Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time

by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

Overview

Are we what we eat? What does food reveal about how we live and how we think of ourselves in relation to others? Why do people have a strong attachment to their own cuisine and an aversion to the foodways of others? In this engaging account of the crucial significance rice has for the Japanese, Rice as Self examines how people use the metaphor of a principal food in conceptualizing themselves in relation to other peoples. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney traces the changing contours that the Japanese notion of the self has taken as different historical Others--whether Chinese or Westerner--have emerged, and shows how rice and rice paddies have served as the vehicle for this deliberation. Using Japan as an example, she proposes a new cross-cultural model for the interpretation of the self and other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400820979
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/14/1994
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is Vilas Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among her works is The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton).

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• A Note to the Reader, pg. xii
• One. Food as a Metaphor of Self: An Exercise in Historical Anthropology, pg. 1
• Two. Rice and Rice Agriculture Today, pg. 12
• Three. Rice as a Staple Food?, pg. 30
• Four. Rice in Cosmogony and Cosmology CLEARLY,, pg. 44
• Five. Rice as Wealth, Power, and Aesthetics, pg. 63
• Six. Rice as Self, Rice Paddies as Our Land, pg. 81
• Seven. Rice in the Discourse of Selves and Others, pg. 99
• Eight. Foods as Selves and Others in Cross-cultural Perspective, pg. 114
• Nine. Symbolic Practice through Time: Self, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, pg. 127
• Notes, pg. 137
• References Cited, pg. 149
• Index, pg. 171

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is a fascinating analysis of the meaning of rice as a symbol of personal and particularly of social identity in Japanese culture."—Robert N. Bellah

"Ohnuki-Tierney usefully explodes the notion of Japanese cultural homogeneity while explaining why the idea of homogeinity and distinctness, symbolized so vividly in Japanese rice, has come to play such a significant cultural role."—Robert N. Bellah, University of California, Berkeley

Bellah

Ohnuki-Tierney usefully explodes the notion of Japanese cultural homogeneity while explaining why the idea of homogeinity and distinctness, symbolized so vividly in Japanese rice, has come to play such a significant cultural role.
— Robert N. Bellah, University of California, Berkeley

Robert N. Bellah

This is a fascinating analysis of the meaning of rice as a symbol of personal and particularly of social identity in Japanese culture.

Editorial Reviews

Honorable Mention for the 1993 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Sociology and Anthropology, Association of American Publishers

From the Publisher

An important and timely book on the Japanese sense of self and the link to the sacredness of rice agriculture.

The Times Higher Education Supplement - Drew Gerstle

As in [Ohnuki-Tierney's] Monkey as Mirror, where she follows her metaphor deep into the prejudices of Japanese society, so she here finds that rice has been given a major role in historical formulation of the idea of self. . . . Beautifully, even elegantly, presented. . . . An important volume which traces this chosen means of identity and makes understandable the various anomalies that it would seem to have occasioned.

The Japan Times - Donald Richie

An important and timely book on the Japanese sense of self and the link to the sacredness of rice agriculture.
— Drew Gerstle

The Times Higher Education Supplement

As in [Ohnuki-Tierney's] Monkey as Mirror, where she follows her metaphor deep into the prejudices of Japanese society, so she here finds that rice has been given a major role in historical formulation of the idea of self. . . . Beautifully, even elegantly, presented. . . . An important volume which traces this chosen means of identity and makes understandable the various anomalies that it would seem to have occasioned.
— Donald Richie

The Japan Times