ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the anthropological study of much-studied places. My sudden participation in a newly established festival in the Japanese upland municipality of Hongu (recalled in detail below) occasions an examination of a state-led rural revitalisation campaign as an institutionalised form of representation management. My active presence in the Echo Festival has led me to reflect on the way in which my own anthropological practice became locally subsumed and institutionally directed to an internally specified purpose. What follows is an attempt to explore, with respect to contemporary upland Japan, a particular local manifestation of what Giddens calls ‘institutional reflexivity’ (1991). In order to present an outline of this local theatre of self-representation, I identify the earlier scholarship carried out, and the uses to which it is put.
