Journeys to Japan: from Culture to Technology

Speaker: Dr Denisa Butnau (Universität Konstanz)

Date: 14 Oct, 2021, 1pm

Venue/Platform: Webinar by Zoom

Organised by: (opens in a new window)Dr Naonori Kodate - UCD Centre for Japanese Studies

Abstract: Many years ago, the novel of James Clavell, Shogun (1975) introduced me to a first landscape of Japanese culture. Wanting to understand how history confronts present, I started to engage in a concrete exploration of Japanese society, which brought me to conceive a landscape shaped by a variety of tensions and contradictions. The figure of the “bricoleur” which opposes that of the engineer discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1962) offers me a productive approach to consider the active and rich nuances that I could experience regarding Japan, and explain how the current development of technological artefacts embeds older forms of social models while inventing further novel ones.

Registration link(opens in a new window) here

For more information email (opens in a new window)Naonori.Kodate@ucd.ie