The study examines the thought of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), an influential Japanese nationalist thinker best known as a founder of the discipline of Japanese folklore (minzokugaku). The purpose of the study is to bring into light an unredeemed potential of his intellectual and political project as a critique of the way in which modern politics and knowledge systematically suppresses global diversity. The study reads his texts against the backdrop of the modern understanding of space and time and its political and moral implications and traces the historical evolution of his thought that culminates in the establishment of minzokugaku. My reading of Yanagita’s texts draws on three interpretive hypotheses. First, his thought can be interpreted as a critical engagement with John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of history, as he turns Mill’s defense of diversity against Mill’s justification of enlightened despotism in non-Western societies. Second, to counter Mill’s individualistic notion of progressive agency, he turns to a Marxian notion of anthropological space, in which a laboring class makes history by continuously transforming nature, and rehabilitates the common people (jōmin) as progressive agents. Third, in addition to the common people, Yanagita integrates wandering people as a countervailing force to the innate parochialism and conservatism of agrarian civilization. To excavate the unrecorded history of ordinary farmers and wandering people and promote the formation of national consciousness, his minzokugaku adopts travel as an alternative method for knowledge production and political education. In light of this interpretation, the aim of Yanagita’s intellectual and political project can be understood as defense and critique of the Enlightenment tradition. Intellectually, he attempts to navigate between spurious universalism and reactionary particularism by revaluing diversity as a necessary condition for universal knowledge and human progress. Politically, his minzokugaku aims at nation-building/globalization from below by tracing back the history of a migratory process cutting across the existing boundaries. His project is opposed to nation-building from above that aims to integrate the world population into international society at the expense of global diversity.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:31:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernando Santomauro.pdf: 4626789 bytes, checksum: 7c779cdd962f42e1ced6f4df9fe8b930 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-10-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The main goal of this Master s Thesis is to observe how a Cultural Policy is structured and directed in International Relations as a political instrument or important complement to achieve the interests of a country abroad. Based on the main studies of the area and mainly on the documental research of diplomatic files, the Cultural Policies of France and United States in Brazil in the interwar period were analysed / O objetivo principal desta dissertação é observar como a Política Cultural nas Relações Internacionais se estrutura e é dirigida quando adotada como instrumento político ou um complemento importante para a consecução dos interesses de um país no exterior. Para isso, com base nos estudos sobre o assunto e principalmente na pesquisa documental dos arquivos diplomáticos, foram analisadas as Políticas Culturais de França e Estados Unidos no Brasil no período do entre-guerras