Carmen Blacker

Author
Carmen Blacker (1924-2009). At the end of the war she carried on her studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, graduating in 1947. She then went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford, followed by a further year’s study at the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She then travelled to Japan and became one of the first foreigners to study at Keio after the WWII. Her subject was the life and thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi, published as a monograph in 1964. In 1955 she was appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge where she was to spend the rest of her life, teaching and publishing the results of her research until her retirement in 1991. She served as President of the Folklore Society from 1982-84, was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown by the Japanese Government in 1988, made a fellow of the British Academy in 1989, won the Minakata Kumagusu prize in 1997, and was awarded the OBE in 2004. As some of these awards suggest, her interests gradually shifted from Meiji thought to folklore and religious practices in Japan. It turned out that her real strength was as an indefatigable anthropologist, an excellent fieldworker, always ready to experience pilgrimage and ritual at first hand, always ready with her notebook. The result was the famous The Catalpa Bow: A Study in Shamanistic Practices in Japan (1975), which has excited generations of young scholars ever since and has been described as one of the three best books ever written on Japan. It was translated and published in Japanese in 1979.