Journeys to Japan: from Culture to Technology
“Shogun” (1975) introduced me to a landscape of Japanese culture. Wanting to understand how history confronts present, I started to engage.
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Speaker: Dr Denisa Butnau (Universität Konstanz)
Title: Journeys to Japan: from Culture to Technology
Abstract: Many years ago, the novel of James Clavell, Shogun (1975) introduced me to a first landscape of Japanese culture. Wanting to understand how history confronts present, I started to engage in a concrete exploration of Japanese society, which brought me to conceive a landscape shaped by a variety of tensions and contradictions. The figure of the “bricoleur” which opposes that of the engineer discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1962) offers me a productive approach to consider the active and rich nuances that I could experience regarding Japan, and explain how the current development of technological artefacts embeds older forms of social models while inventing further novel ones.
Biography: Denisa Butnaru was born in Romania. She studied English and Japanese, sociology and philosophy (having specialized in phenomenological philosophy). She holds a doctor title from the University of Strasbourg, France (2009) and she finished her habilitation thesis in sociology in 2021, at the University of Constance, Germany. Her areas of research are: sociology of the body, disability, rehabilitation and augmentation technologies, phenomenological theories of the body and embodiment, and qualitative methodology in social sciences.