Festivals and new social movements

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waiting for communitas

When I first arrived in Kyoto¹, in the summer of 1992, I began that first week on what would be a futile year of searching for a local urban Shinto festival that would display inclusive, community-building features—an aspect of these events that was often noted in ethnographic and tourist literature as their main, if unintended, outcome.

What I did not count on was the simple fact that many of the neighborhood communities—or, at least, organizations that are said to represent these (chounaikai)— had been “preformed” decades earlier, and that this original construction was more inflexibly durable than I had first imagined, and this duration had extended long beyond the springtime of their creative formation. So, today, their original pre-formance is no longer per-formable. In Kyoto, no discussion of neighborhood events can begin without some background on “neighborhood association” organizations.

¹Kyoto prides itself as a “city of festivals,” and matsuri events in the city are quite common—some sort of matsuri could be found on any given week. But even the old family Kyoto people I spoke with confessed that Kyoto's festivals were not as lively as those in some other parts of Japan. Emotional display in public was apparently not Kyoto's forté. Centuries of Imperial court oversight and cultural management and a capital city's increased focus on crowd control might have served to “domesticate” festivals to an extent greater than in other locales during pre-modern times [See: Domestication]. So I have to remind the reader that I am not describing “Japanese” festivals here. I am not even describing a festival that could easily reveal similar features in all of the matsuri in Kyoto. As much as the factors that are changing festivals in Kyoto are present elsewhere in Japan, I hope this work adds insight to the study of similar practices in other Japanese cities. But I am not and would not suggest that my observations of a certain few festivals can possibly critique the entire festival production of Japan.