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Difference & Modernity: Social Theory and Contemporary Japanese Society (Japanese Studies (Kegan))
Author(s): John Clammer (Author)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 6 Jan. 1995
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 152 pages
- ISBN-10: 0710305079
- ISBN-13: 9780710305077
Book Description
First Published in 1995. The question of ‘postmodernity’ that has swept Western academic and intellectual circles raises critical comparative questions. Do societies that have not experienced the same historical development as the West pass inevitably through modernity into postmodernity, or can they skip such stages altogether? Japan, the only non-Western society to develop independently a fully-fledged capitalist-industrialist economy, poses such fundamental questions to social theory. Is Japan in fact ‘unique’ and as such is it a society which escapes the net of conventional sociological abstractions? The book questions how special Japanese society really is, the limitations of Western social theory in grasping the fullness of this dynamic and a complex Asian society, and inquires as to how Japan in turn may speak to social theory and deepen and broaden the principles on which social theory attempts to explore and categorize the social and cultural worlds.
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Japanese culture has long since assimilated and refined the issues that now exercise western social theorists – the place of emotion in culture, the unity of mind and body, the centrality of the body, and the position of the self not as autonomous actor but as nodal point in a social and ecological web of relationships. This book begins to address these issues by questioning how special Japanese society really is, the limitations of western social theory in grasping the fullness of this dynamic and complex Asian society, and by inquiring as to how Japan in turn may speak to social theory and deepen and broaden the principles on which social theory attempts to explore and categorize the social and cultural worlds.
About the Author
John Clammer
