2012 Volume 76 Issue 4 Pages 463-474
This paper aims to discuss the human-animal continuity through theoretical and ethnographic perspectives on the relationship between humans and animals in Japan. Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland proposed a nature continuum in which humans perceive and act upon nature in two opposite directions: on one hand, domesticated nature, whose beauty is cherished, and on the other, wild nature, that must be tamed by human interventions. However, the model of nature continuum proposed by Asquith and Kalland is not necessarily compatible with theories of the human-animal relationship in Japan. John Knight argued that Japanese people show enmity toward wild animals that feed on the crops they have grown, but also mentioned that interactions with pests give them an opportunity to realize a continuity between humans and animals. Kenichi Tanigawa likewise stressed the fact that the human-animal (-spirit) continuity is based on competitions among them. While Asquith and Kalland assumed the existence of two perceptions of "nature" among the Japanese, and stressed the human intervention that transforms wild nature into a domesticated one, Knight and Tanigawa's discussions called for a more sophisticated analysis on human-wildlife continuity that can even accommodate rivalry between the two. Moreover, as I try to demonstrate in the discussion to follow, the model of nature continuum proposed by Asquith and Kalland cannot explain the seemingly "cultural" characteristics that cats in Oki Islands were said to possess, leaving the impression that this model has limited applicability for studying the human-animal relationship. Based on the case study of the human-cat relationship in the Oki Islands, I argue that humans and cats share "one culture," in that both compete for fish, have a linguistic capacity, engage in dancing and singing with other fellows, formulate stable marital bonds with another individual of the same species, sometimes try to modify their environments through manipulation, and do "sumo wrestling" between the two species. It is then suggested that the human-cat relationship in the Oki Islands can be understood in terms of a human-animal continuity based not only on human-animal competition over the same food, but also on the sharing of "one culture" between the two species. I then argue that Amerindian "multinaturalism," a term proposed by Eduarudo Viveiros de Castro as a possible cosmological model of Amerindians, has an analogy with the human-cat relationship in the Oki Islands, in that humans and non-humans share "one culture" in both cases. Since Viveiros de Castro mentioned the sharing of "one culture" as "animism," it is suggested that the human-cat relationship in the Oki Islands can be characterized as "animism" in his sense. In spite of the abovementioned similarity, there exists an important contrast in those two examples: the "many natures" in Amerindian "multinaturalism," and the Japanese human-animal continuity that is revealed through human-animal competition over common staples, a point already mentioned by John Knight and Kenichi Tanigawa in their studies on human-animal relationship in Japan. Therefore, the tentative conclusion of this paper is that the human-animal relationship in Japan should be analyzed with the two interconnected dimensions of the human-animal continuity in mind, and that recent discussions on "animism" should offer valuable insights to an investigation of the topic.
