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Book review: A Malleable Map
Apr. 20th, 2011 12:56Bibliographic Data: Wigen, Kären. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Main Argument: "…the rehabilitation of ancient Japanese administrative spaces, while formalized in high-level negotiations in Tokyo, also entailed breathing life back into a once-dormant imperial geography, animating what (after John Gillis) we might term 'provinces of the mind'" (2). At the same time as it studies the ancient province of Shinano's transformation into the prefecture of Nagano, Wigen offers a nuanced portrait of how the Meiji state transformed Japan at the regional level--the book is an exercise first and foremost in chorography, the study of regions, and not of the typical chora in Japan from a historian's perspective, the domain or han, but that of an ultimately more enduring form, the kuni or province.
Historiographical Engagement: Wigen engages primarily with what she, one suspects by way of Beth Berry, terms the 'chorographic archive,' the subset of the library of public information that deals specifically with regions, in this case that of Shinano/Nagano. The chorographic archive embraces maps, atlases, and geographical primers as well as more conventional texts.
( A return to chorography )
Critical assessment: I really liked this book. I think Wigen does a great job of demonstrating something that political scientists know well and that historians really ought to know better: i.e. that regions are artificial constructs. She also makes convincing arguments about the Meiji regime's strategic usage of regional identities sited around the classical geography of kuni (provinces) which had been overlaid but never fully erased by successors to the ritsuryo state. She uses the word 'neoclassical' a lot, which I've seen rarely or never in books on comparable time periods in Japanese history, and I think her insistence that the Meiji regime was deploying neoclassical spatial understandings, and that this accounted for the relative ease with which the Meiji state cemented its control, is quite important. I also enjoyed her focused discussion of maps of Shinano province with an eye to what they demonstrated about the construction of Shinano, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to dig around in the 'chorographic archive' for nontraditional sources, such as statistical yearbooks, geography primers and newspapers. If anything, I think her one notable slip comes in the conclusion, when she introduces the problems with the notion of "scale" as it is currently understood virtually ex nihilo. A great book would be even better had this notion--and the flaws in it, as well as Shinanology's potential corrections of those flaws--been integrated throughout.
Further reading: Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920.
Meta notes: I particularly appreciated Wigen's usage of a vastly alternate locale and source base to illuminate a history whose outlines we already knew. I also found her integration of geographic and spatial theory into her arguments to be really interesting.
Main Argument: "…the rehabilitation of ancient Japanese administrative spaces, while formalized in high-level negotiations in Tokyo, also entailed breathing life back into a once-dormant imperial geography, animating what (after John Gillis) we might term 'provinces of the mind'" (2). At the same time as it studies the ancient province of Shinano's transformation into the prefecture of Nagano, Wigen offers a nuanced portrait of how the Meiji state transformed Japan at the regional level--the book is an exercise first and foremost in chorography, the study of regions, and not of the typical chora in Japan from a historian's perspective, the domain or han, but that of an ultimately more enduring form, the kuni or province.
Historiographical Engagement: Wigen engages primarily with what she, one suspects by way of Beth Berry, terms the 'chorographic archive,' the subset of the library of public information that deals specifically with regions, in this case that of Shinano/Nagano. The chorographic archive embraces maps, atlases, and geographical primers as well as more conventional texts.
( A return to chorography )
Critical assessment: I really liked this book. I think Wigen does a great job of demonstrating something that political scientists know well and that historians really ought to know better: i.e. that regions are artificial constructs. She also makes convincing arguments about the Meiji regime's strategic usage of regional identities sited around the classical geography of kuni (provinces) which had been overlaid but never fully erased by successors to the ritsuryo state. She uses the word 'neoclassical' a lot, which I've seen rarely or never in books on comparable time periods in Japanese history, and I think her insistence that the Meiji regime was deploying neoclassical spatial understandings, and that this accounted for the relative ease with which the Meiji state cemented its control, is quite important. I also enjoyed her focused discussion of maps of Shinano province with an eye to what they demonstrated about the construction of Shinano, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to dig around in the 'chorographic archive' for nontraditional sources, such as statistical yearbooks, geography primers and newspapers. If anything, I think her one notable slip comes in the conclusion, when she introduces the problems with the notion of "scale" as it is currently understood virtually ex nihilo. A great book would be even better had this notion--and the flaws in it, as well as Shinanology's potential corrections of those flaws--been integrated throughout.
Further reading: Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920.
Meta notes: I particularly appreciated Wigen's usage of a vastly alternate locale and source base to illuminate a history whose outlines we already knew. I also found her integration of geographic and spatial theory into her arguments to be really interesting.