Bonds of Civility

Eiko Ikegami was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving a university education in Japanese classical literature in Japan, she became a business journalist in Tokyo at the Nikkei, the Japan Economic Journal. In 1983, on a Fulbright program, she came to the United States for her graduate studies in sociology, at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in 1989. She held a number of fellowships and grants including Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2002, she was elected as Chair of the Section of Comparative and Historical Sociology at the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Taming of the Samurai.

"This book is as brilliant a description of the stratification of Japanese culture as Bourdieu's Distinction is of French culture. Ikegami's work opens up the social history of Japanese culture in the way that the past two generations of social historians from Elias to Darnton have done for European culture. This is as fine a work as we have for any part of the world on the long-term shaping of culture, and on the political consequences of cultural institutions." -Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

• Part I. A Social Theory of State, Civility and Publics: Introduction: aesthetic Japan and the Tokugawa Network Revolution; 1. Civility without civil society: a comparative overview; 2. Culture and identity as emergent properties in networks: a theoretical overview; Part II. The Transformation of Associational and the Rise of Aesthetic Publics: 3. The medieval origin of aesthetic publics: linked poetry and the ritual logic of freedom; 4. The Late Medieval transformation of Za arts in struggles between vertical and horizontal alliances; 5. Tokugawa state formation and the transformation of aesthetic publics; 6. The rise of aesthetic civility; 7. The Haikai, network poetry: the politics of border crossing and subversion; 8. Poetry and protest: the rise of social power; 9. Tacit modes of communication and their contribution to Japanese national identities; Part III. Market, State, and Categorical Politics: 10. Categorical protest from the floating world: fashion, state and gender; 11. The information revolution: Japanese commercial publishing and styles of proto-modernity; 12. Hierarchical civility and beauty: etiquette and manners in Tokugawa manuals; Part IV. Concluding Reflections: 13. The rise of aesthetic Japan; Epilogue: toward a pluralistic view of communication styles; Endnotes; List of illustrations.