Public lecture series in EARL: Dr Luka Culiberg's lecture on "Samurai, Confucianists, gentlemen: How Japan became modern while inventing its tradition"

Centenary of the University of Ljubljana : EARL's series of public lectures

Eight lecture:

4th December 2019 at 17:00 in lecture room 08 (EARL, FDV).

Dr Luka Culiberg

Samurai, Confucianists, gentlemen: How Japan became modern while inventing its tradition

“Invented Tradition” is a notion that has been much used and often vulgarised in social studies. However, the original formulation by Hobsbawm and Ranger remains an important historiographical tool that enables an understanding of the past not just as a simple accumulation of sources but situates historiography in the field of theory and analysis of social processes, which always construct historical meaning ex post facto. When discussing the question of Japanese modernity, we will try to explain the mechanisms that transformed Japanese society in the second half of the 19th century, often by reformulating the past into an invented tradition and by interpreting this tradition as an historical continuity. A typical case in point is the so-called “Way of the Samurai”, or bushido, which is basically a modern ideological invention based on the assumed samurai ethics, intertwined with Chinese Confucian thought and the idea of the English gentleman. 

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