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Discourses of the Coming: Ignorance, Forgetting, and Prolepsis in Japanese Life-Historiography

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The Anthropology of Ignorance

Part of the book series: Culture, Mind, and Society ((CMAS))

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Abstract

This chapter explores a genre of autobiographical historiography known in contemporary Japan as jibunshi, or “personal history” (literally, “I-history”).1 The genre specifically refers to “ordinary people’s” history, that is, the amateur practice of history writing outside the institutional loci of knowledge such as academia and the media, centering on narratives of everyday life. It has been popular since the late 1980s, especially among the elderly population, giving rise to a culture of amateur publishing. The genre has provided its practitioners with a means of retrospective examination of personal life through literacy practice, the concrete material practice of making textual objects. At this intersection of textuality and personal life we may be tempted to observe, as Kobayashi (2006) suggests, what Foucault called a “technology of the self” (1988).

Is it not possible that the contemporary mind, in its restless attempt to drag all the forms of behavior into consciousness and to apply the results of its fragmentary or experimental analysis to the guidance of conduct, is really throwing away a greater wealth for the sake of a lesser and more dazzling kind?

—Sapir, “The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society” (1949:549)

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Authors
  1. Shunsuke Nozawa
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Casey High Ann H. Kelly Jonathan Mair

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© 2012 Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and Jonathan Mair

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Nozawa, S. (2012). Discourses of the Coming: Ignorance, Forgetting, and Prolepsis in Japanese Life-Historiography. In: High, C., Kelly, A.H., Mair, J. (eds) The Anthropology of Ignorance. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137033123_3

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