Plausibel und anschließbar

Studying, for me, is like riding a cheap Splash Mountain ripoff: a long, tortuously uneventful slog punctuated occasionally by rushes of excitement. In the two years I took classes in Düsseldorf, my greatest moment of excitement was the discovery of an essay called Die soziale Konstrukt des Fremden (The Social Construct of the Other), by Alois Hahn. In it, he systematically breaks down the characteristics of the phenomenon of "otherness" in society. It is a short, dense text that has the unmistakable mark of genius - it's filled with ideas I'd never had before that, upon reading, were so self evident as to be obvious to any fool.

I've intended to use Hahn's text as the theoretical basis for my master's thesis ever since I read it last year. Now that I've dug a bit deeper into the question of Buraku history, I'm finding that Hahn alone isn't going to be able to pull off the trick of explaining the curious combination of phenomena that make up the particular flavor of "otherness" enjoyed by the Burakumin and, historically, by the dozens of groups that eventually came under that label. I'm going to have to find other approaches to the question of otherness, stretch them out a bit, sew them together, patch in a few of my own ideas, and try to make a reasonable theoretical basis for the analysis I'm trying to pull off.

This is a much more difficult nut to crack than I thought it would be. At the heart of it, my question is really quite simple; how were the Burakumin seen before 1871? How were they seen after 1871? How much of the change can be attributed to their change in legal status due to the 1871 Buraku Emancipation Edict?

The more I learn, the more questions I end up with. There is, first, the huge problem that "Burakumin" as a unitary, nation-wide status never really existed until it was legally abolished - right up until the Buraku Emancipation Edict there were local rules on who was a member of an outcaste group, and what, exactly, that membership meant. That makes it very difficult to describe views of the outcastes prior to 1871 without overgeneralizing. Another problem is that, although the Burakumin were a subject of a great deal of public debate in the 1870's (precisely because of their emancipation), there wasn't a great deal written about them in the years immediately before that.

This is like walking through an infinite maze. The more you explore, the more you know, but the more you know, the more unexplored places you become aware of. It's hard to know when to stop trying to go down every path and start sketching out a map.