Actors of influence: Discourse and institutional growth in the history of noh theater.

This dissertation utilizes the case of Japanese noh theater to explore how tradition is engineered by the professionals who are its de facto arbiters. Noh theater is a masked theatrical art, which originated over 600 years ago and has been performed continuously since then. Nevertheless, our understanding of noh's past is obfuscated by myths about noh's origins, founders, rituality, and foundational theories. These myths impoverish noh's history and sustain noh's hegemonic institutions and ethos. My approach to noh's history is to understand the formation of these myths and how they disguise the arbitrariness of power relations in politics and the marketplace. Thus, this work not only departs from prior studies which validate noh's aesthetics, past, and order, but also historicizes noh discourse and considers the role of discourse in shaping power relations. Using primary sources such as performers' secret treatises, family histories, and public declarations this dissertation concentrates on the rise of three types of myths about noh--its patriarchs, religiosity, and the centrally of hereditary transmission--which constitute the dominant signs used to naturalize authority. The invocation of symbolic, ancient founders such as Zeami facilitated the consolidation of the power of living patriarchs, namely the family-heads (iemoto), who lead the profession. Myths of noh's sacredness likewise empower noh performers with priestly legitimacy and noh's validation of bloodlines effectively closes the noh occupation. After dismantling noh's modern myths I examine their formation in the medieval era. I identify how the four Yamato troupes (Kanze, Konparu, Hosho and Kongo) differentiated themselves from their competitors by embellishing their past and by deploylng secret writings. Subsequent chapters follow the rise to dominance of the Yamato troupes and the impact of Japan's political unification on noh's discourse, institutional growth, and artistry. Throughout this project, comparisons are drawn between noh's development and other occupations and religious movements. The fact that noh performers adopted technologies of authority comparable to other professions and the early modern state suggests a new understanding of the interplay between cultural production, the marketplace, and politics in the transition from the medieval to the early modern period.Ph.D.Asian historyAsian literatureCommunication and the ArtsCultural anthropologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131080/2/9825329.pd