Event

Rooted in indigenous traditions and Western influences, ethnology (minzokugaku) emerged as a social scientific discipline in early twentieth-century Japan. Ethnology developed in tandem with empire: scholars supplied useful information for administration and expansion in exchange for financial and institutional support from colonial authorities. Japanese social scientists of the 1930s, like their counterparts worldwide, were captivated by Polish-born British social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork methodology, involving long-term immersion among the population under analysis. During the so-called Malinowski boom, Japanese ethnologists embraced direct, sustained experience as the foundation of legitimate scholarship. Rather than Malinowski’s solitary ventures, however, Japanese researchers of the late imperial age generally worked in teams to minimize danger, maximize resources, and collect comprehensive information.

The team fieldwork methodology produced a unique relationship among Japanese ethnologists, their research subjects, and the imperial state. Lone European and American social scientists, who routinely spent months without metropolitan contact, often came to identify with their informants. In these cases, studies originally intended to benefit the empire ended up challenging the legitimacy of foreign rule. By contrast, with each other for company and support in the field, Japanese researchers enjoyed correspondingly diminished contact with their subjects, and were less likely to overcome scientific and political biases against “inferior races.” Groups, moreover, fostered an environment of surveillance hostile to the expression of unorthodox views. Ultimately, whereas the team fieldwork methodology gave coherence to ethnology as a discipline, it also suppressed most potential for political dissent, and cast a long shadow into the postwar period.
* CEAS Humanities Colloquium Series