Travelers -- The discipline of the foot -- Travel as reading -- The native place index : an economy of affects -- The folk index : a taxonomy of daily life -- Cultivating informants -- Buried authors, excavated -- Western social science and the Japanese task -- Daily life : what the academy doesn't know (and is unable to ask) -- From dilettantes and eccentrics to colleagues -- Epilogue : colonial dreams, colonial nightmares
Summary
Exploring the fundamental question of how a new discipline comes into being, this groundbreaking book tells the story of the emergence of native ethnology in Imperial Japan, a "one nation" social science devoted to the study of the Japanese people. Roughly corresponding to folklore studies or ethnography in the West, this social science was developed outside the academy over the first half of the twentieth century by a diverse group of intellectuals, local dignitaries, and hobbyists. Alan Christy traces the paths of the distinctive individuals who founded minzokugaku, how theory and practice d
