The Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series

Thursday February 11^th 2010
3:00 pm in Crawford Hall 115
Reception to Follow

Yoshinobu Ota, Professor of Anthropology
Kyushu University, Japan
presents,

An “Anachronistic” Reading Practice: Ruth Benedict, For Example

This presentation is an intervention, limited in its scope, into on-going scholarship on the re-imagining of anthropology. By rereading Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword—rarely regarded as being of significance to contemporary anthropology—I present it as a text that reminds practicing anthropologists of what I deem a defining element of anthropological knowledge, namely, its reflexivity derived from her emphasis on cultural mediation, which makes this discipline. As one who has been interpellated by this text in the position of “(native) informant,” I am bound to anthropological knowledge in somewhat ambiguous and shifting relations, which highlight the historical indeterminacy of such conceptual positions as “informant” and “researcher.” The Japanese epistemology Benedicts articulates in the text, on/giri, for instance, legitimates my attempt to take her text seriously as a theoretical work of anthropology, rather than as a descriptive work of Japanese culture.

Yoshinobu Ota (Ph.D., U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1987) is Professor of Anthropology in the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. His fieldwork sites include the southern Ryukyu islands and the Western Highlands of Guatemala. As a Fulbright Research Scholar for 2009–2010, he has been investigating the contemporary significance of Jean Charlot’s public art projects. He is the author of several books on anthropological theory; the most recent of these is Bourei to Shiteno Rekishi [Ghost Histories: Anthropology of Traces and Surprises] (2008).

Cosponsored with the Center for Japanese Studies

For further information, please contact Anthropology at anthprog@hawaii.edu.

page last updated March 5, 2010