SeungHyeon Pyo
I frame Modern Japan through the prism of Global Intellectual History. Thematically, I specialize in the post-Kuhnian History of Science and Intellectual History of Language, integrating Linguistic Anthropology. Interrogating the genealogy of academic paradigms—from pre-Meiji philological discourse and translational praxis to modern linguistics—I reveal how the scientific categorization of knowledge constituted as a geopolitical imperative to index sovereign legitimacy and political modernity in the 19th century.
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Session
Scientific differentiation became a fundamental mechanism linked to nationhood in the late nineteenth century. Those who advocated for the universalization of ethnolinguistic concepts did so as part of an overarching vision of academic modernity, where the nation-state was to be continuously reflected through the scientific infrastructure of the university. Scientific methodology in linguistic study would make national sovereignty objective. When linguists in nineteenth-century Germany and Meiji Japan made claims to speak for the national mind, the use of global scientific standards strengthened those claims by naturalizing the ethnolinguistic community-as-nation as a psycho-mechanical certainty. This reality created a paradox at the heart of modern linguistics: a globalized methodology was bolstering the episteme of irreducible national essence, a category it was circularly configured to substantiate.
Placing the methodological decisions and disciplinary positioning of the “intellectual middle” front and center, this article addresses questions of nationalism vis-à-vis global intellectual connection: how did non-Euro-American intellectuals such as Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937) secure the scientific legitimacy of national particularity? Through the prism of the Neogrammarian methods and the institutionalization of Gengogaku in Japan, I demonstrate the practice of science as a locus of socio-intellectual alignment in difference-making rather than Eurocentric diffusion.
This article undertakes a comparison of the 1878 Neogrammarian manifesto and Ueda’s 1895 lecture notes, Nihongogaku no Hongen, at the Imperial University of Tokyo. It argues that the spontaneity and contingency behind the mysticity of the modern nation-state was cunningly covered as the result of deliberate methodological operations—erasure, iconicity, and recursion—transforming the fluid messiness of speech into the rigid, law-governed boundaries of a global enterprise. By centering these disciplinary acts, the study reveals that national languages emerged not despite transnational regime of science, but as its essential byproduct.