Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation, and Power in Japan and Other Societies

By Joy Hendry

Book Overview

Wrapping Culture examines problems of intercultural communication and the possibilities for misinterpretation of the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Starting with an examination of Japanese gift-wrapping, Joy Hendry demonstrates how our expectations are often influenced by cultural factors which may blind us to an appreciation of underlying intent. She extends this approach to the study of polite language as the wrapping of thoughts and intentions, garments as body wrappings, constructions and gardens as wrapping of space. Hendry shows how this extends even to the ways in which people may be wrapped in seating arrangements, or meetings and drinking customs may be constrained by temporal versions of wrapping. Throughout the book, Hendry considers ways in which groups of people use such symbolic forms to impress and manipulate one another, and points out a Western tendency to underestimate such nonverbal communication, or reject it as mere decoration. She presents ideas that should be valid in any intercultural encounter and demonstrates that Japanese culture, so often thought of as a special case, can supply a model through which we can formulate general theories about human behavior.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198280289
• ISBN13: 9780198280286
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Japanology Classic

This is an excellent book about Japan - one of the best books of Japanology, up their with Benedict's Chrysanthemum, Doi's Amae/Dependence, and Nakane's Verticle Soceity and other sleeper, Nakashima Yoshimichi's "Urusai Nihonjin no Watash". This book reads a little like a series of lectures, upon which I guess it was based going for breadth, and a considerable degree of repetition. I would have liked to read more about "why" (but then see below). And the style is couched in antrhopologist speak (e.g. calling her friends and aquaintances in Japan "informants," ho ho) but then scholars have to tow the jargon if they are to be accepted as scholars. I would recommend this book to anyone as a fun and informative back door to understanding Japanese society, and as food for further thought. If I might be allowed to highlight one point, that I wish Hendry had addressed further... She cricises Barthes' (and Maruyama Masao's?) "empty center" theory with reference to the imperial palace, saying (in a moment of enlightenment, about herself too on p109) "In fact, contrary to Barthe's expectation, I think that the place does irradiate power of a certain sort, and the problem may lie in our Western propensity to want always to be unwrapping, deconstructing, seeing the objects at the center of things." Here I think that Hendry really hits the nail on the head, but in so doing she challenges the notion of Japan being a "Wrapping" culture. Japan is a "wrapping culture" so long as you are a Westerner that expects there to be something inside. To the Japanese wrapping is not wrapping, but the real deal. The problem is that we attempt to find something inside. Perhaps the same criticism could be leveled at this review.