Joy Hendry is professor emerita of social anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, co-founder of the Japan Anthropology Workshop and the Europe Japan Research Centre, and until recently a senior member of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

In 1975-6, she undertook a year’s fieldwork in Kurotsuchi, a village in Fukuoka Prefecture in Kyushu, Japan. She made a number of wonderful friends and over the year was invited to a number of social occasions including weddings and funerals. She also made family trees for each of the 54 houses in the village, and  a chart showing  how the families related to each other. She has continued to visit Kurotsuchi over the years.

Last autumn, with a Small Grant from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, she returned to Kurotsuchi with the materials she had collected and compiled, including the family trees. The culmination of the visit was a formal handing over of the village wide family-tree chart to a gathering of village officials who had been active members of the youth group 45 years ago.

One of Hendry’s sons travelled to Kyushu with his partner in order to film Joy’s return to the area and the handing over of the family tree charts. The film documents a thriving town, known for its tea fields and honey production. It also shows how the area has changed over the years, illustrating the advantages of such a long-term anthropological experience.

The film can be viewed on YouTube via the link below:

Speaker Biography

Joy Hendry is professor emerita of social anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, co-founder of the Japan Anthropology Workshop and the Europe Japan Research Centre, and until recently a senior member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She has been a visiting scholar at Tokyo University, at the Gengo Bunka Kenkyujo at Keio; at the universities of Melbourne, Otago, McMaster, Freiburg, Prague, Vienna, and the University of the South Pacific, as well as the CNRS in Paris. She has carried out fieldwork in various parts of Japan over some 40 years, but in most depth in the Yame-shi tea-producing area of Kyushu (Fukuoka-ken) and in the fishing community and holiday resort of Tateyama-shi in Chiba-ken. She has also travelled widely within Japan and in several other countries, where she seeks to put her Japanese research into a global context. A recent example was to examine the situation of Ainu people within the context of indigenous people worldwide, and an ongoing project is with indigenous science. Her publications include Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993; The Orient Strikes Back: A Global View of Cultural Display, Oxford: Berg, 2000; Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous People and Self-Representation, New York: Palgrave, 2005; Science and Sustainability: Learning from Indigenous Wisdom, New York: Palgrave, 2014 and An Anthropological lifetime in Japan: The Writings of Joy Hendry, Brill, 2016 and has also published three introductory anthropology texts and five editions of Understanding Japanese Society as well as editing volumes such as Interpreting Japanese Society, Japan at Play and Dismantling the East-West Dichotomy.

 

On Wednesday 26 July 2017,  Ambassador Tsuruoka bestowed the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette on Joy Hendry in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the promotion of Japanese studies in the UK and thus to deeper mutual understanding between Japan and the United Kingdom. Her acceptance speech can be found here.