Cultural landscapes - local knowledge versus outsiders' fresh eyes

Downtown Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin 1/2023

Thinking about cultural landscapes as I walked to my nearby grocery store, I imagined myself in a month or two immersed in my Japan project - biking and walking, on the lookout for features that attract my eye. The photos of traces from the past will serve as writing prompts so that I can explore the past (1875-1925) when infrastructure and modernization of mass-everything got going; and to appreciate what the society is now by contrast to then. Being able to "read" the landscape implies many things, things which set apart the people with local knowledge (deep or shallow) from those who have little or no way to fasten onto/tune into the surroundings.

This photo shows the old commercial district of the town, a place attracting buyers before the big box era of shopping centers at the outskirts of a town. For a first-time visitor one impression is the scale: this is comfortable to walk, possibly able to fit under the roof and footprint of a very large big-box store of today. A long-time local resident might know some of the shopkeepers and staff and may have purchased things over the years from some of the merchants. The cycle of annual events such as parades, debates and speeches, contests, seasonal decorations and entertainment will provide some memories of growing up in the area or the times as a parent with children of one's own. And even if not ready to spend money, being able to talk informally with a store owner about how to solve a problem is another way of making meaning here. Doubtless, a person of modest means will have a different set of relationships and memories in this scene than a person never wanting for money. And there could be patterns of difference in experiences by gender, age, ethnicity, religion, and so on, too.

What is called "local knowledge" has at least two dimensions. One is the ancient Greek distinction of Nomos/Physis (glossed as culture/nature, or perhaps subjective/objective). In the same way that Berlin and Kay did their famous color-chip sorting piles to discover where people of various language/cultures would make distinctions in the rainbow of the color palette (one calls it 'green' but another classifies it as 'blue'), so too of cultural vision of a place --one's own, or a place visited far from one's frame of reference, assumptions, meanings. That is to say, people local to a place are accustomed to labeling the cultural elements with familiar terms and distinctions. But outsiders may project their own understanding of what a thing is and how it could have value or else lack meaning. Or consider the metaphor of "Head Up Display" (HUD) used on fighter planes and now airlines, too: pilots looking through the front glass can also see useful and consequential information layered on top of what is outside in view. This is something like the way that terrain of infinite shades of gradation can be neatly labeled and divided into types or categories drawn from language or culture.

The other dimension of seeing the cultural landscape is based on meaning; not the labeling/projection phenomenon, above, but meaning in the sense of memories and personal involvement (not a spectator to a terrain, but an active agent with intention, purpose, meaning, expectation, precedents). A person who "knows" the place [important semantic play of Conocer (know personally) vs. Saber (know facts, analytics)  --Spanish example of separate "know" words that English lumps together] is able to see cultural capital (status level, past and present value, aesthetic degree of depth), and social capital (knowing names and relationships past and current of various residences, services, businesses; and knowing who to ask when solving any given problem), financial capital (past and potential/future sources of gain or risks of loss), and maybe linguistic capital (powers of verbal expression by voice or by writing). By contrast, a foreigner or even a citizen of the country who is unfamiliar with the locale, will lack almost all of the foregoing meanings that blanket the land, turning it from meaningless space to meaningful place.

Since I am an outsider to my Japan destinations planned for April and May 2023, but with some language and cultural experience and professional anthropology expertise of a general kind along with lived experiences gained by age, these many kinds of meaning will mostly be invisible to me. So, perhaps, I will have to imagine: granting the meanings to be all around and filling the terrain, even though I am practically blind and deaf to this local knowledge at the start.

In conclusion, locals with insider knowledge and layers of memory probably know their way around the physical plane and also the invisible terrain of events, personalities, and situations that are good or bad for one's own condition. Outsiders will faintly perceive only a fraction of all of those things. But a person who is looking out for the many meanings and sources of significance in a place is perhaps best positioned to see and to appreciate the worth of the many elements distributed around the terrain. For in-between the familiar and the taken-for-granted viewpoint of locals on the one hand, and the distant spectator stance of outsiders on the other, there is a flickering middle ground where some of the local meaning is hinted at and can be scrutinized to understand it more. In this middle perspective some of the meanings and lives, as well as possible futures and pasts of the place, come to mind. The beautiful complexity of cultural significance, social connections, linguistic play, and financial patterns all comes alive, together with the awareness that human meaning (nomos) neatly imposes itself on the much larger and more basic reality (physis), a system of meanings that is preoccupied with certain distinctions but oblivious of other ones.

Cultural landscapes accommodate all these viewpoints: locals, outsiders, and those with an inquiring mind who occupy the in-between space in order to see a bit of the outsider standpoint and the perspective of the local residents, too.

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.