Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony

In the "world system" of anthropology, the narratives of the colonizer—American, British, and French scholarship—has been privileged in academia, argues Kuwayama (history and anthropology, Hokkaido U., Japan, allowing Western scholars of Japanese anthropology to remain ignorant of the valuable work of "native" Japanese anthropologists. He critically examines the operations of this academic anthropology world system, touching upon questions of relationships between peripheral countries in the world system, the idea of "global" and "national" folkloristics, and the concept of "ethnographic reading in reverse" (in which ethnographies can be read as a narrative of the ethnographer using other people as a metaphor), and representations of Japan in American anthropology textbooks. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR