Tradition, Democracy and the Townscape of Kyoto: Claiming a Right to the Past
About this ebook
This book, based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, provides an ethnographic study of this particular social field. It analyses how people in Kyoto deal with their most cherished traditions, such as the traditional town houses and the famous Gion matsuri festival, which calls into question several of the standard social scientific assumptions about the functions of cultural heritage for present-day societies. The book looks at the way concerned citizens, government bureaucrats, and other important players interact with each other over contentious modern buildings, often with the best intentions but constrained by set role expectations and by the superior power of national-level regulations and agencies. This book contributes to debates on the social uses of tradition and heritage, and the question of how to create sustainable, liveable urban environments.
About the author
Christoph Brumann is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. He is the co-editor of Making Japanese Heritage and the forthcoming Urban Spaces in Japan, both also published by Routledge.
