artificialia

Triangle Center for Japanese Studies

Morgan Pitelka — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:44:53 +0000

Please check out the website of the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, which I am working on with colleagues from Duke and NCSU. It includes announcements of events at the three universities in the area, as well as news about faculty and the TCJS itself.

New digs

Morgan Pitelka — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:55:30 +0000

I’m writing from my new home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had the amazing chance to move here, to the position of associate professor in the Asian Studies Department and adjunct associate professor (which just means affiliated faculty) in the History Department at UNC Chapel Hill. I join a number of colleagues in Japanese studies: Jan Bardsley and Mark Driscoll, both specialists in modern Japanese literature and culture; Chris Nelson, an anthropologist who works on Okinawa; Miles Fletcher, a historian of modern Japan; Jen Smith, a linguist who specializes in Japanese dialects; Inger Brody in Comparative Literature; and Barbara Ambros, a scholar of religious studies who works on early modern and modern Japan. Duke University is located nearby in Durham, and has a remarkable Japanese studies library curated by Kris Troost, a historian of medieval Japan, as well as a lineup of Japanese studies scholars. Also nearby is Raleigh’s North Carolina State University, which also has some top Japanese studies faculty. I’ve been enjoying the activities of the Triangle Japan Forum in particular, and hope to be able to work with Japan studies faculty in the region to build something that goes beyond an occasional forum to instead serve as a center for the three universities and their faculty, graduate students, and undergrads.

View from my office in New West

Another great resource is the Ackland Museum of Art, which is part of the university and better integrated into campus academic life than any university museum I have encountered. The museum invites regular collaboration with faculty. In the short time I have been here, I have already brought students to the museum multiple times: once to see ceramics and paintings in a study room, twice to examine objects on display in a special exhibition, and more recently, to look at woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that I selected for exhibition in the public study gallery that rotates bay displays selected by and for academic classes. It is remarkable. The museum has an impressive Asian art collection, with very strong Japanese works because of the activities of the late art historian and museum curator Sherman Lee, who retired to this area and worked with the museum before passing away in 2008.

One of my students examining some Tang dynasty "three color" ceramics.

JLSC Research Group Strikes Again: Berkeley, 2010

Morgan Pitelka — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:29:40 +0000

The elaborately named “Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century Research Group” held its third symposium in February of this year, graciously hosted at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, UC Berkeley. This gathering, “Lost Strands of Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century” (great title, David S!) focused on aspects of the long sixteenth century that have been overlooked in historiography and popular representations of the period, which tend to focus on themes such as the medieval/early modern split, unification, and heroic figures like Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The event brought together historians of Japan who gave papers and also included commentary from Professor Beth Berry and Professor Greg Levine among other local faculty.

My talk was entitled “Absent Actors: Falconry in and out of the Long Sixteenth Century”:

Sixteenth-century warlords such as Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) and his peers were active practitioners of falconry (takagari) according to the documentary record. These men gave and received falcons as part of the gift exchanges that cemented military alliances and created networks of potential cooperation. They also invited vassals and allies to accompany them on trips into the countryside to engage in this uniquely rough and rural form of warrior civility. Falcons—captured, raised, and trained in harsh and distant locales such as Korea and Ezo as well as in numerous provinces across Japan—were rare luxuries comparable in their social and cultural power to Chinese ceramics or heirloom swords. Unlike those durable pieces of material culture, however, falcons had limited life spans.

This paper explores the practice of falconry in the long sixteenth century with particular focus on Tokugawa Ieyasu and his peers. Elite warrior falconry emerged out of imperial patronage of takagari and faded into Tokugawa dominance of land and the right to hunt. As such it is key to mapping the long sixteenth century as a period in which warriors continued to appropriate courtly culture while also embracing material and textual forms of Chinese institutional authority. This paper concludes by arguing that the disappearance of falcons from the material legacies of powerful warriors like Ieyasu effected a contiguous effacement of this key warrior practice from later historiography. It may be that the absence of falcons from our narratives of the sixteenth century contributes to the privileging of unification and the obsession with the establishment of new, early modern institutions.

I will draw upon sources such as Ieyasu’s letters (collected in the seven total volumes of Tokugawa Ieyasu monjo no kenkyû), chronicles such as Sumpuki, and the posthumous record of Ieyasu’s probate, Sumpu owakemono odôgu chô. I will also consider the few material remnants of Ieyasu’s obsession with falconry, such as leather cords and paintings.

Stanford Material Culture Workshop

Morgan Pitelka — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:12:20 +0000

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.

Fowler Tea Events, 2009

Morgan Pitelka — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 03:47:38 +0000

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

Morgan Pitelka — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:23:46 +0000

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

Morgan Pitelka — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:21:35 +0000

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

In This Issue
Foreword
Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Jordan Sand, Guest Editors

The Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror and Its Inscription
David Barnett Lurie

A Chinese Green Jar in Japan: Source of a New Color Aesthetic in the Momoyama Period
Louise Allison Cort

Screens for a Young Warrior
Matthew Philip McKelway

The New Year’s Gift and a Painting of Jupiter
Timon Screech

The Longevity of a Dirty Little Dictionary
Miriam Wattles

A Raku Wastewater Container and the Problem of Monolithic Sincerity
Morgan Pitelka

Photography, Handwriting and Memory in the Obituary of Natsume S?seki
Satow Morihiro

Watanabe Yoshio’s Photograph of the Okada House
Ken Tadashi Oshima

Two Votive Plaques for a Rescue at Sea
Sarah Thal

A Midwife’s Bag
Julie Rousseau

The Kodera Family Folding Table
Jordan Sand

Hakk? Ichiu™: Projecting “Greater East Asia”
R. W. Purdy

Domon Ken’s Mur?ji
Alice Y. Tseng

“There Was No East or West/When Their Lips Met”: A Movie Poster for Japanese War Bride as Transnational Artifact
Kim Brandt

The Tiger, a Toy Gun
Gregory M. Pflugfelder

Yours Forever More?: A Narrow Ikat Sash from Yaeyama
Amanda Mayer Stinchecum

Imagine Again and Again: Copies of the Portrait of Minamoto no Yoritomo by Yamaguchi Akira
Miwako Tezuka

The N501i: Mobile Phone as Portable New World
Giles Richter

Afterword
Henry D. Smith II

Exhibition Review
Horses of the Heart
Melinda Takeuchi

Letter to the Editor

Contributors

Supplement
Exhibition Labels: Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860

The Early Modern Warrior Experience

Morgan Pitelka — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:18:43 +0000

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

Morgan Pitelka — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:56:52 +0000

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

Morgan Pitelka — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:28:58 +0000

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?