Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

Main Argument: In the Tokugawa period across Japan, cooperative farming was displaced by individual family arming, and the individual family "clearly emerged as the center of production organization and economic interest" (ix). The most important cause of this was the growth of the market, which was disruptive. In general, these changes show that Japanese agriculture is dynamic, not sempiternally fixed, and that changes in farming during the Tokugawa period were the very opposite of regressive.

( Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan )

Critical assessment: Tom Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Fifty-five years on and this book has barely aged--some of the details are sketchy, and see my comments for the question of rural immiseration in the Meiji period and after, but all in all, working mostly from sketchy and unevenly published documents cited in other people's works, he laid it out, and got it right.

Further reading: Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan; Smith, Nakahara; Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization

Bibliographic Data: Noreña, Carlos F. Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Main Argument: This book argues that, in the period 69-235 CE, "the dissemination of specific imperial ideals was more pervasive than previously thought, and indicates a high degree of ideological unification amongst the aristocracies of the western provinces. The widespread circulation of a particular set of imperial ideals, and the particular form of ideological unification that this brought about, not only reinforced the power of the Roman imperial state, but also increased the authority of local aristocrats, thereby facilitating a general convergence of social power that defined the high Roman empire" (frontispiece).

( Ideals in circulation )

Critical assessment: It's useless to pretend that I am any kind of objective about this book, as Noreña is a professor of mine, and in my opinion one of the best in our department. So, both by training and inclination, I think he's largely right here, and I think it's interesting to see in particular, in the epigraphy/coinage divergence beginning with Commodus, some of the ancestry of the transformation of the emperorship after the 3rdC crisis.

Further reading: Syme, The Roman Revolution; Grey, Constructing Community in the Late Roman Countryside

Meta notes: "…systematic exploitation on the grand scale is consistent with the logic and normative claims of ideals and values to which many of us still subscribe" (324).

Bibliographic Data: Gordon, Andrew. Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Main Argument: "Put to manifold uses with varied meanings, both a tool of home-based production and a high-status object of consumer desire, the sewing machine and its sojourn track the emergence and then the ascendance of the middle class as cultural ideal and social formation, along with the emergence of the female consumer and professional home manager as defining figures in Japanese modern times" (9).

( Fabricating consumers )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews his earlier arguments; it is important to note again that "with the birth of the salesman came the birth of the consumer, in Japan as around the world," and that "in the cultural life of the consuming subject or citizen, one sees in Japan as elsewhere a two-sided modernity projected at and anchored in the imagination of a new middle class" (216, 217). In Japan as elsewhere, the sewing machine had many similar effects, including its role affirming the social order and bridging class differences. Gordon finds that local differences in Japan include "the figure of the woman managing home finance with professional attention, struggling to rein in her spendthrift husband's binging on credit tickets, to be a singular one, linked to the singularly enduring influence in high-growth, postwar Japan of the ideal of the professional housewife," and that the preponderance of home sewing in Japan is also a salient difference linked to the survival of that same housewife ideal (223).

Critical assessment: Another excellent book from Gordon, and a welcome focus on women as agents in their own historical stories and in the story of Japan's economic history. He really is an excellent writer, although the press copy editor was asleep at the switch on this one.

Further reading: Skud: Why Is It So Difficult to Make Your Own Clothes?; Mimura, Planning for Empire; Atkins, Blue Nippon

Bibliographic Data: King, Katie. Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Main Argument: "…in the nineties, science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled, and displayed by new technologies. These emergent embodiments became experiments in communication and offered epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring" (8). In her view, "reenactments are not a way to keep pasts and presents apart--or a way to keep authorities and alternative knowledges, metaphors and referents, materialities and abstractions, forms of academic expertise and cultural entertainment, or affects and cognitions separated, managed, or delimited by membership. Flexible knowledges, transdisciplinarities, new media, all plunge us into uncertainties, risk, collusion, and collaboration; all conditions that--as with responsibilities to multiple audiences from painfully limited authorships--we do not control and in which we are elemental 'bits' in emergent reorganizations of knowledge economies and among altering evaluations" (18).

( Networked reenactments )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent, really dense book. The four chapters could just as easily have been six, especially because King is a very dense writer. She says many things that are interesting and thought-provoking, though I think at times the fact that what she is talking about is still inchoate gets in the way of her pinning things down explicitly. In a word, it's still kind of hard to understand what she means by "reenactments" at times, though I think the idea of pastpresents is important to understanding it. Still, this is an excellent book, and I think she really understands the current dilemma of post-post-modernity in a way that other writers aren't willing to even fully acknowledge.

Further reading: Fembot interview with Katie King; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Hopkins, A World Full of Gods; Haraway; Latour; Manovich

Bibliographic Data: Fagan, Garret. The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Main Argument: Any answer to the question of "why did the Romans watch the games?" "requires due consideration of human psychology, once it is properly set against the Romans' historical context" (2). Sociological explanations for the appeal of the Roman games are not enough, as the Romans were by no means the only people to enjoy this kind of spectacle. Fagan argues "that an explanation for the transcultural and transhistorical appeal of violent spectacle must be sought in human psychology and, on the other, that appreciation of the psychology in turn depends our understanding of the Roman experience" (ibid).

( Games and why people watched them )
Critical assessment: I really like Fagan's work in general, and this is an excellent book which I basically completely agree with.

Meta notes: "The nexus of patronage, indeed, was pretty much how everything got done in ancient Rome, and the ability to attend games was no exception" (115).