#BRETT WALKER MONTANA STATE FULL#
The following highlights are from a conversation with Brett Walker about his book, "A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine." To hear the full converstation, click the link above or subscribe to our podcast. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. The Lost Wolves of Japan is a first-rate academically-oriented text that combs through the natural and cultural history of wolves on the Japanese archipelago.A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body's immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. Author Brett Walker is a professor of history at Montana State University who specializes in Japanese history this book was published by the Univ. He used historical research methodologies to frame an inquiry into what the Japanese wolf was, and what led to its extinction. If you like historical detail, this book serves it up in helping after generous helping. Walker explores many different themes in The Lost Wolves of Japan, most of which are centered around people, culture, wolves and nature. He pokes and prods the relationships of these entitites to each other by using various historical lenses. He examines the near-myth of Japanese “oneness” with nature the culture of the Ainu (an indigenous people group in the Japanese archipelago) and their spiritual reverence for wild wolves, and their close relationship with domesticated hunting dogs how early Japanese naturalists classified the wolves and mountain dogs that populated their islands the Japanese government’s quest to modernize their society through ranching during the early years of the Meiji Restoration (ca. Walker first investigates the taxonomy of Japanese wolves, which was disputed and left unclear (similar to the red wolf) because there were so few whole specimens to study prior to their extinction around 1905 (though some say this date is wrong and they survived until the mid-1940s, post World War II). He concludes that true wolves of the Canis lupus variety migrated to the Japanese archipelago from mainland Siberia and underwent evolutionary insular dwarfism, resulting in a smaller-statured wolf than found on the mainland.
These animals historically followed prey like red deer and several now-extinct variety of large deer, as well as (possibly) boar, fish and the occassional beached whale. Walkers writes that the ungulate prey species likely traveled to the Pacific-side of the islands in winter because these held less snow and forage was found more easily, and the wolves followed the prey seasonally. (I’ll be the first to admit I got confused by the different islands he discussed, and the differences in their topography, climate and prey - so I’m over-generalizing here.)īut when the Meiji Restoration took place and Japan was unified from the comparatively-looser knit feudal system of the Tokugawa-family shoguns, the new government was myopically focused on modernizing the country.
#BRETT WALKER MONTANA STATE HOW TO#
Part of this entailed introducing ranching (all the other modernized countries ranched), so they brought in ranchers and wolfers from the West to teach them how to raise horses and cows and kill wolves. At the same time, the native prey of wolves was decimated by over-hunting, and the wolves had quickly turned to eating the new hoofed ungulates on their landscape: horses and cows.
0 kommentar(er)
