ahorbinski: kanji (kanji)
Bibliographic Data: Wigen, Kären. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Main Argument: Using a geographical perspective on history, Wigen makes three principal arguments: that "bringing more self-consciously geographical analysis to the study of Japanese development" is "needed if we are to put together a meaningful picture of Japanese development" (20, xiii); that "both before and during its passage to modernity, the spatial patterns of the Japanese economy were the products of complex social negotiations" (21); and that "the transformation of Shimoina confirms that spatial patterns are more than a passive projection of social process" (ibid). The successful peripheralization of Shimoina and many other places like it, and the re-harnessing and redirection of Tokugawa-period networks that this process entailed, are key to understanding Japan's swift rise to the status of an imperial power on the world stage.

Historiographical Engagement: With a lot of literature on protoindustrialization in the early modern period, as well as historical geography, i.e. DeVries and Braudel.

A geographical revolution )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent, interesting, well-written book--"a gem," as professors in the department have described it to me. When we read Wigen's second book, A Malleable Map, for seminar last year, I was given the rather unenviable task of defending it in the face of a number of criticisms, not least being that this book is a stronger work than her more recent effort. Having now read this book, I think that it's very true that The Making of a Japanese Periphery is better, mostly because it is so beautifully constructed, its evidence laid out clearly and concretely. I found one of the best aspects of A Malleable Map to be Wigen's firm grasp of the fact that regions are constructed rather than made, and it's interesting to see in this book her application of that insight to a broader realm than the government/society interactions with which the second book is largely concerned. It's also interesting to note the places where her research in this book undoubtedly led her to start thinking about the questions that inform her second. And I continue to be highly gratified by her attention to the gender dynamics of social and economic power, as well as to the hierarchies of social power across time.

I am quite certain that Wigen is fundamentally correct when she argues that the peripheralization of Shimoina (and countless other comparable regions around Japan) enabled Japan to shrug off its own peripheral/non-participant status in the global economic and political order and become an imperial core, and I would have quite liked an entire other chapter expanding this argument, particularly her fascinating, throwaway assertion that contemporary China's inability to reconfigure its spatial hierarchies was part of its ultimate inability to retain state integrity. Of course, such a chapter would have been well outside the scope of the present study, which obviously deservedly won the Fairbank Prize in 1995.

Further reading: Jan DeVries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; People and Production; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Meta notes: On Earth as it is not in heaven, representing space temporally, or time spatially, is going to lead to some misrepresentations.
ahorbinski: kanji (kanji)
Bibliographic 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.

Profile

ahorbinski: shelves stuffed with books (Default)
Andrea J. Horbinski

August 2017

S M T W T F S
   1 2345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags