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Travel, agency, and the circulation of knowledge.
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ISBN: 3830985673 9783830985679 3830935676 Year: 2017 Publisher: [Place of publication not identified] Waxmann Verlag GmbH

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Ever since the Gilgamesh epic and Homer's Odyssey, stories of travel and adventure, whether 'fictional', 'factual', or a mix of both, have been crucial to the collective self-definition of human societies. Since the early modern period and the increased frequency of cross-cultural encounters, the literary motif of the journey became a significant ingredient of colonial imagination. The ideology of adventure, crucial to many works of literature, pervades Western discourses of economic expansion and scientific discovery, while anthropologists, seeking to document indigenous story traditions, encountered an oral archive not unlike that of their own. Travelistic texts (by 'culture heroes', explorers, colonial agents, missionaries, scientific explorers, refugees, and foreign visitors) often provide the semantic repertoire for descriptions of 'exotic' spaces and populations. The knowledge gained through physical encounters during journeys to foreign lands often functions to revise inherited ideas about 'cultures' - those of others as well as one's own. The topics 'travel' and 'travel writing' therefore invite us to address questions of reliability and verifiability. This volume brings together experts from diverse disciplines and places around the globe whose work is concerned with the phenomenon and discourse of travel, transculturation, and the cross-cultural production of knowledge. The contributions reflect the recent shift in travel scholarship toward including the study of ideological conflicts within Europe's 'imperial gaze', as well as attempts at tracing the perspective of Europe's 'others', which frequently challenged colonial certainties and claims to intellectual supremacy. Das breite Panorama des Bandes lässt zwei Entwicklungen in der transdisziplinären Auseinandersetzung mit postkolonialer Theorie erkennen: Erstens wenden sich viele Beiträge von der Vorstellung ab, den mobilen Reisenden stünden lokal gebundene "Bereiste"gegenüber.[...] Die Umkehrung des kolonialen Blicks durch die Frage, wie außerhalb Europas Wissen über die Welt gewonnen wurde, hat hier besondere Bedeutung. Zweitens illustrieren mehrere Kapitel, welche Einsichten sich aus einer Abkehr von der pauschalen Verurteilung europäischer Reisetexte als kolonialistisch gewinnen lassen. Auch europäische Reisende der kolonialen Ära fanden sich immer wieder in der prekären Position kultureller Mittler. Dies darf bei aller gebotenen Kritik am ausbeuterischen Charakter des Kolonialismus nicht außer Acht gelassen werden. Die Beiträge des Bandes bilden insgesamt sehr gut die Vielfalt der Reiseforschung und die Herausforderungen ab, die sich aus interdisziplinären Dialogen zu diesem Feld des Kulturkontakts ergeben. - Anke Fischer-Kattner auf: sehepunkte.de Das vorliegende Werk erweist sich durch seine vielen Perspektiven als lesenswerte Lektüre, um die Praxis des Reisens und das Berichten über Reisen als raumzeitlich spezifische, hier vor allem westliche Formen des Welt-Aneignens zu reflektieren. - Sebastian Dorsch, in: Historische Zeitschrift 307 (2018), S. 443.


Book
Recreating Japanese men
Authors: ---
ISBN: 1283278502 9786613278500 0520950321 Year: 2011 Publisher: Berkeley, CA : University of California Press,

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The essays in this groundbreaking book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men's sense of gender as authentic and stable.


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A malleable map
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ISBN: 9786612697692 1282697692 0520945808 9780520945807 9781282697690 9780520259188 0520259181 6612697695 Year: 2010 Publisher: Berkeley University of California Press

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Kären Wigen probes regional cartography, choerography, and statecraft to redefine restoration (ishin) in modern Japanese history. As developed here, that term designates not the quick coup d'état of 1868 but a three-centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Drawing on a wide range of geographical documents from Shinano (present-day Nagano Prefecture), Wigen argues that both the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868) and the reformers of the Meiji era (1868-1912) recruited the classical map to serve the cause of administrative reform. Nor were they alone; provincial men of letters played an equally critical role in bringing imperial geography back to life in the countryside. To substantiate these claims, Wigen traces the continuing career of the classical court's most important unit of governance-the province-in central Honshu.


Book
What Is a Family? : Answers from Early Modern Japan
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ISBN: 0520316088 0520974131 9780520974135 Year: 2019 Publisher: Oakland University of California Press

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603-1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status-from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant-but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources-population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature-to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.


Book
Food and fantasy in early modern Japan
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ISBN: 1283277336 9786613277336 0520947657 9780520947658 9781283277334 6613277339 9780520262270 0520262271 Year: 2010 Publisher: Berkeley University of California Press

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How did one dine with a shogun? Or make solid gold soup, sculpt with a fish, or turn seaweed into a symbol of happiness? In this fresh look at Japanese culinary history, Eric C. Rath delves into the writings of medieval and early modern Japanese chefs to answer these and other provocative questions, and to trace the development of Japanese cuisine from 1400 to 1868. Rath shows how medieval "fantasy food" rituals-where food was revered as symbol rather than consumed-were continued by early modern writers. The book offers the first extensive introduction to Japanese cookbooks, recipe collections, and gastronomic writings of the period and traces the origins of dishes like tempura, sushi, and sashimi while documenting Japanese cooking styles and dining customs.

Mapping early modern Japan
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ISBN: 9786612356599 1282356593 052092830X 1597347337 9780520928305 9781282356597 9780520232693 0520232690 0520232690 6612356596 9781597347334 Year: 2003 Publisher: Berkeley Los Angeles University of California Press

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This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes-including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias-to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.

Japan in print : information and nation in the early modern period
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ISBN: 0520237668 0520254171 1423752643 9786612360466 0520941462 1282360469 1598759280 9780520941465 9781423752646 9780520254176 9781282360464 9780520237667 9781598759280 Year: 2006 Volume: 12 Publisher: Berkeley (Calif.) : University of California press,

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A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge. Japan in Print shows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an "us" bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning.

Geographies of identity in nineteenth-century Japan
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ISBN: 1282759299 9786612759291 0520930878 1597346322 9780520930872 9781597346320 9780520240858 0520240855 9781282759299 6612759291 Year: 2005 Publisher: Berkeley (Calif.) : University of California Press,

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In this pioneering study, David L. Howell looks beneath the surface structures of the Japanese state to reveal the mechanism by which markers of polity, status, and civilization came together over the divide of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Howell illustrates how a short roster of malleable, explicitly superficial customs-hairstyle, clothing, and personal names- served to distinguish the "civilized" realm of the Japanese from the "barbarian" realm of the Ainu in the Tokugawa era. Within the core polity, moreover, these same customs distinguished members of different social status groups from one another, such as samurai warriors from commoners, and commoners from outcasts.

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