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Lost Innocence: Folk Craft Potters of Onta, Japan . By Brian Moeran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xv, 252 pp. Maps, Tables, Figures, Bibliography, Index. $30.

The impact that an urban aesthetic movement has on a community of rural artisans whose life and work in part inspired that movement is a multifaceted theme. Guided by this theme, Brian Moeran's anthropological study of "the total social processes surrounding the production, marketing, and appreciation" (p. 8) of Onta pottery speaks to social scientists, Japan specialists, potters, and craft enthusiasts. Aficionados of Japanese folk ceramics consider Onta pottery the purest of the genre. As Moeran cogently argues, this appraisal derives from the public's perception of the potters' adherence to a time-honored technology, style, and social organization of production. A detailed review of the history and philosophical underpinnings of the Japanese folk-craft (mingei) movement in chapter 1 explains the origin of such criteria for evaluating both the artisans' product and the spirit in which they work. To Yanagi Muneyoshi (Soetsu; 1889-1961), the ideologue of a movement romanticizing a moral social order of the past, the aesthetic value of traditional crafts lay in the humility of "unknown craftsmen" who worked communally in an "abandonment of egoism and pride" (p. 14) to make objects of functional utility. It is clear from the ethnographic description of Sarayama, the hamlet in Kyushu where Onta pottery is made (chapters 2 through 8), why Yanagi thought this craft community especially exemplified his ideal. Even today its households conform to the paradigm of the traditional ie or "enterprise house," and traditional kinship ties closely link the fourteen houses. (It might confuse readers that, without explanation, households and their members are identified by the house's shop name rather than by family surname.) Moeran contends that, through the 1950s, factors relating to production technology and access to resources combined to maintain an egalitarian social structure characterized by considerable community solidarity. He weaves together information concerning ownership of land, agricultural techniques, rights to space in the communal kiln, and constraints imposed by the quality of local clay and the use of water-powered clay crushers to construct his argument. Labor cooperation, common in farming, potting, construction, and repair activities, is the primary measure of community solidarity.