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| Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney | |
|---|---|
| Name | Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney |
| Birth date | 1934 |
| Birth place | Kyoto, Japan |
| Occupation | Anthropologist, Author, Professor |
| Alma mater | Doshisha University, University of Chicago |
| Notable works | Rice as Self, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellows Program (note: check exact awards) |
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is a cultural anthropologist known for comparative studies of symbolism, ritual, and nationalism, particularly in Japan and the United States. Her work links detailed ethnography with broad theoretical conversations occurring in anthropology, history, sociology, and art history. She has held positions at major institutions and influenced debates on images, metaphor, and political performance in modern societies.
Born in Kyoto in 1934, she experienced the social and political transformations of Shōwa period Japan and the aftermath of Pacific War. She studied at Doshisha University before pursuing graduate work at the University of Chicago under scholars connected to the legacies of Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, David Schneider, and the Chicago School milieu. Her doctoral formation intersected with debates that involved figures such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Pierre Bourdieu.
She served on the faculty of University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she interacted with colleagues in departments including Anthropology and programs affiliated with Area Studies and East Asian Studies. Her career included visiting positions and collaborations at institutions such as Harvard University, Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and research centers like the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She participated in conferences sponsored by organizations including the American Anthropological Association, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Japan Foundation.
Her monographs include Rice as Self and Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms, which place her alongside theorists who address symbol systems such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erving Goffman, and Jacques Derrida. She published articles and edited volumes that entered conversations with work by Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Major themes include the symbolic aspects of rice cultivation in East Asia, representations of the body and death in wartime iconography, and the role of festivals and ceremony in modern identity formation, engaging scholarship from Siegfried Kracauer to Benedict Anderson.
Her research analyzes how visual and material symbols—such as rice, cherry blossoms, kamikaze imagery, and tea ceremony objects—are mobilized in projects of state and popular identity, dialoguing with literature by Benedict Anderson on imagined communities, Eric Hobsbawm on invented traditions, and Hannah Arendt on political action. She examined ritualized performances in rural and urban contexts, connecting insights to comparative studies by Victor Turner on liminality, Clifford Geertz on interpretive anthropology, and Mary Douglas on purity and danger. Her analyses engaged debates around nationalism and memory alongside historians and theorists including John Dower, Toshio Nishioka (note: check), Sheldon Garon, and Mitsuo Nakamura (note: check), and intersected with visual studies influenced by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
Her recognitions include fellowships and prizes linked to bodies such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Fulbright Program, and grants from national funding agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities and foundations such as the Ford Foundation. She has been honored by academic societies like the American Anthropological Association and received invitations to deliver named lectures at institutions such as Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton University, and University of Tokyo.
Her interdisciplinary approach influenced scholars working on Japanology, visual culture, memory studies, and the anthropology of food, connecting to later work by specialists in rice studies, food anthropology, and symbolic anthropology such as Sidney Mintz, Jack Goody, Arjun Appadurai, and Wendy James. Her writing shaped curricula in East Asian Studies and inspired comparative projects at research centers like the International House of Japan, Asia Society, and university departments across North America, Europe, and East Asia. Contemporary scholars cite her when discussing the politics of representation, the anthropology of death, and the cultural life of material objects in nation-building processes.
Category:Japanese anthropologists Category:Women anthropologists Category:People from Kyoto