Astronomy, as both a scientific discipline and a cultural practice, holds immense potential as a site for education and engagement. Since the advent of modernity, astronomical observatories have been positioned within a canonical lineage of scientific knowledge production that has excluded diverse epistemologies, bodies, and cultural narratives. However, from a cultural astronomy perspective, the sky has always been a site of multiplicity, where different communities have developed distinct interpretations and modes of application of celestial phenomena.
The Japanese Archipelago is itself a vivid example of astronomical multitude, given the different geocultural positions of Hokkaido, the Ryukyu Islands, and Chubu. Hokkaido is shaped by Ainu cosmology and its northern position, the Ryukyu Islands are rooted in lunar agricultural practices, and Chubu is a land of Shinto and Buddhist cosmologies and agricultural festivals centered around star myths such as Tanabata. These traditions reveal that astronomy is never singular, but rather entangled with local ecologies, belief systems, and temporalities. Similar multiplicities are echoed in other archipelagic and continental contexts such as in Greece, where I grew up.
With this project, I seek to investigate how such cosmological narratives are embedded in material culture—specifically through archeological and museum artifacts such as the 星見石 (hoshimi-ishi), archaeological stone markers traditionally used for celestial observation, and celestial globes from the Edo period, as well as other objects that visually or materially encode astronomical knowledge. My goal is to map the multiplicities of Japanese astronomy through curatorial practices of digital archives, as well as cultural and sensory analysis.