Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

by Shiho Satsuka
Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

by Shiho Satsuka

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Overview

Nature in Translation is an ethnographic exploration in the cultural politics of the translation of knowledge about nature. Shiho Satsuka follows the Japanese tour guides who lead hikes, nature walks, and sightseeing bus tours for Japanese tourists in Canada's Banff National Park and illustrates how they aspired to become local "nature interpreters" by learning the ecological knowledge authorized by the National Park. The guides assumed the universal appeal of Canada's magnificent nature, but their struggle in translating nature reveals that our understanding of nature-including scientific knowledge-is always shaped by the specific socio-cultural concerns of the particular historical context. These include the changing meanings of work in a neoliberal economy, as well as culturally-specific dreams of finding freedom and self-actualization in Canada's vast nature. Drawing on nearly two years of fieldwork in Banff and a decade of conversations with the guides, Satsuka argues that knowing nature is an unending process of cultural translation, full of tensions, contradictions, and frictions. Ultimately, the translation of nature concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included and excluded in the society as a legitimate subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822358800
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 07/14/2015
Pages: 276
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Shiho Satsuka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Notes on Transliteration  vii

Acknowledgments  ix

Prologue. A Journey to Magnificent Nature . . . or Why Nature Needs to Be Understood in Translation  1

Introduction  9

1. Narratives of Freedom  39

2. Populist Cosmopolitanism  67

3. The Co-Modification of Self  95

4. Gender in Nature Neverland  122

5. The Interpretation of Nature  147

6. The Allure of Ecology  183

Epilogue. Found in Translation  213

Notes  223

Reference List  241

Index  255
 

What People are Saying About This

Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan - Miyako Inoue

"Shiho Satsuka's intimate and rich ethnography vividly and meticulously traces these tour guides' dreams of self-making, aspiration, joys, and—perhaps inevitably—disappointments, through their work as nature's translators. Satsuka reveals the extent to which the conditions of possibility of the way of life they have chosen are critically linked up with post-war Japan-U.S. relations, the accelerated globalization of the Japanese political economy, and the genealogy of the linguistic and social reception of the western concepts such as freedom and subjectivity. Nature in Translation is a sheer joy to read."

Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

"This brilliant exposition of postcolonial translation shows how nature emerges through lively reworkings of the West. Shiho Satsuka frees science studies, still trapped inside the imagined closure and coherence of the West, to address environmental knowledge in a diverse world. Nature in Translation is a pioneering intervention."

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