Lost Innocence   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> ever, after Chapter 3, "Social Organization of a Pottery Community" and Chapter 4, "Ecological Aspects of Social Structure," where 13 of some 40 pages are tables and charts on everything from "locations of dams" to "household connections through temple affiliation". This is not a criticism but rather an observation. Moeran is after all an anthropologist, and it is this anthropological approach and the intellectual discipline it demands that, I feel, make Lost Innocence significant.

Americans have held for far too long a simplistic and romantic view of Japanese folk craft and the philosophy of Yanagi Muneyoshi that made it popular. His credo as projected by Bernard Leach in An Unknown Craftsman (1972) was embraced by large numbers of Americans who were looking for a philosophy that would explain and justify their choice of pottery making as an alternative way of life. These potters seemed particularly susceptible to the simplistic and ethereal musings of Yanagi. One of the tenets that seemed most attractive to them was Yanagi's belief that an intellectual understanding of beauty and the conscious attempt to produce it only resulted in ugliness. Great works of art were made, Yanagi felt, only when "a potter's heart was filled with love". According to Moeran, "Yanagi visualized the potter alone at the wheel, intent on his work, with no thought in his mind". (p. 196) This anti-intellectual stance, coupled with an emphasis on the use of simple techniques, natural material and anonymous production, was a heady mixture for young American potters in the 1960s. Their interpretation of Yanagi's philosophy kept many of them from ever really questioning or trying to understand not only what it is exactly that makes pottery relevant in contemporary society but also what gives it the remarkable potential to express so profoundly such a vast range of human emotions. The work of many of these potters reflects this lack of intellectual inquisitiveness and much of it has become a trivialized commodity rather than an eloquent aesthetic statement.

The plight of these American potters in some ways mirrors that of the potters in Sarayama, whose dilemma Moeran describes:

"With the increase in demand for folk crafts, Onta pottery has been seen to be losing its qualities of 'craftsmanship' and Œhealthy pricing'. It is moving away from the essential characteristics of mingei, which no longer exists in its original 'beauty' and Œhonesty'. Those craftsmen who survive have to make the choice between two evils: whether to become individual artists or to merely turn out souvenir items." (pp. 148-149)

Although their immediate circumstances are different, both groups of potters find themselves at the same point of having to make that choice between becoming an individual artist or a souvenir maker. It is a choice they are reluctant to make because either is contrary to the folk craft philosophy that has been so important to them in their economic struggle for survival. It is this same folk craft philosophy though that, in its inability to bridge the gap between theory and the actual production and aesthetic appraisal of pottery in a modern, industrialized society, has created this quandary.

Moeran's analysis of the folk craft movement and Yanagi's ideas goes a long way toward addressing some of the obvious inconsistencies that have affected potters in Sarayama and the United States.
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