Search results
Mar 14, 2023 · Similar to this microbe that captured Kumagusu’s imagination, with queer nature the process of knowing defied the epistemological dichotomies and hierarchies that were fundamental to the social ...
Abstract In the intellectual history of modern Japan, the late 1880s epitomized the Meiji government’s effort to ‘civilize’ through Westernization, driven by the social Darwinian vision of the survival of the fittest. During this period in the United States, the ideas of civilization theory, informed by the very antithesis of the Meiji state’s understanding, surfaced in the life and work of the aspiring young naturalist-botanist Minakata Kumagusu. He imagined a ‘different kind of ...
Naturalist, translator, littérateur, and political activist, Minakata Kumagusu, in his many endeavors, offers an intriguing series of parallelisms with patterns of non-linear development and network relationships found in the field of study that was
Sep 29, 2022 · This talk considered the role of non-humans in the intellectual history of modern Japan through the presenter’s case study of the Buddhist naturalist-polymath Minakata Kumagusu. Building on Kumagusu’s fascination over the microbe slime mold, the lecture delineated the ways in which a parallel paradigm of interdisciplinary knowledge production emerges when the historian places microbes as the basis for the historical actor’s truths, which Honda conceptualized as ‘queer nature.’ In ...
Mar 11, 2020 · The outstanding and renowned naturalist, Minakata Kumagusu, was fascinated by slime molds. These entities move about freely in moist conditions while changing their shape like amoebas, propagating themselves in dry conditions by releasing countless spores while retaining their mushroom-like shape. He was so captivated by these tiny organisms, which could be classified as either a plant or animal, that he devoted his life to studying them and to developing the world’s most extensive ...
In January 1887, the 20-year-old aspiring naturalist-botanist Minakata Kumagusu ( 南方熊楠, 1867–1941) arrived at the port of San Francisco, inspired to investigate the knowledge required to become ‘civilized’ (Figure 1).3 The Japanese needed to sur-vive the inevitable changes in civilizational progress by learning from the West.4 As Kumagusu came face to face with the supposedly civilized nation, however, he quickly realized that the theory of civilization the Japanese Meiji state ...
Nov 1, 2023 · The Japanese biologist and ethnologist Minakata Kumagusu has achieved a degree of celebrity in Japan for being the first Asian contributor to the British scientific magazine Nature.
