Kanagawa University the 21^st century COE program Systematization of Nonwritten Cultural Materials for the Study of Human Societies

Program Outline

Program Outline

Objectives and Framework

The 21^st Century COE Program launched by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in fiscal 2002 is a measure for supporting universities in the building research centers of global caliber. Universities offering doctoral courses have come to compete for their eligibility for the program. Our project “Systematization of Nonwritten Cultural Materials for the Study of Human Societies” was selected in fiscal 2003 into the program’s interdisciplinary, combined fields, new disciplines category. The project was to be developed in an interdisciplinary manner by Kanagawa University’s Graduate School of History and Folklore Studies, the Institute for the Study of Japanese Folk Culture and scholars in the Course of Chinese Language and Culture at the Graduate School of Foreign Languages. In implementing the program, we established a system composed of the program representatives, the COE faculty and COE associated researchers. Furthermore, we invited a myriad of academics from inside and outside the university who were involved in the research topic and had them engage in joint research, in order to achieve the objective.

Existing studies on culture have mainly focused on phenomena recorded in writing. Nevertheless, human conception, knowledge and behavior are far more diverse and significant in quantity and quality. They are incomparable to the aforementioned phenomena. Among such phenomena, we chose (1) pictorial materials, (2) physical techniques and (3) the environment and scenery, and strived to devise methods to organize them into materials. The resulting data was to be accumulated, analyzed and disseminated. A few specific topics were chosen for each category and organized as follows

Group 1: Systematization of Illustrated Materials and Its Dissemination

Task 1: Compilation and Publication of Multilingual Version of Pictopedia of Everyday Life in Medieval Japan

Task 2: Compilation of Pictopedia of Everyday Life in Early Modern Japan

Task 3: Compilation of Pictopedia of Everyday Life in East Asia

Group 2: Arrangement and Systematization of Physical Techniques and Sensibility

Task 1: Comparative Study of Physical Techniques

Task 2: Analysis of the Relationship between Tools and Human Movement

Group 3: Arrangement and Systematization of the Environment and Scenery

Task 1: Timeline Research of Scenery

Task 2: Research of Environmental Recognition and Its Changes

Task 3: Interpretation of the Traces of Human Activity and Natural Disasters Inscribed into the Environment

In an attempt to develop ways to integrate these three types of nonwritten materials and disseminate them globally, the following study groups were formed:

Group 4: Dissemination of Regionally Integrated Information

Group 5: Experimental Exhibits of Research Results in Museum Studies

Postgraduate Curriculum for Specialized Training of Curators

Experimental Exhibits

Group 6: Integration of Theories

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