Professor Paula Findlen of the History Department at Stanford University organized a wonderful gathering January 29-30, entitled the “Early Modern Things Workshop.” The schedule included historians of science, scholars of Renaissance mercantilism and design, art historians and museum curators who work on everything from furniture to fashion, and many historians who have come over time to work with material culture (finally a growing trend?). I was struck by the openness of the historians of Europe and America to the notion that Asia was centrally involved in the production and flow of early modern material culture. I wonder if the tireless efforts of Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and others have finally produced a shift in the awareness and consciousness of those operating at the center of the historical enterprise in the U.S.?
My paper was:
The Shogun and His Things: Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) and the Agency of Objects
ABSTRACT:
Tokugawa Ieyasu is best known as the founder of the military government that ruled Japan from 1603-1868. Less recognized is his role as a collector, whose acquisitions were divided upon his death, distributed among his descendants, and carefully preserved in family storehouses as well as temples and shrines that honored his apotheosis. I am currently finishing up a biography of Ieyasu, in which I examine his relationships with objects of material culture—swords, ceramics, paintings, books, and even falcons—in an attempt to foreground the social and cultural practices which enabled his career. I argue that these inanimate, material “actors” shaped his horizon of choices and contingencies. The book also tracks the diachronic history of Ieyasu’s collection and makes the case that the Shogun’s things have shaped the hagiography and historiography of not just Ieyasu but all of early modern Japan.
