The Haves and the Havents Part 6
The Japanese tea ceremony as a perfect example of the interaction of the haves and havents in equilibrium.
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
Culture is, in a certain way, the curation and elaboration of elements in a people’s past, the romantic rendering of episodes of want in periods of plenty.
The rich crystallize this abstracted and stylized experience and set them as standards and reward the poor by patronizing their efforts in developing the rich’s narrow and particular taste. The poor are keen to adopt the rich’s prejudices, what they value and what they dismiss, and tailor their arts and innovations to match in order to obtain resources from the rich. The rich define themselves by their sense of discrimination, they suspend their self-image on it. The poor, however, are judged (and judge themselves) by how well they meet the demands of the rich’s value system; they hang their very lives on this valuation. Here does artisanship of diverse kinds find validation.
We can see this phenomenon expressed in chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony, a cultural innovation of the late Medieval Japan, where an aristocratic indulgence of social tea drinking demanded and appreciated the creativity and labor of a legion of various craftsmen, not to mention the tea producers themselves.
Developing alongside samurai warrior culture and influenced by Zen Buddhism, chanoyu is primarily a medium for expressing a certain outlook, a philosophy shared by the participants, i.e, the appreciation of imperfection and impermanence in nature. In the materials and methods of the ceremony, values like asymmetry, economy, lack of refinement, and intimacy—a sort of stylized mirroring of nature— are emphasized.
The ceremony, with its precise conventions and detailed formulae, reflecting sensitive attention to seasons and circumstances, creates aesthetic standards that the participants are bound to uphold. The aficionado amongst his peers, who checks all the requirements in his performance, meeting the standards set by and maintained among them, shows his bona fides as a member of this cultured set. The considerable set of equipment required is produced under equally exacting standards as the rituals expected of the aficionado, and great care, knowledge, and skill is put into the production of the bowls, cups, whisks, mats, boxes, landscape hangings, flower arrangements, furniture and the landscape. In this way, the aficionado, the utensils he chooses for his performance, and by that hand, the artisans who sourced them are jointly evaluated by the ceremony.
(One can easily reach the conclusion that this system is a rigid, fossilized one, with no room for creativity, but it really isn’t. what the rich provide is only a set of principles, the hint of how to look and not what to see. The poor are not rewarded for following slavishly the point of the rich, because they will offer nothing new to the blasé, easily bored rich and the rich will not offer rewards. It is that the poor keep to the broad suggestions while translating them in new and inspired ways to satisfy at once the rich’s need for the familiar as well as excite their taste for the exotic that perpetuates and enlivens the system)
Thus artisanship receives patronage and respect from aristocrats, whose sense of the rare and rarefied is satisfied and exercised in the ceremony. Nwata kwochaa aka…[1] It is in this manner that the workman’s gritty paw can meet the delicate fingers of the noble in across a common table. That this equalizer happens is evidenced in how the artisans of various artifacts necessary for chanoyu acquire family names of repute, establish prestigious schools dedicated to their arts, and sometimes, in a reversal of roles, retain the right to choose which noble to grace with their offerings.
In a place where is lacked this cross-class intercourse, the tastes of the well-to-do turn vulgar—as in the odd fondness for the mindless mish-mash which a soup like Ofe Owerri is. (Rather than a discriminating elimination of ingredients until the absolutely essential remains, the idea behind the concoction appears to be to throw in as much rich stock as one’s means can reach, hence the saying, does the poor man eat Ofe Owerri?).[2] It’s funny how food which should establish class fails in that regard by making a wealth-based distinction: the patron makes a point of snobbery without the graceful (noblesse oblige?) concession to (and communion with) the refined sense of the producer. The vulgar tastes of the rich in such case represents an endless pursuit of variation (have three changes of furniture in 5 years rather than make an antique) or excess to outrun the poor, or results in a restless rococo of taste.
[1] Nwata kwocha aka…A Igbo proverb that translates as ‘When the child washes his hands well, he dines with elders’
[2] When I was in secondary school, our route to school through the railway lines took us past the building materials section of Kenyatta Market. Catching the traders at their breakfast hour, I would marvel at the mélange their breakfast comprised of: white rice with ofe akwu, fried eggs and plantains, beans, fish and kanda, and steamed vegetables, followed closely by a bottle of beer. Those meals make more sense as a dare than one’s idea of a sensible diet.