ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 offers insights into the rise of aesthetic publics in the Edo era. It centres on the performing arts, most prominently meetings for renga-linked poetry, the so-called haikai circles, a linked verse performed collectively within a seated group (za). We are dealing here with a society of interests and thoughts, which is intensively aesthetic and not religious per se. However, viewed from the angle of the sacred drama, there are indeed striking similarities. As in ‘real’ religions, the ritual is a highly formalised performative language ‘encoded in a canon and therefore exactly repeatable’ (Connerton 1989). What is more, the ritual creates images that are disconnected from those of the clan or the local Gemeinschaft-like community. It offers a stage for aesthetics and dramatic representations. Theoretically the study of the za arts points towards more open and complex definitions of ritual. The chapter suggests a reinterpretation of the za arts using Emile Durkheim's idea of the sacred drama. It leans on Durkheim's The Elementary forms of religious life, Book III, The Principal Modes of Ritual Conduct, above all his writings on the Positive Cult, Mimetic rites and the Principle of Causality (1995 [1912], 355–92).
