Ainu : AB06

Summary

This collection about the Ainu consists of 8 documents, all in English, including three books which were translated from Japanese. The collection contains a variety of cultural and historical infor...

This collection about the Ainu consists of 8 documents, all in English, including three books which were translated from Japanese. The collection contains a variety of cultural and historical information from two widely contrasting time periods. The first covers the years 1877 to 1924 when most Ainu were living in their traditional homeland in southern Sakhalin. The second is from the 1960s-1970s after the Ainu almost disappeared as a distinct group following their relocation in the Hokkaidō Island by the Japanese government during World War II. The oldest materials in the collection were compiled by Batchelor, an English missionary who lived among the Ainu for fifty years in 1877-1924; Pilsudski, a German ethnologist who conducted fieldwork there from 1895-1905; and Munro, an English physician who lived in Japan in 1900-1942. These works provide firsthand accounts of pre-relocation Ainu culture and society, covering religion, ceremonials, mythology, folklore, economic activities, life cycles, and health issues. Three of the books in the collection were authored by Japanese scholars focusing on Japanese conquest and assimilation of the Ainu (Takakura), ecological and economic effects of relocation (Watanabe), and features of Ainu kinship system (Sugiura). The remaining two books are by Ohnuki-Tierney, an American anthropologist who, in 1965-1969, sought to retrospectively reconstruct the "Ainu way of life" through extensive ethnographic fieldwork among elderly informants in Sakhalin. Ohnuki-Tierney's works, which also provide extensive review of previous works on the Ainu in Sakhalin, Hokkaidō and the neighboring islands, are the most comprehensive sources. Ainu people who lived in Kurile and the other islands taken over by the USSR during World War II are not covered in the collection.

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