ICREA researcher at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies of the UAB, Rebekah Clements, has received an ERC Consolidator Grant to develop the project, "Consuming Nature: Early Modernity, Popular Culture and the Natural World in Japan, 1600-1900." The project will analyse the changes that "early modernity" brought about in the relationship between ordinary people in Japanese society and the natural world during the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods.
The central hypothesis of Consuming Nature is that a new mode of interacting with the natural world developed among non-elites during the social and economic upheavals of Japan's Tokugawa period (1600–1868), with consequences for our understanding of "early modernity" in the Japanese case and beyond. Previous studies, both of Japan and of other regions, have examined early modern nature from the perspective of environmental degradation and resource management or elite philosophy and natural science. In contrast, the focus of this cultural historical study will be on a largely untapped corpus of objects and texts from 17th to 19th century Japan attesting to a new kind of (purchasing) power over nature, one which saw the commercialized enjoyment of plants, animals, and natural phenomena as consumer products and leisure activities among commoners.
The project will collate this corpus and analyse it in light of the characteristics associated with Japanese early modernity: rapid urbanization, increasing literacy, a commercial print industry, and a consumer culture concentrated in large urban centres connected to rural areas by improved communication and transport networks. The final stage will connect the project's findings to the history of global early modernity/ies, and to research on nature and Japanese modernity, which often takes the Meiji Period (1868–1912) as its starting point. It will interrogate the supposed rupture between the early modern Tokugawa period and the modern Meiji period when it comes to the consumption and commodification of nature, and will provide a scholarly framework for challenging Eurocentric teleologies of nature and modernity.
Rebekah Clements is a cultural historian of Japan, specializing in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Her research draws upon textual and material-culture sources to examine the characteristics of Japanese early modernity as understood in the broader context of East Asia. She received her PhD in East Asian History from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in 2012. Following her PhD she was a Leverhulme-funded research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, and held a junior research fellowship from Queens' College, Cambridge, from 2012-2015. From 2015-2018 she held a lectureship and then an associate professorship (senior lectureship) at Durham University, U.K. Since 2018, she has been an ICREA research professor hosted by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she led the European Research Council Starting Grant Project, "Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598" which ran from 2018 to 2024.
