| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Mark McNally. Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 245.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2005. Pp. xiv, 287. $49.50.

Kokugaku, variously translated as "national learning" and "nativism," has been the subject of several monographs in recent years, among them works by Peter Nosco, Harry Harootunian, and, more recently, myself. While my work and that of Nosco are oriented around the work of Motoori Norinaga, Mark McNally's study of kokugaku focuses on Hirata Atsutane, Norinaga's self-proclaimed successor. In this he is following in the wake of Harootunian's massive and monumental study of Hirata and his rural followers, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (1988). Taking on a well-studied topic is of course not an easy task, but McNally boldly argues that recent studies, most notably Harootunian's, are flawed in that they "ignore any causal relationship between the text and its historical conditions of productions" (p. 244) and thus fail to elucidate the significance of kokugaku as discourse and cultural institution during the Tokugawa period. For McNally, the key to "restoring historicity" (p. 13) to our understanding of kokugaku is to be found in the work of Randall Collins, Pierre Bourdieu, and Roger Chartier, whom he cites repeatedly (and deploys uncritically) in order to argue that ideas must be viewed as the product of competition and conflict between authors, who "struggle in a social space populated by other authors, each competing for particular stakes" (p. 245).

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