The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan

Cornerstone of the landholding system underpinning elite power, the estate, or shoen, has long been recognized as the central economic institution of medieval Japan. Thomas Keirstead argues that the estate system constituted more than a type of landownership. In rent rolls, land registers, maps, and other data describing individual estates, he discerns a cultural system, a framework that produced and shaped meaning for estate residents and proprietors. As his discussion of peasant uprisings reveals, the system did not define a stable, closed structure, but was built upon contested terrain.This book draws on the works of Foucault, de Certeau, and Geertz, among others, to illuminate the presuppositions about space and society that underwrote estate holding. It traces how the system reordered the social and physical landscape, clearing the ground for shoen and establishing the terms that specified identity for both rulers and subjects. Estate holders, seeking to counter the fluid movement of populations across estate boundaries, pressed into service a social distinction between ''peasants'' and ''wanderers.'' Peasant rebels made use of the fiction that the estate comprised a natural community in order to resist proprietorial exactions. In all these instances, Keirstead contends, the estate system reveals its governing logic: social and political divisions were articulated in spatial terms; power was exercised (and contested) through geography.