Eric C. Rath

Contact Information Phone: (785) 864-9470 Office: 3624 Wescoe Hall Email: erath@ku.edu

Eric C. Rath, Associate Prof. (Ph.D. Michigan, 1998; M.A. Michigan, 1992; B.A. Skidmore, 1989). Fields: Premodern Japan, social and cultural history especially traditional Japanese performing arts and foodways.

 

My previous research focused on the masked noh drama, one of the highpoints of Japan’s traditional culture, which has enjoyed a continuous performing history of more than six centuries. “Noh” literally means talent, but since its origin actors have resisted the notion that noh rests on natural talent alone. My book, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2004) traces how definitions of noh, both as an art and as a profession, have changed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on the development of noh’s most salient traditions including legends about masks, secret artistic writings, patriarchs, and rituals that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others. For more information, click here.

I am currently working on a book on cuisine in late medieval and early modern Japan entitled Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan: The Development of Japanese Cuisine . Typical definitions of cuisine describe modern phenomena arising with nationalism and industrialization to name two important factors, but scholars have yet to show fully where modern cuisines come from or to think critically about what “cuisine” means historically in Japan. So-called consumption studies posit that we are now defined more by what we consume than what we produce, but cuisine in premodern Japan centered on practices of not eating elaborately prepared but highly symbolic dishes, which fueled fantasies about the artistic and political significance of those foods and the acts and people associated with them. My book explores the development of these “fantasies with food” from their origin in religious offerings to their important use in warrior banquets to the final development of what Roland Barthes called “idea cookery” in culinary writings.

 

Recent and Forthcoming Publications include:

“Godzilla Meets Super-Kyôgen, or How a Dinosaur’s Debut on the Classical Kyôgen Stage Saved the World,” In Godzilla's Footsteps, ed. Bill Tsutsui and Michiko Ito. (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 139-52.

“Warrior Noh: Konparu Zenpô and the Ritual Performance of Shura Plays” Japan Forum 18:2 (2006), pp. 167-183.

“New Meanings for Old Vegetables in Kyoto” for Cuisine, Consumption and Culture: Food in Contemporary Japan, ed. Ted and Victoria Bestor, (University of California Press, forthcoming).

“Rural Life and Agriculture,” in A Companion to Japanese History, ed. William Tsutsui (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 477-92.

 

I teach the following courses: Intro to Japanese History; Ancient & Medieval Japan; Early Modern Japan, and History of Tibet. I also offer these topics courses: The Samurai, Food in History, and Japanese Theater History.

 

Rath email: erath@ku.edu