Developing skills for getting actively involved in a task at hand: A diachronic study of "San'yako" engaged in Nozawa-onsen Dosojin festival

Abstract

In this paper, we report on a diachronic study of "San'yako," people who are engaged in Nozawa-onsen Dosojin festival. They are working together for three years for the preparation of each year's festival, such as logging and timber processing and construction of a big shrine pavilion. In the first year, they sometimes stand awkwardly, failing to find what to do, but in the subsequent years, they can get actively involved in a task at hand. We show how they develop these skills, by understanding a sense of values behind such skills, based on the interactional data obtained from our longitudinal recordings of the field.