Reconfiguring Modernity

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Reconfiguring Modernity

Julia Adeney Thomas
Reconfiguring Modernity Book PDF

Author : Julia Adeney Thomas
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2002-01-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520926844

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Reconfiguring Modernity by Julia Adeney Thomas Pdf

Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.

Anthropology, Development and Modernities

Alberto Arce,Norman Long
Anthropology Development and Modernities Book PDF

Author : Alberto Arce,Norman Long
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2003-12-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781134628421

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Anthropology, Development and Modernities by Alberto Arce,Norman Long Pdf

While the diffusion of modernity and the spread of development schemes may bring prosperity, optimism and opportunity for some, for others it has brought poverty, a deterioration in quality of life and has given rise to violence. This collection brings an anthropological perspective to bear on understanding the diverse modernities we face in the contemporary world. It provides a critical review of interpretations of development and modernity, supported by rigorous case studies from regions as diverse as Guatemala, Sri Lanka, West Africa and contemporary Europe. Together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the crucial importance of looking to ethnography for guidance in shaping development policies. Ethnography can show how people's own agency transforms, recasts and complicates the modernities they experience. The contributors argue that explanations of change framed in terms of the dominantdiscourses and institutions of modernity are inadequate, and that we give closer attention to discourses, images, beliefs and practices that run counter to these yet play a part in shaping them and giving them meaning. Anthropology, Development and Modernities deals with the realities of people's everyday lives and dilemmas. It is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and development studies. It should also be read by all those actively involved in development work.

The British Stake In Japanese Modernity

Michael Gardiner
The British Stake In Japanese Modernity Book PDF

Author : Michael Gardiner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351757461

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The British Stake In Japanese Modernity by Michael Gardiner Pdf

This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan’s modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain’s own unification in the long eighteenth century, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly faithfully in the 1860s-70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura Masanao, and other writers in the ‘Japanese Enlightenment’. However, from around the end of the Meiji era, we can see a concerted and pointed response to this British universalism, its historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be read in texts including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country), and various work of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood in terms of its British specificity, this response should have something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this de-universalisation may be precisely why these ‘native’ Japanese modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism within the Anglophone academy, despite this field’s apparent widening of its ground in the twenty-first century.

Anarchist Modernity

Sho Konishi
Anarchist Modernity Book PDF

Author : Sho Konishi
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2020-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684175314

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Anarchist Modernity by Sho Konishi Pdf

"Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations.Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences.Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West."

The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan

Federico Marcon
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan Book PDF

Author : Federico Marcon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2015-07-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226251905

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The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan by Federico Marcon Pdf

From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.

Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora

Elisa Joy White
Modernity Freedom and the African Diaspora Book PDF

Author : Elisa Joy White
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780253001153

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Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora by Elisa Joy White Pdf

Elisa Joy White investigates the contemporary African Diaspora communities in Dublin, New Orleans, and Paris and their role in the interrogation of modernity and social progress. Beginning with an examination of Dublin's emergent African immigrant community, White shows how the community's negotiation of racism, immigration status, and xenophobia exemplifies the ways in which idealist representations of global societies are contradicted by the prevalence of racial, ethnic, and cultural conflicts within them. Through the consideration of three contemporaneous events--the deportations of Nigerians from Dublin, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the uprisings in the Paris suburbs--White reveals a shared quest for social progress in the face of stark retrogressive conditions.

Bad Water

Robert Stolz
Bad Water Book PDF

Author : Robert Stolz
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2014-03-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822376507

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Bad Water by Robert Stolz Pdf

Bad Water is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers and activists' efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan's social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The need to incorporate nature into politics was revealed by a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s. The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds. Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state. In the following decades, socialism, anarchism, fascism, and Confucian benevolence and moral economy were marshaled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis. With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shōzō, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan's environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections.

Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia

Anonim
Nature Environment and Culture in East Asia Book PDF

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2013-07-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789004253049

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Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia by Anonim Pdf

Since in the current global environmental and climate crisis East Asia will play a major role in negotiating solutions, it is vital to understand East Asian cultural variations in approaching and solving environmental challenges in the past, present, and future. The interdisciplinary volume Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia. The Challenge of Climate Change, edited by Carmen Meinert, explores how cultural patterns and ideas have shaped a specific understanding of nature, how local and regional cultures develop(ed) coping strategies to adapt to environmental and climatic changes in the past and in the present and how various institutions and representatives might introduce their ideas and agendas in future environmental and climate policies on national levels and in international negotiating systems.

Japanese Modernity and Welfare

R. Vij
Japanese Modernity and Welfare Book PDF

Author : R. Vij
Publisher : Springer
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2007-11-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780230287143

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Japanese Modernity and Welfare by R. Vij Pdf

Challenging conventional thought on the nature of welfare and civil society in modern Japan, Ritu Vij offers an original theoretical and historical interpretation of both. Drawing upon a neo-Hegelian understanding of the formation of modern subjectivity in political economy, this book uncovers a specific pattern of welfare provision in Japan.

Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition

Samira Haj
Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition Book PDF

Author : Samira Haj
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2008-10-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780804769754

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Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition by Samira Haj Pdf

Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers—Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703–1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849–1905)—each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

Globalizing Automobilism

Gijs Mom
Globalizing Automobilism Book PDF

Author : Gijs Mom
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 688 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2020-08-07
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9781789204629

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Globalizing Automobilism by Gijs Mom Pdf

Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

House and Home in Modern Japan

Jordan Sand
House and Home in Modern Japan Book PDF

Author : Jordan Sand
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 502 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2020-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684173846

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House and Home in Modern Japan by Jordan Sand Pdf

"A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants’ social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan."

#MeToo and Modernism

Robin E. Field,Jerrica Jordan
MeToo and Modernism Book PDF

Author : Robin E. Field,Jerrica Jordan
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781638040378

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#MeToo and Modernism by Robin E. Field,Jerrica Jordan Pdf

#MeToo and Modernism offers a blend of cultural, historical, literary, and pedagogical responses applied to the themes behind today’s ongoing #MeToo Movement. This volume is organized into four sections: a three-part chronological response in which scholars analyze literary understandings of how ripples of the #MeToo Movement began to emerge in Modernist literature, followed by a pedagogical section on how to incorporate such teachings in university classrooms. Editors Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan foreword the collection with an introduction answering the question of why such a volume is necessary in today’s educational landscape. The introduction summarizes the current scholarship regarding #MeToo and Modernism, while also uncovering the omissions, particularly in approaching nonbinary or queer writers, as well as writers of color, that still exist; as a response, many of these essays attempt to approach these gaps. Furthermore, the introduction shows how more traditional Modernist writers--including Woolf, Forster, Wells, and Joyce--served as forerunners of early glimmers of the #MeToo Movement in Modernist Literature.

Contemporary Social Issues in East Asian Societies: Examining the Spectrum of Public and Private Spheres

Merviö, Mika Markus
Contemporary Social Issues in East Asian Societies Examining the Spectrum of Public and Private Spheres Book PDF

Author : Merviö, Mika Markus
Publisher : IGI Global
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781466650329

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Contemporary Social Issues in East Asian Societies: Examining the Spectrum of Public and Private Spheres by Merviö, Mika Markus Pdf

While the balance between private and public sectors are based primarily on the experiences of the wealthy societies in Western Europe and North America, the global reach and increased political weight of East Asian economies is bound to influence other societies as well. Contemporary Social Issues in East Asian Societies: Examining the Spectrum of Public and Private Spheres focuses on modern highly developed East Asian societies and their social issues, particularly ones that are related to family, institution, and health. By examining the modernized global society and its connectedness, this book is a vital resource for researchers, students, and academicians interested in the distinctive features connected with local, social and cultural traditions of East Asian society.

The Youth of Things

Stephen Dodd
The Youth of Things Book PDF

Author : Stephen Dodd
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780824838416

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The Youth of Things by Stephen Dodd Pdf

When he died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, Kajii Motojirō had written only twenty short stories. Yet his life and work, it is argued here, sheds light on a significant moment in Japanese history and, ultimately, adds to our understanding of how modern Japanese identity developed. By the time Kajii began to write in the mid-1920s there was heated debate among his peers over “legitimate” forms of literary expression: Japanese Romantics questioned the value of a western-inspired version of modernity; others were influenced by Marxist proletarian literature or modernist experimentation; still others tried to create a distinctly Japanese fictional style that concentrated on first-person perspective, the so-called “I-novel.” There was a general sense that Japan needed to reinvent itself, but writers and artists were at odds over what form this reinvention should take. Throughout his career, Kajii drew from these various camps but belonged to none of them, making his work an invaluable indicator of a culture in crisis and transition. The Youth of Things is the first full-length book devoted to Kajii Motojirō. It brings together English translations of nearly all his completed stories with an analysis of his literature in the context of several major themes that locate him in 1920s Japan. In particular, Dodd links the writer’s work with the physical body: Kajii’s subjective literary presence was grounded first and foremost in his TB-stricken physical body, hence one cannot be studied without the other. His concerns with health and mortality drove him to play a central role in constructing a language for modern literature and to offer new insights into ideas that intrigued so many other Taishō intellectuals and writers. In addition, Kajii’s early years as a writer were strongly influenced by the cosmopolitan humanism of the White Birch (Shirakaba) school, but by the time his final work was published in the early 1930s, an environment of greater cultural introspection was beginning to take root, encapsulated in the expression “return to Japan” (nihon kaiki). Only a few years separate these two moments in time, but they represent a profound shift in the aspirations and expectations of a whole generation of writers. Through a study of Kajii’s writing, this book offers some sense of the demise of one cultural moment and the creation of another.