Stanford Humanities Center
Ariel Stilerman has a background in Japanese literature, the Tea Ceremony, Clinical Psychoanalysis, and Industrial Design. His first monograph studies the role of classical verse in the transmission of culture and knowledge across social classes. Current projects include a second monograph on technology and knowledge, a bibliographic database for research, and an exploration of materiality in late medieval aesthetics. Still on hold is the first direct translation of Genji monogatari into Spanish.
SHC Project
How to Know Everything: Encyclopedias, Technology, and Cultural Warfare in Early Medieval Japan
Stilerman's project explores how dramatic changes in knowledge, authority, and technology can create opportunities for the construction of new shared cultural networks. The aftermath of the civil war of 1180-85 was a period of political fluidity as rising warriors challenged the legitimacy of aristocratic rule. The failure of a loyalist uprising in 1221 consolidated the need for social rearrangements. Already-strained natural reserves reached exhaustion as the new warrior culture commandeered resources. The climate-induced great famine of 1230-31 killed a third of the population, and the violence that ensued deepened cultural and material anxieties. This project looks at the emergence of encyclopedias and illustrated works in medieval Japan as agents of cultural integration in the aftermath of social and natural catastrophes. Works that have often been treated as mere repositories of historiographical sources emerge as the spearhead of deep transformations in the ways medieval Japanese writers organized social knowledge, conceived of cultural authority, and represented technology. As these writers reformulated the roles of cultural and political elites, they strived to bring together victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim, survivor and casualty, and thus heal the wounds of the civil and cultural wars of the previous generations.
