Assistant Professor KIKUCHI, Akira
Assistant Professor KIKUCHI, Akira
- Academic Degree
- Ph.D. in Letters, Osaka University
- Expertise
- Japanese ethnology
- Research Theme
- Comprehensive research on ethnographic practices in modern Japan
Research on ethnographic systems in modern Japan
The problem of “representation” has been widely debated in humanities and the social sciences in recent years. My research aims to examine representation in concrete terms based on the historical development of Japanese ethnology and explore the challenges and possibilities of ethnography as a method of representation. Japanese ethnology has in the past been understood and axiomatized in terms of ethnologists trained in objective academic methods surveying, analyzing, and recording pre-modern “folk practices” preserved in communities across Japan. Through my research, I mean to overturn this view of ethnology, redefining it as the activity of recording “folk practices” which are themselves products of modernization, through perspectives on “folk practices” formed through the processes of modernization. This ethnology arose from the multilayered combination of a range of elements, including the establishment of academic knowledge, the creation of the legal system, and the development of transportation and media. Repositioning these systems of “folk practice” representation collectively as the “modern Japanese ethnographic system,” I will reconsider the historical movement known as “ethnology” in its full dimensions. This will allow me to offer a compound perspective for simultaneously considering both discourse-analytic and experiential-scientific ethnological criticism, which seem to have developed independently, and reveal a new standpoint for considering “modern Japan.”