Alan Christy

A Discipline on Foot (eBook, ePUB)

Inventing Japanese Native Ethnography, 1910-1945

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Exploring the fundamental question of how a new discipline comes into being, this groundbreaking book tells the story of the emergence of native ethnology in Imperial Japan, a "one nation" social science devoted to the study of the Japanese people. Roughly corresponding to folklore studies or ethnography in the West, this social science was developed outside the academy over the first half of the twentieth century by a diverse group of intellectuals, local dignitaries, and hobbyists. Alan Christy traces the paths of the distinctive individuals who founded minzokugaku, how theory and practice developed, and how many previously unknown figures contributed to the growth of the discipline. Despite its humble beginnings, native ethnology today is a fixture in Japanese intellectual life, offering arguments and evidence about the popular, as opposed to elite, foundations of Japanese culture. Speaking directly to fundamental questions in anthropology, this authoritative and engaging book will become a standard not only for the field of native ethnology but also as a major work in broader modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 308
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. August 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781442216495
• Artikelnr.: 41069090

Autorenporträt

Alan Christy is associate professor of history and director of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
Chapter 1: Travelers
Part I: Exceeding Knowledge, Becoming Practice
Chapter 2: The Discipline of the Foot
Chapter 3: Travel as Reading
Part II: Sewing and Sowing
Chapter 4: The Native Place Index: An Economy of Affects
Chapter 5: The Folk Index: A Taxonomy of Daily Life
Chapter 6: Cultivating Informants
Chapter 7: Buried Authors, Excavated
Part III: Pioneering
Chapter 8: Western Social Science and the Japanese Task
Chapter 9: Daily Life: What the Academy Doesn't Know (and Is Unable to Ask)
Chapter 10: From Dilettantes and Eccentrics to Colleagues
Epilogue: Colonial Dreams, Colonial Nightmares