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kaigouFollowing on from earlier post, processing the notion of stories like Gegege no Kitaro and Nurarihyon no Mago led me to considering the theory that Japan is nearly unrivaled in its ability to self-market. I don't mean simply "sell itself", either; I mean an astute ability to take how it's been marketed by others, and adapt/adopt that other-created perspective as a sort of model of how to market itself. From japanoiserie to ninjas to wabi-sabi, on a economic-cultural level, Japan is undeniably a master of figuring out how other cultures see it, and then turning around and using that perspective to sell to other cultures exactly what they want. It's like a form of ultimate self-exoticization.
With that as a backdrop, and in consideration of yokai-stories like Gegege no Kitaro and similar, it occurred to me that one of the very first introductions westerners have to any culture (including their own) is in the form of children's tales: just-so stories, fables, myths, and fairy tales. I wouldn't know half of the anglo-saxon, celtic, and teutonic lore if not for collections like the Brothers Grimm, or my battered childhood book of "Fairy Tales of the World," wherein I was first introduced to Stupid Youngest Brother or the land that's East of the Sun, West of the Moon (both of slavic origin).
I'm not saying that any culture sets out to create such tales specifically for external production (though Japan's self-marketing can sometimes appear to come awfully close, but only if you discount that it's also selling such perceptions to itself, as well). Just that the fairy tales and myths are an easy way to relate these little stories, and being generally small-ish in terms of comprehension required, the entire package makes for an easier translation. Readers don't need to know the entire history of the Jomon period, or why the Yuan Dynasty was such a radical change, but the little stories bound up in myth and fairy tale often incorporate assumptions about those histories (or the cultures who hold those histories) and before you know it, the reader has incorporated these additional little stories into their personal pantheon.
We always absorb stuff as we read, and children do it with far less discrimination. When a sponge is dry, it soaks up everything; adults are damp to sopping sponges in comparison.
Anyway, the end result is that fairy tales, just-so stories, and other myths -- what I'll just call "tales" to distinguish from the "little stories" that are discrete units often embedded in tales -- all act as a form of cultural currency. The more one culture's tales can overwhelm or dominate or impress, the greater that culture's currency when it comes to the embedded little stories.
There was a post awhile backin one of the Fails, and I want to say one of the Bear-inspired Fails, erm, RaceFail, maybe? someone, if you recognize this and know the link/author, please do tell that spoke of growing up in India, called I Didn't Dream of Dragons, by Deepad. As I recall, the author wrote of being worn down as a child by the prevalence of American/European tales, where the message was that "what makes a good tale" (or what "deserves" to be made into a tale) required western facets, bearing nothing in common with Indian/local tales. Dragons and princesses dominated. [Note: any error in description is mine alone, as it's been awhile since I read the post, but either way, if you haven't read it, you should.]
That post was arguing for people (especially writers) to have an awareness of how the dominant westernized cultural tales can squeeze out local/regional/other-culture tales (akin to Adichie's lecture on the single story). What I'm getting at here is that if we look at this from a quasi-economic perspective, then the dominating culture has, effectively, greater cultural currency, much as we talk about how the dollar is strong against the RMB, or falling against the SEK, or rising against the yen.
But to create that cultural currency, one must have tales to tell, and rather than seeing the tales as a place where you can embed little stories, I think it's the other way around: having little stories creates the ground upon which you can build tales. A lack of little stories, then, undermines the strength of any tales, and that in turn reduces a culture's outward-bound tale-currency.
Japan, as I mentioned at start, is definitely a poster child of perceiving what tales gain currency, and using that to its own benefit as it markets itself. Mind you, I'm not saying this requires a totalitarian-style mastermind who okays or denies any exported tales; I think it's something that happens as a matter of course, and it's part of the acculturation process to also understand how others perceive our culture. That is, part of being American is also being aware of the ways in which we're seen by other countries; a savvy businessperson, in marketing anything tinged with "American-ness" is going to either manipulate that perception or capitalize (pun intended) on it in some way.
That, I think, is what's going on when we see Japanese animation/manga that's been horrendously mutilated in the process of translation from Japanese audience to external/western audience: in nearly all of the worst instances, the Japanese company was aware of the changes, signed off on them, and in several was even the origin/perpetrator of much of it. I'm told the One Piece dub is an absolute catastrophe, but apparently Toei Animation -- the Japanese production company behind One Piece -- signed off on every single change; the impression that non-Japanese dubbing companies do all this behind the Japanese production companys' backs is utterly ridiculous, when you think of it business-wise. If you've got a product and you want to make money off it, you don't just "hand it over" and hope for the best; you try to manipulate the external market or capitalize on its perceptions. Seems to me, then, that a lot of the dubbing-related fiascos (changing names from, say, Hiroku to Mike, or editing out cultural references, or even changing genders) may equally be the fault of the Japanese companies assuming that non-Japanese wouldn't be able to understand the story without it being dumbed down in some way.
...which is probably a whole 'nother post on its own, and one I'm not sure I'd be qualified to ponder, not without a significant amount of research. Anyway.
Every culture markets itself in some way, whether in an organized manner -- as many tourism boards try to do -- or in a looser, semi-disorganized way, where individual companies each do their best to gauge which tales (or little stories) appeal most, and to capitalize on those. There are certainly ethical questions, and identity issues, about doing so: if, say, Virginia has the highest rate of divorce (to create a random no-basis-in-reality statement) yet the marketing is that "Virginia is for lovers", does this dismiss or diminish the reality of Virginia's situation, or might one hope that a positive perception by others -- that Virginians are more likely to fall in love -- lead to a positive self-perception on the part of actual residents?
I mean, there have been plenty of psychology studies showing that if people are predisposed to think well of us, we may be ignorant of their predisposition but we still end up being friendlier, getting along better, and apparently "proving" that we deserved that predisposition. Or alternately, if before meeting someone, you're told the person has a hard time getting along with people or doesn't like people with your skin tone or is just generally a nasty dickhat, you're probably going to be on the defensive and find it harder to be quite as openly friendly as you might've been if you were told you're about to meet a great person who gets along with everyone and is well-liked.
The same kind of thing goes on with cultural currency, on a larger vaguer scale. Countless friends have insisted they had the worst time in Paris, getting nothing but attitude from Parisians (and you could insert "New York City" and "people who live in NYC" here and it'd be the same story, really) -- yet the time I spent in Paris, I found the people to be friendly, helpful, with sharp senses of humor and quick to laugh. Notably, Paris was a major contrast to the closed-off faces I found in the small town where I'd been prior to visiting Paris -- there, I got a lot of dirty looks for being a foreigner, when I wasn't getting the cold shoulder outright. Yet when I say to people, "I don't get why everyone thinks Paris is full of dickhats," I get story after story of someone's horrible stay in Paris.
Which is it? Are Parisians really that bad, and I'm an anomaly, or did my ignorance of any anti-Parisian expectations mean I lacked predisposition to expect ill, or did my host-mother's insistence that "Paris is one of the greatest cities, and everyone should go there, because it's so alive and cosmopolitan, you'll love it" predispose me to see the entire Paris-experience as wonderful and welcoming, thus leading Parisians in general to react to that predisposition, akin to the psychology studies?
So, what people expect to see (and expect to get as a reaction) is going to color their experiences -- whether in-person as a tourist, or in reading the tales or learning the little stories. That's the point of tourism boards, after all, to convince you ahead of time that your travel-experience will be filled with friendly and exciting and sparkling experiences: it predisposes you to see every interaction in a positive light.
'Cept that, of course, tourism boards are going to have an uphill battle if they're trying to promote such a predisposition against the grain of information/versions the outsider gets from elsewhere. Lebanon might do its best to promote itself as the Paris of the Middle East (which, for a long time, Beirut really was), but it's going to be simultaneously trying to undo/outweigh the fact that its last big exposure in western news was for being suddenly and thoroughly bombed by Israel. Who wants to travel to a country where the airport is shut down under heavy bombardment, and diplomatic personnel were being airlifted out by Army helicopters? ...the best the tourism board can do is remind people that such was, oh, three or four years ago, it's better now, but still: if that externally-produced tale has greater cultural currency, then the internally-created tale will be weak against it.
(Incidentally, Washington DC went through a similar experience in the late 80s, thanks to being labeled as the city with the "highest murder rate per capita in the world". It got to the point that no one on the news called it "the District," half so much as they called it "the Murder Capital". Didn't matter that those of us actually in the so-called Murder Capital knew that 90% of those murders were drug-related crimes taking place in Southeast, and that you could spend six months in Northeast and never even get mugged, let alone shot. PR, baby, I'm saying it's a lot of PR, good and bad, and not all exposure is better than none.)
Add together cultural currency, the weight of it, and the variations of external perceptions (especially externally-produced perceptions) and the attempts of internal forces to create positive external perceptions, maybe also positive self-perceptions, and the importance of tales to communicate this cultural currency, and the requirement of little stories to be the foundation of those tales... Well, for this, let's leave behind Japan and Lebanon and the Murder Capital, and visit a Native American reservation surrounded by soybean fields, somewhere in middle Mississippi.
The complex is now grown into two hotels and two casinos and what's pretty much a smallish shopping mall between the two, but when I was there, the Silver Star Hotel and Casino was a single massive multistoried neon-lit glow against the low-slung Mississippi rural skyline. Getting there meant wending our way along two-lane roads, past little white churches and yellow-lit convenience stores with names like Kuntry Korner and Stop N Shop, where the clerk smacked gum with a bored expression and little old ladies looked you over and asked in oblique terms honeyed with that throaty mid-Mississippi accent if you're visiting family. Then you come over a hill and there's casino-mecca, glowing blue-green against the ruddy evening sky, with the packing labels practically still on it. Hell, the parking lot was little more than gravel, but there it was, this monstrosity a little less than an hour's drive from my in-law's.
The interior, of course, must've been from a patternbook of casinos; lots of bright lights and jangling machines and bathrooms larger than my first apartment. It offered little in the way of any reminder that you were, technically, on an Indian reservation -- with the exception of a display of supposed "artifacts", which I guess acted as the obligatory reminder that, in fact, this was Indian-owned and Indian-run. Honestly, for everything else, you could've been in Biloxi or Las Vegas or Atlantic City or Wyoming -- though, come to think of it, if it were possible to do a time-slip and distance-slip and end up in Wyoming, I think I could've handled it better, instead of almost bursting out laughing. (Just so you don't think it was only me, my then-spouse did the exact same.)
See, this particular casino-hotel shindig was on the Choctaw reservation, and we were staring right at a feathered headdress whose full regalia could've been lifted from some Hollywood movie in the '50s. To the best of my knowledge, the only native tribes that wore feather headdresses are plains tribes. Choctaw hunted and farmed and fished in the low hills and tall pines of Alabama and Mississippi, and have a culture and history that's nothing like the, say, Lakota or Apache. It'd be like, oh, arriving in Thailand and the first thing you see -- that's supposedly part of the mini-cultural introduction -- is a Japanese wedding kimono.
[If you're curious, take a look at a traditional Choctaw dress, compared to a traditional Sioux dress, or compare Cherokee beadwork to Arapaho beadwork. Or compare a portrait of Mosholatubbee, a Choctaw leader in the 1830s with a portrait of Hó-ra-tó-a of the Crow (Absaroka).]
Before you get me wrong, I don't mean to ridicule the display I saw. Setting aside the remote possibility that it had been worn by a tribal member for some don't-know-better Hollywood movie, the inclusion of this so-not-Choctaw item was both a moment of sadness and a testament to the way human beings will do their best to capitalize on even those things that erase them, because it's better than simply being erased with no protest. That is to say: in the eyes of the average non-Native person (and I include Americans and non-American tourists in this category), "indian" has only one meaning, one image, varied a million times but never really changing.
It's a single story.
It meant that -- from what I could tell, as a casual visitor to the newly-built casino -- that someone along the way was aware that for non-Native guests, to gain any recognition the "Indian reservation" part of the casino's existence meant playing along with the external-owned single story. In other words, if it had been a Choctaw woman's dress, it wouldn't have registered as "indian"; if it had been a mannequin dressed in, say, Chickasaw-Oklahoma dress (which also has a feathered headdress, of a sort) then you might get a few people recognizing... but really, the vast majority of visitors are going to expect stuff like this, not this.
This is imperialism, plain and simple, and from a storyteller's point of view, I think it's one of the most insidious type of damage, because it can be well-nigh impossible to recover everything, once erased. If we were talking about a written tradition, that's one thing (assuming people write down everything, and they don't, especially when it comes to the little stories) -- but little stories are, by definition, spoken pieces of culture. In one generation's silence, you can destroy nearly all the little stories, and the next generation will grow up ignorant. Or if the parents won't keep silent, you can simply take away all the children, force them to convert to a different religion, beat them if they speak their parent's language, and deprive them of the thousands of little stories they would otherwise hear morning, noon, and night.
When you destroy the little stories, you annihilate the ground upon which a culture builds its tales. You're removing the substance of the tales, and what remains are myths. To me, a tale is something that teaches you, but a myth is a tale without that lesson, because it won't or can't explain the what, who, and why that would be provided by the little stories embedded within. Those little stories answer questions like: what did the mother mean when she cut the bread in thirds? how did he know he'd need three horses, not six? why did the girl tell her friend but refuse to tell her brother? Without those, we're left shrugging and saying, "well, there doesn't need to be a reason the queen decided she wanted that clan's largest bull; that's just how the story goes." It's a sign we've lost the little stories that once would've been embedded or referenced within that tale, and that living tale has become static myth.
So, imperialism and cultural currency. Just like the inability of a conquered people to print and control its own form of cash, so too does a conquered culture trade in the currency of its overlords -- both benevolent and destructive. Most western countries would, after all, claim to be benevolently representing their cultural dominance -- they're not colonizing, they'd remind you, as though the semantics make all the difference -- but it's still the imposition of an external tale and the erasure of the little stories.
You can look at pretty much any country/culture still recovering from imperialism or colonialism, and you'll see an externally-imposed single story ("noble savage", "inscrutable chinese"). Even if you try to educate yourself about the cultural tales, you'll probably still find that the majority of outsiders won't look past the single story. The problem with such self-education (or maybe just the pain of it) is that this opens your eyes to the struggle: do we sell ourselves as the outsiders expect to see us -- plains headdress and all -- or do we find a way to increase our cultural currency enough to be able to defeat their single story with our many tales?
If you can't beat 'em, is joining them really the only option?
But that's not something you can answer from the outside. For that matter, thinking about it further, it seems to me that sometimes (as some Indian nations appear to have decided) a self-determined inaccurate translation is better than none at all. Or, as I suspect in the case of Japan, that there's more to gain from a watered-down translation, in part because a more accurate translation wouldn't translate (so to speak) and perhaps in part because this creates a mystique as to the untranslatable parts. And, of course, in some cases it's because the interior of the tales -- the little stories, really -- are considered sacred, or to be held only by a few, with only mysteries presented to outsiders.
There's a story people used to tell, when I was growing up in Atlanta, about a visiting Anglican Bishop. He'd come all the way from England with much excitement about visiting the "real" Deep South, his very first trip to the US, and what he wanted more than anything else was a certain "real" Southern dish. He wanted to try the "real" thing, so his first stop was a little diner serving breakfast not far from the diocese headquarters. Very politely, he made his order for "a grit". The waitress, of course, hadn't the fainted clue what he meant. "You mean you want grits," she clarified, and the bishop was surprised, saying, "I didn't realize they only come in pairs."
Or more recently, watching a film that CP had shown to his students, called The Japanese Version. (If I have time later, I may go into this film, with 80% chance of thunderous snark in certain corners of my living room, but for now, just... don't bother tracking it down. Not worth it.) Issues with the film's bias aside, there's one segment showing a Western-style theme bar, with interviews of a number of the patrons.
They introduce themselves: watashiwa Doc desu and watashiwa Jack desu and so on; they're wearing ten-gallon hats, bolero-ties, plaid shirts with stitched yokes, blue jeans, cowboy boots. They lecture the interviewers [note: they appear to, at least, based on the subtitle word choices, but the subtitles elsewhere are inaccurate and incomplete enough that I wonder whether the implied tone from word choice is really a good translation] about the 'lessons' of the American wild west, saying: "you've got it all wrong; you don't understand what 'The West' really means." They have picked and chosen from among the multitudes of western-genre tales, selecting those that correspond to their own cultural biases. (What's unusual and makes me suspect the subtitles is that most outsiders instinctively recognize a lack of privilege in designating a 'true' meaning to a tale or collection of tales, unless the outsider is operating at an intersection of feeling more privilege in other areas, like race or age or class or gender. Hence, my suspicion about just how the interviewers appeared to the interviewees, that the interviewees would respond with such finality and definiteness, but again, another day, another post.)
Or in religious terms: if you ever meet someone who practices voudoun or santeria, you might find the person is reluctant to tell you everything s/he does. Expressing the tales -- without the background of all those little stories -- means incomplete translation, and it's human nature to reinterpret tales through the lens of our own little stories. (Remember what I said about children being sponges; adults are less likely to soak up the little stories, which means new tales are viewed through the lens of our already-soaked collection.) If you don't want the listener bastardizing your tales because they lack time or awareness or energy to learn the little stories as well, then you just plain don't explain. Double that if you've already learned -- as have most Native American nations, from what I've seen -- that the next step after learning the tale is to turn around and figure out a way to sell it back to you.
[had to break into two, so... continued in part two.]
With that as a backdrop, and in consideration of yokai-stories like Gegege no Kitaro and similar, it occurred to me that one of the very first introductions westerners have to any culture (including their own) is in the form of children's tales: just-so stories, fables, myths, and fairy tales. I wouldn't know half of the anglo-saxon, celtic, and teutonic lore if not for collections like the Brothers Grimm, or my battered childhood book of "Fairy Tales of the World," wherein I was first introduced to Stupid Youngest Brother or the land that's East of the Sun, West of the Moon (both of slavic origin).
I'm not saying that any culture sets out to create such tales specifically for external production (though Japan's self-marketing can sometimes appear to come awfully close, but only if you discount that it's also selling such perceptions to itself, as well). Just that the fairy tales and myths are an easy way to relate these little stories, and being generally small-ish in terms of comprehension required, the entire package makes for an easier translation. Readers don't need to know the entire history of the Jomon period, or why the Yuan Dynasty was such a radical change, but the little stories bound up in myth and fairy tale often incorporate assumptions about those histories (or the cultures who hold those histories) and before you know it, the reader has incorporated these additional little stories into their personal pantheon.
We always absorb stuff as we read, and children do it with far less discrimination. When a sponge is dry, it soaks up everything; adults are damp to sopping sponges in comparison.
Anyway, the end result is that fairy tales, just-so stories, and other myths -- what I'll just call "tales" to distinguish from the "little stories" that are discrete units often embedded in tales -- all act as a form of cultural currency. The more one culture's tales can overwhelm or dominate or impress, the greater that culture's currency when it comes to the embedded little stories.
There was a post awhile back
That post was arguing for people (especially writers) to have an awareness of how the dominant westernized cultural tales can squeeze out local/regional/other-culture tales (akin to Adichie's lecture on the single story). What I'm getting at here is that if we look at this from a quasi-economic perspective, then the dominating culture has, effectively, greater cultural currency, much as we talk about how the dollar is strong against the RMB, or falling against the SEK, or rising against the yen.
But to create that cultural currency, one must have tales to tell, and rather than seeing the tales as a place where you can embed little stories, I think it's the other way around: having little stories creates the ground upon which you can build tales. A lack of little stories, then, undermines the strength of any tales, and that in turn reduces a culture's outward-bound tale-currency.
Japan, as I mentioned at start, is definitely a poster child of perceiving what tales gain currency, and using that to its own benefit as it markets itself. Mind you, I'm not saying this requires a totalitarian-style mastermind who okays or denies any exported tales; I think it's something that happens as a matter of course, and it's part of the acculturation process to also understand how others perceive our culture. That is, part of being American is also being aware of the ways in which we're seen by other countries; a savvy businessperson, in marketing anything tinged with "American-ness" is going to either manipulate that perception or capitalize (pun intended) on it in some way.
That, I think, is what's going on when we see Japanese animation/manga that's been horrendously mutilated in the process of translation from Japanese audience to external/western audience: in nearly all of the worst instances, the Japanese company was aware of the changes, signed off on them, and in several was even the origin/perpetrator of much of it. I'm told the One Piece dub is an absolute catastrophe, but apparently Toei Animation -- the Japanese production company behind One Piece -- signed off on every single change; the impression that non-Japanese dubbing companies do all this behind the Japanese production companys' backs is utterly ridiculous, when you think of it business-wise. If you've got a product and you want to make money off it, you don't just "hand it over" and hope for the best; you try to manipulate the external market or capitalize on its perceptions. Seems to me, then, that a lot of the dubbing-related fiascos (changing names from, say, Hiroku to Mike, or editing out cultural references, or even changing genders) may equally be the fault of the Japanese companies assuming that non-Japanese wouldn't be able to understand the story without it being dumbed down in some way.
...which is probably a whole 'nother post on its own, and one I'm not sure I'd be qualified to ponder, not without a significant amount of research. Anyway.
Every culture markets itself in some way, whether in an organized manner -- as many tourism boards try to do -- or in a looser, semi-disorganized way, where individual companies each do their best to gauge which tales (or little stories) appeal most, and to capitalize on those. There are certainly ethical questions, and identity issues, about doing so: if, say, Virginia has the highest rate of divorce (to create a random no-basis-in-reality statement) yet the marketing is that "Virginia is for lovers", does this dismiss or diminish the reality of Virginia's situation, or might one hope that a positive perception by others -- that Virginians are more likely to fall in love -- lead to a positive self-perception on the part of actual residents?
I mean, there have been plenty of psychology studies showing that if people are predisposed to think well of us, we may be ignorant of their predisposition but we still end up being friendlier, getting along better, and apparently "proving" that we deserved that predisposition. Or alternately, if before meeting someone, you're told the person has a hard time getting along with people or doesn't like people with your skin tone or is just generally a nasty dickhat, you're probably going to be on the defensive and find it harder to be quite as openly friendly as you might've been if you were told you're about to meet a great person who gets along with everyone and is well-liked.
The same kind of thing goes on with cultural currency, on a larger vaguer scale. Countless friends have insisted they had the worst time in Paris, getting nothing but attitude from Parisians (and you could insert "New York City" and "people who live in NYC" here and it'd be the same story, really) -- yet the time I spent in Paris, I found the people to be friendly, helpful, with sharp senses of humor and quick to laugh. Notably, Paris was a major contrast to the closed-off faces I found in the small town where I'd been prior to visiting Paris -- there, I got a lot of dirty looks for being a foreigner, when I wasn't getting the cold shoulder outright. Yet when I say to people, "I don't get why everyone thinks Paris is full of dickhats," I get story after story of someone's horrible stay in Paris.
Which is it? Are Parisians really that bad, and I'm an anomaly, or did my ignorance of any anti-Parisian expectations mean I lacked predisposition to expect ill, or did my host-mother's insistence that "Paris is one of the greatest cities, and everyone should go there, because it's so alive and cosmopolitan, you'll love it" predispose me to see the entire Paris-experience as wonderful and welcoming, thus leading Parisians in general to react to that predisposition, akin to the psychology studies?
So, what people expect to see (and expect to get as a reaction) is going to color their experiences -- whether in-person as a tourist, or in reading the tales or learning the little stories. That's the point of tourism boards, after all, to convince you ahead of time that your travel-experience will be filled with friendly and exciting and sparkling experiences: it predisposes you to see every interaction in a positive light.
'Cept that, of course, tourism boards are going to have an uphill battle if they're trying to promote such a predisposition against the grain of information/versions the outsider gets from elsewhere. Lebanon might do its best to promote itself as the Paris of the Middle East (which, for a long time, Beirut really was), but it's going to be simultaneously trying to undo/outweigh the fact that its last big exposure in western news was for being suddenly and thoroughly bombed by Israel. Who wants to travel to a country where the airport is shut down under heavy bombardment, and diplomatic personnel were being airlifted out by Army helicopters? ...the best the tourism board can do is remind people that such was, oh, three or four years ago, it's better now, but still: if that externally-produced tale has greater cultural currency, then the internally-created tale will be weak against it.
(Incidentally, Washington DC went through a similar experience in the late 80s, thanks to being labeled as the city with the "highest murder rate per capita in the world". It got to the point that no one on the news called it "the District," half so much as they called it "the Murder Capital". Didn't matter that those of us actually in the so-called Murder Capital knew that 90% of those murders were drug-related crimes taking place in Southeast, and that you could spend six months in Northeast and never even get mugged, let alone shot. PR, baby, I'm saying it's a lot of PR, good and bad, and not all exposure is better than none.)
Add together cultural currency, the weight of it, and the variations of external perceptions (especially externally-produced perceptions) and the attempts of internal forces to create positive external perceptions, maybe also positive self-perceptions, and the importance of tales to communicate this cultural currency, and the requirement of little stories to be the foundation of those tales... Well, for this, let's leave behind Japan and Lebanon and the Murder Capital, and visit a Native American reservation surrounded by soybean fields, somewhere in middle Mississippi.
The complex is now grown into two hotels and two casinos and what's pretty much a smallish shopping mall between the two, but when I was there, the Silver Star Hotel and Casino was a single massive multistoried neon-lit glow against the low-slung Mississippi rural skyline. Getting there meant wending our way along two-lane roads, past little white churches and yellow-lit convenience stores with names like Kuntry Korner and Stop N Shop, where the clerk smacked gum with a bored expression and little old ladies looked you over and asked in oblique terms honeyed with that throaty mid-Mississippi accent if you're visiting family. Then you come over a hill and there's casino-mecca, glowing blue-green against the ruddy evening sky, with the packing labels practically still on it. Hell, the parking lot was little more than gravel, but there it was, this monstrosity a little less than an hour's drive from my in-law's.
The interior, of course, must've been from a patternbook of casinos; lots of bright lights and jangling machines and bathrooms larger than my first apartment. It offered little in the way of any reminder that you were, technically, on an Indian reservation -- with the exception of a display of supposed "artifacts", which I guess acted as the obligatory reminder that, in fact, this was Indian-owned and Indian-run. Honestly, for everything else, you could've been in Biloxi or Las Vegas or Atlantic City or Wyoming -- though, come to think of it, if it were possible to do a time-slip and distance-slip and end up in Wyoming, I think I could've handled it better, instead of almost bursting out laughing. (Just so you don't think it was only me, my then-spouse did the exact same.)
See, this particular casino-hotel shindig was on the Choctaw reservation, and we were staring right at a feathered headdress whose full regalia could've been lifted from some Hollywood movie in the '50s. To the best of my knowledge, the only native tribes that wore feather headdresses are plains tribes. Choctaw hunted and farmed and fished in the low hills and tall pines of Alabama and Mississippi, and have a culture and history that's nothing like the, say, Lakota or Apache. It'd be like, oh, arriving in Thailand and the first thing you see -- that's supposedly part of the mini-cultural introduction -- is a Japanese wedding kimono.
[If you're curious, take a look at a traditional Choctaw dress, compared to a traditional Sioux dress, or compare Cherokee beadwork to Arapaho beadwork. Or compare a portrait of Mosholatubbee, a Choctaw leader in the 1830s with a portrait of Hó-ra-tó-a of the Crow (Absaroka).]
Before you get me wrong, I don't mean to ridicule the display I saw. Setting aside the remote possibility that it had been worn by a tribal member for some don't-know-better Hollywood movie, the inclusion of this so-not-Choctaw item was both a moment of sadness and a testament to the way human beings will do their best to capitalize on even those things that erase them, because it's better than simply being erased with no protest. That is to say: in the eyes of the average non-Native person (and I include Americans and non-American tourists in this category), "indian" has only one meaning, one image, varied a million times but never really changing.
It's a single story.
It meant that -- from what I could tell, as a casual visitor to the newly-built casino -- that someone along the way was aware that for non-Native guests, to gain any recognition the "Indian reservation" part of the casino's existence meant playing along with the external-owned single story. In other words, if it had been a Choctaw woman's dress, it wouldn't have registered as "indian"; if it had been a mannequin dressed in, say, Chickasaw-Oklahoma dress (which also has a feathered headdress, of a sort) then you might get a few people recognizing... but really, the vast majority of visitors are going to expect stuff like this, not this.
This is imperialism, plain and simple, and from a storyteller's point of view, I think it's one of the most insidious type of damage, because it can be well-nigh impossible to recover everything, once erased. If we were talking about a written tradition, that's one thing (assuming people write down everything, and they don't, especially when it comes to the little stories) -- but little stories are, by definition, spoken pieces of culture. In one generation's silence, you can destroy nearly all the little stories, and the next generation will grow up ignorant. Or if the parents won't keep silent, you can simply take away all the children, force them to convert to a different religion, beat them if they speak their parent's language, and deprive them of the thousands of little stories they would otherwise hear morning, noon, and night.
When you destroy the little stories, you annihilate the ground upon which a culture builds its tales. You're removing the substance of the tales, and what remains are myths. To me, a tale is something that teaches you, but a myth is a tale without that lesson, because it won't or can't explain the what, who, and why that would be provided by the little stories embedded within. Those little stories answer questions like: what did the mother mean when she cut the bread in thirds? how did he know he'd need three horses, not six? why did the girl tell her friend but refuse to tell her brother? Without those, we're left shrugging and saying, "well, there doesn't need to be a reason the queen decided she wanted that clan's largest bull; that's just how the story goes." It's a sign we've lost the little stories that once would've been embedded or referenced within that tale, and that living tale has become static myth.
So, imperialism and cultural currency. Just like the inability of a conquered people to print and control its own form of cash, so too does a conquered culture trade in the currency of its overlords -- both benevolent and destructive. Most western countries would, after all, claim to be benevolently representing their cultural dominance -- they're not colonizing, they'd remind you, as though the semantics make all the difference -- but it's still the imposition of an external tale and the erasure of the little stories.
You can look at pretty much any country/culture still recovering from imperialism or colonialism, and you'll see an externally-imposed single story ("noble savage", "inscrutable chinese"). Even if you try to educate yourself about the cultural tales, you'll probably still find that the majority of outsiders won't look past the single story. The problem with such self-education (or maybe just the pain of it) is that this opens your eyes to the struggle: do we sell ourselves as the outsiders expect to see us -- plains headdress and all -- or do we find a way to increase our cultural currency enough to be able to defeat their single story with our many tales?
If you can't beat 'em, is joining them really the only option?
But that's not something you can answer from the outside. For that matter, thinking about it further, it seems to me that sometimes (as some Indian nations appear to have decided) a self-determined inaccurate translation is better than none at all. Or, as I suspect in the case of Japan, that there's more to gain from a watered-down translation, in part because a more accurate translation wouldn't translate (so to speak) and perhaps in part because this creates a mystique as to the untranslatable parts. And, of course, in some cases it's because the interior of the tales -- the little stories, really -- are considered sacred, or to be held only by a few, with only mysteries presented to outsiders.
There's a story people used to tell, when I was growing up in Atlanta, about a visiting Anglican Bishop. He'd come all the way from England with much excitement about visiting the "real" Deep South, his very first trip to the US, and what he wanted more than anything else was a certain "real" Southern dish. He wanted to try the "real" thing, so his first stop was a little diner serving breakfast not far from the diocese headquarters. Very politely, he made his order for "a grit". The waitress, of course, hadn't the fainted clue what he meant. "You mean you want grits," she clarified, and the bishop was surprised, saying, "I didn't realize they only come in pairs."
Or more recently, watching a film that CP had shown to his students, called The Japanese Version. (If I have time later, I may go into this film, with 80% chance of thunderous snark in certain corners of my living room, but for now, just... don't bother tracking it down. Not worth it.) Issues with the film's bias aside, there's one segment showing a Western-style theme bar, with interviews of a number of the patrons.
They introduce themselves: watashiwa Doc desu and watashiwa Jack desu and so on; they're wearing ten-gallon hats, bolero-ties, plaid shirts with stitched yokes, blue jeans, cowboy boots. They lecture the interviewers [note: they appear to, at least, based on the subtitle word choices, but the subtitles elsewhere are inaccurate and incomplete enough that I wonder whether the implied tone from word choice is really a good translation] about the 'lessons' of the American wild west, saying: "you've got it all wrong; you don't understand what 'The West' really means." They have picked and chosen from among the multitudes of western-genre tales, selecting those that correspond to their own cultural biases. (What's unusual and makes me suspect the subtitles is that most outsiders instinctively recognize a lack of privilege in designating a 'true' meaning to a tale or collection of tales, unless the outsider is operating at an intersection of feeling more privilege in other areas, like race or age or class or gender. Hence, my suspicion about just how the interviewers appeared to the interviewees, that the interviewees would respond with such finality and definiteness, but again, another day, another post.)
Or in religious terms: if you ever meet someone who practices voudoun or santeria, you might find the person is reluctant to tell you everything s/he does. Expressing the tales -- without the background of all those little stories -- means incomplete translation, and it's human nature to reinterpret tales through the lens of our own little stories. (Remember what I said about children being sponges; adults are less likely to soak up the little stories, which means new tales are viewed through the lens of our already-soaked collection.) If you don't want the listener bastardizing your tales because they lack time or awareness or energy to learn the little stories as well, then you just plain don't explain. Double that if you've already learned -- as have most Native American nations, from what I've seen -- that the next step after learning the tale is to turn around and figure out a way to sell it back to you.
[had to break into two, so... continued in part two.]
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Date: 8 Sep 2010 01:09 am (UTC)That sounds like I Didn't Dream of Dragons, by Deepad.
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Date: 8 Sep 2010 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 Sep 2010 09:53 am (UTC)However, I can't resist responding to a few bits.
1. Are you sure East of the Sun, West of the Moon is Slavic? I've only run into it as Nordic.
2. *grins* That was exactly my impression of Paris: friendly, competent, helpful, clean, and full of good humour. The 'clean' is probably because I'd been in London, which was grimy, but the rest was really just how I found Paris.
3. The idea that native American cultures are all one is most frustrating if one wants to follow up on anything one encounters. My daughter's music class is an American franchise, and they keep trying to provide cultural diversity by having occasional 'American Indian' songs. The tunes and concepts may be that, but the words are pretty definitely English, and the complete lack of specific attribution makes the tokenism even more obvious than teaching these songs to New Zealand kids instead of local songs does, somehow. (It's a pity, because the class is otherwise fantastic.)
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Date: 8 Sep 2010 05:26 pm (UTC)2. London was filthy, but Paris was... well, it got points for trying. I was there when the city was doing it semi-regular cleaning of the facade of the Opera and talk about a scary-looking before and after. Literally one-half of the building's marble was brown-black, and the other half was pristine white. Ugh!
3. Native Americans get the "all is one" the same way Africa gets it. I actually ditched a class mid-semester in college and demanded the dean of the department switch me to a different intercultural communications class because I was sick and tired of hearing the professor -- a man from Zimbabwe, mind you! -- refer to "African" traditions as though there were any kind of monolithic "African" culture that could be derived from places as diverse as Kenya, Mauritania, Lesotho, and Libya. Honestly! If I'd expected anyone to be aware of the distinctions (or at least that they exist) and that you can't truly apply a title of "African" to anything because it's a freaking continent, not one big country, I'd've expected it to be a professor born, raised, and mostly educated in Africa. It really pissed me off.
As for 'American Indian' songs... well, that's an American bias for you -- that introducing diversity means dredging up some kind of quasi-indigenous cultural artifact, instead of seeing the rest of the world as potential inclusion. But that gets into tokenism and long-time imperialism, and that's a bit much for a simple reply.
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Date: 8 Sep 2010 09:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 Sep 2010 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 Sep 2010 06:04 am (UTC)I was impressed by the excellent performance (the dancing, especially, was very good indeed), but it was surreal to encounter it there. It was a little sad to hear some of the tourists talking about the dancing as 'indigenous' when it was as much of an import as the waltz would have been, though.
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Date: 9 Sep 2010 05:21 am (UTC)I think also that perhaps the economics of the situation have changed , and some fans might be thinking more on perceived assumptions? Sort of tying into what you were saying about the marketing - for example; there are many older animations that were done between French-Japanese companies (Mysterious cities of Gold, and The little Prince) and to be honest when I was quite small, the recognition was given more to the French than to the Japanese company (ironically the oposite now). It also used to be more common for just the animation to be used rather than the orignal storylines - for example Robot Wars, which merges several mecha series into the one, and adaptations rather than translations from the 80's in particular. (one of the interviews I read of the big adaptors of the time said that he just watched the animation then made up his own story to match.)
So I think with older series Japan had less say (or care) as to how their product is marketed overseas, prioritising the extra income that came in; as they might not of realised that there was a market for their own products overseas, similar to what I've heard spoken about Korea these days.
Although I definitely think that these days, I think that Japan is definitely aware that it has it's own powerful market.
~~Qem-Chibati / using a public computer.