Gathering for the 1st time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on jap civilization, The different Face of the Moon kinds a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to appreciate one’s personal tradition, one needs to regard it from the viewpoint of another.
publicity to eastern artwork used to be influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early highbrow progress, and among 1977 and 1988 he visited the rustic 5 occasions. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this quantity, written among 1979 and 2001, are the made from those trips. They examine an superb variety of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the individuality of the japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the connection among jap image arts and food. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a different position between international cultures. Molded within the old previous through chinese language affects, it had extra lately included a lot from Europe and the USA. however the substance of those borrowings was once so conscientiously assimilated that eastern tradition by no means misplaced its specificity. as if seen from the hidden aspect of the moon, Asia, Europe, and the US all locate, in Japan, photographs of themselves profoundly transformed.
As in Lévi-Strauss’s vintage ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation provides the voice of 1 of France’s such a lot public intellectuals at its so much personal.
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Extra info for The Other Face of the Moon
Accumulated round it, at floor point or on a moderate mound, are a couple of stones, shellfish, or different normal gadgets fascinating for his or her shape or rarity. at the west aspect, you recognize upfront the place seventy six herodotus in the china sea to discover the pigsty (when it nonetheless exists) and the latrines, either positioned less than the safety of specialised gods. within the kitchen, frequently incongruously glossy among partitions of naked forums, there's continually a spot for 3 stones, prepared in a small dish and representing kamado, the deity of the fireplace. normally room, a tv set, grew to become on from morning until evening whether not anyone is observing, is sufficient to convince you that those “pictures of the floating global” in a brand new variety occupy where that previously belonged to the ukiyo-e in Japan. Women’s Initiation Rites i've got simply alluded to the neighborhood cults. experts insist on their archaism and think they belong to a cultural stratum that can as soon as were universal to all of Japan, sooner than the formation of Shinto. what's amazing approximately them, initially, is the total absence of temples or figurative representations. regardless of the televisions, the electrical stoves, the showering machines, i have not felt so on the subject of prehistory as amid those coppices, those rocks, those caves, those typical wells, those springs, which for the folks of the Ryukyu are the seventy seven herodotus in the china sea merely expressions of the sacred, which, besides the fact that, takes many varieties. In larger Okinawa, overlaying a few twenty kilo meters round the Naha Prefecture, a ravaged nature—now occupied through empty barracks and American fuel and kit depots—attests to the violence of the battles of 1945. yet on many of the island, the panorama turns out intact or has won the higher hand. midway throughout, at the Motobu Peninsula, the ruined wall surrounding Nakijin fort, which within the fourteenth century was once the positioning of an independent principality, appears like a miniature nice Wall of China. On a hill that is still a pilgrimage vacation spot, rites have been previously celebrated dealing with the ocean, towards the Iheya and Izena Islands, from which ancestral navigators can have arrived. In any occasion, Iheya-jima is the birthplace of the 1st and moment ShÇ Dy nasties, which unified 3 past kingdoms and governed the Ryukyu Islands from the fifteenth century till their annexation through Japan in 1879 (the Amami Islands to the north were conquered through the lord of Satsuma in 1609). at the different aspect of the island, to the southeast, at the Chinen Peninsula, the location of Seifa Utaki is nonetheless a spot of veneration. it's a unbelievable seventy eight herodotus in the china sea workforce of sheer rocks, crevices, and steep wooded slopes from which streams tumble down, and the place you want to watch out for venomous snakes— abundant adequate, it seems that, in these kind of islands for the inhabit ants to dissuade you from going to hunt old holy locations which are too distant. From the peaks of Seifa Utaki, you understand Kudaka-jima, which occupies a unique position within the spiritual lifetime of the Okinawa Islands.