| Naturalist, translator, littérateur, and political activist, Minakata Kumagusu, in his many endeavors, offers an intriguing series of parallelisms with patterns of non-linear development and network relationships found in the field of study that was his primary focus: botany, more specifically mycology. In contrast to models of cultural and political development imported from the West during the Meiji Restoration and extended during the Showa and Taisho eras, and the strong orientation toward centralized vertical hierarchy that in Japanese culture and governance of that period, Minakata offers an understanding in terms of dispersed non-linear networks. As botanist, folklorist, and environmental activist, Minakata refused engagement with academic and governmental institutions, conducting his life and work in the remote Kii Peninsuala. In doing so, he engaged with a variety of significant horizontal networks: elite aristocratic networks, demotic press networks, ascent pan-Asian political networks, domestic folkloric and literary networks, and international intellectual networks. He argued forcefully against the monocultural tendencies of that period, providing an example of the ways in which understandings of ecological and physical cultures and the corollary social, intellectual, and spiritual cultures arising from that base validate cultural and political counter-narratives that might otherwise be seen as subversive and alien by centralized institutions and those beholden to those institutions. |
