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“Part 2 explores a suite of common ideas about Japan, what it is to be Japanese, and the nature of Japanese society. We will look at where those ideas came from, the issues being addressed when these ideas were formulated and what has become of them since. Our approach will be highly selective, focused on the research of three remarkable anthropologists, who all happen to be women. One is an American forced to study Japan from a distance, one a Japanese who studied anthropology in Britain, did fieldwork in India, then brought her comparative perspective home, and one is a Japanese-American whose fieldwork in Japan tests her understanding of her own, partly Japanese, identity.

“The first two attempted the impossible, to summarize the essential Japan in one short book. Their work has been frequently criticized, not least because any attempt to summarize “the essence” of a thoroughly modern, rapidly changing nation with a history thousands of years long and a population approaching 127 million is doomed to failure. But the books that they wrote were so powerful that, despite being frequently criticized, they have shaped discussions of Japan ever since they were published. The ideas they offer cannot be avoided; their value and their limitations must both be understood.

“Our first author conceives of her research as the study of patterns of culture, habits of thought, behavior and feeling. The second sees Japanese society through the lens of social structure, how groups and individuals relate to each other. The third focuses on stories and how stories are used to construct different kinds of Japanese selves. This newer, more modest approach to the study of Japanese lives has much to recommend it.”

The introduction to Part 2 begins,

“What we need now are some basic ideas to help us sort out what we’ve learned so far. Don’t forget, however, that even the most basic ideas begin as notions in someone’s mind. They emerge in a context and address specific problems. To understand their relevance to what we have learned so far, we have to keep asking ourselves, who, what, when, where, and why.”

This tack, of situating theories in the historical moment and situation in which they appeared, is one I would recommend to anyone teaching theory. Among other things, it avoids the common straw man approach that depics classical theorists as idiots who failed to recognize what today’s buzzwords are teaching. It also depicts anthropologists as fully engaged in the major intellectual debates and events of their day; not just as debating other anthropologists.

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And is the alternative to genuflect to the hand-as-dealt, starting with the first place that hung an “Anthropology Department” shingle on their door? Maybe, as you said in an old blog post, Rex, it’s a question of what past you need to draw on to build a future.

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In terms of Sahlins’s work Critique of Practical Reason is a sort of summary — I reread the chapter I’ll be teaching and was impressed again with its ferocious precocity — as might be considered the intro to Culture in Practice.

You know one interesting spin on these articles is the attempt to create deep genealogies for anthropology — like those essays or readers that start with Herodotus and move through Montaigne to Malinowksi as if all of these people were part of the same academic discipline, making the discipline a ‘meditation on otherness’. Sometimes people teach the history of anthro by rooting it in the tradition of travel writing, making it ‘ethnography’. I’m not particularly drawn to either of these options.

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Dominic Boyer, “Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy”
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/257733.ctl

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Carneiro, R.L., Evolutionism in cultural anthropology: a critical history. 2003, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. xiii, 322.

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