The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in a Japanese Community

The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in a Japanese Community. Scott Schnell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 363 pp.

Rituals serve to reinforce the status quo by making visible the social integration of participants. Ritualized performances are also opportunities for social protest. What has motivated the residents of a small Japanese town to engage for hundreds of years in the "rousing drum" prelude to the annual Shinto shrine festival (matsuri)? In this richly documented, engaging book, Schnell sees this performance as a chance for common townspeople to express displeasure with local elite or national authority and to claim a platform for negotiating more favorable conditions.

The first two and the last chapters of Schnell's book are a thought-provoking review and critique of "ritual" theory, and Schnell places himself squarely among those who focus on ritualized performance as a potential site for sociopolitical maneuvering.

He has conducted fieldwork in Furukawa, an agricultural and commerical town in central Honshu, off and on since 1989. The annual Shinto shrine festival, which is the immediate focus of the book, involves virtually all of the 7,000 residents of this town. Schnell has produced a splendidly detailed depiction of the entire three-day event, including, for example, the order of the procession components, procession platform architecture, the symbolic representation of the geographical opposition between participating neighborhoods, and the age-graded initiation into the bamboo flute and drum performances. Schnell's own direct experience in the rousing drum ritual has made him privy to the unwritten codes...