1st Edition
Folk Art Potters of Japan Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics
By Brian Moeran
Copyright 1997
290 Pages
by
Routledge
288 Pages
by
Routledge
272 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This is a study of a group of potters living in a small community in the south of Japan, and about the problems they face in the production, marketing and aesthetic appraisal of a kind of stoneware pottery generally referred to as mingei, or folk art. It shows how different people in an art world bring to bear different sets of values as they negotiate the meaning of mingei and try to decide... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 The Japanese Mingei Movement; Chapter 2 A Pottery Community; Chapter 3 Social Organization; Chapter 4 Ecology and Social Structure; Chapter 5 Labour Cooperation; Chapter 6 Environmental and Social Change; Chapter 7 The Mingei Boom and Economic Development; Chapter 8 The Decline of Community Solidarity; Chapter 9 Theory and Practice in Japanese Mingei; Chapter 10 Folk Art, Industrialization and Orientalism;
Biography
Brian Moeran
'One of the strengths of this book is that it contextualizes a rich, tightly focused ethnography within discussions of the implications of the data to larger theoretical questions Although grappling with abstract theoretical matters, this book is well organized, highly readable, and always grounded in the case study of the potters. Influences are always shown to be reciprocal or circular and not linear. The splendid photographs bring the pots and the setting to life. If Blake can "see a world in a grain of sand," Moeran can in a grain of clay, and he has depicted it for us in rich and satisfying detail.' - Karen A. Smyers, Asian Folklore Studies
