Minoru Hokari

Gurindji Journey: a Japanese Historian in the Outback Minoru Hokari

After immersing himself in the culture of a remote Australian Indigenous community for close to a year, the young Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari emerged with a new world view. Gurindji Journey tells of Hokari s experience living with the Gurindji people of Daguragu and Kalkaringi in the Northern Territory of Australia, absorbing their way of life, and beginning to understand Aboriginal modes of seeing and being. This compelling book, published in English posthumously, seven years after the author s death, is a personal, philosophical, lyrical record of his journey into Indigenous Australian culture. Part memoir, part history, part theory, Gurindji Journey is the story of Hokari s discovery of Gurindji modes of history and historical practice. It is a breathtaking work that opens up new pathways for approaching cross-cultural history, anthropology and historical epistemology. It will appeal equally to historians of place and oral traditions, readers in Indigenous cosmology and customs, theory lovers, anthropologists and anyone interested in Australian Aboriginal history and culture.

Gurindji Journey makes an important contribution to indigenous and subaltern histories without the usual dryness of academic prose. Hokari s insights into different ways of perceiving the past are fresh and illuminating. (Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago)

A playful, whimsical opus of integrity, imagination, and breathtaking audacity, Gurindji Journey will make a significant interdisciplinary impact. (Ann McGrath, Australian National University)

Published in the United States and Canada by University of Hawaii Press