Christopher Craig – författare
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4 produkter
4 produkter
168 kr
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Middlemen of Modernity
Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Modern Japan
Häftad, Engelska, 2022
295 kr
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Among the challenges facing Japan in its quest to match the modern states of the Western world, none was more crucial than the development of agriculture. With a state focused more on the emblematic goals of mechanization, urbanization, and a modern military, it fell upon local elites in villages across the country to bring rice production into the modern era. Middlemen of Modernity explores these elites and their actions in a region in northeastern Japan, presenting a view of the transformation of Japanese agriculture from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.Meiji-era agricultural policy called for village elites to mobilize their wealth and local reputations to introduce improved farming methods, transform the physical landscape, and increase agricultural production. Farmers looked to the same figures to use their elevated status and government connections to direct public funds toward building prosperous villages. But economic shocks and social change created a new generation of elites with their own vision for agricultural improvement, leading to conditions that caused famine, economic disparity, and village unrest. The official and local responses to these discrepancies brought an end to the elite leadership of agricultural development at the beginning of the twentieth century, but its legacy set the course for farming and rural Japanese society for the next half century.Middlemen of Modernity offers a new perspective on Japanese modernization, one in which farming villages were neither premodern relics nor secondary concerns for the architects of the new nation. Modernity was worked out in the mud of rice paddies, as much as in any stateroom or factory, and the communities of Miyagi and villages throughout Japan helped shape the modern state, even as they were shaped by it. Mining a wealth of local sources, Christopher Craig provides a comprehensive study studded with stories of individual actors that remains closely connected to Japan's development and presents a history of agriculture from the early Meiji period to the postwar American occupation. Craig also engages with scholarship in environmental history and food studies, and his detailed treatment of the interactions between local villagers and central bureaucrats makes a valuable contribution to studies of state-society relations.
358 kr
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How is one to learn in a time of globalization? And in particular: how is one to learn if the research “object” is a non-European culture, such as that of Japan? What are the methodologies appropriate for working in the field of “Nippon/Japan” in a bi-directional approach from West to East and from East to West? Based on an interdisciplinary and intercultural orientation, specialists from Europe and Japan analyze topics focusing on History, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Literature, Linguistics, Sociology, Economics and Religious Studies.
Knowledge and Arts on the Move
Transformation of the Self-aware Image through East-West Encounters
Häftad, Engelska, 2018
273 kr
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East and West have long stood as towering edifices dividing history and the world into separate spheres. In fact, the two poles have not only shared a multitude of connections over the centuries, they have also played essential roles in shaping the identities of their oppositional others. Cultural exchange, mutual imaginings, and other forms of interaction have contributed to both the construction of an exotic other and a framing and definition of the self. The essays in this collection explore the construction and transformation of self image through the encounter between East and West from a variety of disciplinary approaches. Scholars from Japan and Europe apply methodologies and concerns from history, literature, art history, aesthetics, sociology, political science, law, and anthropology to issues of identity formation and transformation at the nexus of East Asia and Europe.