2009 Public Lecture Series – Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Asia Institute Public Lecture Series in conjunction with UCLA Fowler exhibition, “Steeped in History”

Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum, August 16-November 29, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009

Curator Lecture: Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Beatrice Hohenegger, exhibition curator and author of “Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West”
Saturday, September 12, 2009
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM

From Elephants to Tea: The Nilgiris under Colonial Rule

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, UCLA Professor of History
Thursday, September 24, 2009
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Tea and Chinese Cultural Aesthetics

Pei-kai Cheng, Chinese Civilisation Centre, City University of Hong Kong
Saturday, October 24, 2009
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

The Buddhist Arts of Tea in Medieval China

James A. Benn presents the 22nd Annual Sammy Yukuan Lee Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Art
Saturday, November 07, 2009
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Tea of the Samurai in Times of War and Peace

Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Sunday, November 22, 2009
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

K-12 Teacher Training Workshop: Food for Thought

An ARTalk Multi-Part Teachers Workshop at the Fowler Museum
Saturday, October 03, 2009
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM

For more information please call (310) 825-4572.

Sincerely,

The UCLA Asia Institute Staff
asia@international.ucla.edu
www.interntional.ucla.edu/asia

Changes to the site

I recently moved this blog from Bluehost.com to WordPress.com. In the previous iteration, I was responsible for updating the blogging software quite regularly, and lots of maintenance was required. Now those changes occur automatically. WordPress only does blogging, whereas Bluehost is a fully configurable web hosting service, with marketplace and email options that I didn’t need. Anyway, I unfortunately have also given up on the “Displaying Japan” blog and the “Ravi and Luca Files” blog, both of which were just too much trouble to maintain. I will probably continue to tweak the design of this site, and some of the old posts need to be reformatted to remove incorrectly coded quotation marks, but overall the transition was very smooth.

Essay in Impressions 30

I have an essay in the recently published issue of Impressions. This special issue came out of a Festschrift conference held in honor of Henry D. Smith II.
The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America
Number 30 (2009)

PICTURES AND THINGS: BRIDGING VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN JAPAN
Essays in honor of Henry DeWitt Smith II

The Early Modern Warrior Experience

An essay that I originally wrote for an anthology (that was not meant to be, alas) has now appeared, in a completely new version, in the new issue of the wonderful online journal Early Modern Japan. It provides a general introduction, probably best for undergraduates, to the history of daily life of the samurai during the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868). It also introduces three wonderful essays on warrior food, shopping, and travel:

The Early Modern Warrior: Three Explorations of Samurai Life
Pitelka, Morgan pp. 33-42
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (977.23 kB)

Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan
Rath, Eric C. pp. 43-55
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (537.34 kB)

Samurai and the World of Goods: the Diaries of the Toyama Family of Hachinohe
Vaporis, Constantine N. pp. 56-67
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (476.05 kB)

Encountering the World: Kawai Tsugunosuke’s 1859 Journey to Yokohama and Nagasaki
Nenzi, Laura pp. 68-83
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (631.69 kB)

I began this project when I was doing the early research for my current research into the life and career of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. I was surprised to discover that the scholarship on warriors seemed to focus mostly on institutions and war, rather than issues such as social networks, cultural practices, class, gender, and daily life. That scholarship is invaluable, but I feel that we need to build on it by shifting our focus away from questions of periodization and political power.

Review of What’s the Use of Art? in Japan Times

Thanks to Donald Richie for reviewing What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context in The Japan Times on February 24, 2008.

Acquiring and Possessing Korean Things: Material Culture and National Identity in Japan

I’m giving a public talk at UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies (243 Royce Hall) on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, which will consider how the survival of old things (especially objects from the 16th century) informs modern national identity in Japan. In particular, I’ll examine the genealogy of “acquiring and possessing Korean things” as an elite cultural practice in late medieval and early modern Japan. Buddhist monks, merchant tea practitioners, and feudal lords actively sought ceramics and other forms of material culture from Korea, and cherished and labeled these pieces as products of Korai (Koryo). I will survey some of these objects, and then theorize the legacy of their existence in Japan.

Examination of Korean art in Japanese collections has tended to focus on style and aesthetics with little attention to the biographies or socio-political influence of such objects. Perhaps we assume that in the relationaship between art and society, pictures and things are mere contrivances or tools. However, some anthropoligists have challenged us to revise this view, arguing that artistic products have a non-linguistic agency through which they influence people. How, we need to ask, do material things shape (literally and figuratively) the world we live in? What role have old things played in the making (and unmaking) of modern identity in Northeast Asia?

New book review

My review of Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur E. Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2005) appears in the recently published Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal v. 15 (2007), p. 20-21. EMJ has gone completely online, making it the most accessible journal in our field.

What’s the Use of Art? now available

The anthology that I edited with Jan Mrazek is now available.

The Early Modern in East Asia: The Challenges of Periodization

East Asia Seminar: A Symposium

The Early Modern in East Asia: The Challenges of Periodization
February 1, 2008
SOS 250, USC

9:00 – 9:10 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks

9:00 – 10:50 a.m. East Asia and the Early Modern World

John Wills Jr., USC
Some Earlier Divergences: China-Europe Differences that Mattered,
Han to Ming

Robert Marks, Whittier College
Early Modern or Late Imperial: An Environmental Perspective

Richard von Glahn, UCLA
An East Asian Early Modernity? Kinsei in Japanese Scholarship on
Japanese and Chinese History

11:00 a.m. – 12:10 p.m. Consciousness and Culture

Samuel Yamashita, Pomona
Reimagining the Intellectual Landscape of ‘Early Modern Japan

Jahyun Kim Haboush, Columbia University
Discourse of ‘Nation’ in Choson Korea: Early Modern?

1:30 – 2:40 p.m. Interactions

John Duncan, UCLA
From External Stimulus to Internal Integration in Late Koryo and
Early Choson Korea

Kenneth Pomeranz, UC Irvine
Early Modern Networks Without an Early Modern Period-or is it the
Other Way Around?

3:00 – 4:40 p.m. Authority Structures

R. Bin Wong, UCLA
The Eighteenth-century Qing State: Fantasies and Fallacies of the
‘Early Modern’

Kyung Moon Hwang, USC
Constructions of State and Society in the Late Chosôn

Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Afterlives of the Shogun: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Material Legacy in
Early Modern Japan

4:40 – 5:00 p.m. Closing Discussion

Sponsored by the East Asia Seminar of the USC-Huntington Early Modern
Studies Institute, and the Department of History, East Asian Studies
Center, and Korean Studies Institute at USC

More People Will Read This . . .

A short essay (just 500 words!) of mine has just been published in a new book, which will probably sell more copies than anything else I will contribute to in my entire life: the 10th edition of the Lonely Planet Japan Guide.

The essay, “Japanese Tea Culture,” is easy to find: it’s on page 100! The book looks great and is already helping me to plan my next research trip.