2024 Volume 317 Pages 118-136
A new academic discipline called “psychological constructivism of affect” has emerged in the field of psychology of affect in recent years. On the other hand, modern folklore studies has not carried out the intention of Yanagita Kunio, the founder of folklore studies in Japan, that “the discipline of minkan densho needs to collaborate with psychology.” In this situation, a new field called history of emotions was born in the field of history, having been inspired by psychological constructivism of affect.
As the collaboration between history and psychology progresses, how can folklore studies collaborate with psychology? With this issue in mind, this paper reinterprets Yanagitaʼs minkan densho from the viewpoint of psychological constructivism of affect.
Specifically, this paper reinterprets Yanagitaʼs argument that minkan densho is “what has been inherited from the ancestors or what has been imbibed unconsciously.” That is, minkan densho is a process of mental inheritance transcending generations consisting of a mechanism of “inheritance” termed “predictive processing” and a mechanism of “influence” termed “co-construction of affect.”
By reinterpreting Yanagitaʼs minkan densho as described above, this paper points out that concepts such as “inheritance” and “influence” in Yanagitaʼs minkan densho are closely related to modern psychology, and therefore, folklore studies and modern psychology have the potential of “collaboration” through reinterpretation of Yanagitaʼs minkan densho.
