1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456801303321

Autore

Ivy Marilyn

Titolo

Discourses of the vanishing [[electronic resource] ] : modernity, phantasm, Japan / / Marilyn Ivy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 1995

ISBN

1-282-53736-9

9786612537363

0-226-38834-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (284 p.)

Disciplina

306.0952

306.4/0952

Soggetti

Ethnology - Japan

National characteristics, Japanese

Nationalism - Japan

Ethnocentrism - Japan

Culture - Semiotic models

Electronic books.

Japan Social life and customs

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-260) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter One. National-Cultural Phantasms and Modernity's Losses -- Chapter Two. Itineraries of Knowledge: Trans-Figuring Japan -- Chapter Three. Ghastly Insufficiencies: Tono Monogatari and the Origins of Nativist Ethnology -- Chapter Four. Narrative Returns, Uncanny Topographies -- Chapter Five. Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore -- Chapter Six. Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams -- Afterwords on Repetition and Redemption -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these



anxieties-and the attempts to contain them-as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.