Event

Abstract:

This paper discusses issues of individual agency arising from previous scholarship on iemoto societies. Since its pre-modern times, the iemoto (guild-like) system has played significant roles in the preservation and transmission of musical traditions in Japan. Focusing on describing strict rules and regulations imposed on their members, many scholarly works on iemoto tend to characterize its societies and performance traditions as static, bounded, and coherent, overlook individual differences among members within each school, and view human action as mere enactment of such rules and standards. Nevertheless, based on the data obtained through my field research on Oyama Yoshikazu, a member of an iemoto school of Tsugaru shamisen music named Oyama-kai, and his associates in Japan, I see the society as made up of a complex set of individuals with different sociocultural backgrounds, subjectivities, knowledge, personal goals/projects, and thus the capability for agency. In this paper, I outline my own theory of musical agency, drawing on the work of social theorists Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Sherry Ortner, and William Sewell, Jr. Rather than problematic concepts like “culture” and “society,” my study explores individuals and their capabilities (1) to extensively access actual cultural resources (both human and non-human), as their objective structures, (2) to “read” them in their own ways, and (3) to creatively apply their cultural schemas, as part of their cognitive structures, to various situations. Introducing different points of view into the study of iemoto, this paper aims to facilitate deeper understanding of musical actions and their formative processes.