Representing the rural: Place as method in the formation of Japanese native ethnology, 1910-1945

This dissertation addresses questions regarding the formation and dissemination of Japanese native ethnology (minzokugaku). It focuses on the multiple positions of its practitioners, seeking to understand the field as more than the creation of a few "giants." It is also concerned with the relationships between the native ethnologists and the "average" Japanese who were the objects of investigation. In particular, this dissertation considers the importance to the discipline of shifting notions of marginality. First, the field itself, as a newcomer to academia, was conceived of as marginal to the mainstream disciplines. Second, its object of investigation, predominantly rural life, was deemed a marginalized space in modernizing Japan. Third, the field of native ethnology was itself organized around central figures--such as Yanagita Kunio, Orikuchi Shinobu and Shibusawa Keizo--and marginal people--such as Yanagi Soetsu, Minakata Kumagusu and a vast array of local informants.;Chapter One examines the discursive terrain. How did its practitioners articulate the special tasks and abilities of the new field that would provide it with its own discursive space, apart from that of the established disciplines? The chapter also considers the interior terrain, on which some people were marked as central and others marginal.;Chapter Two discusses the way the ethnologists constituted their objects of investigation. Of primary concern is how these objects were constituted as "communal" or "folk.".;Chapter Three addresses the central practices of the discipline: travel and fieldwork. In particular, it questions the field's presumption of the priority of experience to writing and shows how notions of textuality pervaded the "experience" of fieldwork.;Chapter Four returns to the critique of representation discussed in Chapter One, and asks how the ethnologists sought to overcome the limitations of representation to which they argued the established disciplines had succumbed. By reexamining the ethnologists' own representations, this chapter considers the complex and uncomfortable relationship between science and aesthetics.;Chapter Five is a case study that examines the way the methodological issues raised in the first four chapters functioned in the premier site of ethnological fieldwork: Okinawa.