ABSTRACT
At a meeting of the Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS), held in Hong
Kong in early 2005, a plenary session was held on the theme East meets West in Japanese Anthropology. It followed a style which had been initiated
by Jan van Bremen, then Secretary General of JAWS, and Bill Kelly, local
organiser of the 2002 JAWS meeting at Yale, where a few speakers gave
short position essays on a specific subject to an audience which was then
invited to respond. As before, plenty of time was set aside for discussion,
and a fruitful debate ensued. The theme was addressed, but a recurring
comment, also echoing some of the presentations, was that this East-West
dichotomy had reached a point of declining usefulness. The scholars present had travelled from several different countries, they
originated from many more, and their training was also quite varied.
Although they were focusing their presentations on Japan, they were often
addressing a much more diverse audience than they would in their usual
place of work, and the big plenary workshop offered a special chance to
turn over ideas that reflected the heady mix that the conference comprised.
Lola Martinez (Spanish-American-Japan-UK) pointed out that the line of
demarcation anyway shifts historically – from the UK, the East was for long a lot nearer than Japan, Mexican participant Genaro Castro-Vazquez
complained that he finds no place in such a division of the world, and session
chair, Dixon Wong (Hong Kong-UK-Japan), suggested that complaining
from the East of the hegemony of Western systems of thought merely per-
petuates that hegemony.
