The Ethos of Noh
November 08, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3725016-the-ethos-of-noh The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art by Eric C. Rath Since the inception of…
Eric C. Rath
Professor (Ph.D. Michigan, 1998; M.A. Michigan, 1992; B.A. Skidmore, 1989). Premodern Japan, social and cultural history. His research examines the relationship between authority, technology, and aesthetics in early modern (1600-1868) culture. Most of my work extends into the medieval and modern periods since writing the narratives of key institutions and developments in the early modern era often requires moving beyond set chronological boundaries to examine earlier antecedents or to trace how modern incarnations of traditional culture have retained or replaced modes of organization or ideas prominent in the early modern period. For instance, modern chefs and scholars often attribute the “traditional minimalist aesthetics” of Japanese cuisine to the influence of Zen Buddhism or the tea ceremony, but these assumptions ignore how early modern diners actually preferred larger, more complicated and symbolically rich meals than are typical of Japanese cuisine today. Part of my interest in early modern history lies in trying to uncover the roots of modern institutions and manifestations of traditional culture, but I am equally focused on discovering what has been lost, and in determining the exercise of power and the role of technological innovations in these changes. His first book, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2004), traces the evolution of the masked noh theater as an art and as a profession from the fourteenth to the twentieth century demonstrating the importance of myths, masks, secret writings, and rituals in noh’s transformation from a medieval performing art into a closed, male dominated profession. His recent research on the history of cuisine appears in two books. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) examines medieval culinary rituals and early modern cookbooks to reveal the importance of the intangible and inedible to the formation of Japanese cuisine. Japanese Foodways Past and Present(University of Illinois Press, 2010), which I coedited with Stephanie Assmann, includes fourteen chapters covering six centuries of Japan’s food culture with topics ranging from children’s lunches, ramen, dining out in World War II, and wine drinking. Eric Rath, current research projects are on the history of tobacco use, traditional dietary culture (washoku), and the sake industry. Besides teaching courses on foodways and Japanese history. He offer classes on Tibetan history; and I was the principal investigator for a US State Department project to develop a curriculum for a school for Tibetans in rural Qinghai, China. See the project blog at: http://mayulschool.wordpress.com/.
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