Thursday, April 18th, 2024 · 10 am-12 pm EST
Virtual talk on Zoom
About this event:
Menoko Itak: Language of Women in the Ainu Language
Kanako Uzawa
The Ainu, meaning “human” in the Ainu language, traditionally lived in the Kurile Islands, southern Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and part of Honshu. In the 19th century, they came under Japan’s colonial rule. In 2008, the Japanese government officially recognized them as the Indigenous peoples of Japan. Ainu were once described and perceived as exotic people of Northern Japan, Hokkaido (Ainu Mosir in the Ainu). The Ainu became a very popular research subject both internationally and domestically from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. Thousands of Ainu objects were collected from Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kurile islands which are now stored in many museums worldwide.
This presentation will focus on hidden stories and narratives of the Ainu women through Ainu museum collections from the eye of Dr. Kanako Uzawa, an Ainu scholar and artist. She will present the current situation of the Ainu culture and language. At the same time, she will also discuss the process and challenge she faces through ongoing Ainu art exhibition-making in collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Lastly, she will introduce the trailer of her most recent art video production, Ainupuri, in which she reconstructed the counter-narratives that Ainu objects stored in the Historical Museum of Oslo University in Norway. This tells her storytelling in the form of narration, poetry, song, dance, and performance; Laura Liverani’s visual storytelling mediates these personal and collective histories in a constant dialogue between the two artists.
Language Diversity, New Speakers, and Well-being in the Ryukyu Islands
Patrick Heinrich
Just like other nation-states around the world, Japan is multilingual and features autochthonous languages such as Ainu, Japanese Sign Language, and Ryukyuan. There are six different Ryukyuan languages which comprise a total of 700 local Ryukyuan dialects. These local varieties are usually called shimakutuba or shimamuni in Ryukyuan. All local varieties of the Ryukyuan languages are endangered today, and they are set for extinction around the mid-century if no counteraction is taken. In the first half of this talk, I will introduce some background knowledge about the linguistic diversity of the Ryukyus and provide historical and sociolinguistic information on their current status and vitality. In the second half, I will report on two topics that give hope that some varieties of the Ryukyuan language may be maintained. I first report on new speakers – young or middle-aged individuals who are learning a Ryukyuan language through what we call ‘language reclamation’. Language reclamation differs from second-language learning in two important ways. It involves a very emotional experience and a sense of language ownership from the very start. I report here mainly on interviews I conducted with new speakers. I then turn attention to a recent development in endangered language studies, that is, the study of the relation between language and well-being. Speakers of Ryukyuan languages report much higher rates of life satisfaction than passive speakers or non-speakers of Ryukyuan. Based on quantitative research I conducted with two Ryukyuan communities, I argue that speaking Ryukyuan itself contributes to Ryukyuan well-being and that speaking Ryukyuan enhances the experiences of belonging to a local community and in that way to life quality.
Kanako Uzawa is an Ainu scholar, artist, and rights advocate. She is the founder of AinuToday, a global online platform that delivers living Ainu culture and people. She is an Assistant Professor for the Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity at Hokkaido University in Japan. Her most recent work engages with Ainu art exhibitions as a guest curator in collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the United States as well as an associated researcher at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo in Norway. She is also an editorial board member of AlterNative: an International Journal of Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand, Aotearoa and an Advisory Board Member of a project, Japan Past & Present. This project was created as part of a project of the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities at UCLA and Waseda University.
During her youth, she encountered negative representations and discrimination towards the Ainu and discovered a stark contrast between the general public view and her people. She began to wonder what does it mean to be Ainu in the twenty-first century? This gave her motivation to explore a way to express the contemporary livelihood of the Ainu. She obtained her master in Indigenous Studies and doctorate degree in Community Planning and Cultural Understanding from the UiT Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø in 2020. She held an internship in the Project to Promote ILO Policy on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (PRO 169) at the International Labour Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland. She contributes to collaborative research and Ainu performing art on the multifaceted articulations of Indigenous knowledge through museums and theaters as an artist.
Useful link: https://japanpastandpresent.
Photo by Susan Dine
Patrick Heinrich is professor of Japanese Studies and Sociolinguistics at the Department of Asian and Mediterranean African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. His current research interests focus on language endangerment and communication in the city. Recently co-edited books in English include The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics, Urban Sociolinguistics, and the Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages. He is currently concluding an edited book on Ideologies of Communication in Japan. Patrick Heinrich has received the annual award from the Japanese Association of the Sociolinguistic Sciences for his contributions to welfare linguistics. He is an honorary member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.
Registration
The event is open to the public. Guests who register for the event will receive details for joining the Zoom meeting.
The Sigur Center for Asian Studies and GW Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) together received the highly regarded designation of National Resource Center (NRC) for East Asian Studies. The designation — the first time these two centers have received NRC status — enhances the institutes’ ability to engage the broader public community, including students, K-12 educators, HBCUs, policymakers, military veterans, journalists and the general public on regional and global issues of importance. With this award, GW joins a handful of other world-leading universities with this honor, including Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Additionally, the Sigur Center and GWIKS have been awarded funding for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships which support undergraduate and graduate students studying modern foreign languages and related area or international studies.
