Minakata Kumagusu in London: Challenging Eurocentrism in the pages of Nature

Abstract

The Japanese biologist and ethnologist Minakata Kumagusu has achieved a degree of celebrity in Japan for being the first Asian contributor to the British scientific magazine Nature . However, although Minakata's many contributions to Nature from 1893 to 1914 provided British readers with rare insight into Asian scientific achievements, he is seldom discussed in history of science scholarship produced by American, British and European researchers. In this article we examine Minakata's Nature articles to gain insight into how his encounter with the Eurocentrism of British culture while living in London from 1892 to 1900 affected his intellectual development. We argue that having his articles published in Nature to gain scientific recognition was not Minakata's real goal. Rather, we demonstrate that his Nature articles were connected to a larger project that inspired Minakata for much of his life, a descriptive sociology of Japan. For this descriptive sociology, Minakata wished to construct a new form of historical analysis that drew on past Asian sources, as well as anthropological and sociological perspectives learned from British philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer and British anthropologists such as Edward Clodd, Edward Tylor and Andrew Lang. Minakata's writings reveal him to be much more than a conduit of information about Asia. He was also a pioneering global intellectual who demonstrated how Asian science complemented Western science.