual abstention. Hunger is a familiar experience for destitute people who live in the desert-often described as a nonhuman place, void of both food and water. Thus, leaving home and entering the desert represents a direct confrontation with the core of temptation: the loss of humanity. The need for food forged a connection between the ascetics and the shared weaknesses of a starving humanity-a condition from which the ascetics wanted to free themselves (Brown 1988). In other words, they constituted a new form of humanity and sanity formed through withdrawal and resisting fleshly needs, including food. This raises questions concerning how this new form of humanity might be disclosed in a state of inaccessibility and in ascetic practices, and how resistance to fleshly needs and renunciation of bodily pleasures might constitute sanity. Both questions can be explored from the Christian understanding of the body or flesh-for example, the Old Testament description of the body as the site where the meaning of holiness is manifest:
The body is shown to be liable to pollution from various foods and from its own discharges and emissions. Lack of bodily integrity, whether caused deliberately or congenital or the result of disease, also causes impurity. The blurring of boundaries between species or between genders, through bodily activity, was also regarded as an unclean act. Israel was called by God to be a holy nation, and this essentially involved being separated from other nations with significant boundaries being vigorously policed. [Isherwood and Stuart 1998: 53]
Accordingly, holiness is actualized by physical purification involving distinctions between dirty and clean and the maintenance of boundaries. In the New Testament, the religious meanings of sin and redemption are realized through Jesus incarnate and resurrected body. His body constitutes a site of transformation for redeemed men and women:
It is from the body of sin and death that we are delivered, it is through the body of Christ on the Cross that we are saved; it is into the body of the Church that we are incorporated; it is in our body that its new life has to be manifest; it is to a resurrection of this body to the likeness of his glorious body that we are destined. [Robinson 1952: 9]
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The letters written by Paul contain a consistent contrast between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma). But instead of proposing a body/soul duality, Paul held that the contrast between flesh and spirit lies in their indications of humans fallen or redeemed states (Isherwood and Stuart 1998). Although infirmity is an inherent quality of the body, the body is also the vehicle of resurrection. Under conditions of persecution, qualities such as faith, the capacity to bear suffering, other-worldliness, contempt for material goods, and longing for heaven constitute a martyrs virtues (Chadwick 1958). Ascetics are considered white martyrs, who eagerly pursue redemption through combat with the body weakened by sin and liable to sin. As Chadwick observes, Whatever is hard in their bodily circumstances is to be counted as discipline, like the athletes training, as the soul prepares itself for heaven (1958: 20). According to Athanasius, a successful ascetic life lies in the incarnation of the Word: By dwelling in a human body, the Word granted incorruption to other human bodies, renewed humanitys knowledge of God in preparation for a life of virtue, and defeated the devil and his demons (Brakke 1998: 149). Athanasius describes the ideal human as a being whose body is perfectly controlled by the Word and remains untouched by its passions. In Athanasius book, Antony represents a paradigmatic instance of a human being whose life is steered by the Word-that is, the saints body is a tablet on which to be written (Clark 1999: 59). The process of writing constitutes an incessant conquering of fleshly needs, and the ideal state of spirituality disclosed by the Word starts the ascetic on the long journey of cultivation. While an ascetic still lives with a human body, the ideal state is never fully achieved. This inaccessibility constitutes the prime impetus behind the ascetics void and longing. Furthermore, the process of writing the religious ideal does not imply bodily passivity. As Asad has noted,
The human body is not to be viewed simply as the passive recipient of cultural imprints, still less as the active source of natural expressions that are clothed in local history and culture, but as the self-developable means for achieving a range of human objects-from styles of physical movement (e.g., walking), through modes of emotional being (e.g., composure), to kinds of spiritual experience (e.g., mystical states). [Asad 1997: 47-48]
Accordingly, it is the various bodily experiences, such as hunger, thirst, sense of control and lack of control, which make the realization of religious ideals possible.
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Similarity/Difference: The Perfect Body

After Antony gave away his possessions and left the village, he began his journey to sainthood by imitating the senior ascetic. Brakke argues that by describing Antonys pursuit of holiness as the imitation of a senior ascetic, Athanasius supports an ethic of imitation that reflects his own program of self-formation (Brakke 1998: 245). The logic of imitation is also expressed via Athanasius understanding of the relationship between soul and God. In his Contra Gentes, he states that the soul is like a mirror-only when every stain of sin is removed and purity attained can one truly contemplate as in a mirror the Word, the image of the Father (Athanasius, Contra Gentes, cited from Louth 1981: 79) This metaphor of the souls semblance to God implies the intimate relationship between self and holy knowledge-in other words, self-knowledge involves knowledge of God, because God has made the soul to reflect His image (Louth 1981: 79). Unlike the Origenist mystical theology, which was strongly influenced by a Platonic understanding of soul and ideas, Athanasiuss mirroring metaphor does not suggest a natural kinship between the soul and God. Following the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, there is an unbridgeable gap between God and all creatures-God is eternal, while human beings are both unstable and changeable-therefore no ontological continuity exists between the image in the mirror and the image itself. Accordingly, In the case of the soul reflecting the image of God, this similarity discloses a much deeper dissimilarity at the level of substance (Louth 1981: 80). For Athanasius, The Christian life required continual formation of the self through imitation of an eternally consistent form or pattern. Such self-formation through imitation was the ethical facet of the process that he called divinization (Brakke 1998: 167). Gaps or dissimilarities between imitators and an exemplar raise several questions: What does it mean to be a follower? What is the guiding issue for the follower? What does it mean to be a perfect imitator? Is it possible to be a perfect imitator? I turn to Gadamer (1989) and Masuzawas (1993) discussions of art and representation to discuss these questions. Gadamer uses the ontological interwovenness of the original and reproduced when distinguishing between a picture (Bild, also meaning image) and a copy (Abbild). Since the essential character of any copy is to resemble the original, it functions as a means rather than an end that points to what is copied via the similarity. Once the function is accomplished, its own existence is no longer important. Gadamer calls this and similar mediating functions self-effacement. In contrast, the picture can never be separated from what is represented:
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The picture has its own being. This being as presentation, as precisely that in which it is not the same as what is represented, give it the positive distinction of being a

picture as opposed to a mere reflected image. This kind of picture is not a copy, for it presents something which, without it, would not present itself in this way. It says something about the original. [Gadamer 1989: 140]
Unlike the one-sided relationship between a copy and its original, a picture and its original define and enhance each other. The picture is an autonomous reality emanating from the original, and essential to an emanation is that what emanates is an overflow. What it flows from does not thereby become less. Recognition of the ontological valence of a picture implies that it has an autonomy that also affects the original. For strictly speaking, it is only through the picture (Bild) that the original (Urbild) becomes the original (Ur-bild) (ibid.: 142). In another illustration of the exemplary significance of a religious picture, Gadamer argues that the divine becomes picturable through word and image, neither of which replicates the divine like a copy duplicates its original: Word and image are not mere imitative illustrations, but allow what they present to be for the first time fully what it is (1989: 143). From this perspective, the original is no longer the origin to which the representational work (word or image) tries to return. Rather, the original is something to be pursued. Since there is nothing to be replicated, the representational work realizes its origin by saying something about it rather than by simply duplicating. Thus, we can say that Tao Yuan-mings work is the realization of the ideal world of the peach blossom spring through language, but the realization of no-thing does not give birth to a definite something. The work remains a no-thing, but one that allows for all kinds of imaginative elaboration. This represents the indeterminate and inexhaustible quality of a work of art. If we use Gadamers understanding as an analogy,5 Antonys pursuit of the perfect can be understood as an event of being-in it being appears, meaningfully and visibly (1989: 144). His practice of a disciplined and solitary life was not an imitation of his prior exemplar in the same manner that a copy replicates its original and functions via the simple similarity. By reading different exemplars and taking them into his heart, he wrote his life as a work of art and became a new exemplar to in turn be read and followed by
The analytical strategy of adopting Gadamers understanding as an analogy is similar to the analytical strategy of juxtaposition of this essay. Etymological speaking, analogy means making two things proportional, on which a comparison may be based.
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others. In asceticism, the transcendence of the natural is analogous to an act of literary or artistic creation (Cameron 1995: 153). In other words, the production of an ascetic self resembles the work of artistic creation. In the same manner as a work of art whose ideality does not consist in its imitating and reproducing an idea but, in the appearing of the idea itself (1995), Antony made the ideality of sainthood visible through the writing of his flesh. Where Gadamer emphasizes the interwoven relationship between origin and representation by illustrating the ontological valence of a picture, Masuzawa (1993) disrupts the order of origin and representation in her discussion of Walter Benjamins essay on photography, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1968), which she describes as one of the most important commentaries on the disappearance of the authority of origin, original, originality (Masuzawa 1993: 16). According to Benjamin, the advent of photography-characterized by new technological modes of production and reproduction-destroyed the original aura of artworks by substitut[ing] a plurality of copies for a unique existence (Benjamin 1968: 211). Masuzawa examines this loss of aura and authority from two perspectives. First, she notes that the photographic copy does not replicate the original but acquires autonomy and independence from it by its unique way of capturing an image, which differs from our daily bodily experiences. In other words, it creates something new rather than reproducing something old. Furthermore, its limitless simulacra circulate on their own terms and reactivate the original. Second, photography as an art form lacks an original, therefore the traditional auratic economy of origination (Masuzawa 1993: 19) disappears and the boundary between origin and replication become blurred. Masuzawa further argues that regardless of how faithfully it represents, it is by no means identical to what it repeats. She uses Jorge Luis Borgess illustration of Pierre Menards re-writing of a Cervantes novel to claim that representation as such does not establish identity either through resemblance or by the logic of descent; rather, representation is a function of difference, of repetition without a unitary origin (ibid.: 25). Here representation is characterized by rebellious difference, or we can say that difference gives birth to resemblance, and the descendant gives birth to its ancestor. By building an ideal world through the fabrication of language in Peach Blossom Spring, Tao Yuan-ming remains aware of the original difference that partakes in the building process. Here, the dialogue between the same and the different can be read from two perspectives. First, his ordinary description of the peach blossom spring is a construction of difference between the ideal world and the fishermans world via the similarity. The second level of difference is the fishermans failure to return to the peach blossom spring, implying that the same marks cannot be
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used to find ones way back. In other words, the difference is original, and the disruption of difference only temporary. Furthermore, when the descendant becomes the original, lineage is something to be earned rather than inherited. Antonys combat with his own desires illustrates a longing for the likeness of the glory of Adam (Brown 1988: 213)-that is, a longing for the original state of humanity. However, such an original state does not exclude the existence of temptation, which existed at the very beginning. As Harpham (1987) observes, The origin is always already differential and nontranscendent; usurpation or violence has always already occurred; the natural is always already unnatural (Harpham 1987: 9). The loss of the original state does not result from the existence of temptation, but from humanitys twisted will, and so there is no original perfect state to return to, only an original condition that allows one to relive Adams first and most fatal temptation, and to overcome it (Brown 1988: 221). Rather than pursue the original state of perfection, Antony pursued a disciplined and solitary life as part of his unremitting search for the original condition of battle. Evenutally time no longer follows the successive rhythm of past, present, and future. The past must be cut off at every moment, and only the present counts:
He did not hold time past in his memory, but day by day, as if making a beginning of his asceticism, increased his exertion for advance, saying continually to himself Pauls word about forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies aheadHe observed that in saying today he was not counting the time passed, but as one always establishing a beginning, he endeavored each day to present himself as the sort of person ready to appear before God. [Athanasius 1980: 37]
In order to enter an eternal state of freshness and readiness, Antony had to forsake all past memories, including those of his parents and relatives. Athanasius writes, All the desire and all the energy he possessed concerned the exertion of the discipline (1980: 32). Furthermore, his body had to be remade, to return to an original, natural and uncorrupted state (Brown 1988: 223). In other words, Antonys ascetic practice is not an attempt to destroy his body, but to perfect it (Jasper 2004). The remade body becomes the expression for the process of transformation. Thus, when St. Antony emerged from his fortress after twenty years of pursuing the ascetic life, his friends were amazed to see that his body maintained its former condition, neither fat from lack of exercise, nor emaciated from fasting and combat with demons, but was just as they had known him prior to his withdrawal. He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature (Athanasius 1980: 42). In Wares words,
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There is no trace of dualism here, physical austerities have not destroyed Antonys body but restored it to a healthy and natural state. Asceticism, rightly understood, is a struggle not against but for the body (Ware 1997: 99-100). The unchanging body state is thought to be the outcome of an incessant battle with temptation. So Adam as the original ancestor is not an ideal to return to, but a critical moment to be overcome, after which the possibility of temptation must still be acknowledged and resisted. The Flesh is shown as polysemic, writes Wyschogrod (1995). Words [are] resplendent with higher meaning when disciplined, but always ready to erupt into temptation (1995: 24).
Unmindfulness/Discrimination: The Redeemed Body

The difference between unmindfulness and the state of discrimination is the point of tension in Peach Blossom Spring, the first being a Daoist ideal and the second a degraded state originating from the use of language. As a poet who fully aware of the power and problems of language, how did Tao Yuan-ming handle this? If we first explore the Daoist perspective on language, we inevitably come across Lao-tzus dictum, He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know. The emphasis on pure nonintellectualized experience reflects a belief in the transparency of language, or, when applied to poetic language, the ideal is its transparency, which makes it like a spotlight that brightens objects emerging from the real world, showing them in full brilliance (Yip 1993: 82). As long as it brings us before Nature, it will be forgotten, suggesting that poetry is created to disappear. The goal of language is not to represent or rebuild reality, but to recover the relationship between us and a spontaneous Great Composition. Poems are bridges that carry us from intellectualized suffocation to the freedom of Nature. Instead of explaining Nature to us, a good poem leads us to the threshold between the spoken and the unspoken. Yip (1993) used Chinese painting to illustrate, arguing that the full activity of language should be like the co-presence of the solid and the void in Chinese painting, allowing the reader to receive not only the words (the written) but also the wordlessness (the unwritten). Thus, when language brings us to the unspoken, the concrete, or changing Nature, we can forget it in the same manner that-as Chuang-tzu put it-a fish trap can be forgotten once a fish has been caught. To see things as things see themselves is a Daoist ideal, one that cannot be achieved easily because our minds are clouded by broken knowledge through which we lose the ability to relate to Nature. In Transmission of the Lamp, the famous Zen Buddhist Kung-an succinctly explains the three stages of our perception of reality:
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Thirty years ago, before I was initiated into Zen, I saw mountains as mountains, rivers as rivers. Later when I got an entrance into knowledge, I saw mountains not

as mountains, river not as rivers. Now that I have achieved understanding of the substance, mountains are still mountains, rivers still rivers. [Yip 1993: 101]
That is, originally we perceive things in the manner of innocent children who respond to concrete meanings and the tangibility of things-the smell of their blankets and the feel of their bottles. However, when this primary relationship is broken, we must use language to repair the rupture, thereby seeing mountains not as mountains, rivers not as rivers. At this stage we try to rebuild order through ideas and knowledge about things from many different disciplines, each one built upon different assumptions. These human-made theories alienate us from immediate relationships with things, and when we lose the ability to see things as they are, we also lose part of ourselves. How does poetic language bring us back to things? The next example is Wang Weis (701-761 AD) Hsin-Yi Village:
High on the tree-tips, the hibiscus Sets forth red calyxes in the mountain. A stream hut, quiet. No one around. It blooms and falls, blooms and falls. [Yip 1972]
Wang Weis language spotlights the brilliance of the hibiscus blossom, bringing us before Nature to listen to its rhythm. The poet invites us to a landscape in which no one else is around-in other words, he invites us to suspend our typical attitudes and desires to listen to the subtle voice of the blossoms, blooming and falling, blooming and falling. The same idea was captured in Cezannes words: The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 17). Wang Wei shows us how a poet pursues the Daoist ideal of unmindfulness: letting things be themselves without the disturbance of human contrivance. The ideal of linguistic transparency may be possible for poets like Wang Wei, but the problems of language are more complex for Tao Yuan-ming. The three stages of perception described in Transmission of the Lamp do not hold here. In his depiction, the unmindful state of the fisherman is immediately and irrevocably lost once the differentiating mind arises. The rupture of differentiation cannot be repaired and the longing at the end of the work does not recover our relationship with the spontaneous Great Composition; it expresses that
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rupture rather than resolving it. If we view Wang Weis poem as arrival, then Tao Yuanmings work is simply passing through. The dialectical relationship between undifferentiation and differentiation in Antonys life can be explored from two dimensions: demonology and the non-differentiation between public and private life. Demons are central elements in any ascetics solitary life, their most distasteful and faithful companions. Valantasis (1992) argues that demons contribute to the perfection of a monks body through a growth-oriented antagonistic relationship, and Brakke (2001) suggests that for Antony, demons constituted principles of differentiation resistant to the ascetics return to an original unity of spiritual essence (2001: 22). The temptations of demons are recognized by the ascetics discrimination of bodily movements; he needs to know differences between those that are natural to the body, those caused by negligence in food and drink, and those caused by demons. According to Rubenson (quoted in Brakke 2001), who analyzed Antonys letters,
The mind or soul that fails to attend to the teachings of the Spirit of God becomes disordered, allows the demons to stir up movements within the body, and serves as a guide to the evil spirits working in its members. [Brakke 2001: 24]
Since the invisible power of demons is actualized in the ascetics body, and since the body both exteriorizes the negative invisible power of demons and the positive spiritual power of the Word, the work of discrimination constitutes important training for ascetics. This work is best exemplified in the discernment of sexual desire-in Browns (1988) words, Sexuality became a privileged ideogram (1988: 230). Compared with the bodily labor of enduring pangs of hunger, the work of discernment is more closely tied to a mindful awareness of the state of the heart. The strong connection between control of the body and control of the mind indicates that the state of the heart may be recognized in bodily movement. Sexual dreams and emissions mark the lingering of an ascetics sexual desire, regularly pointing to an impure state that needs to be purified. Harpham (1987) explored the significance of discrimination in his discussion of ascetic linguistics. One of the most important tasks in an ascetics life is discriminating among spirits and not being entrapped by the tricks of demons. In Antonys life, demons tried to disrupt his discipline through memories of things he had renounced, including his possessions, the pleasures of food, and the bonds of kinship. The reason why demonic suggestions are tempting is because they make sense, both in terms of what is being resisted and what an ascetic is trying to achieve. Demons are good at imitation: they chant sacred songs, recite scripture, and are capable of repeating what an ascetic has just
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read. Harpham suggests that a demons repetition of an ascetics imitation of the apostles through reading blurs the boundary between the original and parody:

[The] demons mere repetition reveals that speech operates not by a one-way process of redemption, but by a two-sided possibility of double mediation that both realizes the meaning of the text and empties it of meaning. In all they do, demons represent a principle of perfect imitation that is at once the goal of the ascetic and his undoing. [Harpham 1987: 9]
He continues to note that demonology reveals the fallen dimension of speech, with perfect mimicry disturbing the order of logos in the suspicion that the original is already structured by repetition (1987: 10). The ascetics best weapon for defeating parody is to see through its illusion and ignore the content, otherwise it can only complicate the ascetics pursuit of perfection. Whereas ascetics had to inscribe the truth of the Book onto their own hearts, they also had to see through the illusion of truth when it took the form of parody. It is interesting that the only time a demon utters the truth is to admit failure: I no longer have a place no weapon, no city (Athanasius 1980: 62). Through this confession, the demon admits that he is able to do nothing, but nothing will continue to haunt the ascetic until he can see through the something to nothing. The problem of language that Tao Yuan-ming dealt with resonates with the lives of ascetics, leading us to ask if language leads to referential reality or cancels the existence of the reference. Demonic temptation exposes the problematic relationship of the ascetic to language, and Antonys solution differed from both Wang Weis re-appropriation of poetic language and Tao Yuan-mings maintenance of irreconcilability. As Harphram explains so well, Antonys radical solution was to make himself into a sign that shines in heaven:
Counseling his audience not to boast about expelling demons, Antony cautions that the performance of signs does not belong to us-this is the Saviors work. So he said to the disciples: Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven [a] sign that truly signifies is like a person who has been cleansed so that the apparent is identical to the real. This is a goal worthy of any discipline, and yet human beings are incapable of true signification; the successful performance of signs can only be Gods work. The best we can hope for ourselves is not that we learn to use signs, but that we become signs-and not spoken signs, but durable signs written in heaven in a script which, defying the nature of script itself, is intimate with the divine essence. Signs may be vulnerable to demonic pollution, but the mark of virtue is that we aspire to the condition
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of signs, aspire to an utter materiality, a totally degraded and therefore perfect dependency on the animating spirits. [Harphram 1987: 10]
The fallen dimension of language revealed by demonic temptation turns out to be the ascetics redemption. The question being asked is no longer where language leads us, but how to transform oneself into a sign that can be written by the Savior. The problem of differentiation and undifferentiation also appears in another dimension of an ascetics life: how to undifferentiate ones private and public lives. This goal is related to Antonys teaching that the ascetic must withdraw from his individual, separate, surface self of the fleshly name to the shared, united, hidden self of the true name (Brakke 2001: 27). While discriminating awareness is emphasized in combat with demons, undifferentiated states of private and public become the main goal as the ascetic goes through incessant self-examination. Such works of self-examination and self-testing are not limited to the sphere of the inner self. On the contrary, Athanasius (1980) describes it as a process of bringing private thought into the context of public heteroglossia to erase the distinction between the two by social judgment:
Let each of us note and record our actions and the stirrings of our souls as though we were going to give an account to each other Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that, blushing as much to write as to be seen, we might never be absorbed by evil things. [Athanasius 1980: 73]
As Foucault (1997) pointed out, writing here as an arm in spiritual combat [has an] ethopoietic function (1997: 209) that transforms truth into ethos. The others gaze becomes the light that penetrates the shadow of the ascetics desire. Brown (1988) adds that combat against the ascetics desire is carried out via the interpenetration of body and soul:
In the desert tradition, the body was allowed to become the discreet mentor of the proud soul. The rhythms of the body, and with the body, his concrete social relations determined the life of the monk: his continued economic dependence on the settled world for food, the hard school of day-to-day collaboration with his fellow ascetics in shared rhythms of labor, and mutual exhortation in the monasteries slowly changed his personality. The material conditions of the monks life were held capable of altering the consciousness itself. [Brown 1988: 237]
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The redeemed body is a body of living sacrifice; it is also the only place in which the Spirit of God can manifest itself (Destro and Pesce 1998). Denial of personal wealth is only one preliminary stage for the final renunciation of the wish to possess ones own experience. Every trace of the inner world has to be transformed into the communal world of the desert. An ascetics life is not one of solitary insulation; on the contrary, community plays an important role in the disciplined life.

Exile and Sociality: The Social Body

Liao (1985) identifies five levels of exile in Peach Blossom Spring. The exile of the village ancestors from Qin political disorder constitutes the territorial exile. The villagers were themselves people of dis-placement or land-lessness who lost their original property. When their village was accidentally found by an outsider, they became outsiders to the outsider. These were not people from no-where, but from the same origin as the fisherman. However, their collective origin was not a place to return to-their ancestors had fled the disorders ...and, having taken refuge to this inaccessible spot with wives and children and neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world (1985: 34). The retreat becomes the center, with no place to return to. This explains the villagers comment to the fisherman upon his departure: Theres no need to mention our existence to outsiders (ibid.: 34). The temporal difference revealed by the fishermans report constitutes the second level of exile: the villagers sighed unhappily as the fisherman enumerated the dynasties one by one and recounted the vicissitudes of each (Liao 1985).The temporal difference makes the fisherman and villagers strangers; when the villagers settled at the peach blossom spring, they permanently abandoned the temporal zone defined by the alternately ruling dynasties (remember that each new dynasty started its own calculation of time). When the villagers asked the fisherman about the present dynasty, they lamented the erasure of a prior time and the laying down of a new beginning. From their atemporal perspective, the loss of prior times meant only that the fate they had suffered in historical time would be repeated. From the fishermans perspective, the Tai-yuan period of the Jin dynasty to which he belonged had lost its footing, not broken by an alternative historical temporal course, but by the peach blossom springs atemporality, which represented Natures undisturbed timeless cycle (Kwong 1994). The third level of exile emerges through references to signs or marks. When the fisherman left the peach blossom spring, he carefully marked the route and reported what he had found to the magistrate. Such an intentional mindset was in total conflict with his earlier unmindfulness, and the marks and signs he noted could not return him
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to that place. The high-minded Nanyang gentleman who heard the story and followed the same signs, could not find the place, either. The disappointment expressed at the end of the prose section is followed by a wishful poem that suggests the fourth level of exilethat of the poet himself. While he uses language to fabricate the peach blossom spring, he also suggests that it is only accessible to unmindful people, that language at once creates the world and makes it inaccessible. The reading experience is the fifth level of exile. We experience the exile of the villagers, the fisherman, and the writer until we finally realize that we, too, are exiled by the work, the language, and the ideal world it creates. The peach blossom spring is no more than a non-place that takes shape in our longing, and the experience of reading exposes its unbridgeable distance. In accord with this theme, we must ask how exile becomes possible, how does the world expel a person, and how does a person abandon this world. The alternative Peach Blossom Spring world is not a non-world. When the refugees hid themselves from the disorder of the fishermans society, they rebuilt a place of their own; when the ascetics retreated into the desert, they built a new city there. In his discussion of Indian asceticism, Olivelle (1995) describes the dialectic between the ascetic creation and the social construction of the body. We cannot understand one without the other. Even though the ascetic creation is considered a deconstruction of the socially constituted body, at times they share a common pursuit. For example, they both quest for purity and immortality, although these values are pursued in opposite ways. This model of dialectical interrelatedness can be productively used to discuss the relationship between the desert and the city. In the fourth century, Egypt was a land whose population lived under a pall of perpetual fear of starvation (Brown 1988: 218). When Antony refused to participate in the conventional world, he was in fact making a radical move because the desert was considered an especially food-deprived zone. If ascetics could remain human in such an environment, they were thought capable of recovering a touch of the unimaginable glory of Adams first state (1988: 220). They viewed their lives as mimicking Adams condition in order to overcome the Fall and acquire a new humanity. But after Antony had spent twenty years in solitude, his spirit attracted many followers, and from then on, there were monasteries in the mountains and the desert was made a city by monks, who left their own people and registered themselves for citizenship in the heavens (Athanasius 1980: 42-43). This new city was a counter-world where twisted humanity could only be healed by contact with others. Antony, acting as spiritual father in this new community, led his followers by teaching from his own ascetic experiences. It was through dependence on his spiritual father that the monk learned to understand his own heart, and to open the heart to others (Brown 1988: 227). When these followers left their parents,
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they did not become orphans or strangers in the world, since the new community and its spiritual guide offered a countercultural identity. Their bond with the world was changed but not dissolved (Nagy 1992). The new community was dedicated to devotion and righteousness, for neither perpetrator nor victim of injustice was there, no complaint of a tax collector . . . (Athanasius 1980: 64). It was also a place for transforming multiple hearts into one spirit. Brown (1988) argues that such transformations were not achieved by pondering the meaning of scripture in the manner of the highly literate Origen; instead, the monks own heart was the new book (1988: 229). They read themselves through the incessant exegesis of the movement of their hearts. Such readings were not done in solitude, but in front of the spiritual father and fellow monks. In Origens group of elites, peoples hearts were burned by the appropriation of sacred texts. In Antonys nonliterate community they found a new alphabet of the heart (Brown 1988: 229). Twenty years of solitude did not deprive Antony of his sociability: When he saw the crowd, he was not annoyed any more than he was elated at being embraced by so many people. He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature (Athanasius 1988: 42). He was gifted in healing those who suffered bodily ailments, purging demons, consoling the mournful, and reconciling those who were hostile to each other. Athanasius alternately describes him as a lamp to everyone (1988: 99) and a physician given to people by God (1988: 94). When he chose an ascetic life, he did not do so from a sense of contempt for peoples needs in this world; he shared the same longing for Paradise with common people. When ascetics used their energy to break the dark cycle of hunger and avarice (Brown 1980: 221) by fasting, people believed that they would be rewarded with the huge, physical exuberance of Adams Paradise (Brown 1980). Farmers therefore collected sand from the successful ascetics footsteps and scattered it on their fields in hope of producing a richer harvest. The ascetic and the farmers shared the same famine-centered situation. The ascetic radicalized this lack to its most underprivileged degree, while the farmers recognized the paradox of the ascetics practice-the more you renounce, the more you get-and attempted to share the extraordinary power gained from strict discipline by collecting the ascetics physical traces. The ascetics life was textualized even as he was alive, with others reading it and using it as the desert yearns for water. Another means of exploring the relationship between ascetics and farmers is through the meaning of bread, symbolic of ties to human social life. When Antony first retreated he started to grow food by himself, rejoicing that he would thereby be annoying no one and because he kept himself from being a burden in all things (Athanasius 1988: 69). If true ascetics were those who attempt to completely deny the interdepen-
169
dence that constitutes a basic character of human life, then the farmers revived that interrelatedness by connecting the crops growth with the ascetics physical existence. When Antony did not become a martyr, he gave himself as a teacher to his imitators and became a healer for the sick and broken. The common people called the ascetic back to their world through their needs, and the ascetic responded like a martyr, answering with a testimony of his faith. The ascetic who renounced the world and the common people who remained in the world sustained a kind of dialectical relationship. Unlike modern science fiction writers who situate their stories in extraordinary temporal-spatial matrixes, Tao Yuan-ming used the most ordinary language and located his fable in the era in which he lived, making Peach Blossom Spring simultaneously too near and too far. His villagers created a world of no-where from their experience of exile, but when we encounter their world through the construction of language, we become the ones who are expelled and no longer completely at ease in our own world. Perhaps it was this sense of being a stranger that led Antony to the desert, and perhaps it was the very cry of urban destitution that led him back to the world. When he came out of his desert cell and reencountered people, he participated in the old world in accordance with his new humanity-not like an immortal angel, but like someone giving from a state of destitution, a new mind creating a new line.
Conclusion
Both Athanasiuss hagiography of Saint Antony and Tao Yuan-mings Peach Blossom Spring can be regarded as texts that say otherwise than culture and urge transcendence. Their similar combination of disquiet and longing allows us to read one through the other. Although more directly comparative studies across traditions are important and worthwhile, the focus here has stayed primarily with the desert ascetic. Following Harphams articulation of culture and asceticism, I have tried to reveal how Christian asceticism raises issues for Western culture. But to distill these problems as posed in The Life of Antony, I found a detour to the famous Chinese utopian poem useful. While this detour has been unconventional, the decision to make it was not totally arbitrary or intuitive since it has allowed me to reveal the meaning of one thing through another thing. Accordingly, the intertextual relationship between The Life of Antony and Peach Blossom Spring is symbolic. As Trias points out, the original etymological meaning of symbol was not a noun form, but rather symboling, which implies the act of throwing-together two parts of a broken coin that betoken and secure an alliance (Trias 1998: 103): The event itself is always an encounter, or rather a (sym-ballic) relation between a presence
170
of some kind that reveals itself and its recognition by a particular witness (defining its form and figure) (Trias 1998: 105). In this sense, Peach Blossom Spring is more like a translucent mirror held up to The Life of Antony. The one must be translucent to let the other emerge. The Peach Blossom Spring in this sense manifests the method, The Life of Antonys way of going. Furthermore, in addition to serving as a strategy for this essay, intertextual reading also plays a significant role in ascetic beliefs and practices. In the preceding I propose that an ascetics reading of a text and transformation of the self can be regarded as a translinguistic movement between scriptural reading and bodily writing. And I argued that Christian ascetic practices are strongly associated with the exemplification/textualization of the body and the embodiment of text. The religious ideas of the Word-including renunciation, the imitation of Christ, redemption, and resurrection-are all embodied in the Saint Antonys fasting, solitude, demon fighting, and performing miracles. In other words, body is the medium through which transcendence can be experienced (Norris 2005: 184) . Since the body is a site of transformation, the practices of fasting and solitude are not really negative effacements of human inclinations, but affirmative acts toward making a new humanity based on the creation of a new body. The stage of bodily transformation is preliminary to the transformation of the heart. Discernment and undifferentiation then constitute the mindful part of ascetic labor. But bodily and heart transformations cannot be separated in ascetic practice. The textualization of the body, encompassing both negative control and affirmative re-creation, and the mutual engagement of body and mind in this process indicate the indispensability of the body to ascetic practices. For Antony, the new humanity both originated and was realized in the malleable body, which manifested text to transform him into an exemplar for his culture. People witnessed the power of transcendence through the ascetics most balanced and healthy body:
He never succumbed, due to old age, to extravagance in food, nor did he change his mode of dress because of frailty of the body, nor even bathe his feet with water, and yet in every way he remained free of injury. For he possessed eyes undimmed and sound, and he saw clearly. He lost none of his teeth-they simply had been worn to the gums because of the old mans great age. He also retained health in his feet and hands, and generally he seemed brighter and of more energetic strength than those who make use of baths and a variety of foods and clothing. [Athanasius 1980: 98]
The religious practice of the desert ascetics springs from uneasiness about culture. As a negative landscape located outside the sphere of existence, the desert becomes the place
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susceptible only to things transcendent (Cirlot 1962: 76). The ascetic body in the desert is a body of becoming. By renunciation of food, sex, and identity, it pushes the logic of the culture to its limit and invents a heterogeneous logic of fertility. The ascetic body problematizes issues of culture and offers an arena for echoing and counterpoising the same. Consequently, it is not only the medium for achieving transcendence, it also constitutes a site where culture is both reflected and rewritten.
Appendix
The Text of Peach Blossom Spring

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Yi-Jia Tsai Department of Religious Studies, Fu Jen Catholic University 510, Jhongjheng Rd., Sinjhuang, Taiwan 24205
yijia.tsai@gmail.com
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Bodily Cultivation as a Mode of Learning

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