Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance begins and ends with the body--an entity, Hahn argues, through which cultural knowledge is transmitted, represented, and embodied multi-sensorially. In Sensational Knowledge, Hahn presents her ethnographic research on the process of transmitting and embodying cultural knowledge through Japanese dance (nihon buyo), a national theatrical genre originating in the Japanese kabuki and constructed to bridge modern and traditional ideals since the early 1990s.
The concept of bodily transmission is not unfamiliar to folklorists and ethnomusicologists who study oral/aural transmission. In Sensational Knowledge, Tomie Hahn understands transmission “as a process that spans the practices of both teaching and learning” and subsequently she tells us, to study transmission is “to view a process that instills theory and cultural concepts of embodiment” (2). The book is divided into five chapters, symbolizing five fingers of a fan gracefully unfolding. Fans that are used in nihon buyo are called sensu, which, as Hahn explains, are “an extension of dancers’ bodies and essential to our expressive art.” Sensation Knowledge offers “a way for the reader to vicariously ‘know with the body’ through text and other media” (8). A DVD that provides fourteen case studies of daily lessons with Iemoto Tachibana Yoshie, the master and leader of Tachibana School, accompanies the book.
According to Tomie Hahn’s research, the term nihon buyo was first coined by Tsubouchi Shoyo, a critic who had played an important part in the construction of the genre in the early 1990s. Relatively unknown outside Japan in comparison to kabuki, noh, and bunraku, the genre contains three dance elements, mai, odori, and furi (the pantomime movements from kabuki dance). The first chapter of the book introduces Hahn’s theoretical orientation and approach, which begins with a Said-- and Clifford--inspired concept of disOrienting from the fixed East-West gaze, and it establishes the framework for the subsequent chapters. The second chapter, “Moving Scenes,” describes the historical and social background in which nihon buyo was formed and transmitted. The third chapter presents what Hahn considers to be the “energetic qualities of dance” and Japanese concepts of the body and aesthetics. The fourth chapter contains five sections; each of the five sections presents a daily showcase of transmission in the format of graphic, textual, and media transcription. The DVD brings to its audience the three types of transmission Hahn focuses on: visual, tactile, and oral with fourteen examples. The last chapter, titled “Transforming Sensu,” presents Hahn’s reflexive thoughts on her personal experiences studying nihon buyo and on her fieldwork.
For theoretical and methodological analysis, Hahn draws from ethnomusicology, dance studies, anthropology, performance studies, and interestingly, Asian philosophies of the body, especially Zen Buddhism. Performance studies, for instance, has led Hahn to believe that “performance provides a special metaphoric space often revealing how people make sense of their lives and community” and reinforces the participant-observer method (4). Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, emphasizes the value of direct transmission (teaching without words) that manifests itself through the active body (44). Hahn points out that nearly all traditional art in Japan has been deeply influenced by Buddhism, which considers mind and body to be interdependent rather than separate entities. To show the connection between the iemoto social structure (the hierarchical headmaster system), Zen Buddhism, and nihon buyo, Hahn draws on Yuasa Yasuo (1987), Zeami (in Rimer and Yamazaki 1984), Kukai (774-835 C.E., the founder of Shingon Buddhism) and uses them as references for her own interpretation of the iemoto’s instruction on the dance as well as the iemoto way of living.
Tomie Hahn focuses on the information communicated between teacher and student--what she calls “the sender and receiver cycle”--as well as the interpersonal relationship built through interaction. The complementary DVD not only captures and reveals the process of types of transmission Hahn discussed in the book (oral, visual, and tactile), but also serves as a guide to its audience for experiencing this cultural sensibility with his/her own body. Hahn does an impressive job strategically exposing herself as both “an embodied subversion of fixed East-West boundaries [and] distinctions of ‘other,’” and an ethnomusicologist performing throughout the book (18). This is achieved by her writing with a reflexive voice and is furthered by the complementary DVD. The DVD is enriched with detailed graphic and textual transcription found in the book while the shooting is somewhat restricted by an emphasis on instructional transmission. A more versatile approach to the production of the accompanying DVD would have made it more appealing to audiences and readers. In various ways Sensational Knowledge, accompanied by its media component, is a rich and original work. Through it, Hahn is able to create a metaphoric space that can be expanded through interaction with its audience.
By presenting her personal experience of embodiment of the nihon buyo as what Abu-Lughod called “a halfie”--“people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage” (1991:137), Hahn joins those who have approached ethnographic research and ethnological discourse in different ways (Shelemay 1991; Kisliuk 1998; Ness 1992; and Sklar 2001) as she learns to re-orient her vision of self, break social taboos, and level “the polarity of my biracial ‘halves’ and redeployed ‘doubleness’” (170-171). The words of Tomie Hahn’s iemoto, Tachibana Sahomi, may be used to summarize the multi-sensorial body that has been thoroughly reflected upon in this reflective work: “When you’re dancing you can be anyone” (12).
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[Review length: 897 words • Review posted on May 22, 2008]