ABSTRACT
Objects that are ascribed heritage value bear the weight of many interpretative pressures and strategic aspirations. They may be required to substantiate ideas about the past as tradition and the significance of the locality of their creation. These ideas fashion identities that may extend the significance of and even come to stand in for the individual situation and skill of their makers. At the same time these objects are recognised as having an ‘agency’ and a ‘biography’ that is based on their particular, even unique, material attributes (Gosden and Marshall 1999). This recognition is derived at least in part, from the notions of intentionality, aim and force implied by the term ‘object’ itself. The acknowledgement of the existence of these forces that act upon and arise from objects, has gone some considerable way in redressing a conservative and sometime conservationist view of heritage objects as historical entities, whose meaning is as rigid and prescribed as the processes available for preventing their material deterioration or their placement in repositories of knowledge. The description and analysis of these forces show how heritage value may
be construed as a determinant of the literal and intellectual position of objects in the display spaces, storage facilities and inventories of museums. These institutional arrangements condense and make visible the object’s movement across different networks of meaning and status, between categories such as artefact and art; craft and curio. The trajectories of objects through these networks reveal movement in terms of an effect or ‘trace’ of objects and locate the dynamic for these shifts and changes in overarching relations of power and authority. The heavy hand of discourse and the explanatory power of theories of modernity and globalisation (Appadurai 1997; 2001) and of property relations and copyright legislation (Strathern 1999) in these kinds of interpretations make the relations between object, context and human actor(s) the fundamental point of issue in the creation of value. In the Japanese context and in the UNESCO criteria for universal cultural
recognition, the tying together of object and actor is the basis of ‘intangible
cultural knowledge’ (Condominas 2004), whereby value is the expressive outcome of the artisan’s body in skilled motion. This is at once a romantic notion, of the artist genius whose skill is ever present and transferred directly to the materials, reminiscent of what Michael Taussig (1992) calls, following James Frazer’s thesis about ‘sympathetic magic’, ‘the magic of contact’. It is also a notion which draws attention away from a recognition that now is belatedly being made of the particular and sometimes peculiar force of the object. This force is not derived from a position within a network or system of social relations, nor is it the effect of materiality. It is a capacity for affect which emerges from the object’s ontological position in the order of relations between persons and things. Approaching object relations in terms of ontology is different from the anthropological emphasis on social relationships, by which and through which the ownership of objects and the skill that goes into their making are normally understood. It is also different from the Western attitude to objects as things that have ownership, tied inextricably to the location and creativity of their makers and protected by the laws of copyright (Strathern and Hirsch 2004). It is the anthropological influence which has been most instrumental in the construction of the idea of heritage, through various UNESCO declarations, in opposition to the idea of cultural knowledge being a ‘thing’ created and authored uniquely by a single individual (Bouchenaki 2004). What has emerged is a shift from ‘cultural property’ to ‘cultural heritage’ that has been based on a three-fold approach: first, on interpreting tangible heritage within a context of social relations and ties to place; second, on translating intangible heritage as ‘materiality’; and, finally, on supporting efforts to sustain practitioners and the passing on of knowledge and skill (ibid.: 9). In the Japanese context, when these social relationships are systematised as
a ‘family system’ iemoto, articulated through the bodily actions of a craftsperson and qualified through the application of aesthetic terms to an object, then they achieve an identifiable expression that can be appreciated as part of a value system, that is as ‘cultural heritage’. However, there are objects which create and are sustained by human relationships which are not systematic. They also lack a vocabulary for public or official recognition. These are strange and sometimes unsettling objects defying easy categorisation, transgressing boundaries and in their hybrid, ephemeral nature, separate from the world of the ordinary. The objects I refer to and shall investigate here are mechanical dolls (kara-
kuri ningyô) which were made not as children’s playthings, but as devices for the adult imagination and for playful diversion in the ‘shows’ (misemono) of curiosities and wonders that were a regular sight in the urban world of the Edo period. They are often sophisticated in design and the clockwork technologies from which they were developed were instrumental in introducing ideas and practices from western science, (rangaku) during the Edo period (Screech 2002). Probably the most famous example of a karakuri is the ‘teacarrying doll’ (chakumi ningyô) originally made in the seventeenth century as an element in a form of popular theatre and recreated in the 1960s (Schodt
1988: 60-2). This mechanical human achieved national recognition because of the age and complexity of its wind-up, clockwork mechanism, but is one of many types of automata, that include relatively simple hand-operated devices. It is also one of many styles and themes, the majority of which are only acknowledged for their local associations as ‘famous products’ (meibutsu) and as ‘folk products’ (minzoku geinô). As inanimate objects that may be artificially animated so as to imitate the
action and behaviour of a variety of figures from the human, animal and spirit worlds, these karakuri are part of dispersed networks of human and non-human agents with the power of intention. They are similar in this respect to the ‘good-luck’ amulets (engimono) described by Daniels (2003), which are bought at shrines and have a domestic and everyday usage. These amulets challenge the divide between artistic value and technological utility and through their material properties are attributed an agency and an intentionality to act upon the world (ibid.: 623). The important and interesting difference between engimono and karakuri, is that while acquisition and operation of the former have a causal outcome, resulting in good fortune, there is no determined causal outcome of the latter. It is a device that repeats and signifies itself, producing affect rather than effect. It is this distinction and what I shall argue is the intrinsic strangeness of automata as well as the peculiar situation of the karakuri I am interested in here that can help us to understand an object on the margins of what is understood by heritage, never quite achieving this valuation. The karakuri I shall describe are particular to the city of Kobe and as such
known as the ‘Kôbe ningyô’. The analysis that follows is based on interviews with collectors and restorers, visits to museums and research carried out in Kobe’s city library archives. Here there was a particular unpublished thesis that I have come to rely on, for it contains a number of detailed interviews with significant individuals in the history of the making and collecting of the Kobe ningyô, who are now unfortunately deceased (Ushiro and Endo 1998). The Kôbe ningyô are hand-operated and approximately hand-sized wooden
devices, depicting a hybrid figure that variously combines the features of a Buddhist priest, a ghost (ôbake) and a black man (Figure 10.1). The first two recorded makers of the dolls were both connected to the makers of the jôruri puppets from Awaji island (Ushiro and Endo 1998). The first, a person named ‘Haru’ from Nagata (Nagata no Haru) is said to have been born in the early Meiji period and lived until some time in the 1940s. He sold sanshô kombu (seaweed flavoured with Japanese pepper) on the approach to Nagata shrine, and had experience as a craftsman making stage props for the Awaji puppet theatre. He was well known as an eccentric, who would regularly hide inside a coffin, displayed in the front window of his shop, so as to surprise passers-by. This grotesque sense of humour led locals to refer to him as ‘coffin Haru’, a title which tied in with the ‘ghost dolls’ (ôbake ningyo) that he made. These were popular items, from the late Edo to the Meiji period and included ghost figures like the long-necked monster (rokuro-kubi) and dolls with three eyes (mitsume).
