International Symposium

SymposiumRealities”“Coping Internationalwith Vertiginous“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

Edited by Ryoko Nishii
Edited by Ryoko Nishii

Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Tokyo 2019
Tokyo 2019

Publication Date:28 Mar 2019

Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
3-11-1 Asahi-cho, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534, JAPAN

Coping with Vertiginous Realities
Edited by Ryoko Nishii
Assistant editors: Akimitsu Ikeda & Tomoko Hatao
Printed by Nihon Root Printing & Publishing Co., Ltd.
Nagatani Bldg., 1-5-4 Shin-Ohashi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0007, JAPANCover design by Fumiyo IshiguroInternational Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”
Saturday, October 6, 2018
#303, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS)
Opening address
Nishii Ryoko (ILCAA)
Keynote lecture: “Affective Responses to Manufactured Anomie”
Vincent Crapanzano (The Graduate Center of the City University of New York)“Sectarian Tension and Everyday Life: Case of Lebanon”
Akimitsu Ikeda (ILCAA)“Enacting the Past Incidents in a Non-literate Society: Tripartite Interaction among the G|ui Narra
tors, Research Assistants, and an Anthropologist in Central Kalahari”
Kazuyoshi Sugawara (Kyoto University)“Accommodating Nightmares: How to Cope with Anxieties in a Sudanese Refugee Community”
Akira Okazaki (ILCAA)
Comments
Tadashi Yanai (University of Tokyo)
Discussion
Jointly sponsored by
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) “New Anthropological Approach to Affective Studies through Fieldwork of Critical Situations” (17H00948)
ILCAA Core Project (Anthropology) “The Potential Value of Indigenous Knowledge in Managing
Hazards in Asia and Africa: The Anthropological Explorations into the Linkage of Micro-Macro
Perspectives 2”
ILCAA Joint Research Projects “Life as Dynamism in Search of a Methodological Connection
between Affect, Thinking, and Art”

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”
Saturday, October 6, 2018
#303, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS)■■■:inaudible passage
Opening Address
Ryoko Nishii (ILCAA)

Now, we will start our international symposium “Coping with Vertiginous Realities.” Myname is Ryoko Nishii and I am chairing today’s symposium. Thank you for coming to suchan out-of-the way place from the city center of Tokyo. As Project Leader of Affective Studies
through Fieldwork, Kakenhi, sponsor of this symposium, with ILCAA Research Anthropological
Project, I would like to make a short speech.
We are honored today to have Professor Crapanzano as a keynote speaker in our International
Symposium titled “Coping with Vertiginous Realities,” a term borrowed from his abstract“Vertiginous Reality Connotes the Unpredictable and Contradictory and Unconventional.”
My impression from his recently published book Recapitulations is that Professor Crapanzano
is the adventurous sort, so we have adventurously titled this symposium “Coping with Vertiginous
Realities.” We hope today’s symposium will fulfill its promise to similarly exceed mundane
reality.
Before introducing Professor Crapanzano, please allow me to digress back to my undergraduatedays. My first encounter with Professor Crapanzano’s work was reading Tuhami: Portrait ofa Moroccan, translated to Japanese in 1991, Seirei to kekkonshita otoko titled in Japanese. I
was deeply impressed by his writing style and pleased to discover how anthropological writing
could be. Tuhami is said to be one of the most important experimental ethnographies. Professor
Uchibori, Japanese leading anthropologist, tells me he introduced this book to his students as oneof four must read anthropological work.
Professor Crapanzano did not stop this Tuhami. He also wrote The Harkis: The Wound That
Never Heals, The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: Portrait of a Navajo, Waiting: The Whites ofSouth Africa and many other books. Among these, several were translated into German, French,1

Italian and Japanese. The subject covered includes psychoanalysis, comparative literature andanthropology and so on.
I will now briefly introduce the other speakers and the commentators.
Dr. Akimitsu Ikeda is an up and coming anthropologist doing field work in Lebanon. His
meticulous fieldwork focused on sensitive interaction in Lebanon’s complex society between the
Muslim, Shia, Sunni, Druze and Christians who live side by side.
The next speaker, Professor Kazuyoshi Sugawara is one of the most prominent anthropologists
in Japan. He wrote numerous books during 32 years of field work in Gwi Bushmen in Southern
Africa. He started his academic career as a primatologist and later, he became an anthropologist.
He bridges and draws on both perspectives in his studies producing unique writing from minute
observation and analysis. His work advances our understanding of humanity in term of debts
as well as pledges. Professor Sugawara was natural choice to include when organizing withProfessor Crapanzano.
Next, I owe the third speaker, Professor Akira Okazaki a debt of gratitude for making this
symposium a reality as he made contact with Professor Crapanzano. He is a member of our affectproject and continuously pushes us with his characteristically frank manner to find new aspects.
His works is peculiar, in that it does to the heart of the affective phenomenon of human being.
Professor Tadashi Yanai will give comments today. He is the spiritual and theoretical leaderof our affect project. He first studied anthropology at the University at Tokyo, then philosophy
at Barcelona University. Recently, he published an important book entitled An Anthropology of
Images which is the condensed essence of his anthropological and philosophical speculation onlife, nature and body.
In closing, a brief word on the affect project. Its formal title is “New AnthropologicalApproach to Affective Studies-Through Fieldwork of Critical Situations”. We treat affect associal phenomena that cannot be traced back to physiological responses or the mind of people.
In other words, this is an attempt to understand affect as things that affect others or are affectedby others. Following what Spinoza called “affectus,” their feelings and senses such as delight,
anger, sorrow, fun, pleasure are regarded not as subjective but as inter-subjective events or it
might be said an occasion following the recent Professor Crapanzano term. The focus of research
being the communality of affect that expands beyond individual bodies. This symposium is one
such affect event, a shared experience and I believe it will push forward our research for coping
unpredictable, unconventional vertiginous future. Thank you for your attention.
Next, I would like to invite Professor Crapanzano to have a keynote speech.

2International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”“Affective Responses to Manufactured Anomie”
Vincent Crapanzano (The Graduate Center of the City University of New York)				PART ONEI should say before beginning this lecture I should state that it is my first venture in writing
about contemporary politics. I find that it is impossible to be neutral, though neutrality does notnecessarily exclude objectivity if one recognizes ones bias. Indeed, if you look at the papers
given at the last and. I presume, the forthcoming AAA Meetings – that is meetings during
Trump’s presidency, you will find more activism –-political activism concerning the US and its
policies -- than since the Vietnam war. - This has become especially significant since the Trump’s
propagation of “false news,” “false facts,” or “alternate facts” has created a sort of epistemologicalwhirlpool. It should, in any case, be obvious that I and nearly all my colleagues are highly criticalof Trump and his followers.
Let me begin by saying that my talk today is, in one sense, tangential to the main theme of thisconference, namely affect -- as affect is understood in its contemporary study. My primary interest
is in the effect of affect, more accurately. In the way the creation and manipulation of affect canbe used for all sorts of goals, ranging from the therapeutic, the pedagogic, the political, and the
seductive – the amorous. Put another way, I am interested in the provocation of affect.
Before proceeding with my particular argument, I would like to say something about affectstudies generally. I have to admit skepticism – not on the need to study affect, its expression
and its evaluation, but on the sloppiness of some of the studies. The number of approaches to,definitions of, and attributions to affect in affect theory is dizzying. I make no claim in this brief
preface to my argument today to give order to affect theory. My remarks are rather cautionary.
Most of the studies I have read, especially those of a biological or psychological nature,seem indifferent to the way different cultures conceptualize and evaluate affect and the range of3

associated experiences: emotions, feelings, moods, sentiments, etc. Though they recognize thedifficulty in defining affect, they usually offer one or even more than one, without recognizing thatthe indefinability --or at least the difficulty of defining affect -- is in an important feature of affect.
I am not necessarily advocating a Wittgensteinian approach to affect but the study of the way“affect” is used in both ordinary conversation and specialized studies. How does its significancechange with changes of contexts? How does it affect contexts? What are the central affects/
emotions in both ordinary and scholarly discourse? Spinoza-- passed through the interpretive filterof Deleuze --stresses sadness and fear. Others might single out love. How does it affect action?
Spinoza asks repeatedly.
Is “affect” used in daily conversation? When I started to think about it, I listened for it in theconversations I was having or overhearing. Guess what? I almost never heard it used. To be sure, I
did hear its verbal form—to affect something, for example, to change or influence that something.
When referring to a human being, including themselves, speakers usually referred to being moved
by something or described their condition in terms of emotions, like anger and fear, or moods andfeelings, like happy, sad, elated, depressed, anxious, afraid, or excited. Sometimes, they referred
to being overcome by nostalgia or feeling of world ending. I am of course speaking of Americans.
I wonder if my observations would be the same in Japan. What is the semantic aura aroundwhatever words you use for affect? Does it have the dual sense of being affected by – a passive
sense – and an active one – to affect something? However you answer, you can see how deeply
embedded ”affect” and the constellations of associated concepts are embedded in grammar
and, by extension, the psychology embedded in that grammar. Some theorists who see affectstudies as a palliative to the dryness of post-structuralist studies ignore the role of language.
Often, they describe affect as pre-conceptual. It may be, but it is, as I have stressed in discussing
phenomenology, still in response to a linguistically endorsed world.
Most often when Europeans and Americans speak of context, they are referring to the immediacyof the situation in which an event – a conversation, a mood, or an action --occurs. What is lessfrequent is any reference to how the context is framed and evaluated -- the etiquette that framingand evaluation presupposes. By etiquette, I mean more than the appropriate behavior – or manners– but also etiquette of perception. What one ought to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch under thecircumstances? In New York, for example, you do not hear the rumbling of the subway under
Carnegie Hall. Of course, you do at some level. But, if you are deeply moved by the music, the4International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

rumble is muted or, if you not so moved, you become irritated by the rumble, further destroying
the aesthetic experience. Contexts, I should add, are never static, though they are usually taken asa constant. The framing of an event and its experience are never fully synchronized and should not
be collapsed one in the other. The tension between them, one might say, is affectively creative.
I have already mentioned the psychology embedded in language. I could have simply said
the implicit and explicit psychologies prevailing in a society. Spinoza is frequently mentioned inaffect studies most often without asking what is the nature of his “psychology” --if there is one
in anyway comparable to what we mean by psychology today. In other words, are – affection
and affectus psychological terms? However modern we might like to make Spinoza, we haveto be careful not to read him through the lenses of romanticism and post-romanticism that haveso deeply penetrated our (folk) psychologies that we take for granted the universality of such
notions as depth, self, innerness, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and emotionality. We see avacillation in affect studies between psychological approaches and non-mentalist ones in which
affect is characterized as simply intensity or force. Brian Massumi, like Deleuze and perhaps
Spinoza, stresses the temporal – the anticipatory – dimension of affect. The affective stance canbe characterized in terms of what I would call promptitude – a readiness to be acted upon andto act. Of course, this expectant stance is continually punctuated by feelings and emotions thatarise in responses to situational and proprioceptive changes. We must not forget that social life
is characterized by suspense – a binding suspense perhaps. It certainly figures in the affective
resonance – the mirroring and echoing – in any social engagement and the action that ensues.

				PART TWO

My focus in the remainder of this lecture is on the production of a sense of anomie throughthe manipulation of affect and the feelings, moods, and emotions that follow. Although anomie
is usually understood impersonally as the product of contradictory social conditions, I want tostress that the production of affective anomie can be a means to personal empowerment. I am
not denying the role of social and economic forces in creating the necessary conditions for anindividual to assume power, but my interests lie in how power seekers can produce and manipulate
anomic conditions for their own benefit but are subject to the very anomie they produce. I willcompare, as odd as it may seem, curing ceremonies I observed in Morocco with the chaotic
conditions that Donald Trump has produced in the United States and beyond its borders. I am
5certainly not claiming that Trump is a shaman though some anthropologists, most notably Keir
Martin and Jakob Krause-Jensen, have likened him to one. It is their common practice, despite
their very different goals, that interests me. I argue that their unpredictable, unconventional, andcontradictory behavior, which often appears at odds with their ostensible goals and the authority
they seek, can produce so intense a cognitive vertigo, or affective anomie, in their audiencesthat they can assume power over them, if only be offering them a stable orientation point. I
should note that it has been claimed that people living in chaotic conditions are particularly—and
uncritically -- suggestible. They can be likened to the shipwrecked who will desperately grab atwhatever flotsam is around.
My earliest extended fieldwork was in Morocco with the Hamadsha, members of an Islamic
confraternity, or tariqa

that specialized in exorcisms. Their appeal was to the urban poor. Many,

if not most of them, had moved from the countryside to cities in search of work. The Hamadsha
were known for their spectacular cures of those believed to be suffering from an attack or
possession by a jinn – an irascible, essentially amoral spirit who is quick to attack anyone who
has offended it. The curing ceremonies were long, highly dramatic, dissonant affairs in which aband of professional musicians played on flutes (naira-s) and oboes (ghita-s), accompanied byinsistent drumming, melodic phases (rih-s) that were said to be pleasing to possessing spirits
while the possessed danced into a deep trance. The curer would egg on his patient, sometimes
gently, sometimes violently, often thrashing about in a threatening manner, until the patient fell
unconscious and was revived by the curer, often, in my experience, symptom-free.
Although the ceremonies were centered on the patient, some on-lookers would also fall into
trance when they heard a musical phrase dear to the jinn who had once taken possession of them.
Some men slashed their scalps with knives until their heads were drenched in blood. Exorcisms
did not aim at riding the possessed of the possessing spirit once and for all, but rather intransforming it from a malign and into a beneficent one -- that is, so long as its commands wereobeyed. These commands might include wearing certain colors, always dancing to the spirit’s
favored air, making an annual pilgrimage to a shrine, or sponsoring a yearly ceremony. If thecommands were not followed, the possessed would be struck again.
I want to focus here on one curer, because he best illustrates my argument. Qandish was themost famous curer in Meknes when I worked there. His reputation rested on his successful curesand his unorthodox methods. In fact, he was viewed with ambivalence, suspicion even, but never6

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

as dangerous. His techniques were unpredictable, at times grotesque. I have seen him argue
angrily with a jinn who had possessed an adolescent girl and refused to reveal its identity or its
desires and then turn on the girl, insulting her, at times whipping her with a switch, accusing herof lying, screaming that she was pretending to be possessed. Given that the girl was voicing thespirit and the spirit the girl, it was never clear whom Qandish was addressing. He exploited thisconfusion. The barrage of contradictions was dizzying. When the confusion climaxed, the jinn
announced its identity – at least Qandish said it did – and demanded a full exorcism, which thegirl’s family could not afford. Finally Qandish performed a simple one with an oboe player and adrummer in the middle of a public square in the afternoon. (Exorcisms are usually performed atnight.) The spirit departed, Qandish announced, but on condition that a larger ceremony be held. A
few days later, I saw the girl at an exorcism for a man who had been “slapped” by angry jinn andwas suffering from facial paralysis. Qandish suddenly saw her, charged her, jumped around her,shouted at her – the jinn -- and when the jinn refused to leave her, he dipped a chunk of hardenedsugar in the blood from a sacrificed goat and forced her to eat it. Though ingesting blood is haramfor Muslims, no one was shocked at the time, caught up as they were in the act. The shock camelater. I have no idea whether the exorcism was successful since the girl’s family sent her back totheir village.
Qandish was always playing with reality. Before interviewing him, I never knew how he would
react. The first time, he answered all my questions with exceptional insight. The second time hisanswers did not relate to my questions, but upon reviewing my notes I realized he had answeredthem all but out of order. On another occasion he refused to say a word and on still another hebeat me with his switch to make a point. He was clearly brilliant. He played both within and withthe ritual conventions, but they were never in doubt. With me, where there were no set interview
conventions, I and I believe Qandish were caught in a vertiginous reality – saved, as it were, by ashared playfulness.
When I described Qandish’s antics to psychiatrists, they immediately declared him
schizophrenic. I could not convince them otherwise. For them, Qandish’s individual behavior
superseded considerations of contexts and conventions – even clearly demarcated ritual ones. I
have to admit that this was particularly difficult in Qandish’s case since he was not only breaking
conventions but also the conventionality of conventions. By transgressing these meta-conventions,
he was calling attention to the conventions – and the overriding power of their sacrality.
Diagnostics was a defense against what defied the psychiatrists’ conventional understanding.
7

In many respects Donald Trump’s behaviors, as serious, indeed as dangerous, as theirconsequences may be, resemble in dramatic form, but obviously not in substance and intent,
those of Qandish. Substance and intent aside, there are important differences that can haveconsequences, I suggest, of even greater import than their immediate effect on those who aresubject to them. They can backfire.
As I am primarily interested in the effect of anomic conditions on the people who are affectedby it, I will only discuss Trump’s tactics and strategies briefly. “I use “tactics and strategies” withcaution since, as I shall argue, anomic conditions put in question any attribution of intention. They
are, however, ascribed continually and unquestioningly in the media by both commentators andsatirists, who have grown in number and importance since Trump’s election, if not before during
the campaign, and on countless blogs. More important perhaps is the near-obsessive discussionof Trump’s latest acts. No president of the United States has received as much media coverage as
Trump.
Let me briefly discuss some of Trump’s anomic-producing practices. They will probably
be familiar to you. As his positions change from day to day, often dramatically, any discussionof them immediately gives them a false stability, a specifiable intentionality, and realistic
expectations. Under these circumstances prediction, always at the limit of speculation, can reach
speculative heights that so defy realism that their speculative nature has to be bracketed off, if not
fully denied. So noted, I discuss some of Trump’s most effective maneuvers, recognizing that it is
at times impossible to determine any integrating goal, other than his presumable desire for power,
fame, wealth and the preservation of his presidency.
In calling attention to himself, he not only enhances his own authority but also draws attention
away from other news items or frames those items as he would have them -- less through (mis)interpretation than through falsification. There is no dialogical engagement. He simply tweets that,as my wife puts it, are like the voice of God coming from nowhere. What explanation he offers
is rarely an explanation but simply unsubstantiated pronouncements. Evidence lies in the factthat he has said it. They are performatives, faulted to be sure, by the reality he evokes and by hisdisregard for consistency. Vested in his authority, as president, they still have a performative force
that loops back on itself performing, as it were, their performativity. Were he to rationalize his
inconsistencies, explain away his contradictions, and justify his sudden turn-arounds, they would
8

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

lose that force. It is as though every pronouncement is an isolate -- independent of every otherone. When they are ineffective or contradictory, they are left to fall out of memory. As one of his
advisors put it, Trump “delights in chaos and confusion.” The production of chaos and confusion
draws attention to him since only he has the key to it, if indeed he has a key.
Any (public) challenge to his particular, if momentary, version of reality Trump dismisses as
false news. He repeatedly excoriates the Press turning it into an enemy bent on destroying him.
Recently, as his standing, if not his office, is threatened, he has begun to accuse dark forces in thegovernment hell-bent on destroying him. His counterattacks are, however, directed at individuals– reporters, members of the intelligence community, those engaged in investigating his relations
with the Russians, immigrants and Muslims – or at specific institutions, like CNN or the FBI,
that he personifies in his ranting’s. They are to the juggler, demeaning, insulting, vulgar, racist,and peppered with sexual slurs, mainly directed at women, and unsupported accusations, such as
Muslims are terrorists and Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists. He taunts them, sneers
and jeers at them, calling them names, like “crooked Hilary” or “scumbag Comey” the way
children taunt each other with tags like “fat Mary” or “pretty Tommy.” Infantile, they are repeatedat every mention of them without regard to context. He does not seem to realize that he is in factdemeaning himself, as apparently many of his supporters don’t in repeating his tags. As LéviStrauss observes in open naming systems “He who names, names himself.” There is no order tohis ranting.
What is extraordinary -- and rarely noticed – is that his depictions of his enemies, their values,
thoughts, and acts mirror how he himself is characterized by them. It is a form of reversed
echolalia. Repetition substitutes for evidence. It is enforced by his rage – a bullying rage that, by
breaking presidential etiquette, seems to be read by his supporters as a sign of power rather thana sign of weakness. He plays on a nihilistic, anti-intellectual, violent undercurrent, but weakly
suppressed, in right-wing American individualism – in its demand for “freedom.”Like an illusionist Trump plays with reality, producing an epistemological tumbledown.
Already in the Art of the Deal published in 1987, he advocated what he called “hyberbole of facts”
as a deal-making device and his advisor Kellyanne Conroy attempted to explain away his false
accounts, exaggerations, and lies as alternate facts, ruffling conventional standards of veracity.
Trump ignores his own production of false facts if indeed he does not con himself into believing
them It could be argued that he has conflated rhetoric – his rhetoric – with reference. Reference,9unlike rhetoric, is subject to truth conditional logic. Rhetoric is, as Socrates knew, prone totrickery. Persuasion substitutes for truth evaluation (even when “truth” figures rhetorically). This
is not to say that rhetoric is simply persuasive, for it functions not only to convince but to subtly
change the context and thereby the significance of the referential.
		
Trump is attracted to the unseemly, the less-than-legal, the swamp -- the corruptions -- hepromised to do away with in his campaign, as has been dramatically revealed, as I write, by the
judgments against his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his lawyer-fixer Michael
Cohen, incriminating him in their testimonies. He is drawn to autocratic leaders -- Putin, Kim
Jong-un, Netanyahu, and Roderigo Duerte of the Philippines -- but will turn on them when it suits
his purposes. The law and indeed the American constitution, which he has apparently never read,appear to be simply obstacles to achieving his goals. He does not seem to grasp the balance ofpowers and has tried again and again to interfere with the independence of the legislature and the
judiciary. He has no qualms about breaking tradition, conventions and even the law. He refused –and still refuses -- to reveal his tax returns, as presidents traditionally do; he asked to swear over
his book, The Art of the Deal, instead of the Bible at his inauguration. (His request was refused.);he has withdrawn or threatened to withdraw security clearances from people whom he considers
his enemies – even President Obama -- solely on political grounds His conduct at diplomaticand political meetings is malapert. He arrives late without an apology, pushes his way in frontof other heads of state, interrupts them, mimics them, and has no concern for the appropriate
etiquette as in his meeting the queen of England. He has refused to divest or put his businesses
in fully blind trusts, and he promotes his own business interests at political and diplomatic
meetings. His political speeches have little substance. Rather they are self-eulogizing rallies oroccasions to vent his rage against whoever happens to be the “enemy” of the day. Even when
his meetings are considered failures by their participants, he declares them great – the greatest -success ever -– and is wont to break whatever promises he made within hours. He arrives at them
unprepared, without consulting experts, who he often mocks, for he knows best. His main sourceof news is Rupert Murdoch’s ultra-right Fox New, and he is said to depend primarily on one its
commentator, Sean Hannity, for policy decisions as he depended at the begging on his presidency
on the irascible alt-right Steve Brannon. Most of his political appointments are made on the basisof loyalty and their willingness to agree with whatever he says -- and not on expertise. If they donot, he fires them.
Like an illusionist he plays with reality From the start of his presidency he has broken treaties,
10International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

ignored longstanding commitments, disrupted trade agreements that threaten the world economy,
and the most fundamental moral values, as, for example, the separation from their parents of thechildren of banned immigrants. His responses are off-the cuff without any regard to their longterm consequences. His sense of the future is limited to near time, except presumably when it
concerns his own everlasting fame.
19 I could, of course, continue to discuss Trump’s maneuvers, but then I would be participatingin the effects he has produced. In fact, this lecture is inevitably such a response and should beheard in terms of both my argument and as a symptom of Trump’s effect on Americans like me.
The effect is all-encompassing and therein lies its power. There is no-escape whether you support
him or not. This inescapabilty is re-enforced by his modes of communication, most notably his
tweets, which as I have said, do not invite a dialogical response. It is he – and he alone – who has
the power to respond. When he does, his responses are rarely directed at the issue at stake but are
simply further pronouncements, often self-eulogizing or attacks on his opponents even when they
have nothing to do with the issue in question. Deflection is the rule.
Trump’s followers may find security in his style, as they may find comfort in God’s word.
This would be especially true of the conservative evangelicals who are among his most ardent
supporters, despite his blasphemous outburts and his – in their eyes – sinful acts. I am notspeaking here of Biblical allusions planted in many of George W. Bush’s speeches. If they occur inTrump’s, they are ornamental clichés. The evangelicals’ support of Trump is pragmatic and issue
specific -- a means, for example, to end the right to abortion or stop immigrants (“terrorist andrapists” from) entering their country. It should not be dismissed as greed as many of his opponents
suggest.
Mike Pence, the Christian fundamentalist vice-president, stands beside him at his signing
legislation as a sort of totemic guarantor of the righteousness of -- or at least the necessity for-- whatever bill he is signing. His presence does not comfort to Trump’s opponents. Indeed, it
inspires fear of his becoming president, which many consider worse than Trump’s presidency.
This not to say that Trump’s supporters are not without their fears – fears of his impeachment.
His supporters do not seem to grasp the long-term consequences of his acts -- his denialof global warming; his arbitrarily breaking the Iran treaty without any concern for what it
accomplishes or its effect on Middle Eastern politics; his tax cut on the poor, his Supreme Court
11

appointments; his reducing and redirecting funds for education and healthcare for whatevercrackpot project (e.g. the border wall with Mexico) has entered his mind; his rescinding ofenvironmental protection legislation; his warmongering; his trade-warring; his threats to end
support for NATO, coupled with his veneration of Putin; and of course the effect of his acts on
America’s reputation and influence. That America First really means Trump First has become acliché. It also marks the indifference and ignorance of much of the country to the rest of the world,
as any reader of local newspapers or viewer of local television knows, except of course when it
impinges directly their lives. And even then, many support Trump’s policies that are not in theirinterests.
Whether it is intended or not, the conflict between the two positions produces a radical divisionin the country – one which gives little comfort to either side, for they both suffer from the lackof the communitarian sentiment of unity that nationalism inspires. This sentiment does notnecessarily require agreement but the possibility of engagement. A deep-seated sense of isolation– a sort of loneliness – is coupled with anger and hostility. Family members who have different
views of Trump avoid each other or vow not to let politics enter their relations. Friendships arebroken, and there are fights in bars and political rallies that have led to killing. Trump’s opponents
argue that he has provoked them.
The range, intensity, and erratic quality of affect – what I am calling here affective anomie-- are enormous There is little certainty. Each day Trump’s acts unsettle the accommodations of
the previous day. He offers no grounding. His unpredictability, his failure to follow traditional
conventions, his hyperbole, his falsifying accounts of what happened, his lying, his about-faces,
his dramatic shifts of mood, his rages, his personal attacks, his failure to give evidence for his
pronouncements, his inability to engage in dialogue, his pretense – is it a pretense? – that heactually believes his pronouncement and the reality they imply preclude attributions of intention
and a sense of an expectable future And yet, attributions of intention are made and acted upon interms of an expectable future. They require continual recalibration. There are certain positions heholds with tenacity, and yet he often acts in ways that undermine them. Uncertainty, mistrust, anddoubt are pervasive, however strongly his supporters resist them. It may well account for theirinflexibility and indeed that of his opponents whose opposition is solid and unyielding.
Each side has their own view of Trump – the one that he is a ruthless pragmatist whose
indifference to tradition, convention, and even values they themselves hold demonstrate his
12International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

strength, courage and promise. The other insist the there is something wrong with him mentally.
They throw out one or another diagnosis. He has been called narcissistic, paranoid, manic,delusional, a pathological liar, and schizophrenic, psychopathic, sociopathic, and just plain
crazy. Some claim that he is suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or
ADD (attention deficit disorder), Asperger’s syndrome, the beginnings of Alzheimer’s diseaseor senile psychosis, or that he is addicted to cocaine. These diagnoses are bandied about without
the requisite expertise and examination. They are defensive (as are many diagnoses), providing
an illusory, external vantage point: an escape from Trump’s encompassing omnipresence andits dizzying effect. Whatever truth any of the diagnoses may have, they are essentially attempts
to give order to disorder – to unreason. If affect is taken in temporal terms as promptitude-- a preconscious readiness to respond then we have to recognize that Trump’s frustratingmanipulations give rise to heighten anxiety and unrealistic, erratic emotional responses thatperpetuate that anxiety or surrender to often false hopes. He becomes for both his supporters andopponents a ground stone –a positive one for the one, a negative for the other.
		
What I want to stress by way of a conclusion is that unlike
the cognitive vertigo that Qandish and other curers produce and exploit in relatively defined,
purposeful conditions, the dissonance that Trump produces is by no means so confined. His
techniques may work in the narrow context of making a deal in a property transaction or inasking for a bank loan, but where the frame of reference is expansive, multi-resonant and multiconsequential, extending over time, such tactics are dangerous for not only do they affect the
population at large, but Trump himself. He is not immune to the cognitive vertigo – the anomie– he has produced. He too must seek grounding – a stable vantage point. Perhaps this is one ofreasons why he seems to be attracted to despotic leaders, why he clearly wants their unconstrained
power. They or anyone he depends on becomes stabilizing other, which is of course impossible,
for in surrendering to an other, in reality or in phantasy, he loses the very autonomy he desires. He
has to destroy them. Danger lies here, for finally he is left to himself in the dizzying conditions he
has created. How then, we have to ask, will he respond, knowing full well that we can’t answer
this question with any certitude.

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“Sectarian Tension and Everyday Life: Case of Lebanon”
Akimitsu Ikeda (ILCAA)

Thank you. When I was preparing for today’s presentation, I was quite puzzled on
symposium’s title, if it is possible at all to tell about “vertiginous realities,” and moreover,“vertiginous realities” as a topic under “affective studies.” I was worried like, if I pick up one
Lebanese reality, describe it, and analyze it, and present it to you, like “Everyone, this is Lebanesevertiginous reality,” it is not vertiginous at all, because it is as if I grasped the vertiginous reality
as a discrete entity and behaved as if I have authority to talk whatever I want. In this case, I am
sure that I would not be able to convey any texture of being vertiginous to audience. So I felt I
could not say anything for this symposium. Even though I felt honored to be entitled to speak inthis symposium, I was wondering whether I should decline such an honor.
Then, one thing came up to my mind. It was about my classroom anthropology course forthe second year students of undergraduate level. They were all anthropology major and I was
supposed to teach them basic theories and major topics related to anthropology. It was the daythat we were learning about fieldwork. I wanted to invite them to understand what fieldwork waslike through descriptive writing rather than textbook’s-shortened teaching.
I have once published short articles on my fieldwork experience in Lebanon and I thought the
short texts to be suitable for the students. I chose one of them and read it aloud, in front of thestudents. The content of the text is mostly same as my presentation today, by the way.
Now, among the students, there was a little bit older guy, who was once enrolled to economic
department, but eventually gave it up, then got enrolled again to anthropology. Having realized
what he really wanted to do, he showed enthusiasm in studying anthropology. I should say he
was more than ordinary student and though he was still in the second year, he already started
thinking about continuing his study in graduate school. When I finished reading my text, he
immediately reacted and said to me, “Professor, I will never choose Lebanon as my fieldwork site.
If I went there, I would definitely be mentally disordered.” Miserable Lebanon! She was quickly
wiped out from this little anthropologist academic concern. I was trying to invite them to getfamiliarized to field work experience but the attempt was failed. However, maybe he was right.
Now, it is time to think about vertiginous realities. I am not sure if the students’ experience can becalled “vertiginous,” but at least if reading about Lebanon brought him such affective reactions,14International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

including critical declaration, steep decline, I should say Lebanon at last got her proper occasion
to be scrutinized under the title “vertiginous realities” or anthropology of affect. What I can dohere is to enhance and exploit such occasion as much as possible.
Lebanon is characterized by its sectarianism and here, “sect” means social, these aspects ofreligion, and we are intending here, there is no such pejorative connotation for the word “sect.”
In Lebanon, there are 18 official sects of Islam and Christianity. I will not explain all ofthem, but let us just check there are Armenian sects here, like Armenian Orthodox and Armenian
Catholic. I have to mention it later. You can say Armenian Orthodox is one of the sects in
Lebanon like this.
Sectarian is power-sharing system institutionalized throughout modern history of Lebanon
which means Late Ottoman, French mandate and post-war independence. Based on the frame,
even they share, for example, evenly parliamentary seats among Christians or Muslims.
Sometimes these systems worked well, especially when the modernization theory was evaluated,
they considered Lebanon to be a good example of consociational democracy, but at the same time,
there was malfunction of the system and it has led to conflicts or wars for these periods. Actually,around 2008, I was conducting my field work in Lebanon.
Among recent works, I picked up sectarianism studies based on constructionism. One famous
example is historian, Ussama Makdisi’s case, but here I would choose Joanne Nucho’s work
because she is an anthropologist. She regards sectarianism as a process, considering sectarianism
to be social and cultural construction, which is created and re-created by people’s acts. She
emphasizes such as relational, dialogic or negotiational aspects of sectarianism, rather thansectarianism as fixed entity.
The location where she conducted fieldwork is called Bourj Hammoud. It is an Armenian
quarter, close to Beirut, which is the capital of Lebanon. Again, she regards Armenian community
to be not only people, who belong to a shared sectarian category, but social and cultural
construction by claiming.
Here, I just put one case from her book. It is about economic and medical service by NGOs
and hospitals. These organizations were aiming mainly at Armenians, but she introduces thecase of an Arab woman, who married with Armenian husband. She required aids for theseorganizations, by claiming her husband as Armenian. What happened on the side of theseorganizations is; based on Armenian family ideal, her claim was approved. They thought, even15

though she was not Armenian, they should help her because women should be those who should
do such work.
Based on these observations, she recognizes that there is interaction between individuals
and organizations. It follows coordination by encapsulation. The organization encapsulates thewoman and then, Armenian boundary is remade and eventually sectarianism was remade throughthis process.
From this argument, I understand that constructionism opened a framework that regards
sectarianism to be maintained by everyday life or the present, especially the shifting present.
But from perspective of anthropology of affect, constructionism could be criticized because
it has too much leaned towards the discursive. Scholars from this field distinguish emotion from
affect, while emotion is discrete and linguistically-coded meanings, affect is like “energy” or “nonor pre-linguistic registers of experience.” “Its scope goes much beyond that of subjectivity or theself”. This phrase is quite difficult for me actually and another scholar says “if anthropologistsof emotion throughout different compositions of language and the discourse, anthropologists ofaffect… sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture.”
Another one, anthropology affect is a “healthy reminder that human life is messier and moreresistant to our efforts to make sense of it as social analysts than we might think” or “in place ofthe sheer critique of representation, affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise atwhat and how things happen.” “Affect studies helped propel anthropology out of the mental habitof describing its objects as if they were fixed.”
Though I cannot do here theoretical criticisms from my own angle, I still agree with scholars’
aim to register experiences which is difficult to be figured but still important to grasp socially.
Supposedly, many scholars found affect to be useful concept to renew anthropology.
From here, I would love to go into a description of my field. The place where I was doing
fieldwork is called Kab Elias. In Lebanon, there is a valley called Bekaa. Kab Elias is situatedin the Bekaa Plain. They say their population is about 50,000 and the characteristic in terms ofsect is their diversity. About 50% of them are Sunni Muslims, whereas the rest of them consist ofa few Christian sects. They are living together loose segregation and as for inter-marriage, it isquite difficult to judge, but I should say now it is not common.

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International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

・・・
Anyway, in this town, I was interested in what the form of sectarianism or boundary of sects
in local situation in everyday lives is. How do people live sectarianism in their lives? In thefollowing, I will show two cases. One is related to sect, but the other is not.
Case 1: one day I was watching TV with a Sunni couple and two sons. The TV was showing a
Mass, probably of Greek Orthodox. Then, their son, about 4 years old, pointed out the screen by
finger and said to me, “This is Christian.” His mother saw it and suddenly held his hand strongly
and separated him from the television and she said to me, “Muslims and Christians are similar toeach other.”We can see, in this case, a consciousness on sectarian difference quite clearly and especially inverbal or bodily expression. They avert themselves from sectarian difference by comprehensive
but vague expression like “similar to each other.” They reveal sectarian difference first but quickly
deny it in the following moments. We might be tempted to see such phenomenon as something
like strategy in order not to escalate the tension. It will be more so if, especially as I mentioned
before, there was a sectarian tension around the period where I was living. But I would rather put
question if it was really denied, because she said “similar” , but similar does not mean same or
non-existence of the difference. I would like to say they appear to be denying the difference but
actually imply it. What happened is sectarian difference eventually “remains” even though they
try to hide it. Moreover, I would like to put another question. Did they do this because it was amatter of sect?
Now, I would like to continue to non-sectarian case. It is case 2. This one is about George, aGreek Orthodox old man. One day, his wife, two daughters and me were eating in the kitchen.
While we were eating together in the kitchen, George came there and told me, “Give me yourphone (i.e.mobile). I want to buy yoghurt from Paul.” Now Paul is Maronite Christian old guy.
His job is to produce dairy products and he was my neighbor. When I heard George said to me
like this, I felt something strange. Why does not he use home telephone because he is in his
house? Even though I had my mobile on me, I replied, “No, I do not have it, but I will tell Paul
about yoghurt on my way home,” because Paul was my neighbor, it was easy for me. I asked toGeorge, “How much do you want it?”
Then, George raised his voice and said, “No, I do not want yoghurt! There is something and I
17want to talk about it.” Looking at our interaction, his daughter amusedly said to me, “When myfather mentions yoghurt, Paul will know what he is talking about. My father has his business.”
By her comment, I remembered George had told me he might sell an old refrigerator to Paul.
I was wondering if this George’s attitude was related to the plan, but I was not sure. Anyway his
communication style was vague, and I was curious and wanted to know if such style was common
in the town or in Lebanon generally. I asked, “Why did he behave like that?” to his daughter.
Then, she withdrew her gaze from me and said, “I do not know. I just thought like that, that is it.”She did not expand her comment anymore and drank a shot glass of liqueur made from grapes andkept silence.
A few days later, what happened is Paul bought old refrigerator from George.
Now, about this case, the intention of George’s behavior is eventually, most probably,transaction of refrigerator, but I would love to continue my argument. We can say it is similar
to case 1 because both cases reveal, then hide something. If it is valid to say that similarity ofinteraction through both sect-related matter and non-sect-related matter can be observed. Also,
what they revealed still “remains” even after they tried to hide it.
At first, daughter revealed the intention of her father’s behavior. Then she said “I do not know”
but it does not mean she does not know his intention, but she just restricted her comments as her
personal thought. Then, that she knew his intention still “remains,” even though she tried to hideit.
Based on this observation in the field, I would like to remark some concluding points.
The first one: when we go back to Nucho’s constructionist analysis, what she was arguing is,by claiming people make themselves engaged in sectarianism, while in my case, people makethemselves disengaged in sectarianism but still maintain its space.
As we saw here, I made my argument based on people’s, let us say, “affective response”
towards me. I am tempted to say sectarianism is affective. What we are seeing is Lebanon’s
affective sectarianism, but more importantly, I would love to continue argument, if such behavior
extends beyond sectarian matters, their core of life-world could be different from scholar’sattention or excessive attention to sectarianism. Then, we might be able to say ethnographic
description with an emphasis on affect helps us to explore what we really should focus on in orderto do anthropology based on truly other’s point of view.

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International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”(Nishii) Thank you very much, we are gland to listen to your meticulous research, it shows neworientation of anthropology.
Thank you, again.
<Break>(Nishii) Now I invite Professor Kazuyoshi Sugawara to give a speech titled “Enacting the Past
Incidents in a Non-Literate Society.”

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“Enacting the Past Incidents in a Non-Literate Society: Tripartite Interaction among the
G|ui Narrators, Research Assistants, and an Anthropologist in Central Kalahari”
Kazuyoshi Sugawara (Kyoto University)

Good afternoon. This is an honorable experience for me to present my paper in the presenceof great professor Vincent Crapanzano. Other than the abstract, though some people might say
it is too much self presentation, I prepared four kinds of handout; three are my recent articles
already published that are relevant for today’s presentation, the fourth is a full paper on which thispresentation is based. Then, let us begin.
Let me depart from a private memory of the morning of one day in middle of March 1968. On
the day before, I failed on the entrance exam of the University of Tokyo. At the breakfast table,
my father was in a bad mood; my difficult brother, 8 years elder than I, complained about the tasteof mother’s cooking. Father got angry and quarreled with him.
In January 2013, 18 years after father’s death, I had an opportunity to stay at my brother’shome. When we enjoyed the stories of our youth, I was astonished to find him in complete
oblivion regarding this episode. However, from the youth to the present, he has stayed in the
habit of making daily entries in his diary. If there had been no diary, I could never be certain
whether my memory corresponded to what actually had happened nearly half a century ago or it
was merely a delusion.
At least in pre-modernity, a claim that a certain incident had actually occurred at a certain pointof time could be confirmed only by connecting this claim with the communication system basedon letters (literacy). Illiterate societies generally lack decisive materials providing evidence forthe reality of any past incident.
If so, we can assume polar extremes in the interpretation of oral discourse concerning the past
incidents:
A) The singular past really existed. The accuracy of narrative for mapping an incident to thediscourse world depends on the narrator’s faculty of memorizing. The higher this faculty is, the20International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

more faithful the narrative to the singular past incident.
B) The past does not really exist. People being motivated to tell all the past incidents merelytransformed some mental resource that has little relation with the reality into oral language. In
illiterate societies, any attempt to reconstruct the real “history” with objective accuracy is distined
to be in vain.
I will commit myself to neither view. The purpose of the following argument is to cut a narrow
path between them.
Some of the advocators for the embodiment theory in cognitive science inheriting Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s contemplation proposed the “enactive approach,” that regards perception/
cognition as a simultaneous “enaction” both of the subject and the world through embodied
action. The key term for this presentation, enact, enactive, and enaction, derived from this schoolof thought.
Edmund Husserl, the predecessor of Merleau-Pontian thought, argued that all that is presented
to us in flesh-and-blood and vivid reality must be directly accepted in just the same way as it gives
itself. I would like to express this characterization of reality with a rather awkward term “freshvividness.”
Trying to fill up my description with fresh-vividness, I would like to propose rather a curious
perspective: to comprehend narrative as a kind of bodily activity of walking on the mosaic-likeboundary between environment and virtual environment.
I only show a figure omitting the explanation.

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The point is the interpenetration between these two environments. Since 1982 I haveconducted research among the G|ui Southern African hunter gatherers. From 1994 to 2013, I
recorded the narratives that were told primarily by elderly G|ui group members. Here, I want
to reveal some characteristics of the interactive sequence in which the narrator, the investigator,
namely me, and the research assistants had participated.
The G|ui and another dialect group, G||ana, in close linguistic affinity with G|ui, lived anomadic lifestyle dependent on nearly self-sufficient hunting-gathering economy in the Central
Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).
The basis of the subsistence was primarily supported by the gathering activities of women.
Using traditional bow-and-arrow hunting, the most commonly taken game were seven speciesof large and medium-sized ungulates called “things to eat (qχ’óō-χó).”After 1979, the G|ui/G||ana became settled as part of the government’s Remote Area
Developmental Program and the Xade settlement of between 500 and 600 people was born at thewestern edge of the reserve. They were forced to relocate when the government initiated its
Relocation Program in 1997 and today, over 1,000 people are living in the settlement of
Qx’oensakene, official term *New Xade.

The following linguistic knowledge owes much to Professor Hiroshi Nakagawa’s thoroughphonological studies on G|ui, who is the professor of this university, the Tokyo University ofForeign Studies.
22International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

Personal Pronoun System constitutes almost a complete paradigm.

In this presentation, eight segments are picked out from the transcriptions of utterances
recorded in “artificial setting of interview” with six G|ui men who were in or above their 60s. As
for the “artificial setting of interview,” please consult the paper in 2013 handout. Two survey
assistants, Thabuuka (TB) and Kaaka (KA) played important roles in interview.
Generally, interview is a peculiar form of verbal interaction in which an investigator (Iv) wants
to obtain novel knowledge or information from a native person (X). This initial condition
naturally results in an adjacent paring of Iv’s inquiry and X’s response.

23

In Segment one, the narrator, HO, was an influential man who had assisted the chief of the
Xade settlement. One year after the relocation was enforced, I asked him about the recent
circumstances at the relocated village. The exchange of speech turns from Iv3 to HO6 embodies a
conspicuous sequence that consists of the chain of adjacency pairs of inquiry and response. Thisis the ideal type. However, this is far from “narrative.”
In 1994, at the beginning the trial of collecting the “life-histories” from elder people, I tried toinduce the informant to the Q&A sequence. However, soon I found it a boring project because byusing such a method, I could not encounter the G|ui’s “long talk” that had fascinated me when I
had been analyzing their everyday conversation in previous years. Thus, I decided to yield theinitiative of interviewing to the survey assistants. All the following segments are the product of
the interviews that were carried out after this decision.

Over the long turn NK1 (in the paper), omitted from this slide, the narrator described themundane activity of snare-hunting that was denoted by rather a vague verb “gather (ǃʔoõ).” Themost interesting sequence can be observed in turns succeeding KA3, in which KA expressed his
surprise. The characteristic relevance for this sequence is that a distinctive difference between thesexes and ages is found in the “eating rate” for the species of the ŋǂii-ǀòà (tentatively translated as“beast”) category, which approximately corresponds to the biological taxon of carnivores.
All women, as well as juveniles, except those in the eldest grade, consistently avoided them,while the men’s eating rates are due to a wide variation in the males’ accounts of what animal to
avoid. As many as 44% of married men eat genet (tsámbà), while NK regards it as his ŋǃāã-χò;
things which will cause the disease if consumed. KA believes that the genet meat is good-tasted
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International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

and is surprised with NK’s aversion to it. However, in KA5, he tried to re-interpret this aversion
as a sign of NK’s care for his wife and children, who might be harmed by eating their favorite
meat that had been stained with blood of genet. Essential difference in the vulnerability to animal
meat between men, women, and juveniles, is enacted here.

The socio-cultural background of Segment 4 is intricate. According to the narratives by several
elder men, until about half a century ago, especially when there were not enough women eligible
for marriage in their own camp, they had sometimes participated in an all-male team that raided a
distant camp for its women. CM described in detail a case of these violent projects. At that time,
he had already been married with !ʔOno, whose younger brother Kare participated in the raiding
team. Kare kidnapped two women, taking them forcefully to a camp where CM and his wife had
visited and stayed. Two husbands of the two kidnapped women had secretly followed the raiders
in order to get back their wives.

25

Two important features should be framed up. First, CM described in CM6 that the deprived
husband, who had stalked to the camp, had been sitting as far away as the investigator’s video
camera that was standing on the tripod. Similarly, in CM9, it was stated that the kidnapped two
women had been sitting at the distance like that ǁqχ’óà (a kind of acacia). These expressions
illuminated the way how the here-and-now environment and the virtual environment, that is, thepast event, are contiguous with each other on the mosaic-like boundary.
Second, the sequence extending over five turns, CM7-KA6-CM8-KA7-CM9, is striking.
Here, CM and KA are negotiating with each other to estimate the hour on which the deprived
husband had been just stalking. In fact, “hour” in transcription is the translation of naakò, a loan
word from Setswana. As G|ui lacks the word that corresponds to “time” in English, in everyday
discourse, the G|ui of the older generation have never referred to the time itself as an abstract
concept. Their cognition of time is based on an elaborate tense marker system in G|ui that strictly
corresponds to the solar movement. On the other hand, those in younger generation have adapted
to the “temporalized system” in Niklas Luhmann’s term from their experience with wage labor.
Here, the narrator tried to enhance the reality of the past incident he was narrating, by connecting
the local or oral communication system with the temporalized system. It was not until the young
assistant KA behaved quite cooperatively with the senior narrator that the latter’s attempt was
successfully attained.
Most people whom I begged for the narrative were willing to accept my request. The
following example is an exceptional case in which the narrator, at first, showed a reluctant
attitude. The narrator, PR, was the oldest man in my host camp. Since about 1987, I had noticed
that probably owing to the cataract, his eyes were becoming clouded. In 1990, when I was absent
at Xade, I received news that PR completely lost his eyesight. This segment was recorded 6 years
later.

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International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

In PR3 and PR4, PR himself plainly attributed his reluctance to narrate to his lost eyesight.
TB’s view concerning narrative seems to coincide with our common sense—even those people
with no eyesight can scan their memories stocked in their mind with the “mind-eye.” However,after analyzing the conspicuous sequence of interaction between CM and KA in Segment 4, I
recognized that such a common sense view of narrative missed an important point. For the G|ui,
the rhetorical device of overlapping the sense of distance between the narrator and some object
in the landscape visible in here-and-now context with what was experienced in the past incident
is essential resource for enacting their own world. The narrative is not merely an activity to talkwith “only one’s mouth” of what one “knows in her/his heart.”
The G|ui men held their male initiation rituals in the past. That has never been observed fornearly half a century, since the last initiation ceremony was held early in the 1970s. This ritual iscalled ǃhórōχà, while another term ǁùī, which is synonymous with ǃhórōχà, is often used, originally
meaning “the song of men.” TB had told me that PR, his uncle, knew ǁùī very well. The incipient
purpose of the second interview with PR was to record the “song of men.”<VTR>
Sorry, this visual image does not correspond to this segment, but at just the beginning of theinterview. After PR sang, a very complicated negotiation between the assistants and the narrator
about the authenticity of this song occurred. The research assistant of the younger generation
knows Setswana language, agro-pastoralist language, so he quickly supposed that this song
had originated from the agro-pastoralists, but PR showed a very unpleasant facial expression
and claimed that this was truly the ǁùī song, etcetera. I had already wrote about this interestingnegotiation, in an article that was published in 2008, but it is not easy for you to get this article. If
you want, please contact with me, I will send the PDF file.
KA was really absorbed in the past event that was enacted with such fresh/vividness, andhonestly expressed his longing for the past event. “I wonder if I could have been there!”27

The knowledge of magic and sorcery had been certainly imported from the ǂébè (Kgalagadi
agro-pastoralist) culture of Bantu origin. KK in the following segment was an influential man
from the background of intermarriage between ǂébè and Kua, generic term of Bushmen, and KK
was handicapped. His right knee was in complete paralysis. I attempted to ask how he had
become handicapped.

KK’s narratives in KK3, KK4 and KK8 were organized in accordance with a specific “idiom”
in Crapanzano’s term, namely, sorcery (ŋǁâãǀχàè). This idiom confronts in a peculiar way theinvestigator’s attempt to approach past incidents through narrative. The act of harming a person
by sorcery is usually unobservable. The statement that the victim was actually harmed by thesorcerer thus describes invisible agents. Even though this causation assumes incomparable
fresh/vividness for the narrator, it is difficult for the investigator to share this fresh/vividness.
Therefore, such a statement is posited in especially isolated space in the virtual environment as a28

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

token of the narrator’s interpretation of the world.
However, such an epistemological isolation does not necessarily mean that the relevanceof indigenous interpretation of reality is completely cut off. The sequence from KK3 to KK8
expanded my understanding of the semantic field of the transitive verb ŋǀuo, which is frequently
used in everyday discourse. Until recording KK’s narrative, I had simply translated this word into
“regret X (that was lost)” or “be envious of X (owed by the other). However, Narikudzane had
loved KK, but her seduction was refused. Namely, she was mortified at failing to get the object ofdesire, namely X.
Thereafter, I gradually understood that ŋǀuo was the key concept for understanding the social
conflict among the G|ui that was mostly driven by jealousy and envy. Comprehending the“inferential structure” underlying an idiom, or an interpretation of the world, casts light onto thesocial attitude lived by the people, as being-in-the (real)-world.
Although NK is the same narrators in segment three, the following segment had been recorded
two years earlier. Ci is NK’s wife and played a critical role in the interaction.

Generally, the narrators sometimes hide their own acts in the past. Oblivion is the mosteffective potential that leads to unintentional concealment. However, at a scene, where thenarrative is developed, there are sometimes bystanders, who regard the narrators’ oblivion as
lies, being endowed with the competence to reveal the “truth.” The narrator’s spouse is the mostrepresentative of the bystanders with such competence. In this segment, we are tempted to inferthat NK’s concealment was not deliberate but arose from genuine oblivion, especially from his
laughter in NK5 that made it sound as if he was really amused by his own recalling. Oblivion is a
specific process through which stigmatic information is concealed by a natural consequence at the29

level of existential choice, as is discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre, outside the deliberate control of thesubject.
A bystander’s intervening can certainly transform the narrator’s forgetfulness into recollection.
In such a moment, the intensity of virtual environment is enhanced at a stroke. This process itself
heightens the reliability of the following statement. The chain of incidents really existed in which
the narrator was living with a woman named ≠here≠qx’oaxo, fathered a boy with her, and threw
away them.

The last segment is a typical case that impressed me with the interactive significance ofan intimacy between the narrator and the survey assistant. The narrator GS was famous as amaster of dzáãkù, namely, extra-marital sexual relationship that is quite ordinary among the
G|ui and G||ana society. GS had married two women and had dzáãkù relationships with at least
five women. When he was living his first wife ≠Qai, he loved a girl, Tseeha, who had not yet
experienced menarche. In the following segment, he described in detail how he had fallen in lovewith that girl.
This sequence makes us confident that the memory of the past incidents in which the narrator
had loved a young girl is not a text-like mental representation that had remained intact in his“brain.” The glorious experience could be enacted in the here-and-now context only throughastonishingly cooperative responses by a listener of the younger generation. Thus, the past cannot
be re-presented solely by the narrator’s monologue. It emerges from the interaction between the
narrator and the listener, that is, from the co-enaction.

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International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

After the publication of Tuhami, no anthropologists, who had concentrated their attentions on
to the narrative as the most promising path to the different form of life from their own, cannot
dispense with the legacy from Vincent Crapanzano, who had pioneered the phenomenologicalapproach to dialogical interaction perse between narrator and anthropologist. I have approachedthe narrative along a slightly different path. For me, following Husserlian maxim, “Return to thethings themselves” was to return to the face-to-face interactions in the tripartite relation among thenarrator, research assistants, and me. This attempt is an indispensable step towards demonstratingthat the ethnography based on narrative is not an outcome of disembodied mental representation
but has emerged from the ensemble of a huge number of embodied actions—or cooperative
practices.
In conclusion, I have to return to the extreme poles in interpretation of narrative. It is evident
that most of above analyses are contrary to “assumption A.” Even a fantastic story-teller likeCM was encouraged by the cooperation of an assistant of the younger generation. Above all,this realist, as well as representationalist, stance has no means to understand the interactive
significance of oblivion.
On the other hand, the agnosticism characterizing the “assumption B” flatly contradicts withthe experience of fieldwork. As soon as an anthropologist decides to go to Morocco, South Africa,
Thailand, Kalahari Desert, or wherever, the travel has already begun. This travel is fundamentally
motivated by the incipient fascination from the other’s form of life. We cannot perceive the ‘oldthings,’ but we can continue walking on the mosaic-like boundary between environment in thehere-and-now context and the virtual environment we call the “past.” An anthropologist can,through immediate co-presence with the co-enaction between narrators and the listeners, enhance
the intensity of the virtual environment.
Finally, we have to pay special attention to the body on which all the existences anchor
themselves in the world. The paralysis of KK’s right leg constitutes undoubtable reality. His
narrative can reveal the past causation chin, even if the anthropologists cannot believe in such
invisible agency as sorcery. The undeniable perception that some people have of physicalfeatures that are similar to those of the Bantu cannot be explicable, unless we believe in theactual incidence of inter-marriage in old days. Concerning this point, sexuality has a privileged
status for us to comprehend all the living existences as the consequence of reproductive chain.
When anthropologists keep listening to multiple discourses accompanied with pleasurable, andsometimes unpleasant, expressive gestures shown by narrators, they can trace intricate networks
that connect one incident with another, from love affair to violence. Thus, the density of virtualenvironment is enhanced.
31

Thank you for your attention.
(Nishii) Thank you very much. From your speech, now, we understand maybe all anthropologists
here in Japan, everybody has our own Vincent Crapanzano inside us. Thank you.
Now we will have 10 minutes break. Please come back here at 3:40.
<Break>(Nishii) Now, we would like to start the third session. Next speaker is Professor Akira Okazaki;“Accommodating nightmares: how to cope with anxieties in a Sudanese refugee community.”32

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”“Accommodating Nightmares: How to Cope with Anxieties in a Sudanese RefugeeCommunity”
Akira Okazaki (ILCAA)Good afternoon everyone. I am very glad to have this symposium with Professor Vincent
Crapanzano. This symposium has a bit strange title, “Coping with Vertiginous Realities.” In fact,
I proposed this title when we were preparing this symposium because the paper sent by Professor
Crapanzano has this sort of argument about vertiginous realities. Then, I started to think, in mycase what kind of my fieldwork experience I can talk as a vertiginous reality. I found it: that is,
dreams and tricksters.
My paper is concerned with the way the Gamk people of Sudan try to cope with anxieties
caused by nightmares, but I also try to show a possibility of using the Gamk way of coping withnightmares for rethinking the anxieties and anomy produced by Donald Trump.
Now, I want to make clear, there are two kinds of “nightmares”: One is bad ominous dreams,
like omen, and second one is crazy fools. Both are called caalk in Gamk language. Indeed, thisterminology is very odd and confusing. That is, dreams and fools (human) are referred to by thesame Gamk term caalk. I also have to emphasize that in this community, dreams are not regarded
as internally produced mental sensations within the self as suggested by Western psychology. But
dreams are what the human Shadow experiences when it is away from the sleeping host.
For them, dream has nothing to do with personal pleasure. On the contrary, they say, they
disliked dreams because they are troublesome. People even try not to sleep during daytime
since it is more likely to be threatened by ominous dreams. Nevertheless, dreams are importantbecause they reveal in a special way what is really going on in the world (for example, a stateof civil war or a current situation of refugees’ original home). Also, dreams reveal what is really
going on among the people’s moral imagination (for example, hidden moral ambiguity, present
inchoate anxiety, seduction of riches, erotic desires, unsettled quarrel or bitter remorse). So
people cannot easily ignore nightmares. Accordingly, people are often impelled to “repair” thesituation by means of healing rituals. It is also through nightmares that the living and the deadcan communicate with each other. The dreamer is expected to recount dream contents seriously in33

public since they may include socially important or dangerous event going in the Shadow space/time. It is called ok ta kuuth. That is a world invisible during daylight but existing there. There
are always people around and ready to listen to and seriously comment on other people’s dreamnarratives.
Let me briefly talk about the notion of kuuth, “the Shadow.” It is used in various ways thehuman Shadow and the people in Shadow that means ancestors or the world in Shadow. But inprinciple, the term is used as a metaphor of an invisible or hidden aspect of the world, human,thing, and matter. First of all, the Shadow is associated with living human person. Although, it
is not intrinsic to the human being (as this shadow is brought to a new-born baby from under
the tree), the Shadow is essential to human health. If it is lost, the host person will fall ill. The
shadow is also essential because it reveals in ominous dreams an important aspect of the world,which tend to elude one’s attention. But one cannot control one’s Shadow, as one cannot dream by
one’s own will. In other words, the Shadow is vital because it is not under the control of host, but
beyond the control. In other words, Shadow is vital because it is not as an integral part of the self
but as “the stranger within.”Now, let me talk about details of another caalk that is crazy fools. They are usually seen as
pleasant and happy people. They are fond of dance, music, and obscene songs. They are lazyand roam villages like a mob looking for free meals, beer, women while disseminating jokes andlaughter around the village. But at the same time, they are untrustworthy, too capricious, out ofcontrol, greedy. They even steal other people belongings and ignore what is generally consideredsexual decency. This is why both nightmares and crazy fools are often described as ‘nam ok’ (eatpeople, metaphorical meaning of threatening); in other word, both dreams and crazy fools aredescribed in the same way. By the way, please mind, from now on, some similarities between the
crazy fools and Donald Trump.
They are threatening and yet villagers accept their conduct because what they do could or
should be taken as a kind of play. So, on the other hand, they, caalk, are much liked by villagers.
They make people laugh through jokes and jocular play. However, it should be emphasized that
their “play” is not something that is only “permitted” on, or “prescribed” for ritual or formal
occasions. In everyday settings, caalk continue to do quite freely what ordinary villagers just do
not or should not do.
Caalk, crazy fools cause laughter and make people happy. This is not because they are witty,
wise, shrewd or cunning, but because they are amusing, funny, whimsical, prankish, absurd andfoolish. They really make witty remarks or verbal jokes that might otherwise indicate how clever
they are. In fact, they can be talkative and sometimes talk ceaselessly, but people say that they34

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

mostly speak “nonsense.” Because of their incessant nonsense talk, I have never been able to enter
into any serious discussion with these fools. And I doubt if any
villagers ever have. [To audience] I am talking about jokers, but here people are very serious.!
[followed by modest laughter].
Not surprisingly, caalk are never involved in local politics, of course. But from a certain
perspective, they are very political. While their “nonsense language” is outside local politics,
they can “argue” through songs. Many of them are lucid singer-song-makers and lyre players.
Crazy fools can make up new songs mainly about scandals around the village such as love affairs,
extramarital relations, quarrels, misfortunes, marriage troubles, frightening events, the taste of
local beer, strange animals, mysterious phenomena, new fashions, and trouble with foreigners,
such as traders or government people. In such a song, they ridicule or make fun of specific, always
named, person, but people insist that such a person will never complain about and may even bepleased about such a song. That is to say, fools are able to comment on anyone’s conduct without
offending him or her. Such social comments serve to criticize openly the arrogance or insensitivityof certain persons as well as to disseminate news like a local newspaper. Sometimes, the song
itself serves to reconcile two parties in conflict with one another.
Another way in which caalk can be political is through miming. Unlike a jester, caalk say
little, but can ridicule elders, seers (diviners) or any person in authority just by imitating how they
behave. Usually, they do not exaggerate gestures, but simply and often quite accurately imitate
them. For example, he approaches the elder, who is delivering a serious address at a meeting,from behind and mimes his gesture with a serious look. For example, let me show you now [thespeaker, Okazaki, moved to Prof Crapanzano’s rear and mined his move]. That elder cannot see
caalk, but people in front of the elder can see both the elders and caalk. But people try not tolaugh because elders are very authoritative. Likewise, at the end of the rite for twins, they usually
imitate the diviner’s conventional technique for healing. That is picking invisible seeds from thepatient’s bodily parts in shamanistic fashion. What they are doing is not healing but nonsense andpeople know that. But the more accurate detailed the mime is, the more it assumes a satirical effectabout the technique and the more it provokes onlookers to burst into laughter. At such a moment, I
always wondered whether the villagers are really taking the healing power of the diviner seriously.
It seems unlikely that these crazy fools intend, when miming, to defy or rebel against
authorities. They simply enjoy provoking laughter. Likewise, it seems unlikely that those imitatedby them will cease to do what had been ridiculed. Moreover, their act over transgression may
be frivolous because it may well serve to reinforce, rather than undermine, what is considered35morally correct conduct. Nevertheless, their play can create an ambiguous situation in which“serious” “authoritative” and “trustworthy” conduct suddenly seems comical and funny. Thus,
these fools enable people to suspend the taken-for-grant world and see themselves, their social
values, their conventional forms of life and authorities from a different perspective. In short, they
provoke de-familiarizing effect.
Here, I would like to make three remarks about caalk in relation to the Shadow and nightmares.
First, although these fools may provoke people to appreciate something, they do so not byshowing clearly or speaking plainly but by putting people in a state of confusion and puzzlement,
as in a state of the Shadow. Eventually, the ambiguities, uncertainties, wonder and fascination
provoked by them enable people to appreciate something as well as to revitalize everyday life.
What is experienced here is something that can only indirectly be appreciated, as in the case ofpoem and metaphor. Second, such a de-familiarizing effect is not created by crazy fool’s intentions
or with people’s conscious efforts but it occurred rather involuntarily. The familiar can only bedislocated by accident, as by nightmares. Third, such a moment or insight occurs only transiently
and even fugitively as if in a state of the Shadow.. It hardly lasts for more than a fleeting moment.
In sum, all these remarks indicate how elusive the experience of de-familiarization is.
To explore this kind of elusive experience further, let me discuss briefly interesting similarities
between a trickster and the anthropologist. Crapanzano discussed such issues several times: forexample, his chapter ‘Hermes’ Dilemma’ in “Writing Culture” (1986) and his book “Hermes’
Dilemma & Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation” (1992). I quote fromhis 1992 ‘Introduction': “Hermes was a messenger and a trickster. I liken the anthropologist to
him. All truly informative messages have a puckish dimension that jolts us from our ordinary
expectations. (…). He must disrupt the prejudice and pre-understandings of his interlocutor andbreak the frames in which these prejudices and pre-understanding are held. Paradoxically, themessengers must first create disbelief and then destroy it without destroying anguish and concern
the disbelief triggered, for without anguish and concern the message cannot be heard.”
Many anthropologists have also indicated similarities between anthropological practice andtricksters’ or clowns’ activities : for example, Yamaguchi, Beidelman, Koepping. Even outside
anthropological circle, similar effect like de-familiarization had been widely discussed. For
example, Kenneth Burke’s theory of “perspective by Incongruity” and James Fernandez’s ideaof “edification by Puzzlement”, James Clifford’s re-evaluation of “collage” and “juxtaposition”
and Gregory Bateson’s analysis that humour is born from “the confusion of logical types” or,much earlier, Freud’s notion of “displacement” in relation to jokes and dreams (1905). Such a defamiliarizing moment is no doubt pursued in any human society, though perhaps not to the extent
36International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

to which surrealists have explicitly and anthropologists implicitly experimented.
My question is; who is, in effect, this crazy fool, caalk, this Shadowy trickster to us? In his
book “The Zande Trickster”, Evans-Pritchard gave us an extremely interesting interpretation of
the Zande Trickster, called “Ture”. I think there is no more felicitous answer to the above question
than this. I quote:“Ture appeals to Azande because he does what he pleases, what in their hearts they would liketo do themselves. He, Ture, kills his father. He tries to kill his son, he attempts to murder his
wife, he has sexual congress with his mother-in-law. In the telling of the tales these monstrously
uninhibited acts are accepted without demur. We may ask whether they are not pointer to dark
desires. It is as if we are looking into a distorting mirror, except that they are not distortion. We
really like that. What we see is the obverse of the appearance we like to present. What Ture doesis the opposite of all that is moral; and it is all of us who are Ture. He is really ourselves. Behind
the image, convention bids us present, in desire, in feeling, in imagination, and beneath the layerof consciousness we act as Ture does.
Let me stop my paper now by asking a final question very quickly. Donald Trump is certainly agenuine trickster in highest standard in a sense that no one can predict what he will do; but no one
tries to liking him to an anthropologist or to ourselves as in Ture’s mirror. In order to come to termwith the anxieties and anomy produced by him, why shouldn’t we try to de-familiarize ourselvesrather than distancing ourselves from him, since both sides are two sides of the same coin called
the American dream anyway?
Thank you.
(Nishii) Thank you very much. I hope we have some good affect by this symposium. Now I
would like to invite professor Yanai to give coments for the keyuoted and three presentations.

37

Comments
Tadashi Yanai (University of Tokyo)

I am Tadashi Yanai and I am very honored to speak here, in this special occasion, with Professor
Crapanzano, Professor Sugawara, Professor Okazaki, and Dr. Ikeda.
In this part of mine, I thought—maybe erroneously—I was expected to connect the four
lectures. It has turned out that this is an extremely difficult task. I will try to consider themaltogether but you will excuse me for missing, probably, many important points.
Let me say a word on my style of talk. I consider my way of thinking as anthropological, but—
as some of you know—I tend to express my ideas relating them to philosophical terms. I am in noway dogmatic in this: I only want to see things from a different angle. Today, I find myself in an
exceptional place because we have here Professor Crapanzano, who is such an admirable pioneer
in combining ethnography, anthropology, literature, philosophy and other things. I feel lucky.
My comments are on three themes: (1) the imaginary, (2) the frame and the border, and (3)ethics or—I tentatively call it—ethics of the imaginary. I am not going to talk about affect in thiscomment. In fact, I did meditate on the first part of Professor Crapanzano’s lecture. I know wellthat there surely is a fertile ground to discuss. But finally I discard it for lack of time.
So the first point: the imaginary. To introduce this term, I would like to quote a book by aFrench philosopher Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme d'une chandelle or The Flame of a Candle
published in 1961, a year before the author’s death (translated also into Japanese as Rousoku nohonō). To understand what Bachelard wants to say in this book, we have only to imagine what thetitle says literally, “the flame of a candle.” I quote Bachelard: “The flame forces us to imagine. In
front of a flame, as soon as you dream or daydream, what you perceive is nothing compared withwhat you imagine”. When you are watching a flame, you are obliged to imagine. You know thefire is there, and you are perceiving it, but essentially, what you are doing at that moment is notexactly watching the fire but imagining.
We can say, in a way, that the flame of a candle arouses in us, “the imaginary” in its pure form.
Now, we also understand immediately that in its less pure form, the imaginary is everywhere—
albeit not in such a transparent way like in the flame of a candle. The imaginary is everywhere.
Everything, every experience has imaginary connotations or resonances. The imaginary38

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

accompanies the real as if it were its shadow. We imagine at the same time as we live. Of course,very often, we are not conscious of the imaginary side of our experience because we are too
occupied with what we have to do. But it is there, silently, and sometimes it exerts its force
without our knowing.
I think we can connect this kind of idea with all the four lectures today. But before entering
into it, let me continue a little more with Bachelard. In the same introductory part of The Flameof a Candle, Bachelard reflects on the relationship between “the imaginary” and the past. These
two are obviously connected because the flame reminds us many things—things of the past—
uninterruptedly. But there is more. Bachelard thinks that this memory—aroused by the flame of acandle, for example—is not entirely individual.
“In front of that flame,” Bachelard says, “the daydreamer lives in the past which is not only hisor hers anymore. The dreamer is in the past of the first fires of the world.” In a sense, fire is fire,
everywhere: for us now and here, or for our earlier generations, or in Africa or in South America,
500 years ago, or 2,000 years ago. The images aroused in us, by things or events, are not only
connected with my memory—my personal memory—but also with others’ memories without
knowing, or even with the memory of those of the past we didn’t get to know.
I imagine that some of you may be skeptic about this idea, so I would like to mention my own
ethnographic example. The Mapuche of Chile—with whom I did my field work—, when they doimportant rituals, they burn sacrificial animals to send them to their gods in the form of smoke.
Without doubt, the fire is an essential part in these rituals. Although there are diverse forms of
Mapuche rituals, they consider, in a way, that all rituals are essentially the same and they apply
the same term to them: konümpan. Konümpan is a verb in infinitive form. Konümpan means:“to remember”. They “remember” when they see the smoke of their sacrificial animals goingup into the sky. But the important question here is: “who remembers?” And, unexpectedly, theMapuche’s answer—at least their theoretical answer—is this: their ancestors. When they watch
the animals get burnt, they are one with their ancestors. They become ancestors who are doing theritual. It is as their ancestors that the Mapuche “remember” in their ritual. In other words, they
remember as if they were old, ancestral Mapuche, as if they were the first Mapuche. (Of course,
you can easily imagine that there are other layers of their experiences, but here I limit myself topresent the Mapuche’s theoretical idea.)
I have begun with this initial and long digression, firstly because this may be a good way to
pay tribute to Professor Crapanzano’s work. We all know that he has always been working on
the border of the imaginary—experimenting courageously on that insecure border. Just one
example of it is this important book, Imaginative Horizons: An essay in literary philosophical39

anthropology, published in 2003. Now, on the other hand, I also think the idea of imaginary offers
us a good perspective to the entire symposium.
To begin with, I wonder if what Professor Sugawara terms as “virtual environment” might also
be called imaginary environment. Actually, the original Japanese term Professors Sugawara uses
in Japanese is kyokankyo and the word “kyo”, though translated here as virtual, reminds me of themathematical term kyosū, the imaginary number. Kyosū are imaginary numbers, the “i”s, which
are combined with real numbers to form complex numbers. I should add that in physics complex
numbers are completely real. I suspect Sugawara sensei conceived the idea of virtual environment
also as imaginary environment. He may disagree but it will be an interesting topic to discuss.
Ikeda-san’s Lebanese case is also extremely interesting in this regard. I would say that behind
their daily speech, simple speech or act, the imaginary is always present. In his book, Ikedasan makes a long ethnographic description of opening and closing a shutter—though he has not
mentioned it today— and analyzes it in detail. If I use this example, I would say that the simple
act of opening and closing a shutter is accompanied by “the imaginary”; and that part is so
important or more important than real act of opening and closing shutter. The flow of the real isaccompanied by the flow of the imaginary and people know that. And people daily work with bothsides. The imaginary in this Lebanese case would be, of course, necessarily connected with past
memories including those of the Civil War.
The relationship of Professor Okazaki’s lecture with imaginary is evident: nightmares, on the
one hand, and the fools, on the other. These are things and people that arouse the imaginary in thepeople’s experience: the Gamk know, much better than both Westerners and us, about how to copewith the imaginary.
The second point is about framedness: explicitly mentioned in Professor Crapanzano’s lecture
and also in that of Professor Sugawara. Gregory Bateson in his famous essay on “Play andFantasy” mentions a curious example from Radcliffe-Brown’s Andaman Islanders. He cites
this as an example of a peace-making ceremonies, ceremonies in which tribal war becomesbracketed and incorporated into the frame of a ritual. In this way, the Andaman Islanders try to
reduce something like off-frame phenomenon of war into an in-frame event of mock fight. Theinteresting thing here is that this may not necessarily lead to a successful result. I quote Bateson:“In the Andaman Islands, peace is concluded after each side has been given ceremonial freedom
to strike the other. This example, however, also illustrates the labile nature of the frame, ‘This
is play’ or ‘This is ritual.’” And some lines later: “The ritual blows of peacemaking are always
liable to be mistaken for the real blows of combat. In this event, the peace-making ceremony
becomes a battle, a real battle.”
40

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

The lesson I would like to take from Bateson’s reflection is that the outside and the insidemight always be connected underneath. I say this because I have the impression that both socialstructuralist and semiotic interpretations of the ritual—I include here Victor Turner—flattened thisunderneath connection. The tendency in anthropology has been to discuss about the imaginary
only in a bracketed place. I think that the imaginary is potentially everywhere both inside theframe and outside of it. And here enters the border question. I would like to add that, in theoriginal theory of rituals by Arnold Van Gennep, this aspect was clearly contemplated. In thefirst chapter of The Rites of Passage, he develops a theory of dynamism as contrasted with thatof animism. The term “dynamism” here must be understood in the Greek sense of the term
dunamis, which means “power” or “potentiality”. Van Gennep thought, in essence, that rituals arenecessary because the spacetime in which people live is filled with power, with dunamis. It is nota void spacetime as in the social structuralist or semiotic theory. It is filled with power, by which
the inside of the frame is connected with the outside of the frame. So the key question would be:
how to manage the border.
I have prepared comments on the four lectures in this regard. But time obliges me to focus on
Professor Crapanzano’s dense and moving lecture. I think the discussion was precisely about
the border between the inside and the outside of the frame. One point I have been particularlyinterested is why Conservative Evangelicals support Trump so ardently. When I read the lines,
I was reminded of the famous formula of the philosopher Kant, “the sublime”, especially “thedynamic sublime”. The “dynamic sublime” is something that surpasses any possible imagination,
just like these natural phenomena that we have experienced this year in Japan: storms, torrential
rains, earthquakes, typhoons or even nuclear accidents. Sublime means sub: underneath andlime: border. The power that comes from underneath the border is so big, so unimaginably bigthat it becomes awe-inspiring. Of course, the dynamic sublime that Trump creates (I would
ask Professor Crapanzano’s pardon if I am overinterpreting it) would be a false one, or better,“simulacrum of the sublime”. The outside he introduces is not the real outside. It is not basedon the real power of the world, but it only simulates it. This is why, I think, he is in the end
self-destructive himself as Professor Crapanzano talked about it. The fact remains that, so far
as this “simulacrum of the sublime” is by some or many as “sublime” albeit partially, or withsense of humor, we will surely be on a fragile ground. I was remembering a case which is morefamiliar to me: Catalan independentist movement. In Barcelona, many people have come to avoid
talking each other because of the independence problem. So it is a very similar situation. There
are people, in the US, and in Catalonia, and in other places of Europe and maybe in the world,
likewise wait for a magical solution to all problems.
41

I will touch very briefly on my third point: the ethics of the imaginary, which is relatedwith the Trump case. As I understand it, Trump introduces only the simulacrum of the sublime
and this is the difference I think from Qandish’s case who did not lose touch of the border evenwhen he transgressed it. I imagine that somehow Qandish knew how to keep in touch with thereality even in those moments and the reverse is the case with Trump.
And this is why I think the anthropology and the imaginary is so important.
Anthropologists, if we seriously turn to the problem of the imaginary, are in the best position
to treat this problem. In each case we should ask: what kind of the imaginary is there? The
important question here is, perhaps, what I may call “the strength of the imaginary”. Is thisimaginary strong one, or weak one, or fake one? Professor Sugawara has emphasized importanceof describing the density and the intensity of virtual environment. Following this idea, I would
like to say: “the density and intensity of imaginary environment”.
I believe that objective description is important in ethnography, not so much because theobjectiveness is more convincing, but because it is strong; it is denser, more intense. Of course,
there are other ways to arrive at this density or intensity. Literally imagination is one of them, as
Professor Crapanzano has already shown so beautifully and also Professor Sugawara has shown
through his writings.
Personally, I am more convinced now than before the symposium that we should“imaginarize” social sciences: on politics, economy, technology, etc. (and here I am thinking about
old French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde as precursor of this line of thought). But first we should reimaginarize anthropology. For this, we should read Professor Crapanzano’s work perhaps withnew eyes, to rediscover them and to extend those discoveries to other places.

42International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

Discussion(Nishii) Thank you very much to fulfill completely the difficult task which make comments to
4 presentations and draw useful and promissing discussion. Now first, I would like to ask eachpresenter to respond to Prof. Yanai’s comment.
(Crapanzano)・・・(Nishii) Thank you very much.
(Ikeda) Thank you very much. Actually, it is again difficult to respond to the comment, but
actually I was thinking if I should use a term "imaginary" or "imagine" because while I was
preparing, I read part of Dr. Vincent’s work, Imaginative Horizons, but eventually, I gave up theidea. But on the other hand, as for the word "imaginary", I realized as an anthropologist who is
working for Lebanon, the term "imaginary" should have been familiar because there is a paperby anthropologist Michael Gilsenan, which is about lying, and it is quite famous paper. In that
paper, Gilsenan warns us not to take lying as just giving false information but he also pointed out,
though I cannot remember what the exact phrase was, but I suppose he phrased like that lying
is kind of imaginary universe That is why as a researcher to understand Lebanon, I should have
tried to explore the word more seriously but at this stage today, I cannot really develop my idea. I
just tell you fragments of what I remembered.

(Sugawara) I was almost moved by Professor Yanai’s very stimulating comment. Two points I
would like to answer.
The first is on imaginary or virtual. I must confess that, for very long time, I have struggled toescape from Jean-Paul Sartre’s dichotomy between perception and what you think imagination or
nothingness. Recently, I came to think if we will maintain this dichotomy between nothingness
and being, perception is filled with present being. Imagination is filled with nothingness. But
if we think about the time, this dichotomy comes out untenable, because we cannot define thepresent moment itself. In this morning, we met and greeted each other just at that moment,
while it has now retreated into imaginary environment. Then, every present moment is always
retreating into imaginary. I think such kind of wondrous image is nonsense. We have to grasp thepresent moment, as always having some thickness, that is inseparable from our behavior. Plainly
43

speaking, from wakeup to sleep, this thickness is the meaningful present, I think.
Second, adding some comments. I also confess that when I was listening to Hideaki
Terashima’s presentation concerning body resources, I was greatly stimulated because he coined
the term “the body of imaginary figure.” Terashima himself thought about the imaginary bodyand this imaginary has very close relationship to mathematical concept of imaginary, but I avoid
to use this imaginary because of the reason previously I mentioned, an antipathy against Sartrean
dichotomy.
The second point is, I am very interested in the metaphor of shadow, and also in the actual
shadow common with Professor Okazaki’s presentation. I wonder – very difficult in my point– our life is a circle surrounding open air fire. All the people, all the existence move on into thelight around the open air fire from the darkness and, after some time-lags have passed, they all
retreat into the dark. This beautiful metaphor I encountered Kenzaburo Oe’s novel. This darkness
around the open air fire and the shadow, are they the same? For me, they do not look like thesame phenomenon because the shadow is very, very important resource for us to live under thestrong sunshine. Without shadow, all mammals cannot live in African savanna, I think. Shadow
is wonderful, while we are afraid of darkness. On the other hand curiously many people alsocare for the shadow in very negative sense. Actually, the G|ui people are afraid of a pregnant
woman because “she has a shadow.” In this case, the shadow is a dangerous power that makes thecondition of a patient worse. My interest is in the positive and negative meaning of shadow. In
my youth, I have tried to read Bachelard, but it was too difficult for me, so I am not acquainted
with Bachelard. This is my temporal response.
(Nishii) Thank you. Professor Okazaki, please(Okazaki) I do not know it there is any question for me, but I wish to talk a little bit more about
the Shadow and tricksters. As I said, the term Shadow is a metaphor of an invisible or hidden
aspect of the world, human, thing, and matter. The point is that we no longer take the ontologicalstatus of the Shadow seriously after the Age of Enlightenment in the 16th century when the lightsuperseded the shadow, as if the plain-literalistic light eliminated the metaphorical shadow. W.V.O.
Quine warned, “It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body andmetaphorical in its trimming… The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space inthe tropical jungle, cleared by clearing tropes away” (“A postscript on metaphor”, 1979:160) . A
similar insight was also made by early Freud, “It is essential to abandon the overvaluation of theproperty of being conscious ... the unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the44

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

smaller sphere of the conscious” (“The Interpretation of Dreams”, 1900). In this wider context, I'dlike to talk about the Shadow, trickster and Donald Trump altogether.
So far, I don’t know if any anthropologist has ever tried to discuss Trump as a trickster. My
point is that in order to come to term with the anxieties and anomy produced by him, we should
try to de-familiarize ourselves rather than distancing ourselves from Trump. I refer to the EvansPritchard’s understanding of tricksters. Azande people, at first, do not see their tricksters, “Ture”,
as similar to them. But they accept Ture because Ture can be an awful but also interesting figure,like the Shadow and caalk among the Gamk, suggesting something of hidden aspect of people’s
desires, as if they were distorted mirror images. Why , on the other hand, Democrats simply hateand criticized him; why they cannot see Donald Trump as their mirror image. Actually Donald
Trump has never been possible if Obama was not the president before. All are just mirroring eachother and this mirror itself is, I think, the product of the American dream.
(Nishii) Do you like to ask someone or…?
(Okazaki) No. Maybe, again, I would like to know the reaction from Vincent upon these issues.
(Crapanzano) ・・・(Nishii) Thank you. Now, I would like to invite comments or questions. from the ardience(Toriyama) I have two questions. First one is pretty easy. It is about caalk. Is once a caalk,forever a caalk? I mean, is there any situational aspect to just beingof caalk? That is my first question. My second question is, I think it
is a problem of the metaphor. I mean for people like me who does notreally have much of knowledge, I get really confused by this word
shadow. Is shadow means shadow as it is as shadow or shadow as aplace without light? That is my question. Thank you.
(Toriyama) The first one is for…
(Okazaki) Shadow, I think we have talked about the shadow…
(Toriyama) Well, caalk. Can I ask you about caalk? My question is, once caalk, forever a caalk?
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Is there any situational aspect? Once, he is defined as caalk, when he started identifying himself
to be a caalk, then people always knew that he is acting as a caalk or is there other kinds that he is
not acting as a caalk? That is my question. Is there any situational aspect plays?
(Okazaki) I mentioned little bit in my paper today, but actually it is quite strange. They are notsomething like a group people who have to play roles in ritual occasions, but every day; theycannot get married because they are lazy and they do not want to work in the farm, but people
are happy to give them something to eat. I do not know why that sort of people are there, still it iskind of deep question, I mean, how it is possible for such people. Even such people are somehow
special because most of them are twin born children. Twin born people sometimes are not seen as
human. It is not just idea, but they are treated in a very special way. That is what I observed and as
I said I could not have any meaningful discussion with them. They actually do not talk so much.
They just talk sometimes completely lie or just nonsense. They like to sing and dance. FromJapanese point of view, they are somehow mad people.
(Nishii) The second…

(Toriyama) The reason why I asked this is because I really found the problem with this analogy of
being Trump as a trickster as like a caalk. Because the problem arises from this incongruity likeyou keep talking about, we cannot expect Trump to be a trickster or he is claimed as a president
because he is not comedian after all, so we cannot just laugh at him all the time. He has thistrickster side, but at the same time, he is a president. That creates a problem. I really get the
point; I agree with what has been discussed. I thought maybe that point I can ask individually
later. Thank you.
(Nishii) And about the second question about the shadow? Please, A brief reply.
(Crapanzano) ・・・(Nishii) Okay, I would like to invite another one or two questions. Please.
(Miyasaka) I would like to just raise roughly two points. One point is that because anthropology
to think about, we call it an empirical method, so that like the phase of imaginary and real, that46

International Symposium“Coping with Vertiginous Realities”

kind of friction will be finally measured. Although, I understandthat Dr. Ikeda and Professor Sugawara used kind of different terms,
it was important to bridging of point of Professor Sugawara’s
approach focusing on first microscopic interaction. That needs partly
conversation analysis, and probably sort of record of the meta-movie,
just like a meta-gestural aspect as well or supplementary data and also try to analyze the functionof the meta-communicational frame where the anthropologist and the informant and other people
try to negotiate and the conversational sequence is complex product of this introduction. That isvery clear I think philosophically speaking, but Professor Yanai’s philosophical approach also, I
think, is very important. I would like to emphasize these aspects. Professor Yanai did not talkmore about it in political perspective, but anyway.
The second part is coping with sort of very anxiety. We train to have overcome or passively
avoid of anxiety in various situation just like Dr. Ikeda talked about or consummate of thesectarian divide. Although, the secretarial divide is very, very essential part so that the anxiety
settles. Situation can be solved from this approach. Also, I think there would be some examples
such as try to make belief to prepare. This kind of dramatical expression although really able toreal embodied feeling. That is also another way of changing situation. This is also ■■■ andtry to go back to the classical example, the case of the shared value is one of the examples. Thatis try to transform aggressive feeling on the frame of ritual reforms of feeling. I would like toraise this kind of aspect also to be analyzed.
Finally, talking about the President Donald Trump or Trump, his original name, real people
tend to encourage him as joker or trickster so that we tend to be kind of avoid the real sort of state,
granting of real situation. That is kind of emergence of anxiety situation. But we think that hewill be going away later so that more a transitional sort of space and we thought over that try toadapt to very difficult situation by interpreting in that way, and also, sometimes try to transformthe anxiety situation. Some people decided not to look at the real situation like in the case ofEurope and I think from South Africa. Some people tend to have certain mode of hope. Thatis really effective I think. On the other hand, this kind of forgetting the real situation and also
anyway I wrote some sort of delusion of UFO and so on. It is more liminal sort of phase of mind.
This is also one way of avoiding situation. I am so interested in this kind of preventive avoiding
anxiety related situation. That might be also big research topic.
(Nishii) Is it just comment?. You would like to be responded by someone, no?

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(Miyasaka) I just tried to add the dimension of passive inclination, just avoid. I tried to raise aquestion relating microscopic analysis and ■■■ .
(Nishii) Okay. Thank you. Now, we are almost timed up, so the last question if someone would
like to say something. No? Okay.
Thank you very much for fruitful discussions today. For all presenters and commentators,
please give them a big hand.

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