ASIAN ETHNOLOGY

Seven Strands of the Serpent’s Tail

Among the most ubiquitous ritual implements in modern Taiwan, the ritual whip functions to dispel demons and to summon spirit soldiers, the material embodiment of a fearsome serpent deity. Known as Saint Golden Whip, a standard ritual whip has a wooden handle carved in the likeness of a snake, a dragon, or a hybrid of the two, and a thong at least six feet in length, woven from straw rope. Despite the prevalence of these ritual whips, scholars have yet to examine the people involved in making them; the stories of these artists have largely been lost to history, their methods unrecorded and unknown. This article details as a case study the production of a single ritual whip, telling the stories of the carver who shapes its handle and the weaver who braids its tail. Both artists discover their own improvisations to navigate the space between invention and inheritance, highlighting how cultural traditions take on new forms and find new expressions, as these traditions move forward from person to person, from one generation to the next.

“This Is Truly My Favorite Place to Be”

Since the triple disaster of 2011, parents in Fukushima Prefecture have been raising their children under a cloud of uncertainty about possible radiation in their environment. This article explores Buddhist responses to the precarity of these families as well as former Hansen’s disease patients. Ethnographic research at a weeklong retreat for Fukushima families that Jōdo Shinshū clerics host each summer at a former national leprosarium in Western Japan provides a ground-level view of the complex interaction between Buddhism, the state, and the suffering of its citizens. I argue that Buddhism provides the human and liturgical resources to create an environment of ease, joy, and comfort, giving participants a temporary “home.” In addition, the retreat is intentionally cast as a space to criticize and recuperate power from a Japanese government that is not to be trusted.

Folkloric Filmmaking

The Assamese film Kothanodi (2015) radically demonstrates how film adapts to folklore, rather than the other way around. It actively contributes to the folkloric tradition, notably through its commitment to establishing a thoroughly material sense of premodern Assamese life. This grounds the representation of its folkloric narratives in a tangible ecology, bringing the grain of lived experience to material that might otherwise appear to be fantastical. If things horrify in Kothanodi, they do so out of recognition rather than shock. If the film features tricksterish phenomena, as in its account of a woman giving birth to an ouṭeṅgā, known in English as elephant apple, it also incorporates such tricksterism into its own methods, querying its own representation of reality and productively disturbing its audience. Similarly, violence takes many forms in the film. It can be customary and ancestral, superstitious or avaricious, intergenerationally transgressive or simply malicious. The audience is left uncertain how to decode all of it, other than to acknowledge that such material contains more truths and problems than might initially be realized. Such an adept appropriation of folkloric uncertainty into cinema not only captured an international audience for Kothanodi but also engendered the emergence of further interpretive routes, especially within online fan communities. Rather than reading Kothanodi as the auteurist product of its director Bhaskar Hazarika, it can instead be seen as part of an ongoing folkloric enterprise, an expression of the practical magic of a folkloric aesthetic.