École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient EFEO
Scuola Italiana di Studi sull'Asia Orientale ISEAS
(European Consortium for Asian Field Study, ECAF)

KYOTO LECTURES 2017 
Monday, February 27th, 18:00h
 
co-hosted by Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
This lecture will be held at the Institut for Research in Humanities (IRH), Kyoto University  (seminar room 1, 1st floor)  
  


The Archaic in the Modern. Orikuchi Shinobu on Man'yō Japan and the Ryukyus  

Speaker: Chiara Ghidini

This talk aims to investigate how writer, poet and folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887-1953) attempted on re-enacting antiquity (kodai)
in early 20th-century Japan, both through essays and fiction. Also, it
will emphasise the social and cultural orientations of his time and shed
light on his (un?)scholarly approach, in between mysticism
and anthropology, to use the definition historian Momigliano applied to
Swiss
jurist and philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose works Orikuchi
probably
gained access to through his readings of James Frazer and Okinawan
researcher
Sakima Kōei.
In crafting his vision of Japanese antiquity, Orikuchi
was inspired by theories related to the search for ancestral origins,
the need to preserve and revive oral transmission, and the crucial role
supposedly played by women in the ritual “everyday life” of a remote,
almost mythical, past. Lamenting the lack of belief in contemporary
Japan, he located the site where the "cultural principles"
of such an envisioned kodai were still being reproduced and
perpetuated in the Ryukyus, by then formally annexed to Japan and mostly
included within Okinawa Prefecture.

Chiara Ghidini is
Lecturer in East Asian Religions at the University of Naples
“L’Orientale”. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.
Her dissertation dealt with Orikuchi Shinobu’s Book of the Dead and the (re-)construction of antiquity in modern Japan. She is presently working on the Ryūkyū Shintō ki,
recorded by the Pure Land Buddhist priest Taichū shōnin (1552-1639) at
the request of court officials. She is also involved in an
interdisciplinary research project aimed to produce a cultural history
of mental illness in Taiwan.

For detailed directions:
http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/institute/access-institute/access_e.htm  

École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS)

EFEO 
Phone: 075-701-0882 
Fax: 075-701-0883
e-mail: efeo.kyoto@gmail.com  

ISEAS
Phone: 075-751-8132 
Fax: 075-751-8221 
e-mail: iseas@iseas-kyoto.org

 kyoto lectures