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Archive
Douglas
Lummis
Biography
I was born
in San Francisco in 1936, and raised partly there and partly
in the Sierra Nevada. I entered U.C. Berkeley in 1954 on a Navy
ROTC contract, and accordingly, when I graduated in 1958 I entered
the U.S. Marines for three years, the third of which I spent
in a military base on Okinawa. (Much of my life since then has
been spent trying to figure out how I could have let such a thing
happen.)
I spent the
years 1961-3 in Nara and Kyoto, Japan, and returned to U.C. Berkeley
in 1963 to study political theory, just in time for the Free
Speech Movement and all that followed. In 1968 I returned to
Japan ostensibly to write a Ph.D. thesis, but in fact spent the
better part of my time working in the anti-Vietnam war movement
there (or, at the time of this writing, "here"). I
did get the thesis done, however (A Critique of American Modernization
Theory, 1973, unpublished, available in the UCB library and probably
nowhere else). After a few years as a migratory academic worker
in Japan and in the U.S., I took a job at Tsuda College, Tokyo,
where I continued until my retirement in March, 2000.
My writings
over these years (mostly published in Japanese) have focused
on several themes: the peculiar forms that stereotyping and discrimination
take in the case of Japan (e.g. English Conversation as Ideology,
1976; A New Look at The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1982); studies
from a political theory perspective of Japan's war-renouncing
Constitution (e.g. Japan's Radical Constitution, 1987; another
work due out this year, as yet untitled); and searches for a
radical political perspective that does not depend on Marxism
(e.g. Radical Democracy, Cornell, 1996).
My first encounter with the name Ivan Illich was when I was teaching
at an experimental college in Washington State in the early '70s,
and the new age teachers would wave Deschooling Society in our
faces alleging that it proved that teaching anything of substance
to students was a violent usurpation of authority, and that we
should all be facilitators. It was only when I met Illich many
years later on one of his trips to Japan that I learned that
he was not to be blamed for his U.S. West Coast interpreters.
Participating in the Development Dictionary project was one of
the happiest academic experiences I have had, and reminded me
that mutual support, rather than mutual attack, really does produce
a higher quality of work. I hope and trust that this new gathering
in Oakland will have the same feel.
Bibliography
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