Why read Excursions in Identity?

Book cover of Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan

Book description

In the Edo period (1600-1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person's place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Excursions in Identity as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jilly Traganou

Author

Laura Nenzi’s book discusses the role of travel in the formation of identity, using primary sources that derive from travel accounts of Edo Japan. Nenzi looks at personal travel diaries and brings an anthropological view on the subject seeing travel as a self-discovery process, while also paying attention to differences in the experience of the literati travelers and the less educated commoners for whom, with the rise of the market economy, the roads and their pleasures became more accessible. This brings to life the changes in the earlier literati tradition of the meisho (famous places) with the rise of commodification…

From Jilly's list on travel in premodern and modern Japan.