1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910341146503321

Autore

Berry Mary Elizabeth

Titolo

What Is a Family? : Answers from Early Modern Japan / / Marcia Yonemoto, Mary Elizabeth Berry

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Oakland, : University of California Press, 2019

Berkeley, CA : , : University of California Press, , [2019]

©2019

ISBN

0-520-31608-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 275 pages) : illustrations, charts; PDF, digital file(s)

Disciplina

306.850952

Soggetti

Families - Japan - History - Edo period, 1600-1868

Japan Social life and customs 1600-1868

Japan History Tokugawa period, 1600-1868

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Lists of Illustrations and Tables -- A Note to Readers -- Introduction -- 1. The Language and Contours of Familial Obligation in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Japan -- 2. Adoption and the Maintenance of the Early Modern Elite: Japan in the East Asian Context -- 3. Imagined Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Spread of the Ancestor-Venerating Stem Family in Tokugawa Japan -- 4. Name and Fame: Material Objects as Authority, Security, and Legacy -- 5. Outcastes and Ie : The Case of Two Beggar Boss Associations -- 6. Governing the Samurai Family in the Late Edo Period -- 7. Fashioning the Family: A Temple, a Daughter, and a Wardrobe -- 8. Social Norms versus Individual Desire: Conventions and Unconventionality in the History of Hirata Atsutane's Family -- 9. Family Trouble: Views from the Stage and a Merchant Archive -- 10. Ideal Families in Crisis: Official and Fictional Archetypes at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century -- Appendix Suggestions for Further Reading -- Contributors -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse



households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603-1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status-from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant-but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources-population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature-to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.