Linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto had a clear plan for her fellowship year at the Stanford Humanities Center.
Freed of her responsibilities as chair of the department of Asian languages, she finally would have time to analyze hours and hours of taped interviews with elderly Japanese women, looking for signs of age discrimination in a society where 20 percent of the population is over 65. Matsumoto had outlined chapters for her project, “Understanding and Misunderstanding Discourse of Elderly Japanese Women,” and was looking forward to the solitude of her new office. “I wanted to use the time to think, rather than always produce, produce, produce.”
Matsumoto is one of seven Stanford faculty on Humanities Center fellowships this academic year. Eight faculty from other colleges and universities also are in residence, along with graduate students working on dissertations, and the occasional undergraduate. Founded in 1980, the center also hosts interdisciplinary research workshops and public events.
This year’s faculty fellows come from a swath of disciplines across the humanities: music, anthropology, English, art, history, philosophy, religion and linguistics, as well as Asian languages. “In the beginning, we were complaining about the lunches that we had to have together,” says Matsumoto, who typically hunkers down to read incoming e-mail in her office while she munches on a sandwich. “We thought, ‘We have to talk with all these people?’”
But talk they do, over lunch, every day. “I’d forgotten that I enjoy those things,” Matsumoto says. “How civilized it is to have conversations—some of them intellectual, and some of them quite silly—rather than just go through the day.”
In early February, it was Matsumoto’s turn to give a presentation about her research project to the assembled lunchroom crowd. She talked about how elderly women in Japan are seen as separate from—even invisible to—the general populace, and as heavy consumers of health and social services. Young interviewers who had talked with women in their 70s identified them as being in ill health, lonely and disengaged. The interviewers categorized many of the women’s statements as “painful self-disclosure” (PSD).
But when Matsumoto listened to the same tapes, she heard women telling comical stories about their husbands, and laughing about a handsome young man at a spa they frequented. The PSD perceptions, Matsumoto suggested, “exist only in the younger generation’s imagination, not in elders’ lives.”
Matsumoto wondered aloud if elders, whose lives are in transition, might be compared with adolescents. And that’s when the surprises began, with faculty from distant fields asking questions that had struck them.
English professor Rob Polhemus, a specialist in 19th-century British literature, suggested that the Victorians had seen old age not as a period of disease and senility, but simply as one more stage of life. Art historian Bryan Wolf referred Matsumoto to the work of historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, who has studied ordinary women from 1800s American society. And Wendy Larson, a professor of East Asian languages at the University of Oregon, spent considerable follow-up time in Matsumoto’s office, discussing parallels in contemporary Chinese culture. “What’s quite amazing is that people who are not in your field are very helpful intellectually,” Matsumoto says.
As a result of her conversations with colleagues at the center, Matsumoto is rethinking how to frame her research, perhaps examining foundational friendships among women. “It’s said that in the States, women may feel more rivalry,” she says. “I don’t know how true that is, but in Japan it’s not as pronounced, and friendship is very important when we’re old.”
As her sabbatical year nears an end, Matsumoto says that although she may not have written the chapters she intended, “I’m left with something bigger.” The direction of her research is changing, her ideas are expanding, and she’s once again feeling the excitement of the intellectual process. “I feel like I’m living.”
