Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands PDF Author: Arne Røkkum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134253656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu Islands and their world. In particular it explores the mind of the islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression to these relationships. Based on extensive original research, including participant observation, the book allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves as well as setting the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese Studies and Pacific Island studies.

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands PDF Author: Arne Røkkum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134253656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu Islands and their world. In particular it explores the mind of the islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression to these relationships. Based on extensive original research, including participant observation, the book allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves as well as setting the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese Studies and Pacific Island studies.

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands

Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands PDF Author: Arne Røkkum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134253648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu Islands and their world. In particular it explores the mind of the islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression to these relationships. Based on extensive original research, including participant observation, the book allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves as well as setting the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese Studies and Pacific Island studies.

Understanding Japanese Society

Understanding Japanese Society PDF Author: Joy Hendry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415679133
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This new edition provides a clear introduction to Japanese society which does not require any previous knowledge of the country. It contains new material on the effects of the Asian crisis and recession in Japan, the changes to the Japanese ruling political elite and more.

Drawing the Sea Near

Drawing the Sea Near PDF Author: C. Anne Claus
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959471
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment. Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews, this richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. In doing so, C. Anne Claus challenges orthodox assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the future of environmentalism within transnational organizations. She provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations—in this case a field office of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Okinawa—negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life. In pursuing how particular projects off the coast of Japan unfolded, Drawing the Sea Near illuminates the real challenges and possibilities of work within the multifaceted transnational structures of global conservation organizations. Uniquely, it focuses on the conservationists themselves: why and how has their approach to project work changed, and how have they themselves been transformed in the process?

An Anthropological lifetime in Japan

An Anthropological lifetime in Japan PDF Author: Joy Hendry
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004302875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 713

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Book Description
Joy Hendry's collection demonstrates the value of an anthropological approach to understanding a particular society by taking the reader through her own discovery of the field, explaining her practice of it in Oxford and Japan, and then offering a selection of the results and findings she obtained. Her work starts with a study of marriage made in a small rural community, continues with education and the rearing of children, and later turns to consider polite language, especially amongst women. This lead into a study of "wrapping" and cultural display, for example of gardens and theme parks, which became a comparative venture, putting Japan in a global context. Finally the book sums up change through the period of Hendry's research.

Japan's Ainu Minority in Tokyo

Japan's Ainu Minority in Tokyo PDF Author: Mark K. Watson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317807561
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This book is about the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, living in and around Tokyo; it is, therefore, about what has been pushed to the margins of history. Customarily, anthropologists and public officials have represented Ainu issues and political affairs as limited to rural pockets of Hokkaido. Today, however, a significant proportion of the Ainu people live in and around major cities on the main island of Honshu, particularly Tokyo. Based on extensive original ethnographic research, this book explores this largely unknown diasporic aspect of Ainu life and society. Drawing from debates on place-based rights and urban indigeneity in the twenty-first century, the book engages with the experiences and collective struggles of Tokyo Ainu in seeking to promote a better understanding of their cultural and political identity and sense of community in the city. Looking in-depth for the first time at the urban context of ritual performance, cultural transmission and the construction of places or ‘hubs’ of Ainu social activity, this book argues that recent government initiatives aimed at fostering a national Ainu policy will ultimately founder unless its architects are able to fully recognize the historical and social complexities of the urban Ainu experience.

Making Japanese Heritage

Making Japanese Heritage PDF Author: Christoph Brumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135255733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book examines the making of heritage in contemporary Japan, investigating the ways in which particular objects, practices and institutions come to be seen as forms of heritage which are ascribed public recognition and political significance.

The First European Description of Japan, 1585

The First European Description of Japan, 1585 PDF Author: Luis Frois SJ
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317917812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the first critical English-language edition of the 1585 work, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. In addition, the book includes a substantive introduction and other editorial material to explain the background and also to make comparisons with present-day Japanese life. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.

Gender and Island Communities

Gender and Island Communities PDF Author: Firouz Gaini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429558732
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book takes an explicitly feminist approach to studying gender and social inequalities in island settings while deliberating on ‘islandness’ as part of the intersectional analysis. Though there is a wealth of recent literature on islands and island studies, most of this literature focuses on islands as objects of study rather than as contexts for exploring gender relations and local gendered developments. Taking Karides’ ‘Island feminism’ as a starting point and drawing from the wider literature on island studies as well as gender and place, this book bridges this gap by exploring gender, gender relations, affect and politics in various island settings spanning a great variety of global locations, from the Faroe Islands and Greenland in the north to Tasmania in south. Insights on recent developments and gendered contestations in these locations provide rich food for thought on the intricate links between gender and place in a local/global world. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of gender and feminist studies, cultural studies, Island studies, anthropology, and more broadly to sociology, geography, diversity and social justice studies, global democracy, and international relations.

The Japanese Family

The Japanese Family PDF Author: Diana Adis Tahhan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317808347
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book explores how the relationship between child and parent develops in Japan, from the earliest point in a child’s life, through the transition from family to the wider world, first to playschools and then schools. It shows how touch and physical contact are important for engendering intimacy and feeling, and how intimacy and feeling continue even when physical contact lessens. It relates the position in Japan to theoretical writing, in both Japan and the West, on body, mind, intimacy and feeling, and compares the position in Japan to practices elsewhere. Overall, the book makes a significant contribution to the study of and theories on body practices, and to debates on the processes of socialisation in Japan.