1. Inauspiciousness and pollution

‘Having just returned from a funeral, Oue San, one of my neighbours, prevented me from coming into her house. She said: “You must sprinkle salt around the house when you come back from a funeral. (Funerals are kegare, polluting). With these words, she opened a sachet of salt in a white and dark blue envelope. Starting from the entrance front, Mrs. Oue threw salt around the perimeter of the house, and on herself before coming into her house. ‘...At funerals, the family of the deceased must provide salt for all people who bring gifts of koden (incense money). We give koden to help them to pay the priest’s fees. They give us okaeshi (return gift) to thank us for koden. In the past, after the ceremony, the priest would throw salt at you. You would return home and take some salt from your own house and put some in each corner and around the house to keep bad things away. Now they do not do that any more. The bereaved gives us a sachet of salt with the okaeshi gift.[42] (...) Inside the house and after unwrapping the okaeshi gifts. Oue elaborated on the sadness she felt: “when someone dies in your family, you are cut off from the rest, you cannot go to medetai (fortunate, auspicious) events. Our neighbours (the bereaved family) took care of the Shrine, but this coming year they cannot enter the Shrine until it is over (meaning until kegare ‘pollution’ has been removed from the deceased’s house with the departure of the deceased soul), it is really sad (kanashii). When my elder brother died three years ago, we had to send letters to everybody to inform them and ask them not send medetai gifts and cards at New Year. The house was kanashii, [43] and we could not go to festivals, or receive medetai (auspicious) gifts and cards.

The Japanese case of funeral gifts embodies one of the key analytical dilemmas of the literature on gift exchange: the extent to which ritual actions involving the giving of prestations are related to pollution concerns. Although pollution has been a relevant subject in anthropology since Mary Douglas’s work (1966, 1992), only recently have anthropological debates considered the idea that the relevance of this concept hides the importance of other fundamental organising principles such as inauspiciousness. Raheja (1988, 1994) argues that the problem of gift exchange is not a problem about pollution in gifts, but one that confuses supernatural pollution with ideas about inauspiciousness. Such confusion is responsible for a serious misunderstanding of the political relations between givers and recipients, usually reduced to a mere vertical hierarchy (Raheja 1988: 152). Raheja’s argument introduces a new and complex piece of analytical distinction between ‘pollution’ and ‘inauspiciousness’ as two different cultural categories, each underlying a different political strategy. Her distinction is not just a matter of ethnographic perception. I would argue with her that the debate on pollution and its relation to return gifts-cum-hierarchy seem to reproduce a vicious circle because the primacy of pollution has not been sufficiently questioned. Anthropological preoccupation with pollution has served to obscure the differences between it and inauspiciousness, expressed by Raheja’s notion of poison. The latter is, after all, one of the two elements that Mauss described as crucial in the formation of relations of hospitality and the obligation to reciprocate, and it is not necessarily the same as pollution. The distinction between inauspicious and polluting requires a difficult mental exercise because, as Raheja explains, there are other ways to interpret the relation of gift exchange than as one of hierarchy of clean/ unclean givers, recipients and gifts. She argues that in order to escape the circularity of the argument of hierarchy as being contingent on pollution or return gifts, it is necessary to focus on how relations between givers and recipients are viewed and organised in particular contexts without assuming that they are everywhere structured by the fact of a hierarchical ordering (Raheja 1988: 33-155). Tangentially, it could be possible to argue that the problem behind the distinction of pollution and inauspiciousness is what Bloch calls a problem of cognition:

‘People are always prompted to dismiss the more familiar images of their culture, the knowledge of which is well known but not in an explicit verbalised way and which is transformed when put into words’ (Bloch 1996: 6-10).

As anthropologists we should be concerned with ‘how culturally specific knowledge is produced out of universal predisposition’ (ibid.: 4). What Bloch seems to argue is that we have to be aware that although such knowledge, in the case of pollution, is important as a building block for understanding a ‘culture’. It is important because it is one of the topics that first comes to the attention of anthropologists and informants. Other topics are likely to remain less obvious.

Recent works in the study of Japanese funerals have also cast some doubts on these ideas. As Bachnick suggests, ‘ancestors constitute relationships rather than a ‘belief system’. She detects an ambivalence in rituals surrounding death:

‘This ambivalence finds expression in the possibility that the deceased will not become an ancestor, because he/she will not ‘go from’ the ie. This possibility is expressed in terms of the deceased never beginning the ‘journey’, but remaining near the scene of death. Such spirits are viewed as ambivalent (in fact ambivalence is what they represent), and potentially dangerous they may posses and afflict the living (Bachnick 1986: 115).

In her description Bachnick underlines the basic idea, that it is not pollution but the contingent character of inauspiciousness, the criticality and danger of all conditions that do not move over a ‘new beginning’, that most native narratives emphasise. Although she does elaborate on the importance of the ritual prestations given at funerals, it will be clear in this work that it is the set of ritual prestations given by neighbours, by kin to the deceased to expel him/her out of the house, that are the crucial element in passing over, and setting the ie free of the danger of keeping an ambivalent - what I call inauspicious - spirit, or Bachnick’s muenbotoke (those without a relationship). There is thus strong evidence to suggest that inauspiciousness is viewed as a condition where the self cannot establish a relationship with sources of strength like the household, kin, neighbours, food and wrapping, rather than as a mere contingency of supernatural pollution. It is the set of ritual practices around the giving and returning of gifts rather than the ideological concern with pollution, that to my understanding constitutes what Bachnick calls ‘pragmatic meaning’, the form of knowledge people use to think about social relations (Bachnick 1986: 108-114).

Once the ethnographic evidence is taken into account two main theoretical questions emerge. First, it becomes necessary to question the validity of treating the concept of pollution as the key element of cross-cultural comparison in the study of gift exchange. The material from Kamikatsu in this chapter gives a good illustration of how, although the villagers of Kamikatsu provide explanations about how certain prestations (i.e. of salt, clothes, paper) are good for dealing with pollution, it is really not possible to say that people accept gifts in view of their ritual efficacy in not spreading pollution. Our understanding of wrapping should not be reduced to the problem of dirt and pollution. I will argue through this chapter that the villagers’ understandings of gifts are based on a double principle. First, that certain ritual actions, wrapping, and prestations (usually unwrapped) are said to remove and ward off supernatural pollution, while more implicitly other prestations (those conceptualised as ‘useful’ or ‘helpful’) are the main vehicle, recipient, through which auspiciousness and inauspiciousness circulate or return to impinge on the political relation between givers and recipients.

[42] The sachet of salt is placed under the first layer of wrapping paper, which like a pocket holds the wrapped sachet of salt. The sachet can be taken out without unwrapping the gift, and it is thrown to the house and self before one enters and unwraps the gift inside the house.
[43] Oue San, like most villagers used the euphemism of sadness to avoid the use of kegare, although they are very aware that sadness and kegare are different things.