ABSTRACT
Sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko (1918–2006 鶴見和子) is the first, and thus far the only, sociologist in Japan who has attempted to locate animism at the centre of a sociological theory. In doing so, she challenged one of the most fundamental premises of sociology, or, if we look at it more broadly, she challenged social scientific knowledge itself: the Weberian disenchantment of the world and the Cartesian human–nature dichotomy. She challenged the very paradigm of modernity, despite having studied and having lived in the United States in the 1960s, when modernisation theory was at its height.
