Anthropology 254 Lecture Outlines

Note: This page provides links to outlines of all lectures. For more complete links to each class, including readings and image galleries, please use the course unit boxes on the left-hand panel of the home page.

For fall term, 2002, I am experimenting with adding video clips from the documentaries we screen (in QuickTime format) and audio transcripts of many of the lectures (in mp3 format). Please see the course unit boxes for these links. Note that you will need to have these plug-ins installed in order to open the video and audio files.

 

Part One: Culture and Character, Tradition and Modernity

Lecture Outline 1.1
"Zen aesthetes" & "economic animals": Beyond the Seven Deadly Clichés

Lecture Outline 1.2
The Concept of Culture and the Study of Japan: Four Paradigms

Lecture Outline 1.3
Modernity and its Indigenizations: Japan

Lecture Outline 1.4
Language: "Japan's modern myth"?

Lecture Outline 1.5
Place and Time: Geographical and Historical Themes

Lecture Outline 1.6
The Politics of Heritage: Samurai as Social Fact and Cultural Fiction

 

Part Two: Post-World War II Japan as History and as Anthropology

Lecture Outline 2.1
Contemporary Japan as History and as Anthropology

 

Part Three: Work, Family, and Schooling in a New Middle Class Society

Lecure Outline 3.1
Work and Workplaces in a New Middle Class Society

Lecture Outline 3.2
Education for a Meritocracy: Quality and Equality

Lecture Outline 3.3
Family Life in New Middle Class Japan

Lecture Outline 3.4
Women's Work and Gender Roles in Postwar Japan:
The Power of and Resistance to the 4-D Female Image

 

Part Four: Dimensions of Metropolitan Modernity

Lecture Outline 4.1
Faith in a Rational World: Ways of Healing in Contemporary Japan

Lecture Outline 4.2
Multi-ethnic Japan: Beyond "the modern myth of homogeneity"

Lecture Outline 4.3
Pleasure and Profit: Mass Culture and Modernity

Lecture Outline 4.4
Randy Bass, the Hanshin Tigers, and the Complexities of Professional Baseball

 

Part Five: Into the Twenty-first Century

Lecture Outline 5.1
Summing Up:
Beyond New Middle Class Japan