conference paper / 2010

Generational Divides: The Iemoto System in America

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This paper examines the iemoto system of Japanese dance transmission as it functions in American contexts. Sellers-Young is concerned with generational divides: how lineage, obedience, repetition, and teacher authority are understood differently by immigrant, Japanese American, and non-Japanese students. The system carries continuity, but its meaning changes when it is practiced under diasporic and multicultural conditions.

The work deepens her analysis of Nihon buyo as embodied identity formation. Students do not simply learn choreography; they learn etiquette, timing, attention, hierarchy, and a bodily relation to tradition. In America, these practices can sustain memory, produce discipline, create tension with individualist values, and enable new forms of belonging. Sellers-Young's larger insight is that cultural transmission survives by changing bodies in the present, not by preserving an untouched past.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2010
Era 2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy i

2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy

This period broadens and complicates the earlier positions. In belly dance studies, Sellers-Young sharpens the critique of appropriation, commercialization, and the imagined Arab body. She traces belly dance from the Chicago World’s Fair and “Little Egypt” through Arab American nightlife, second-wave feminism, goddess spirituality, and branded spectacle. Enjoyment is not denied, but it is placed inside unequal histories of representation.

In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” she identifies different pedagogical regimes: optical, somatic, and mediated. Mirror-based training produces self-objectification and visual abstraction; direct somatic apprenticeship produces incorporation into lineage and tradition; screen-based learning produces a more autonomous but more image-mediated learner. This is one of her clearest statements that pedagogy produces kinds of consciousness.

Her work on ethnographic perspective marks a decisive methodological turn. Reflexivity must include not only social identity but sensory structure, neurological pattern, and movement history. She names the genetic/structural, imaginal/social, and performance selves. This framework later becomes central to her somatic autoethnography.

The contemplation and neuroplasticity writings connect performance training to broader academic reform. Contemplative practice is framed as a third way of knowing, complementary to rational analysis and empirical observation. Neuroscience supplies a vocabulary for attention, plasticity, habit, and embodied change, though the underlying practical insight comes from performance and somatics.

Continuity: technique forms subjectivity.

Expansion: the performance studio becomes a model for higher education.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventAssociation for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March
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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Generational Divides: The Iemoto System in America” takes what might seem, at first glance, a narrowly local subject—the history of Portland’s Fujinami-kai, a school of Nihon buyō—and shows it to be a condensed history of migration, exclusion, incarceration, pedagogy, and intercultural remaking in the United States. The paper’s real subject is not simply a dance school, nor even Japanese American cultural preservation in any straightforward sense. It is the way a traditional artistic institution, the iemoto system, becomes a vehicle through which different generations inhabit Japan differently in America, and through which bodily discipline becomes a medium of social memory, resistance...

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