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New Currents in Studies on the Japanese Empire colloquium / Does Memory Matter? Historical Anthropology and the Study of Japanese Imperialism
Mariko Tamanoi, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles
The New Currents in Studies on the Japanese Empire colloquium series introduces current trends and new documents that have become available in multi-language archives in Northeast Asia which shed light on Japanese imperialism and inform comparative colonialism studies.
Organized by Jun Uchida, Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University.
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While the definition of historical anthropology is still up in the air, the goal of Mariko Tamanoi's presentation is to reformulate this sub-field of anthropology to better understand imperialism and colonialism in general and Japanese imperialism and colonialism (in Northeast China) in particular. The central issue that Mariko Tamanoi pursues in her paper is the methodological one: how to use ordinary people's memories. Instead of (or prior to) treating ordinary people's memory narratives as "the data," researchers should ask who remembers, when and where they remember, and how they remember. She then argues that these questions often force scholarly investigators to interrogate what they themselves have remembered and forgotten. After all, scholars write history for the present, and it is this complex relation between the past and the present that dictates the research questions.
Examples are drawn from the oral narratives of former agrarian settlers in Northeast China, memoirs written by them, as well as the narratives spoken and memoirs written by their children who had been left behind in Northeast China and the Chinese people who lived under the Japanese through the Manchukuo era.
Mariko Asano Tamanoi received her doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University. She is author of Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women, as well as editor of Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire. Her second book, Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in November 2008.
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