Introductory Seminar – ‘Samurai, Monks, Townspeople, and Courtesans: Ideas and Society in Early Modern Japan”
Spring 2010
HIEA 1501 (2)
Introductory Seminar – ‘Samurai, Monks, Townspeople, and Courtesans: Ideas and Society in Early Modern Japan”
Federico Marcon
Japan of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) is the romantic set of countless adventures of samurai and geisha, ninja and artists, Buddhist monks and violent outlaws. But early modern Japan was also the social laboratory where new forms of thought developed and new political experiments were tried out. Tokugawa Japan is at the same time the negative image out of which modern Japan created itself and the origin of many social, political, economic, intellectual dynamics that facilitated the formation of a modern and technologically advanced nation state by the end of the nineteenth century.
This seminar gives a genealogy of the various forms of thought and their social and political consequences in two centuries and a half of Japanese history.
It fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
This seminar gives a genealogy of the various forms of thought and their social and political consequences in two centuries and a half of Japanese history.
It fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
