The International Symposium of Minpaku Special Project “Global Area Studies: Towards a New Epistemology for Mapping the Globalizing World”

Purpose

In troubled times, fantasies become popular. They did so during the French Revolution and after the Great Kanto Earthquake of Japan in 2011. This probably also applies to the present day and the widely popular Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) anime series. A French translation by Antoine Galland of the Arabian Nights was published in 1704-1717, but it is believed that the original text, which did not include the famous tale of Aladdin, was based on narration by a Maronite Christian in Syria. In Japan, Mt. Fuji went into violent eruption in 1707, releasing ash into the atmosphere. In the following year, a famine and social anxiety appeared in Syria, and the Maronites, who represented French interests, sought protection from King Louis XIV, dispatching the above-mentioned Maronite to Paris. In France, a wave of extreme cold weather claimed many deaths. We don’t know exactly how Galland met the Maronite, perhaps by chance, and how the tale of Aladdin as a fantasy was written – prompting the birth of children’s literature, which soon helped form modern ethical views. Nevertheless, we can suggest that a succession of interrelated events linked macroscopic environmental changes to microscopic states of the human mind or mentality.

In 2020 we experienced phenomena that fundamentally shook the connection between individuals and their community in the global society. The practices of individuals transcended local communities and national systems and had direct impacts on global society, causing global society and individuals to confront each other. I must emphasize the need for global area studies to grasp the real facts of global society in terms of how they were felt intuitively by people. Practical studies to solve today’s problems of the global environment are complicatedly interrelated in temporal, spatial, and cross-sectional terms. We need to build a model of linkage between environment and mentality that replaces the previous Cartesian analytical model that positions society, regions, and the world around or external to individuals. The new model should elucidate culture, civilization, and the world as a system of relations and values that encompasses individuals.

The global (and digital) environment transcends geography and the natural, social environment, and former mass media environments. It transcends the space created by human beings as individuals in their interactions with nature, in the living space in which natural resources and cultural resources are connected and involved, in the social space along the edge of the living space in which regional characteristics and civilizational values are involved. It also transcends the global-area-conscious space that exists along the edge of the social space. All these relations must be recognized to map the present global society. We can recognize the relationships between social and economic systems, and between natural and ecological systems, as a system of problems related to relationships between the environment and the universal cognitive system of human beings.

More broadly speaking, a role to be played by the study of humanities in the future is to depict a vision of the future from an integrated point of view. How are we going to build a forum of academia and society as a space to think together about globalization, global society and environmental change? How can or should we as individuals be involved in co-creating a global society?

Program

March 11 (Saturday), JST (GMT +9:00)

March 12 (Sunday), JST (GMT +9:00)