Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the conceptual potential of social hybridity applied to contemporary Japan in order to critically address the essentialising assumptions of methodological nationalism, regionalism and civilizationalism.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades, one of the main limitations affecting academic investigation on Japan has been the different and often parallel trajectories of international or anglo-phone research in Social Sciences/Humanities on the one hand, and research both Social Sciences/Humanities in Japan and Japanese Studies, on the other. While the former discourse has built on the elaboration of theories, concepts and models intended to contribute to the self-reflective and universal principle of humanitas, the latter discourses on Japan have been mainly confined to a more domestic or particularistic, often self-referential domain of anthropos (Nishitani 2006, Sakai 2010). In this sense, it may be argued, that one of the main methodological limits of Area Studies, inspired by epistemic assumptions configuring a civilizational, regional or national unit of analysis, is not only still reproducing conceptual boundaries within Japan Studies, but may be also conditioning to a certain extent Social Sciences/Humanities in Japan.

This paper will critically address past units of analysis such as 'Japan', 'Asia' and the 'East' and its underlying and equivalent units such as 'Europe', the 'West' or the 'World', in order to focus on its modernist and asymmetrical assumptions. Secondly, it will explore how the concept of cultural and social hybridity may offer new theoretical perspectives for avoiding essentialist or substantialist configurations, especially as regards contemporary Japan. While the concept of hybridity has been so far extensively elaborated within cultural theory, it is only in recent years that the conceptual potential of hybrdity has been applied to the comprhension of society, sociality and social relations (Ong 2006, Koto 2011, Hunt 2014). The overall aim of this paper is to examine these recent investigations on social hybridity by adopting a theoretical perspective inspired by relational, intersectional and positional sociology (Emirbayer 1997, Collins 2000, Bourdieu 1984) in order to stress the mutually constitutive process shaping contemporary Japanese society within the transbordering flows of globalization.