Making Japanese Heritage

by Brumann; Christoph

• ISBN13: 9780415413145
• ISBN10: 0415413141
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book examines the making of Japanese heritage, investigating the ways in which particular objects, practices and institutions are ascribed public recognition and political significance. Through detailed ethnographic and historical case studies, it analyses the social, economic, and even global dimensions of cultural heritage. It shows how claims to heritage status in Japan stress different material qualities of objects, places and people-based upon their ages, originality and usage.

Author Biography

Christoph Brumann is a DFG Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Cologne, Germany. He has published widely on utopian communes in Japan and worldwide, gift-giving in Japan, the anthropological concept of culture, globalisation and urban anthropology. Rupert Cox is Lecturer in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research is on the intersection of art and anthropology with a particular emphasis on sound recording. His books include The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic From in Japan and The Culture of Copying in Japan (both published by Routledge).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
List of contributors	p. ix
Series editorÆs preface	p. xii
Acknowledgments and technical note	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
Performing Japaneseness through heritage	p. 19
Making ôJapaneseö tea	p. 21
Before making heritage: internationalisation of geisha in the Meiji period	p. 31
Making art in the Japanese way: nihonga as process and symbolic action	p. 44
Institutionalising Japanese heritage	p. 57
Architecture, folklore studies, and cultural democracy: Nagakura Saburô and Hida Minzoku-mura	p. 59
Nô masks on stage and in museums: approaches to the contextualisation and conservation of the Pitt Rivers Museum nô mask collection	p. 78
Company culture or patinated past? The display of corporate heritage in Sumitomo	p. 92
Japanese local heritage and the wider world	p. 109
A heady heritage: the shifting biography of kashira (puppet heads) as cultural heritage objects in the Awaji tradition	p. 111
Cloth and identity in Yaeyama: a search for context	p. 124
Houses in motion: the revitalisation of KyotoÆs architectural heritage	p. 149
Automated alterities: movement and identity in the history of the Japanese Kobe ningy&ocire;	p. 171
Perpetuating Japanese heritage	p. 187
Maintaining a Zen tradition in Japan: the concrete problem of priest succession	p. 189
Debating the past to determine the future in Shinky&ocire;, a Japanese commune	p. 202
Index	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.