“Can the Subaltern Bark? Dogs, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World”

Thursday, Feb 25, 2016, 12:00 pm
Department of History Colloquium,
SFU Burnaby Campus, Room AQ 6229

"Tigers--Real and Imagined--in Korea's Physical and Cultural Landscape"

Thursday, February 25th, 2016, 6:00 pm
SFU Harbour Centre, Room 7000
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC

Aaron Skabelund specializes in modern Japanese history, with an emphasis in the social and cultural history  of imperialism, animals, and the  military. Dr. Skabelund joined the  history department in 2006 after completing a Ph.D. in modern Japanese history at Columbia University in 2004 and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Hokkaido  University. His research has also been supported by a  Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and the Japan Foundation, among other external and internal fellowships. His first book  examines the history of empire Western and Japanese, human and canine-by analyzing the actual actions and metaphorical deployment of dogs. In a second project, he is exploring the history of the Japan's post-Second World War military, commonly known as the Self-Defense Force.

CO-SPONSORED BY SFU FASS Dean's Speaker Series, Departments of Sociology/Anthropology and History and the School for International Studies

BOTH EVENTS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
See below for more details of the public lectures.  

This presentation uses Spivak’s famous query to explore human-animal relations in three ways.  First, from an epistemological perspective, it considers why researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have directed their attention almost entirely to human affairs, relegating the study of the non-human world to the natural sciences. Second, it argues that two modern technologies—photography and taxidermy—allow some animals to “speak.” And third, it highlights the tremendous transformation of certain dogs in the imperial world from the nineteenth century to the present, especially in Japan. To explore these three issues, the talk focuses in on two moments of human-canine relations in Japan: the latter half of the nineteenth century when Japan was the object of Western imperialism, and the 1930s when Japan become a major imperial power in its own right. 

People throughout Korea's history have valued tigers more as symbols than actual living beings. Pre-modern Koreans assigned a variety of cultural meanings to the tiger-including trickster, divine messenger, and benevolent protector. Yet actual encounters between tigers and humans were frequently defined by violence, and from ancient times various dynasties, most significantly the Choson (1392-191 0), pursued wild tigers as threats to the safety of their subjects and as sources of valuable fur. Human population growth, agricultural expansion, and overhunting placed significant pressure on tigers by the late nineteenth century, but tigers' cultural mystique continued. While Japan ruled Korea as a colony from 1910-194S, nationalists recast the tiger as a symbol of ethnic unity and resistance to imperial rule. This did little to alter prevailing attitudes towards wild tigers, however, as continued hunting and widespread destruction of tiger habitat contributed to their disappearance by the mid-twentieth century. But even in their absence tigers continued to function effectively as cultural emblems. Rather than diminishing the tiger's symbolic  importance, their  very  elimination encouraged a feeling of closeness and affinity for the animal. Nostalgia for tigers in modern South Korea have led some to consider bringing them back, but the tiger in Korea remains little more than a caricature, a symbol with more importance as a cultural idea than a living member of the  natural environment. While considering the longue dune of human-tiger relations on the peninsula, this talk will emphasize the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Skabelund will discuss the cultural history and symbolic meaning of tigers throughout Korea's history, with an emphasis on the colonial and post-colonial periods.