On French and Japanese anthropologies: André Leroi-Gourhan in Kyoto (1937-1939)

Speaker: Damien Kunik
Tuesday, September 26th, 18:00h 
Please note that this lecture be held at he Center of EFEO, NOT in Kyoto University.
Address: 29 Kitashirakawa bettō-chō, Sakyō-ku, Kyoto 606-8276
 (You can search the location on google map with the word "EFEO Kyoto")   

André
Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986)—considered today along with Claude
Lévi-Strauss as one of the major French anthropologists of the 20th
century—was the first French scholar to be sent to Japan on an official
fellowship in 1937. This talk will focus on this two-year ethnographic
mission in Kyoto.  

Despite scholarship on the history of
Japanese academic fields always considering anthropology as a Western
importation to Japan, Western “purveyors of anthropology” have gladly
conceded that they were strongly impressed, if not influenced, by their
Japanese colleagues. As I will show through the case of Leroi-Gourhan’s
mission, ethnography, anthropology, and folklore studies were actually
much better understood in Japan than they were in France in the 1930’s.
This leads us to reassess the claimed influence of Western academic
thought on Japan and to examine the very real influence of Japan on
Western anthropology.   

Damien Kunik is a research associate at
the University of Geneva. Since 2016, he has also been a postdoctoral
visiting researcher at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. His
current research topics include the history of humanities and social
sciences in Japan, the relationship between the arts and anthropology,
and the study of contending discourses on material culture. He has
published various articles in French peer-reviewed journals (Cipango,
Ebisu, Techniques & Culture, Tracés). Kunik is working on an edited
volume about Leroi-Gourhan’s mission in Japan, which is currently
accepting contributions in French, English, and Japanese.

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

 kyoto lectures