Discourses of the vanishing : modernity, phantasm, Japan / Marilyn Ivy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ivy, Marilyn.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Japan.

Ethnology.

National characteristics, Japanese.

Nationalism--Japan.

Nationalism.

Ethnocentrism--Japan.

Ethnocentrism.

Culture--Semiotic models.

Culture.

Japan--Social life and customs.

Japan.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (284 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties-and the attempts to contain them-as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One. National-Cultural Phantasms and Modernity's Losses

Chapter Two. Itineraries of Knowledge: Trans-Figuring Japan

Chapter Three. Ghastly Insufficiencies: Tono Monogatari and the Origins of Nativist Ethnology

Chapter Four. Narrative Returns, Uncanny Topographies

Chapter Five. Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore

Chapter Six. Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams

Afterwords on Repetition and Redemption

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-260) and index.

ISBN:

9786612537363

9781282537361

1282537369

9780226388342

0226388344

OCLC:

593240114