This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one's self in love combines experiential self-examination and ethical assessment of actions. The (...) notion of the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experience- and action-oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary's actions depended on my acquaintances’ approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex-husband, the Virgin Mary's actions accentuated his ethical immaturity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex-husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. (...) The paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world. (shrink)

Self-cultivation—taking pedagogical action to educate oneself—is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the ‘uncanny’, we outline a few (...) key features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times. (shrink)

This paper delves into the concept of the uncanny, a theme that has fascinated scholars across multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, literature, and film studies. The study’s primary goal is twofold: to examine the theoretical foundations of the uncanny as explored by Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger, and to propose a new perspective on the uncanny within the context of modern technological and urban developments. The paper argues that urban, technologically advanced environments foster conditions in which the (...) class='Hi'>uncanny can easily emerge, and suggests that the adoption of a techno-scientific worldview plays a central role in the rise of uncanny experiences. Through an analysis of Hoffmann’s The Sandman, this paper revisits classical theories of the uncanny and connects them with contemporary realities. Jentsch’s emphasis on cognitive uncertainty, Freud’s exploration of repressed traumatic memories, and Heidegger’s focus on the broader atmospheric conditions of the uncanny are all examined. The paper concludes by reflecting on how urbanization, technological dependency, and scientific reductionism contribute to a profound sense of alienation, increasing the likelihood of uncanny experiences in the modern world. (shrink)

If the uncanny is something one cannot quite come to terms with in the first place, can the uncanny really be represented? There is clearly in the act itselfsomething quite against the grain of referentiality. What in other words is the point of saying that which cannot very well be said in explicit terms? And how do we account for an increase in modern times of efforts to perform what at first look seems infeasible? It also remains to (...) be seen how the Chinese uncanny is represented with the help of a seemingly inane rhetorical tour de force in which the uncanny is confirmed as being historically true despite everything else in the story that points in the opposite direction. (shrink)

The uncanny is the weird, the strange, the mysterious, a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Even Freud, patron of the uncanny, had trouble defining it. Yet the uncanny is everywhere in contemporary culture. In this elegant book, Nicholas Royle takes the reader across literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as he marks the trace of the uncanny in the modern world. Not an introduction in the usual sense, Nicholas Royle's book is a geography of the (...) uncanny as it manifests itself - and disturbs our thinking - in a range of disciplines. (shrink)

The uncanniness of Freud's uncanny -- Alligators, crocodiles and the monstrous uncanny -- The uncanny urban underside -- The uncanniness of Schelling's uncanny -- The uncanny and the work of Walter Benjamin -- The uncanny cyborg -- The uncanny and the fictional -- The uncanny and the modern adult literary fairy tale -- The uncanny and the gothic vampire romance -- The uncanny and the detective story -- The uncanny (...) and the weird horror story -- The uncanny and the dystopian science fiction novel -- The uncanny and the historiographic metafictional novel -- The uncanny commonwealth of Christianity -- The living Polytheism of the Fung Loy Kok institute of Taoism/Taoist Tai Chi. (shrink)

Looking at the often remorseless, inhumane manner in which both the creators and guests approach the robotic hosts, this chapter argues that the integral concept of “humanity” is challenged and transformed in a discussion of Westworld. While the hosts of Westworld are, indeed, robotic, lacking human biological construction, they are made to look increasingly human. In Westworld, evidence of the uncanny valley is seen in the way in which the robot hosts evolve. Taking into consideration the inherent distinctions between (...) the hosts and the guests, the robots of Westworld can be understood as corresponding more accurately to the ideals of humanity and “human excellence” than the humans themselves. In the struggle and constant suffering of robots of Westworld to gain consciousness and regain their memories, the robots achieve a significant, unique aspect of humanity, quite distinct from the apparent humanity of the show's humans. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical response to Fredrik Svenaeus’ use of the Heideggerian uncanny to analyse the experience of illness. It is argued that the uncanny is part of a culture of concepts through which the condition of modernity has been analysed by philosophers, social theorists, writers and artists. All centre upon the idea of alienation, and thus not being at home in the society that should be one’s home. This association will be exploited to offer a reinterpretation (...) of Svenaeus’ thesis as a sociological and political, rather than an ontological, one. By reviewing the work of Hegelian philosophers, Georg Simmel, and novelists, represented by Mann, Camus and McCullers, it will be argued that illness is bound up with social alienation, both as something that is caused by conditions of alienation and as an interpretative response to alienation. Seeing illness as a metaphor of the human condition in modernity allows the medical humanities to inform therapy, that would allow the patient to understand their illness, not as the ontological condition of Dasein, but rather as something mediated by modern social, economic and political conditions. (shrink)

In their quality as acoustic or visual percepts, words are linked to the emotional values of the state-of-affairs they evoke. This allows them to engender meanings capable of operating nearly entirely detached from percepts. Such a laying flat of meanings permits deliberation to take place within the window of consciousness. In such a theatre of the imagination, linguistically triggered, resides the originality of the human psyche.

Le texte aborde un cas particulier d’atmosphère, l’inquiétante étrangeté, dans son rapport à l’espace architectural, selon une inflexion phénoménologique soulignant la teneur d’atmosphère (Stimmung) du sentiment éprouvé. Effectuant une relecture du texte éponyme de 1919 de Freud sous cet angle, notamment l’épisode de la promenade dans la petite ville italienne, la réflexion s’engage ensuite dans une approche de la peinture de De Chirico, en particulier le tableau de 1913 La grande Tour. Les écrits du théoricien américain de l’architecture Anthony Vidler (...) viennent à l’appui de la réflexion. La conclusion fait retour sur la maison hantée, au regard d’expériences artistiques plus contemporaines. (shrink)

This paper extends Mori’s (IEEE Robot Autom Mag 19:98–100, 2012) uncanny valley-hypothesis to include technologies that fail its basic criterion that uncanniness arises when the subject experiences a discrepancy in a machine’s human likeness. In so doing, the paper considers Mori’s hypothesis about the uncanny valley as an instance of what Heidegger calls the ‘challenging revealing’ nature of modern technology. It introduces seeming autonomy and heteronomy as phenomenological categories that ground human being-in-the-world including our experience of things and (...) people. It is suggested that this categorical distinction is more foundational than Heidegger’s existential structures and phenomenological categories. Having introduced this novel phenomenological distinction, the paper considers the limits of Mori’s hypothesis by drawing on an example from science fiction that showcases that uncanniness need not only be caused by machines that resemble human beings. In so doing, it explores how the seeming autonomy-heteronomy distinction clarifies (at least some of) the uncanniness that can arise when humans encounter advanced technology which is irreducible to the anthropocentrism that shapes Mori’s original hypothesis. (shrink)

In this essay I explore a possibility of experiential synthesis of the medicalized abnormal body with its aesthetic images. A personal narrative about meeting extreme abnormality serves as an introduction into theorizing aesthetic abnormality. The essay builds its argument on the phenomenological grounds; I therefore approach corporeality with Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In turn, Max Ernst introduces an aesthetic frame for the subsequent examination of uncanny surreality. Two exemplars of the surreal body, Joel Witkins "Satiro" and Don DeLillds (...) "Body Artist," intend to substantiate the preceding theoretic. The study shows how the encounter with the abnormal embodiment may suspend normalized modes of constitution to provoke uncanny experiences. (shrink)

The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive research. An android provides an experimental apparatus that has the potential to be controlled more precisely than any human actor. However, preliminary results indicate that only very humanlike devices can elicit the broad range of responses that people typically direct toward each other. Conversely, to build androids capable of emulating human behavior, it is necessary to investigate social activity in detail and to develop models of the cognitive (...) mechanisms that support this activity. Because of the reciprocal relationship between android development and the exploration of social mechanisms, it is necessary to establish the field of android science. Androids could be a key testing ground for social, cognitive, and neuroscientific theories as well as platform for their eventual unification. Nevertheless, subtle flaws in appearance and movement can be more apparent and eerie in very humanlike robots. This uncanny phenomenon may be symptomatic of entities that elicit our model of human other but do not measure up to it. If so, very humanlike robots may provide the best means of pinpointing what kinds of behavior are perceived as human, since deviations from human norms are more obvious in them than in more mechanical-looking robots. In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is essential to identify the mechanisms involved in evaluations of human likeness. One hypothesis is that, by playing on an innate fear of death, an uncanny robot elicits culturally-supported defense responses for coping with death’s inevitability. An experiment, which borrows from methods used in terror management research, was performed to test this hypothesis. [Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators: Fast Breaking Paper in Social Sciences, May 2008]. (shrink)

This article examines the appearances of Augustus in Suetonius’Lives of the Caesarsoutside Augustus' ownLife. It shows how Suetonius contrasts the positive image of Augustus drawn in theLife of Augustuswith the distortion of this image by Augustus’ successors, depicted in the laterLives. In their reception, he is still presented as an ideal to follow, yet as a role model for cruelty (Tiberius), adultery and military failure (Caligula), or lyre-playing (Nero)—roles which Suetonius’ real Augustus never or only marginally assumed. Thus in a (...) series of close and intratextual readings, this article invites a more general reassessment of Suetonius’ work: it suggests that theLives of the Caesarsdraw a more critical image of the Principate than has often been said, that they are more consciously part of an image-making process and, above all, that they should more commonly be understood as one whole work, rather than read individually and in isolation. (shrink)

Mirror self-experience is re-casted away from the cognitivist interpretation that has dominated discussions on the issue since the establishment of the mirror mark test. Ideas formulated by Merleau-Ponty on mirror self-experience point to the profoundly unsettling encounter with one’s specular double. These ideas, together with developmental evidence are re-visited to provide a new, psychologically and phenomenologically more valid account of mirror self-experience: an experience associated with deep wariness.

Nostalgic, socially privileged ideals of childhood have actively contributed to the formation of Australian national identity, as well as modern subject-formations more broadly. This paper argues that, while such nostalgia has been drawn on for normative ends—in the service of the management of the modern individual—nostalgia also has the power to disrupt our conceptions of the normal. In the context of the contemporary “crisis” of childhood particularly, opportunities to reconstitute ideals of “childhood” and “family” differently have become available to communities (...) such as Aboriginal Australians, who previously have been denied access to these nostalgic forms. (shrink)

Through the many reinterpretations of Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) within French Postmodernism, in recent decades, the uncanny has become a vague synonym for the methodology of deconstruction. The article aims to disambiguate the uncanny by reestablishing its characterizing nucleus and relocating it within the aesthetics through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. The American philosopher claims that this feeling can be generated by drawing attention to the ordinary, which is so close and familiar to fade out of focus. (...) Cavell and the German Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch following him show that artistic practices can reinforce this experience, as through displacements and dislocations, they deprive objects of daily use and ordinary matters of their familiarity and force us to look more closely at their material, sensorial, and phenomenological dimensions. In this way, Cavell and Rebentisch offer a path to reconstitute a stable conceptual framework for defining the uncanny, linking it to Freud’s definition of something familiar appearing in an unfamiliar light. At the same time, they also propose a novelty by interpreting the uncanny not as inherently frightening and disturbing but as a compelling affective state that encourages a willingness to reappropriate and rediscover the ordinary. (shrink)

What is the normative import of telling a genealogy of our present reason-giving practices? In this paper, I will focus on Michel Foucault’s materialist genealogies in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which attend to the social and material settings in which we act and give and ask for reasons. A number of influential critics have interpreted them as a critical evaluation of our reason-giving practices. But understood in this way, Foucault’s genealogical project faces significant philosophical (...) problems. I will sketch a different account, arguing that telling a genealogy can have an uncanny effect: It can disrupt our familiarity with the everyday world by revealing to us the embodied norms that structure our everyday activities. Once we recognize that our situation is structured by normative demands, we cannot simply let ourselves be carried along by found norms. Genealogies call on us to take responsibility for these norms and to practically transform the space in which we act. (shrink)

There is a very fine line separating democracy from terror. Through analysis of the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, I hope to show that there is an uncanny proximity between terror and democracy. In Lefort’s view, political power rests on the contingency and groundlessness that politics has experienced since the French Revolution. Since that time, political power has been separated from the divine and has become a human affair. For Lefort, totalitarianism can come only after the (...) democratic turn because democracy and totalitarianism have the same political foundation in the French Revolution. The openness of democracy is what allows for a totalitarian regime to take power and to terrorize people. But democracy is also able to combat terrorism because, by giving more voice to the excluded and the oppressed, democracy may be able to assimilate them; for if the claim of such people is a lack of autonomy, democracy is the system that should be able to allow them to exercise power. A true war on terror, therefore, would empower people through democracy and not disenfranchise them further. (shrink)

Adolf Reinach and Gerda Walther were two figures of the early movement who gave phenomenological description to mystical and uncanny experiences; and, while the phenomenological approach each employs is slightly different, both commit to phenomenological description of the experiences of God and the uncanny, including the foreseeing of one’s death, in a manner that is open-minded and unprejudiced. In this chapter I will discuss the experiences of foreseeing and of God for both Reinach and Walther. I will rely (...) on their first-hand accounts of such experiences, utilizing the battlefield notes of Reinach from WWI found in his Sämtliche Werke and the mystical experience Walther describes having in 1918 in her book Zum Anderen Ufer. In the end it will become clear that phenomenology is an approach for all kinds of experiences, even those that are most unconventional, and thus the potential for further and fresh research is great. (shrink)

I propose a definition of the uncanny: an anxious uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility. First, I outline the relevance of the uncanny to art and aesthetics. Second, I disambiguate theoretical uses of ‘uncanny’ and establish the sense of the term that I am interested in—namely, an emotional state directed towards particular objects in the world which are characteristically eerie, creepy, and weird. Third, I look at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the (...) House of Usher’ as a means of drawing out the conditions that I claim are essential to uncanny experiences, and then elaborate the terms of my proposed definition. Finally, I show how the definition accounts for two paradigmatic kinds of uncanny phenomena: cases of ‘uncanny resemblances’, which include twins, doppelgangers, and very lifelike representations of the human body; and unlikely coincidences of events. (shrink)

This article disputes Freud's reading of “The Sandman,” in which he seeks to explain the text's uncanniness primarily with reference to his theory of the castration complex. Rather than abandon Freud altogether, however, I demonstrate how the uncanny effects of Hoffmann's tale are best understood with reference to Freud's concept of “total narcissism.” Specifically, I argue that the ambiguities surrounding this notion are profoundly interwoven with the uncanniness of “The Sandman's” “doubles.” Finally, using these analyses as a foundation, I (...) present my own interpretation of “The Sandman's” subtextual narrative, arguing that the tale effectively dramatizes the self-destructive tendencies of the individual dominated by total narcissism. (shrink)

The term “uncanny valley” goes back to an article of the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. He put forward the hypothesis that humanlike objects like certain kinds of robots elicit emotional responses similar to real humans proportionate to their degree of human likeness. Yet, if a certain degree of similarity is reached emotional responses become all of a sudden very repulsive. The corresponding recess in the supposed function is called the uncanny valley. The present paper wants to propose a (...) philosophical explanation why we feel empathy with inanimate objects in the first place, and why the uncanny valley occurs when these objects become very humanlike. The core of this explanation—which is informed by the recently developing empirical research on the matter—will be a form of empathy involving a kind of imaginative perception. However, as will be shown, imaginative perception fails in cases of very humanlike objects. (shrink)

Freud’s famous essay “The ‘Uncanny’” is often poorly understood. In this paper, I clear up the popular misconception that Freud identifies all uncanny phenomena with the return of repressed infantile complexes by showing that he offers not one but two theories of the uncanny: “return of the repressed,” and another explanation that has to do with the apparent confirmation of “surmounted primitive beliefs.” Of the two, I argue that it is the latter, more often overlooked theory that (...) faces fewer serious objections and carries greater explanatory power in respect of the uncanny. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: I contrast enactivist and ecological perspectives on some of the themes raised by the authors. I discuss some of their worries about the notion of sense-making and other epistemological aspects of enactivism.

I show how mathematical platonism combined with belief in the God of classical theism can respond to Field's epistemological objection. I defend an account of divine mathematical knowledge by showing that it falls out of an independently motivated general account of divine knowledge. I use this to explain the accuracy of God's mathematical beliefs, which in turn explains the accuracy of our own. My arguments provide good news for theistic platonists, while also shedding new light on Field's influential objection.

Yael Lin's The Intersubjectivity of Time: Levinas and Infinite Responsibility is the first sustained inquiry into Emmanuel Levinas's theory of temporality, a concept which permeates his work and can in many ways serve as a lens through which his entire system can be examined and understood. As the first book length monograph on the subject, Lin's work promises to be of significant value to scholars of Levinas. The book proceeds by tracing what the author sees as the Western roots of (...) Levinas's theory of temporality, namely the works of Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, then goes on to explore the various limitations and problems of that philosophical lineage, before showing how Levinas's own theory responds to those limitations and problems by drawing from the Jewish philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Enaction as a Lived Experience: Towards a Radical Neurophenomenology” by Claire Petitmengin. Upshot: Why has the neurophenomenological approach not been adopted as a common and even obligatory tool in the study of consciousness? I suggest that the problem with the neurophenomenological approach is its effectiveness on the one hand and its almost impossible demands from the scientist on the other: One cannot accept the neurophenomenological approach without rejecting not only the paradigm of cognitive science, (...) but the scientific paradigm as a whole. (shrink)

A number of advances in assisted reproduction have been greeted by the accusation that they would produce children ‘without parents’. In this paper I will argue that while to date these accusations have been false, there is a limited but important sense in which they would be true of children born of a reproductive technology that is now on the horizon. If our genetic parents are those individuals from whom we have inherited 50% of our genes, then, unlike in any (...) other reproductive scenario, children who were conceived from gametes derived from stem cell lines derived from discarded IVF embryos would have no genetic parents! This paper defends this claim and investigates its ethical implications. I argue that there are reasons to think that the creation of such embryos might be morally superior to the existing alternatives in an important set of circumstances. (shrink)

Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and nonhuman stimuli. Accounts of this “Uncanny Valley” effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke different emotional responses. We present an alternate account based on the novel hypothesis that the Uncanny Valley is not directly related to ‘human-likeness’ per se, but instead reflects a more general form of stimulus devaluation that occurs when inhibition is triggered to resolve conflict between (...) competing stimulus-related representations. We consider existing support for this inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and further assess its feasibility through tests of two corresponding predictions that arise from the link between conflict-resolving inhibition and aversive response: 1) that the pronounced disliking of Uncanny-type stimuli will occur for any image that strongly activates multiple competing stimulus representations, even in the absence of any human-likeness, and 2) that the negative peak of an ‘Uncanny Valley’ should occur at the point of greatest stimulus-related conflict and not (in the presence of human-likeness) always closer to the ‘human’ end of a perceptual continuum. We measured affective responses to a set of line drawings representing nonhuman animal-animal morphs, in which each continuum midpoint was a bistable image (Exp. 1), as well as to sets of human-robot and human-animal computer-generated morphs (Exp. 2). Affective trends depicting classic Uncanny Valley functions occurred for all continua, including the nonhuman stimuli. Images at continua midpoints elicited significantly more negative affect than images at endpoints, even when the continua included a human endpoint. This illustrates the feasibility of the inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and the need for further research into the possibility that the strong dislike of Uncanny-type stimuli reflects the negative affective consequences of cognitive inhibition. (shrink)

Photography has always been associated with the physical activity of the human body: capturing, editing and viewing photos are all activities that involve the user’s spatial interaction with the technology used. With conventional photography, one aspect of spatial relation with technology is the viewer’s ability to recognize the camera’s location in the photographic scene through visual indications, such as the relative location of objects in the frame to the camera’s point of view, combined with a basic familiarity with the functionality (...) of conventional cameras, relating to the notions of ‘in-front’ and ‘behind’ the camera. Some instances of interactive photography, such as 360-degree imagery and three-dimensional photogrammetry, challenge the spatial connection between the photographer (represented by the camera location) and the viewer due to unique usability and innovative interactions, such as the viewer’s ability to ‘move’ freely in all directions of the three-dimensional, photographic space. The technological affordances of interactive photography create a distinct corporeal experience that challenges the traditional associations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographic imagery, evoking with the viewers the notion of technological uncanniness and, consequently, questioning some of the traditional preconceptions regarding the prime characteristics of the photographic medium. (shrink)

Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short (...) story “The Sandman” as a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by (...) allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies. (shrink)

The popular image of Japanese society is a steroetypical one - that of a people characterised by a coherent set of thought and behaviour patterns, applying to all Japanese and transcending time. Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto found this image quite incongruous during their research for this book in Japan. They ask whether this steroetype of the Japanese is not only generated by foreigners but by the Japanese themselves. This is likely to be a controversial book as it does not (...) contribute to the continuing mythologising of Japan and the Japanese. The book examines contemporary images of Japanese society by surveying an extensive sample of popular and academic literature on Japan. After tracing the development of "holistic" theories about the Japanese, commonly referred to as the "group model", attention is focused on the evaluation of that image. Empirical evidence contrary to this model is discussed and methodological lacunae are cited. A "sociology of Japanology" is also presented. In pursuit of other visions of Japanese society, the authors argue that certain aspects of Japanese behaviour can be explained by considering Japanese society as the exact inverse of the portayal provided by the group model. The authors also present a multi-dimensional model of social stratification, arguing that much of the variation in Japanese behaviour can be understood within the framework as having universal equivalence. (shrink)