This article was presented at EAAA 2016, 15th – 16th October, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Abstract
The anthropological discipline “ethnography” can trace its roots to the travel reports describing non-European peoples in the age of exploration. This kind of literature provided the European public with overseas intelligence and foreign curiosities during the early modern period, and in modern times it became a source to enhance understanding of the past of peoples with less remaining self-documentation. This presents a dilemma for scholars because historic travel literature does not usually satisfy the modern standards of social science but may be the only source to access parts of the vanished past. A common solution for these later anthropologists is to adapt these sources to fit the framework of their scholarly works. The results are thus rhetorical, but this characteristic is hidden in the objectivity of the language as typically presented.
This paper takes a historical and bibliographical approach to review the case of Philipp Franz von Siebold’s nineteenth-century adaptation of a Dutch naval officer’s journal from the mid-seventeenth century to write about Ainu culture. In 1643, Cornelis Jansz. Coen, a Dutch officer, sailed on the ship Castricum to today’s Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the southern Kuril Islands; he wrote in his journal about the Ainu people he encountered. Coen’s journal is still considered one of the few descriptions of the Ainu before the Japanese focused their attention on the north of the country in the late eighteenth century. After Coen’s journal was discovered in an archive and subsequently published in 1858, the famous Japanologist Philipp Franz von Siebold wrote a geographical and ethnographical elucidation of the culture of the Ainu based on Coen’s journal. In this article, von Siebold cited Coen’s journal to analyze eight topics of Ainu culture; this analytic frame makes his discourse appear scientific in its language. However, as we return to Coen’s original journal, it is obvious that he recorded his personal experiences on the voyage and that the journal served no ethnographical purpose beyond investigating the commercial opportunities for the Dutch East India Company.
Reviewing this historical and bibliographical context, this paper reveals that von Siebold’s account of Ainu culture was actually constrained by his sources, and his objectivity was a rhetorical product rather than an empirically studied science. This finding alerts modern scholars of the dangers of using historical sources to study the vanished culture of a particular ethnic group; it also highlights that treating a historical source in its true context is the only mean to avoid the danger.
繼續閱讀「Analytic Frame and Objective Tone:von Siebold’s Rhetorical Adaptation of a Casual Journal into a Scientific Ethnography」
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