“How to Evoke Happy Ordinary Places – Insights from Early Modern Japan–”

About the Lecture:

How can one evoke a happy ordinary place?

Sad places, sublime places, places that promise adventure, mystery, or romance—all these are relatively easy to portray. But how can one communicate the promise of ordinary happiness? What sorts of pictured places inspire viewers to think: “There is nothing special there, but life there seems happy”?

Certain prints in 19th century Japan are quite effective in inspiring this thought. As we probe the secret of their effectiveness, we discover something startling—that the key elements in their evocation of happiness are mostly things that wouldn’t readily occur to us today. And so these prints prompt us, ultimately, to reflect anew not only on the imagination of everyday life in late Edo Japan but also on our own horizons of happiness.

About the Speaker:

Shigehisa Kuriyama is Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History and the Director of  Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. His research probes broad philosophical issues through the lens of specific topics in comparative cultural history of Japan, China, and Europe. His book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999) received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and Korean. His articles and edited volumes span studies probing  the history of distraction, the imagination of strings in the experience of presence, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine, and the web of connections binding ginseng, opium, tea, silver, and MSG. He has also been active in promoting the creative use of digital technologies to expand the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication. Fluid Matter(s) (2020), is an experimental e-book that explores the expressiveness of narratives unbound from the fixed images and words of the printed page.

Professor Kuriyama's visit is cosponsored by the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Program which is hosting a lecture with Kuriyama entitled "The Great Forgetting"--or the one thing that everyone should know about the history of medicine-- on Friday, October 18th at 12:15 pm.