Conclusion

Henrietta moore notes that “competing, potentially contradictory discourses on gender and sexuality” mark many societies. Given this multiplicity, she puts forward as an important inquiry of social research the question dealing with how people “take up a position in one discourse” among many.1 Utamaro’s portrait of a courtesan dreaming of her wedding, which opened this volume, provides an outline of one answer that Tokugawa Japan gave to this question: ritual practice. Ritual mediated a daughter’s entrance into the sociosexual role of either a wife or courtesan. A woman could also employ ritual to exit either role through a variety of forms, ranging from celebrations of transfer to disruptive acts of cutting ties between her and people and institutions. At the same time, a host of practices associated with pregnancy tied women to specific experiences of gender that cut across lines of class, status, and institutional values. This multiplicity of practices indicates heavy “ritual density.”2 In other words, as exemplified even by the narrow range of practices discussed here, Tokugawa society represents a complex grouping of “competing, potentially contradictory” collectives and individual members dependent on forms of ritual to produce a degree of ordering, and at times disordering, in their institutional and personal lives. The task of these final pages is to consider this density in broader reflections of Toku-gawa society and in consideration of religion in light of women taking advantage of this density.

The purpose of female sexuality was contested, as the models of fertility and pleasure exemplify. Pierre Bourdieu’s mapping of social and ideological conflict is helpful in initially charting these contested meanings as part of Tokugawa society. He posits two types of “universe” 1/6 through which forces of social conservation and change are in constant, tense relation. One is the “universe of the undiscussed,” or the given, undisputed assumptions of a society. This is doxa. Embedded in the wider doxa is the narrower “universe of discourse,” which is the realm of disputation and conflict. This universe concentrates on the poles of orthodoxy and heterodoxy; it is indicative of conflicting social dis-course.3 Tokugawa doxa placed much female social value within the confines of sexuality. Masuho Zanko epitomized this, though he distinctly posited the same confines for a man and charged male-female coupling with divine energy. His critique of relations in models other than his own also indicates the narrower existence of disputation concerning the purpose of female sexuality that lay within the wider doxa. For Bour-dieu such disputation marks the poles of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Heterodoxy has a strong interest in contracting the undiscussed borders of doxa in order to expose and discuss the arbitrariness of social reality as construed by orthodoxy. The driving force behind orthodoxy is its insistence that the arbitrary is real, that given assumptions of social reality must be unquestioned, and that the universe of the undiscussed remain as vast as possible. However, the contested sexual values in Tokugawa society, including alternatives outside of fertility and pleasure, such as monastic celibacy and forms of village sexual associations, were co-sanctioned by the various powers that were. This co-sanctioning produces a problematic portrait of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the Tokugawa. Fertility and pleasure, as well as other models, coexisted on a social plane drawn on institutional, behavioral, and sexually purposeful lines of center and periphery. All of those lines, however, possessed legal and social legitimacy. In a society crisscrossed with multiple and co-sanctioned values, the question of which were orthodox and heterodox is not so obvious.

Attention to ritual practice goes around this question by reconfiguring Bourdieu’s notion of contested discourse. If doxa represents a universe of the undisputed, which in the Tokugawa period was the notion that sexuality defined much of a woman’s social significance, then there is another universe that also needs to be considered and that offers a different view: the universe of praxis. By reconfiguring Bourdieu’s mapping of doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy into praxis, orthopraxy, and hetero-praxy, we can better handle the problematic social ground of multiple co-sanctioned values and their models. This reconfiguration is able to diagram, like Bourdieu’s orthodoxies and heterodoxies, conflict between models, but it also draws our attention to conflict within each model.

The Tokugawa universe of praxis consisted of ritual forms and symbols constituting much cultural and religious activity. In this manner it differed from the universe of doxa because it was not something to be validated or invalidated amidst conflicting claims of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Praxis was open for the construction of both ortho - and hetero - rituals; orthopraxy and heteropraxy both pulled from the universe of praxis. Orthopraxy was ritual practice that was not definitive of any group in possession of power over groups lacking such power, as Bourdieu’s orthodoxy denotes. Instead, in the context of sexual values, orthopraxy gave expression to an institution’s values and mediated a woman’s transformation of role identity as a member of a specific community. Orthopraxy was collective centered in this respect. Both the center and periphery engaged in orthopraxy as institutionalized collectives. Heteropraxy pulled from the same universe, but it operated antagonistically toward the dominant values of a woman’s primary community. Such antagonism toward a community could even lead to violence. In the latter half of the period, violence sometimes erupted in villages between long established youth groups, called wakamonogumi or waka-monorenchu, and individual households over which collective—the youth group or the household—held authority to regulate a daughter’s social and sexual development. Expansion of the ie-consciousness among some successful villagers contributed to decisions to remove their daughters from the control of traditional communal organizations so that they could directly educate the girls in the household and prepare them for marriage into another ie, free of influence from the outside. The loss of institutional influence in regulating behavior, development, and the sexual decisions of village females at times led some members of youth groups to respond violently against the girls and their families.4 Here, household fertility values acted as new and intrusive heteropraxy that called into question the orthopraxy of the traditional sexual values of the village. Typically, heteropraxy is often initiated as individual activity employed as a strategy of resistance toward collective values. Any group —household, bordello, and youth organization—could experience, often to its collective dismay, individual women or, as in the above case, individual household heads employing heteropraxy against its interests and its orthopraxy.

Further, similar experiences could act as either orthopraxy or heteropraxy depending on the social identity of the practitioner, her situation, and her institution. Pregnancy was one such experience. In a home in need of or desiring a child, pregnancy acted as a form of orthopraxy. It tied a woman’s role as wife and new mother to her husband’s household and its desire to establish posterity. In the quarters, bringing a pregnancy to term not only set a woman apart from the values of sexual play, but also placed her literally outside of her role as she gave birth and recuperated in an isolated dormitory, such as the one in Minowa. Even if a woman’s bordello allowed the pregnancy to culminate in birth for the purpose of adopting the infant or putting it up for adoption, pregnancy was imbued with a mood of heteropraxis given its contrast to the values of the quarter and the lifestyle of a courtesan. Abortion and infanticide further reveal the situational character of orthopraxy and heteropraxy in pregnancy. Terminating new life within either the household or the bordello was an institutionally orthopraxic act in that it was decided upon and performed for the needs of the collective, and not the individual woman, to better maintain its own sense of order and viability.

The orthopraxy and heteropraxy in which women engaged also generated an intensification of perspectival boundaries marking Toku-gawa society. Ritual activity, notably orthopraxic weddings and celebratory rites of sexual relations in the quarters, strengthened the border of daughter affirmation and wife or courtesan transformation. Heteropraxy brought to light other, sometimes inverse, perspectival boundaries as well. A courtesan, in taking her private petition to Kurosuke, affirmed her status as a member of the quarter vis-a-vis her engagement with her community’s tutelary deity while also anticipating transformation to an identity away from her role as courtesan and devotee to Kurosuke. In this way, a woman’s use of ritual practice, from public and formal orthopraxy to largely individual acts of heteropraxy, both magnified on which side of the border she either wanted or had to be at a particular juncture in her life, and placed her there as well.

The dynamic of women enacting rituals, crossing borders, and taking up positions in, and sometimes outside of, value-based institutions and idealized discourses encourages us to consider how the ritual lives of Tokugawa women contribute to the sketching of a more accurate cartography of religion so that we may better track the various human routes of religious practice. Maps are necessary for comprehending the world around us, which also includes the cartography of humanity and its religious life. No single map can adequately chart the full historical and anthropological breadth of religion. There are problems, however, with mapping religion through often tried but ultimately unsatisfactory categories, such as traditions of world religions or the assumed holistic nature of primitive and folk expressions. The former leaves large numbers of people off the map, and the latter, while attempting to find cartographic space for those displaced from the map of traditions, may inadvertently advance notions of simple men and women unreflectively but contentedly snared in a folk system of taboo, spirits, myth, and ritual.5 Each map fails to place humans in the active center, where they not only “do” religion but also “make” religion. A map overemphasizing the traditions places humans as passive participants within a preexisting institutional, doctrinal, and ritual history that comes to them ready-made, with no assembly required. A map of holistic religion places people in an environment free of choices, independent thought, and self-conscious—even self-serving—actions. In the end, cartography of religion, to borrow the terminology of Peter Berger, too often draws on “objectivation,” that is, seeing religion as an “objective reality” lying outside of its human construction, rather than seeing it as “externalization,” or the active attempt to create meaning in the world.6

The rituals that some Tokugawa women practiced amidst conflicting values exemplify the importance of being attentive to the human cen-tricity in any religious map. Despite the assertion of difference concerning the valuations of female sexuality that the ideals of fertility and pleasure exhibited, the fullness of the Tokugawa symbolic universe and its offering of ritual, symbols, mythological elements, sacred sites, and figures was open to all communities and individuals vis-a-vis the situations and needs they determined as ultimate at a critical moment in their institutional and personal lives. Religion acted not as a group of discrete traditions or as an organic, totalistic system. It was, rather, acted upon as an array of evocative, potentially meaningful ritual practices, symbolic elements, and concepts that could be variously construed and appropriated to express and attempt to meet collective or individual needs. When collective and individual needs meshed, orthopraxy was enjoined; when they did not mesh, an individual might turn to employing a form of het-eropraxy. Women’s practice of ritual to map out places of meaning, of safety, and of hope in their lives amidst the cross-currents of sexual values, multiple roles, predicaments of the life course, and collective and individual concerns shows the human-centered transparency of their religious actions. It draws the curtain and reveals those actions, and indeed all religion, as a product constantly shaped by and for the hands of human need. In this light, the dream of Utamaro’s courtesan—enacting ritual to transform her identity and place herself within a new and hopefully more meaningful life—is truly a religious vision.