weekend update 11/5/2017
At the time of me starting this draft, it’s 11:59 PM, which means the blog post is gonna be late. rip
So I’m pretty torn at the moment. I have 3 versions of my paper that I want to make progress on: the version I started in my notebook during the workshop in class, the one I started fresh and ended up turning in as my first draft, and the version that’s in my head that hasn’t materialized yet. This third version might end up merging with what I have turned in so far, but it’s incredibly vague at the moment. I have a portion of it that I just uploaded, titled ‘The Festival Spirit’ – inspired by a section of one of the books I’m using to research anime at the moment, where she talks about an aspect of Japanese culture that she defines in the following block quote:
But there is another aspect of Japanese society, both traditional and modern, that anime captures: what I have called the notion of “festival” or its Japanese equivalent, “matsuri.” The matsuri is an integral element of Japanese religious and social life, a celebration for “the realm of play and ritual.” Similar to carnival in the West, the liminal space of the festival allows for a kind of controlled chaos, in which “people behave in extraordinary ways, once freed from ordinary time and everyday order,” or, as anthropologist John Nelson says of the shukusai, or night festival, there are “aspects of carnival, bacchanalia, and even protest.” While some observers emphasize that the Japanese festival is less out of control than the Western carnival and is more concerned with a (temporary) leveling of the social order than its complete reversal, t he two forms seem very similar in celebrating spirit of anarchy that offers a brief playful respite from conformity. In Japan this often involves both sexual and violent themes, usually expressed in the form of a performance for the gods of Shinto, Japan’s native religion. As critic Ian Buruma describes matsuri, “Pain and ecstasy, sex and death, worship and fear, purity and pollution are all vital elements in the Japanese festival.”
from page 30 of Susan J. Napier’s Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke
Whatever I end up doing, I want a key focus of my paper to be reception of anime in the West, and the ensuing perceptions of aspects of Japanese culture without the cultural context. The dream is to analyze possible anime influence on American culture, but that might be a little bit beyond the scope of my project.