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- Convenors:
-
Angelo Cattaneo
(Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Radu Alexandru Leca (Hong Kong Baptist University)
D. Max Moerman (Barnard College, Columbia University)
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- Stream:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Torre A, Piso 0, Sala 04
- Sessions:
- Saturday 2 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel investigates a selection of seventeenth-century Japanese cartographic folding screens to understand how Japanese cartographers addressed cosmology and world geography by re-elaborating European and East Asian sources through interaction with European merchants and missionaries.
Long Abstract:
Various forms of intercultural exchange and conceptual transformations developed in Japan at the time of the presence of European missionary orders, in particular the Jesuits. Western cosmology, cosmography and cartography were among the forms of knowledge that reached Japan at the time of the first European presence. This knowledge would be included and re-elaborated on cartographic folding screens (sekai chizu byobu) by Japanese painters and cartographers. These screens are now important testimonies of the intersection between three distinct contexts of knowledge: firstly, the global circulation of material goods and knowledge resulting from the Iberian expansion in Asia; secondly, the Jesuits' missionary strategies in Japan and China; thirdly, the coagulating political entity of Japan.
Beyond past and current implicit assertions of alleged European predestination and superiority in disclosing the orbis terrarum, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the meaning of terms such as 'Europe', 'India', 'China', 'Japan' and their whereabouts was still by no means obvious for European, Chinese or Japanese cultural elites and scholars. All agents were trying to relate these terms to intelligible geographic and cultural concepts. For this they used knowledge that had been accumulated locally over many centuries and mutually disseminated and integrated mainly, but not exclusively, in the contexts of the missions.
This panel discusses the ways in which this mutual act of geographical and cultural emplacement developed at the time of the first encounter between European and Japanese agents. The papers investigate the different strategies, forms of curiosity and communication developed in local contexts of interaction in Japan. Each focuses on specific meanings and functions of a selection of cartographic folding screens.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 2 September, 2017, -Angelo Cattaneo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Susumu Akune (JSPS Post-doctoral Research Fellow)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses a cartographic byobu held at Kanshinji in Kawachinagano that documents articulated patterns of circulation of cosmographic knowledge from China, Korea and Europe in Japan in early modernity. Within a single world view various systems of knowledge were juxtaposed and integrated.
Paper long abstract:
During fieldwork in Japan with a 2014 Japan Foundation Fellowship, the authors were granted permission to reproduce in high resolution a cartographic folding screen held at Kanshinji in Kawachinagano (Osaka Prefecture). This artefact is omitted from previous surveys of cartographic screens and although already reproduced has never been studied. Designed on Japanese paper in the first half of the seventeenth century, the maps are mounted on 3 screens of 2 panels each. Each panel measures 139x54 cm (total 354x139 cm). Panels 1 and 2 represent China; panel 3, Korea; panel 4, North and South America; panel 5 displays a western ship and a diagram of the Aristotelian sub-lunar world; Panel 6 another western ship and a diagram of the Ptolemaic geocentric system.
While the images in panels 4, 5 and 6 derive from European sources (probably indirectly), the cartographic shape and geographic contents of China and Korea derive from a Chinese-Korean map: Yang Ziqi's "Map of the Great Ming Nation," designed in fifteenth-century China and later brought to Korea, where a map of the Korean peninsula was added. Several copies were brought to Japan in the late sixteenth century and are still held in temples and archives connected with the Tokugawa family. Previous research showed that Yang Ziqi's maps were paired with a celestial map representing heavenly phenomena and the four seasons, in a symbolic depiction of time. Thus, the map represented the entirety of the world ruled by a King (the Chinese Emperor) given rule by the mandate of heaven.
The unknown author(s) of the Kanshinji screen put side by side two major cosmological and cosmographic visions as well as cartographic traditions, selecting the most appropriate for the parts of the world they were representing. This cartographic screen is of particular importance because it documents articulated patterns of circulation and transformation of cartographic knowledge to and from Japan in early modernity. This paper highlights the circumstances in which various systems of knowledge and belief were juxtaposed and integrated within a single depiction of the world.
Radu Alexandru Leca (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Paper short abstract:
Cartographic folding screens acted as complex interfaces that initiated a process of material translation and cultural assimilation in tandem with the transmission of geographical knowledge. This is illustrated through the analysis of scenes of cannibalism featured on the screens.
Paper long abstract:
Many of the folding screens produced in Japan by the Jesuit painting school for the conversion of local rulers featured maps of the world. This makes sense if we think of folding screens as performing the equivalent function to Renaissance court tapestries: that of large-scale formats for political statements. In Japan, the makers of the cartifacts employed creative strategies for reconciling disparate sources of knowledge. For example, the versions in the collections of the Imperial Household Agency and the Kosetsu Museum of Art feature a large cartouche with tribesmen roasting human limbs over a fire. The source are depictions of South America on Dutch maps of the world which in turn originate in illustrations of European accounts of encounter with Brazilian tribes. In their new context, cannibals illustrated the pagans civilized by the Christian religion. A possible reason for their prominence on the screens is their similarity to Buddhist hell scenes such as those featured on the 'Kumano Mind Contemplation Ten Worlds Mandala'.
The visual appeal of the maps and their associated figures quickly exceeded their religious context: they were later reproduced in cheap printed editions in Nagasaki and Kyoto. Therein world maps were accompanied by an assembly of 'people of the world' increasingly assimilated with figures of alterity already present within Japanese culture. Brazilian cannibals were thus unlikely participants in the coagulation of a collective identity in Japan. It is a telling example of how folding screens acted as complex interfaces that initiated a process of material translation and cultural assimilation in tandem with the transmission of geographical knowledge.
D. Max Moerman (Barnard College, Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the mutual emplacement of Europe and Japan through the co-articulation of Jesuit and Buddhist cosmologies on cartographic folding screens in order to offer an alternative reading that challenges the prevalence of positivist and Eurocentric interpretations.
Paper long abstract:
Although clearly based on European printed maps, Japanese cartographic folding screens (sekai chizu byobu) do not represent a straightforward transference of geographic knowledge. This new and profoundly hybrid genre of 17th century painting was characterized by a level of invention and experimentation far beyond any simple notion of cartographic reproduction. Designed as pairs, the screens were not intended to be viewed individually, but rather as two parts that together formed a unified whole. The majority of such sets pair a European-style map of the world with a map of Japan of equal size and splendor, emphasizing the place and importance of the archipelago with in this new cartographic order. Yet even these gilded displays of European knowledge suggest an uneasy balance of worldviews, a tension revealed in the very language in which the maps are named. Many of the world map screens borrow the Latin title, Typus Orbis Terrarum from Jesuit and other European sources. The matching screens, however, situate the Japanese archipelago within an explicitly Buddhist geography. Entitled, Map of Great Japan within the Continent of Jambudvīpa (Nansenbushū dainihon shōtōzu), Japan is explicitly embedded in the iconography and vocabulary of Buddhist cosmology. Japan's place in a classical Buddhist vision of the world is here physically and visibly paired, without any evidence of cognitive dissonance, with that of a European cartographic order in an unlikely union of incommensurate worldviews. This paper analyzes the evidence and implications of the mutual emplacement of Europe and Japan through the cartographic co-articulation of Jesuit and Buddhist cosmologies. By tracing the history and persistence of Japan's place within Buddhist geography and cosmology, this paper offers an alternative reading of Japanese cartographic folding screens to challenges the prevalence of positivist and Eurocentric interpretations.