Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, William F. Vilas Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is a native of Japan. Her anthropological work began with an anthropological history of the Detroit Chinese community since their arrival in the city. She then turned to the Sakhalin Ainu resettled in Hokkaido, resulting in three books. Realizing the limitation of studying a “memory culture,” she shifted her focus to the Japanese. She has published, in addition to numerous articles, 10 books in English, 7 in Japanese and one in French, with translations into 10 other languages (Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, & Urdu). The topics range from cultural roles in the health care (ILLNESS AND CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN), through the Japanese conception of the collective self as reflected in their deliberation on the meanings assigned to the monkey (THE MONKEY AS MIRROR) and rice (RICE AS SELF). Her interests turned increasingly to the roles of symbolism in political spaces as her research led to realize how the Japanese state, since the end of the nineteenth century through World War II, manipulated cherry blossoms -- the cherished symbol of the people, especially its folk aesthetic, in order to co-opt people for its own purposes of waging wars and imperial expansions, sending young men to death (KAMIKAZE, CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND NATIONALISMS; KAMIKAZE DIARIES). In her latest book, THE FLOWERS TO KILL, she compared the uses of cherry blossoms by the Japanese military with the uses of roses by the European dictators --Stalin and Hitler. She is now working on a book, JAPANESE NATURE WITHOUT GROUND. Her theoretical interests are continuities and discontinuities of culture, symbols and their meanings in political spaces, and the roles of symbols in power inequalities. She was Kluge Distinguished Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress and is recipient of John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, La médaille du Collège de France, member at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow at L’Institut d’Études Advançées, Center for Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, among others. She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as its mid-west council member.