Indigenous Enviromental Knowledge and its Transformations by Alan Bicker Roy Ellen Peter Parkes

Author:Alan Bicker, Roy Ellen, Peter Parkes [Alan Bicker, Roy Ellen, Peter Parkes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology
ISBN: 9781135295134
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2003-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. See Kanzaki (1988:131–198), Arima (1991:156–9), Ehrentraut (1993), Shioji (1994), Takada (1995:118–121).

2. In response to recent excavations a considerable reassessment of the Jōmon period is taking place (Kobayashi 1989; Anon. 1996). In particular, Jōmon dwellers have come to be viewed as much more technologically advanced. Although Jōmon culture was essentially a foraging culture, a degree of plant cultivation seems also to have taken place (Kobayashi ibid.: 16; Barnes 1993:89–91), as well as raising animals (dogs and wild boars) (Mori et al. 1994:78–9). The Jōmon way of life is seen as having been highly stable, and in the absence of continental invasions, as likely to have continued—just as North American Indian culture on the other side of the Pacific, with which it is often compared, continued until the eighteenth century (Kobayashi ibid.: 17).

3. Some scholars have even argued that, in addition to genetic continuity, the Japanese language, Shintoism, the imperial family and many other aspects of Japanese culture have Korean origins (Hong 1988, 1994).

4. These ‘Jōmon people’ are thick-bearded, have prominent noses, big eyes, large mouths, long limbs relative to the body, waxy ears and a strong body odour (Umehara 1993b:47). While these regional populations might imagine themselves as racially different from the Ainu and according to Umehara similar to other majority Japanese they are, in fact physically much more similar to the Ainu (ibid.).

5. The renewed concern among the Ainu with their lost forest tradition is evident in the revival of deerhunting, as well as Ainu hunting ceremonies (Asahi Shinbun 2/6/1986, 16/11/1995).

6. One eminent folklorist has even suggested that the Japanese national flag—the hinomaru or ‘round sun’—derives from hunting. Hunters throughout Japan offer the heart (or other organ) of the wild boar to the mountain spirit in recognition of the spirit’s benevolence in granting them the animal. The offering is made by placing the bloody heart on white paper—creating the image of a red circle against a white background (Hayakawa Kotaro in Tanigawa 1980:288).

7. The most common Buddhist rite in Japan is the kuyō (Sanskrit puja). The kuyō is performed for dead people in the form of the ‘ancestral memorials’ (senzo kuyō) carried out or sponsored by family descendants. But the kuyō is also performed for a range of non-human spirits, including those of dead game animals, livestock animals, pets, fish, laboratory animals, insects and timber trees. See Knight 1997a.

8. This recalls the debate among Japanese folklorists over the extent to which the Matagi hunting tradition of the Japanese Northeast is related to Ainu culture. Many Ainu words are found in the hunting language used by Matagi hunters (Tanigawa 1980:324–5).

9. Many Hongu villagers trace village origins to the ochi’udo (literally ‘fallen people’)—the refugees of the twelfth-century Genpei Wars, who fled into the mountains to escape the persecution of the victors. The original appeal of the mountains, then, was less as a place of residence than a place of refuge capable of enveloping and concealing those who entered it. If anything, this origin story has developed an even greater rhetorical power

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