Keywords

daily utensils, home appliances, modern life style

Objectives

This study considers the generality of modernization, along with the individuality of different countries and the factors that contribute to it. A careful examination will be made of everyday utensils from around the world related to clothing, food, and housing, and seek to demonstrate how the changes in them reflect change from a traditional to a modern lifestyle. At the same time, an international survey will be made of both universal and different aspects of modern lifestyles. The average citizen generally experiences modernization of national systems and household economies through changes in lifestyle. The modernization of lifestyles is linked with the reinvention of clothing, kitchen utensils, furniture, and room arrangements. Based on studies of material culture that address changes in everyday utensils, this study aims to reveal how modernization has changed lifestyles. Worldwide uniformity can be seen in modernized lifestyles, whereas differences among nations stemming from traditional clothing, food, and housing customs are also expected. This suggests that the process of modernization is influenced by cultural differences. The study also considers the general theory of "modernization" from the perspective of material culture.

Research Results

In this two-and-a half year joint study project, we organized a total of eight workshops and conducted a comparative study of diversity and commonality of daily utensils that households possessed based on materials collected in the respective regions, including Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Turkey, Italy, the Netherlands, Peru and West Africa. We then discussed lifestyles that can be assessed from them and their changes and also the potential of a new perspective of cross-cultural studies brought about by this daily utensils survey. While the report from Indonesia based on the preceding study titled Anthropological Study on the Formation of National Culture Assessed from the Consumption Style: From Daily Utensils Surveys in Indonesia and Others (KAKEN Grants-in-aid Scientific Research (B) FY2011~2015, Coordinator: Haruya Kagami) was supported by adequate data, reports from the other regions were preliminary ones through data collection that each reporter attempted on a trial basis in their respective fields of survey and fell short of full-fledged comparative studies. This can be attributed to the fact that this joint research project was planned as a purely preliminary study before full-scale research and the results were expected from the beginning. However, while making use of the framework of the preceding research in Indonesia, participants in the research project understood its significance and collected data, albeit on a trial basis, and reported the results, thereby having an opportunity to make a comparative study on daily utensils on a global scale, which was the biggest fruit of this joint research project. Although the survey items or the type/content of data needed to conduct a comparative study on daily utensils and the focus of comparison were corrected from the preceding studies, unfortunately, we fell short of finalizing them. We believe, however, that this daily utensils survey can be utilized as a heuristic means of awakening to a new perspective in understanding culture. One example is possessing of unnecessary or excessive articles and we thought that the reason they were stored at home may simply represent cultural characteristics of that particular region and we reported this idea in the Minpaku Tsushin newsletter No. 154 and plan to publish it in several other media as well down the road.