Millstone of 1834 is silent witness to early years

Coarse millstone at bottom center testifies to long Grand Rapids

Year after year, in cold weather or hot, people brought their grain to the mill near this location on the Grand River to run it through the rough surface of the rotating millstones to produce flour suitable for baking bread and other skillet or oven-made treats. Doubtless there is a full story about how the stones came to be (quarried locally, or transported ready made from another location) and how builders harnessed the river before its flow was controlled and it rose and fell with weather and seasons of the year. As well as stones and building, there is probably an interesting story about how a miller or millers gained training and experience before arriving on the scene. Once all the elements were in place, there remained only the matter of spreading the word among settlers and travelers passing this way that milling services were now in operation. Then with bags or bins of grain for the milling to produce flour, the farmer or merchant had to protect the grain in some sort of container before making use of it, day after day.

Looking at the silent stones in their present location near the east wall of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, overlooking the once untamed, unharnessed river, it is hard to imagine all the years these stones rotated while tons and tons of grain passed through to be transformed into flour. Countless souls were raised on the flour from these stones, from earliest solid food until the person's deathbed and the last morsel of bread tasted on this side of mortality. This one piece of technology was a common denominator for a majority of  local residents and those who bought the ready-ground flour that was distributed to stores in the surrounding county or counties. The sound of grinding stones and associated waterwheel machinery will have been the soundtrack to many people living nearby. Some of the particular facts are recorded on a bronze plaque attached to the stones on display.

FIRST MILL STONES (transcribed text, below)

 ...brought to Grand Rapids and placed in mill on Indian Mill Creek about 1834, removed by John Ball for a horse block in 1867 and donated by his heirs to the Kent Scientific Museum. Tablet placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In the age of gas-powered automobiles transitioning reluctantly to electric vehicles, the mention of Horse Block may be baffling. Judging from the height of the mill stones, Mr. Ball took the decommissioned geological mass as a convenience to step from ground level up to a position closer the the horse's saddle, hence the name 'horse block'.

In this artifact intersects so many features of modern and ancient life. The connection to grain hearkens back to the Fertile Crescent where wild forms of wheat and barley trace their origins and the association of calorific surplus with permanent settlements, law codes and armed forces under the command of religious, political, and/or military heads. Hand in hand with grain cutting is grain grinding, first at the household, "as needed" scale, but later in organized and mechanized scale. Thousands of years later, the lessons of best grinding stone, best sources of power, and best varieties of grain for a given soil and temperature condition all came together in these stones at this place at this time. Prayers for [Lord God, may thou] "give us our daily bread" may be far less often spoken in 2022 than in 1822, but bread still does figure in to many city residents' routine variety of foods eaten throughout the year, although almost all of the flour is baked in factories and a few local bakeries, rather than by hand at home.

Even when the service life of these gritty stones ended, they were still useful to Mr. Ball and his horse for many years. By looking at traces of long-ago times like these mill stones some of the people and the lives they lived comes back to life. In this way the material culture that lingers long after the original makers and users have gone can accompany later generations into years to come. Not only does a little of the past live now in the present, but the reverse may be true, too: some of today was already existing when those long-ago people went about their business, following their routines, adapting to innovations that appeared, and dreaming of some indefinite time ahead that they themselves would not live to see but which their efforts - whether wise or foolish - would have consequences among people alive now in 2022.

Japan books - between insider and outsider views

Photos from three recent Japan books

Many times "cultural broker" can be substituted for the word and the work of ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, or social observer doing fieldwork among local residents. That is because the method of participant-observation calls for insider (participant) as well as outsider (observer) perspectives on what the curious person experiences (participant) and interprets (observer). Being in-between and functioning as a bridge between fully participant (local people) and fully spectators (visitors not from around that place) involves talking to both sides in ways that make sense to them. Hence the image of broker or go-between. The down-side of being in the middle is the "glass half-full" effect of missing out on some dimensions of local experience, while also missing out on some of the insights seen by outsiders. At the same time, though, this mid-way position allows a person to see and think of things invisible to the others.

This photo shows a few picture-dominant presentations of people, places, and things in present-day Japan. On the left is World Heritage Japan (John Lander 2019) with online map, https://bit.ly/WorldHeritageMap and on the top right is Tiny Tokyo (Ben Thomas 2014) and 100 Tokyo Sights (Stephen Mansfield 2020). For a non-Japanese with little or no knowledge base, a visual approach is immediately welcoming since little burden of language and history is required to explore the subject according to one's own tastes, habits, and preexisting interests. This is the outsider perspective; somebody on the outside looking in. The opposite is a local Japanese point of view in which some and possibly most of the showcased subjects are already familiar is some way, if not by personal or 2nd-hand reports, then by popular culture of mass media and perhaps some exposure during school days. Both positions, insider and outsider, include blind spots. For the outsider there are dimensions that go undetected, or if noticed then maybe underappreciated or that may be dismissed from ignorance. For the insider there is a risk of taken-for-granted skimming over aspects that are overly familiar already. In other words, Too Much Knowledge (overly familiar) and Too Little Knowledge (ignorance) accompany the insider and the outsider, respectively.

Consider a non-Japanese who is long-time Japan resident, is intermediate or advanced speaker of the language, and is connected to a diverse array of social relationships and obligations with Japanese. Such a person, for example Japan anthropologist or journalist, has bifocal vision: able to see things in the distance, but also able to see things in close-up detail, too. In this cultural broker person reside both of the risks described earlier, the possibility of taking for granted certain meanings and familiar significance, but also the possibility of bouncing off the surface like a passing tourist can easily do. At the same time, though, in this in-between position there is an opportunity to discuss cultural undercurrents visible to Japanese with them and also with outsiders. Likewise, the cultural broker can enter into conversation topics with non-Japanese and interject cultural footnotes, counterpoints, and interpretations only half-aware in the mind of the visiting observer of life in Japan.

Looking at the representation of Japan in these three books (designated Heritage sites, miniature-camera lens manipulation of locations, and seldom seen gems to visit in greater Tokyo) from the eye of a person who is both insider and outsider, the same pages can seem slightly exotic (what tourists might see in the photo) and also slightly ordinary (what nearby residents but also out-of-town Japanese might see in the photo). Take, for example, the officiants of the Shinto Shrine near the center of the composite photo. A Japanese might immediately think of the performance dimension (how well the people approximate to the expectations and ideals for quality of costume and attention to personal grooming, attention to details of ceremony and order of services, and so on) and hearken back to similar experiences at other locations and during other moments of one's own life trajectory. Things like novelty, theology, and hunger to seize on a small piece of interpretive insight are not too likely to be uppermost in the mind of the Japanese who sees the photo.

By contrast, a non-Japanese who sees this same scene for the first (or for the 20th) time may feel cultural, social, and linguistic separation from the people in the photo. Rather than focus on the performative and the personal memories attaching to the portrait, the outsider may drift into abstraction, noticing the textures, geometry, and soundscape that goes with the subject. Or the outsider may view the event as a kind of Reality TV in which the experience of spectating is uppermost in the person's mind: does this thing amuse me, teach me, or cause delight? In between the insider (Japanese) and the outsider (non-Japanese) is the viewpoint of the cultural broker. It could be a Japanese who trains in social science as a way to establish some distance from ordinary habits of seeing and thinking about things native to the person's own formative experience of growing up. Or it could be a non-Japanese who has trained in the language and life among Japanese in order to gain a functional ability to communicate and engage in the cultural landscape there. In either case, the in-between person can look at the photo of officiants in motion and see things that neither the outsider (abstraction, amusement) nor the insider (performative meaning, memory bank) are sensing.

All of the above standpoints may run through the mind of the cultural broker: performance expectations and personal memories for comparison, but also the vantage point from a distance in which artistic abstractness and possibly some small thrill of novelty also come to mind. In the company of outsiders this cultural broker can talk about some of the meanings, origins, and purposes of the officiants. And in the company of insiders the cultural broker can draw attention or the drift of conversation to questions that outsiders might like to know: how does one train to become an officiant, what are the economics of incoming sources of money balanced against expenses to be paid out, organizationally how does this instance fit into larger structures today and across the generations. Both insider and outsider may be content to see the officiants as 2-dimensional, cardboard cutouts doing their jobs. But a social commentator in between the inside and outside will be eager to see the officiants as whole people, not just ceremonial functionaries: who they were before training, who they aim to become as the years of experience accumulate, and what personal likes and dislikes color their experience of the role they perform in formal settings.

Flipping through the pictures and captions in these three books with the eye of a cultural anthropologist of Japan, there is a mixture of exoticness and of familiarity with other places and times experienced first-hand or in the pictures shared by others in print or online. A few subjects stand out for personal visits or experiences of them. These subjects exist as real places that one can plan a trip to visit. They are similar to many other instances seen over the years when living in Japan. At the same time, though, hints of unfamiliarity also come out of these pages: the names, spellings, history, associated events and personalities, and so on may be waiting to be researched. But in the casual browsing of the books, those particulars are absent in most cases. 

Another way to contrast the insider and outsider browsing of photos is that Japanese will have some personal or 2nd-hand knowledge of the subject (conocer in Spanish, "knowing personally"), while a non-Japanese has only book knowledge or spectator experience of the subject (saber in Spanish, "knowing the facts"). In English, though, these twin senses of "know" are blurred in a single word. Yet the difference between knowing (personally known) and knowing (facts learned) parallels the difference between insider (participant; Japanese) and outsider (observer; non-Japanese). So even something as casual and spontaneous as turning the pages of picture books can produce very different viewing experiences in the minds of insiders, outsiders, and those who stand in-between.