The rashomon effect: considerations for existential anthropology

Abstract

Though Rashomon was first screened in 1950, it hit the ordinary popular cinemas in the West in the early 1950s, when Japanese culture was still strange to outsiders. The film’s searching exploration of what is taken to be real and true during an exotic incident in the mountains of medieval Japan, became a suggestive metaphor for the uncertainties facing the generations after the horrendous bloodletting in the war in China and the rest of Asia. Rashomon reminded us that what appeared to be realities could be unmasked, and that human action was capable of multiple interpretations. In the way Kurosawa presented the events in that ill-fated forest grove in ancient Japan, there was an almost Buddhist sense of maya, reality as illusion. When I saw Rashomon for the first time about 1960, I had myself recently returned from years of anthropological fieldwork among Buddhists in Sri Lanka. It soon seemed appropriate to me to express these inchoate sentiments of human ambiguity as the Rashomon effect. Kurosawa’s vision of multiple possible realities fitted in with the problems faced by anthropologists when they tried to understand the colorful but alien reality of other cultures and interpret them to Western academic audiences. What was their reality we asked? Could a single account, however authoritative, do justice to the richness and immediacy of their own experiences? What kinds of intellectual presuppositions had already colored the spectacles of the observer? As anthropological accounts of other peoples multiplied, these questions became more troubling and more insistent for the development of an intellectual discipline.