Suchergebnisse

Introduction / Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto -- The language and contours of familial obligation in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan / David Spafford -- Adoption and the maintenance of the early modern elite : Japan in the East Asian context / Marcia Yonemoto -- Imagined communities of the living and the dead : the spread of the ancestor-venerating stem family in Tokugawa Japan / Fabian Drixler -- Name and fame : material objects as authority, security and legacy / Morgan Pitelka -- Outcastes and Ie? : the case of two beggar guilds / Maren Ehlers -- Governing the samurai family in the late Edo period / Luke Roberts -- Fashioning the family : a temple, a daughter, and a wardrobe / Amy Stanley -- Social norms versus individual desire : conventions an unconventionality in the history of Hirata Atsutane's family / Anne Walthall -- Family trouble : views from the stage and a merchant archive / Mary Elizabeth Berry -- Are all happy families alike? : reading the idealized family in print at the turn of the nineteenth century / David Atherton.

What is a family? The essays gathered here explore disparate family histories in early modern Japan, attending variously to the samurai elite, agrarian villagers, urban merchants, communities of outcastes, and the circles surrounding priests, artists, and scholars. They draw on diverse sources—from population registers and legal documents to personal letters and diaries, from genealogies and necrologies to popular fiction and drama. And while some examine collective practices (the adoption of heirs, the veneration of ancestors), others look intimately at individual actors (a runaway daughter, a murderous wife). What unites these stories is the political and social order of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868), which structured all lives. Families navigated its constraints differently, but the circumstances that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. Those constraints led the majority to form stem families, the focus of this volume. The essays nonetheless depart from essentialist and nationalist narratives to emphasize that family formation was a dynamic process mediated by particular pressures.