Kären Wigen

Kären Wigen (1958 - ) is an American historian and geographer, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Stanford University who specializes in East Asia. She teaches Japanese history and history of cartography.

Education and career

Kären Wigen graduated from University of Michigan in 1980, where she studied Japanese Literature, then earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in the field of geography in 1990.

Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), explored southern Nagano Prefecture in Japan and how the silk industry transformed it. She also studied that locality in her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912(2010), exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism. Her third book, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997), co-authored with Martin Lewis, explains why the present system of classifying certain landmasses as "continents" derived more from historical and political reasons than from natural geographical features.Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps,with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas (forthcoming 2016).

Awards and honors

The Making of Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 won the 1992 John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association. In the spring of 2015, she gave the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures at Harvard University on the topic "Where in the World? Mapmaking at the Asia-Pacific Margin, 1600-1900."

Impact and reactions

A Malleable Map, wrote one reviewer, examines how “protoindustrial enterprises” such as sericulture and papercraft appeared on maps and reflected larger economic and political changes over roughly four centuries from the Tokugawa period through the Meiji period. Wigen focuses on how the relationship between regional and national identities “played an integral role in the creation of modern Japan” (p. 19). She argues that the pictorial and nonpictorial ways in which the geographical location of Shinano was shown redefined the ways in which people conceived of the place. These ways were "malleable" because they changed according to the needs and priorities of Tokugawa shoguns, merchants, Meiji officials, travelers, and scholars.

Reviewers also generally welcomed The Myth of Continents. One noted that readers would find it a "useful volume" which dealt with Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Orientalism, postcolonial thought, and geographic education. Because it summarized classic and contemporary research, the volume was "an important stepping-stone between frequently obtuse, jargon-laden academic works on the one hand, and popular views of geography on the other." Lewis and Wigen's concern is metageography, which they define as "the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world" They find that geographies are "much more than just the ways in which societies are stretched across the earth's surface. They also include the contested, arbitrary, power-laden, and often inconsistent ways in which those structures are represented epistemologically."

Major publications

• Wigen, Kären (1995). The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Wigen, Kären; Lewis, Martin W. (1997). The Myth of Continents : A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520207424. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Wigen, Kären; Bentley, Jerry H.; Bridenthal, Renate (2007). Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 9780824830274. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Wigen, Kären (2010). A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520259188. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)

References

• Department of History (2015), Kären Wigen {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Wigen, Kären 1958- WorldCat Authority Page.