Since the end of the 1980s, scholarly work on Japan has attempted to escape the bounds of the previous discourse that continuously described it as changing Japan, a discourse which paradoxically also focused, in the main, on the hierarchical models of this so-called vertical society. While accepting the rapid rate of social change and enduring continuities within Japan, this new wave of work also looked at the micro-level by trying to place people within the framework of the Japanese model.
The four volumes in this Routledge Major Work...
Since the end of the 1980s, scholarly work on Japan has attempted to escape the bounds of the previous discourse that continuously described it ...
Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be...
Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety ...
Assembling Japan focuses on Japan s modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on changing technology and that has led to the nation s full engagement with the global system. This process forms a complex field of tensions, full of interesting dynamisms and synergies that can be best understood through the book s methodology: anthropological analysis combined with historical contextualization. The approaches in this collection are manifold. Some chapters examine the themes of modernity, technology and Japan s global experience though popular culture, from reggae to...
Assembling Japan focuses on Japan s modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on changing technology and that has led to the nation ...