Ruins of identity : ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1400

Abstract

This thesis discusses the processes of ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands from approximately 400 BC to AD 1400. Previous research on this problem, particularly in Japan, has been based on the assumption that ethnic groups are bounded, a priori entities that, while they may change in outward appearance, retain the ‘essence’ of their identity from their initial formation. It is argued here that this Romantic, primordialist view of ethnicity has deep roots in Japanese nationalist philosophy (Part I). In criticizing this approach, I propose that ethnicity needs to be seen as a hierarchy of three levels: (1) basic genetic and linguistic elements which may form what I term a ‘core population’; (2) the etic ethnos - a culture or society perceived by outsiders as a distinct ethnic group; and (3) the emic ethnos - an imagined selfidentity. The phenomenon of ethnicity involves all these levels simultaneously, but it is extremely rare for them to overlap. Part II of the thesis argues that a Japanese core population was established in the Islands in the Yayoi period with the immigration of a Peninsular population that was biologically closely related to the modem Japanese people and spoke Proto- Japanese. The evidence of biological anthropology, historical linguistics and archaeology are all compared in order to test this theory of immigration and colonization during the Jömon-Yayoi transition. From the basis of this core population, Part in moves on to analyze the following formation of etic ethnoi in the Islands in the late Yayoi to early medieval eras. A world-systems approach is adopted whereby ethnic change results not from the isolation of core and periphery but from their economic, political and ideological interaction within the wider East Asian world-system. The thesis ends with some speculative comments regarding the relationship between the three levels of Japanese ethnicity. I conclude that what I have termed the Japanese core population probably did not see itself as an emic ethnos until the twentieth century. Show more