Events
Japan as Terrain for American Self-Reflection in the Late 20th Century by Prof Amy Borovoy
| Date | : | 15 Jan 2020 |
| Time | : | 15:00 - 16:30 |
| Venue | : | AS8, Level 4, Seminar Room 04-04 |
| Contact Person | : | TAY, Minghua |
| Register | ||
Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore.
CHAIRPERSON
Dr Shiori Shakuto, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
“Cultural relativism”—the radical mandate to regard all cultural-ethical systems as equal—was an idea that shaped anthropology and social thought in the latter part of the 20th century. But it was always a complex mandate and difficult to fulfill. In this project, I explore the place of Japan in American social thought during this time: a non-Western nation that had proceeded through its own industrial revolution and cultivated modern institutions anchored in received historical ideals. The inaugural study of Japan in the postwar era, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, researched during World War II and published during the occupation, explored Japan as radically “other.” The talk explores a series of canonical postwar studies which, in surprising and imperfect ways, nonetheless, managed to challenge American ethnocentrism and create a window for expanding the possibilities of what modernity could mean and for reflecting on the excesses of American individualism. The lecture explores the study of another society as both comparative exercise but also one situated in history and shaped by political and theoretical agendas.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amy Borovoy is Professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Princeton University; her field is cultural anthropology. Her work focuses on the culture of biomedicine, gender, and the meaning of social democracy in modern Japan. More recently she has been working on the emergence of Japan as terrain for self-reflection in the postwar, Cold War, and contemporary U.S. She is the author of The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 2005); “Japan’s Hidden Youths: Mainstreaming the Emotionally Distressed in Japan” (Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry) and “Robert Bellah’s Search for Community and Ethical Modernity in Japan Studies” (Journal of Asian Studies). Her current manuscript is A Living Laboratory: Japan in American Social Thought.
REGISTRATION
Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you complete the form below to RSVP.