Papers (Part 1)

• Embodied Ideology and Body Techniques: The Art of Avoiding Violence of the Travelling Merchants’ Guards in Late Qing Northern China for a Comparative Study with the Southeast Asian World of Trade Laurent Chircop-Reyes Université d’Aix-Marseille

  With the intention of doing a comparative geographical approach with the South-Est Asian world of trade’s phenomenon, this presentation aims to discuss about the role of the practices of the travelling merchants’ guards in terms of socially anchored value systems in Late Qing Northern China. It would in particular highlight the description of local defensive techniques shaped by a certain ideology, which may takes or had took part in a pacifying process between traders and brigands. Thus, the body techniques concerned in this study and paradoxically defined by its practitioners as an efficient fighting system are seems not be taught to nourish free will, aggressiveness and impulsiveness, but to build a body socially rationalised to avoid violence for the interest of the groups involved. Therefore, to find or to keep a social coherence the techniques are then gradually transformed and those practices can modify the social values as well. In a larger scale, the presentation would like to describe such process in order to grasp to what extent body techniques can be determinants in the emergence or the decline of a social class, category or any given group in a historical perspective, as well as contemporary period in Asian societies.

• Ritual Practice and Social Identity, Takachiho’s Yokagura (Japan) and Balinese Legong in Comparison Borsotti Marty Université d’Aix-Marseille

  The purpose of my presentation is to showcase through a comparison that transmission of peculiar body techniques has a role in the negotiation of the identity of a local village. Whether Japanese or Balinese, folk performing arts embody the cultural diversity and social identity of a small locality in response to a broader administrative structure. Takachiho’s Yokagura and Balinese Legong are two folk performing arts which have a particular identity and are an object of transmission in rural villages. Styles and traditions of those dances embody the cultural identity of each village. Thus, they represent one marker of the diversity between villages. Transmission of style and tradition means the cultural and social differentiation of a village from another. Each of the five villages forming the municipality of Takachiho, in the Japanese island of Kyushu, has its own unique tradition of Yokagura, an agrarian ritual dance, performed once a year in each hamlet. In the near future, those diverse styles will risk facing an amalgamation tendency due to the progressive depopulation of the region. Although preservation of the styles is assured by a village association, people having the knowledge and abilities to dance the full corpus are getting fewer.
  Legong dances face a similar situation. Legon are usually performed during festivals or religious events and showcase mythical stories or natural elements. Originally villages throughout Bali used to have their own dancing styles and traditions. Recently, the situation that has been observed is a tendency to a standardization under two main styles, taught at the Indonesian University of Arts in Bali. Preservation of a style implies the safe keeping of a local culture and the memory of ancestors. One of the challenges faced by locals is to combine adaptation and preservation of traditions in relation to the modernization and centralization of the country.

• Weaving and Fabrics in the Age of Tourism in a WA-Paraok Village Sarah Coulouma Université d’Aix-Marseille

  As part of the development of tourism activities since the 2000s, residents of the Wengding Wa-Paraok village started to market and diversify their textile creations. Weaving and fabrics have become the most important local handicrafts and practices for a large number of women in the village, both in terms of the time given to this activity and the income generated by the sale of the artefacts produced. Different fabrics from those typical of the locality - by their forms, weaving techniques, patterns, uses - appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century. The transformation of this mainly domestic activity into a predominantly commercial activity seems to have implications for the organisation of household chores within families that are most invested in this activity. On another hand, from a collective point of view, if it induces economic tensions between different households, they are rebalanced by the maintenance of networks of exchanges and mutual aid based on sustainable activities (such as agricultural work or building maintenance). In addition, this marketing of fabrics in the village also contributes to the development of a new weaving technique and therefore new forms of learning of technical know-how, as well as the emergence of specialists for their manufacture. This presentation will describe the technological innovations and social changes ongoing in Wengding, and will attempt to answer the following question: how resilient are the social organisation and values shared by villagers when facing tourism development?

Papers (Part 2)

• Body Rituals, Body Techniques: Heterodoxy and Islam on Java Volker Gottowik Frankfurt University

  In Central Java, a number of pilgrimage sites exist that are visited by pilgrims of both sexes either to communicate with each other sexually or, in the case of male pilgrims, to have sexual contacts with prostitutes. These heterodox ritual practices have received widespread public attention in Indonesia since they became a mass phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s. As these practices are clearly at odds with the value system of the majority society, some anthropologist trace them back to Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist past and especially to tantric currents. This paper examines the above mentioned heterodox ritual practices as "tantric fragments" that have lost their ideological dimension but are still productive in social and religious terms. It shows how these rituals contribute as body techniques to the formation of the Abangan (Clifford Geertz) as a particular social group within Islam and to the maintenance of Indonesia as a syncretic and pluralistic society.

• Comparison Between Javanese Court Dance and Classical Indian Dance Bharatanatyam: Social, Pedagogical and Aesthetic Changes Julie Rocton Université d’Aix-Marseille

  As pointed by Felicia Hughes-Freeland in Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and change in Java (2008), Javanese court dance and classical Indian dance bharatanatyam, as classicized and reinvented artistic practices, show several similarities. In addition to sharing the same ambiguous status between dance and theatre categories and some common repertoire topics from Hindu mythology, these two practices, evolving from a colonial to a post-colonial context, have contributed to the construction of a nation state, respectively Indonesian and Indian, as embodied symbol. In the first half of the 20th century, both went through an evolution of their practice context that led to major shifts, under foreign influences: institutionalization, status of practitioners, socio-economic conditions and performance spaces changes. This paper will aim to go further than a mere anecdotal comparison, by analysing these different changes and their impact on body techniques, on transmission and on the general aesthetics of these practices.

• Training the Body, Forging the Soul: Japanese Military Training and Indonesian Elite Recruits Edouard L’Hérisson French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations

  This presentation will deal with wartime Japanese military training provided to Indonesian recruits, especially within the PETA, focusing on gymnastics. Through a multi-scaled analysis, it will appear that the structure displayed by the Japanese in Indonesia was based on the establishment of rural training centres in Japan, and that the Indonesian recruits later became the core and head of Indonesian army. Thus they developped both a Japanese-styled mindset and body that produced a feeling of being part of a new military elite.

Abstract

Keywords

• Body
• Social Structure
• Theory