Moriarty the Patriot:
Sherlockian Manga and the Game of City Living
Keywords:
comics, manga, sociological imagination, habitus, illusio, doxaAbstract
Manga is a form of Japanese comics that have become a global source of discourse, arguably reaching intellectual heights. It is often considered pure entertainment, although it contains potential for self-education. Barberis and Grüning (2021) observed that sociologists’ interest in comics is older than one may suspect, traceable to at least the 1940s. This essay analyses the portrayal of urban living in a popular Japanese manga title, from the sociological perspective of social stratification and diversity. Using thematic analysis of Volumes 1 and 2 of Moriarty the Patriot, this essay highlights the habitus that a reader can develop from reading these manga, regarding the spoken and unspoken rules of living in cities corresponding to Bourdieu’s concepts of illusio and doxa – formal and informal “rules of the game”, in navigating the dimensions of social stratification. A short public opinion survey was also conducted to gauge the public perception of manga. Manga could act as an unofficial walkthrough, a dramaturgical map of the lived realities of city life, a tool for socialisation. This study corresponds to the following SDGs: 3. Good Health and Well-Being; 4. Quality Education; 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities.
Author Biography
Rachel Suet Kay Chan, Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA)
Dr. Rachel CHAN Suet Kay is a Research Fellow (Senior Lecturer) at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), National University of Malaysia (UKM). She specialises in cultural sociology, having written on cultural capital flows between East Asia and the West, and most recently, cultural heritage. She received her PhD in Sociology and MA in Sociology by Research from the University of Malaya; and a BSc (Hons) in Sociology and Diploma in Economics from the University of London.
References
Aggleton, J. (2018). Defining digital comics: a British Library perspective. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Barberis, E., & Grüning, B. (2021). Doing social sciences via comics and graphic novels. An introduction. Sociologica, 15(1), 125-142.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). A social critique of the judgement of taste. Traducido del francés por R. Nice. Londres, Routledge.
Brenner, R.E. (2007). Understanding Manga and Anime. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Chan, R. S. K. (2017). Game of translations: Virtual community doing English translations of Chinese online fiction. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 9(1): 39-55.
Chan, R.S.K. (2017). Ah Beng Subculture and the Anti-Capital of Social Exclusion. UKM Ethnic Studies Paper Series, Institut Kajian Etnik (KITA). Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Chan, R.S.K. (2021). Ah Beng Subculture and The Anti-Capital of Social Exclusion. Bangi: UKM Press.
Chan, R. S. K. (2021). Manga as Educational Tool for Sociology: A Comparison of a Japanese Manga and a Malaysian Manga. Proceedings of 4th USM-International Conference on Social Sciences (USM- ICOSS) 2021. https://soc.usm.my/images/pdf/2021/Proceedings%20of%204th%20USM%20icoss%20combined%20LATEST%2025-5-2023%20update.pdf
Chan, R. S. K. (2023). Towards Manga as Cultural Potpourri: Dramaturgy of Ethnicity and Diversity in Selected Malaysian Manga. Journal of Ethnic and Diversity Studies (JOEDS), 1(1). https://joeds.com.my/index.php/home/article/view/7
Cohn, N., & Campbell, H. (2015). Navigating comics II: Constraints on the reading order of comic page layouts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(2), 193-199.
Collison, P. (2011). Oxford Town and Gown. Amberley Publishing Limited.
Cuille, T.B. (1997). Bourdieu: Illusion and the Illusio. Retrieved from: www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/boon-pap.html
Giddens, A. & Sutton, P. W. (2013). Sociology, 7th Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gruenberg, S.M. (1944). The Comics as a Social Force. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 18(4): 204–213. https://doi.org/10.2307/2262693
Harrington, S., Warren, S. & Rayner, C. (2015). Human resource management practitioners’ responses to workplace bullying: cycles of symbolic violence, Organization, 22(3): 368–389.
Holmes, C. (1997) ‘Cosmopolitan London’, in A.J. Kershen (ed.), London: The Promised Land?, Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 10-37.
Igarashi, H. & Saito, H. (2014). Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital: Exploring the intersection of globalization, education and stratification. Cultural Sociology, 8(3): 222–239
Kenworthy, L. (2007). Inequality and sociology. American Behavioral Scientist, 50(5): 584-602.
Mickwitz, N. (2020). Comics telling refugee stories. Documenting trauma in comics: Traumatic pasts, embodied histories, and graphic reportage, 277-296.
Power, N.O. (2009). God of comics: Osamu Tezuka and the creation of post-World War II manga. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.
Orenstein, G. A. & Lewis, L. (2022). Eriksons stages of psychosocial development. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32310556/
Moriarty the Patriot. [English Sub] | Muse Malaysia. YouTube.com. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWBgW1RHJJCSHmEhcD7EXQxwAEwCnxD29
Moriarty the Patriot. The untold story of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest rival, Moriarty! Viz.com. https://www.viz.com/moriarty-the-patriot
Moriarty the Patriot. https://moriarty-anime.com/onair/global
Statt, D. (1995) Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660-1760, Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and racial studies, 30(6):1024-1054.
Weise, B. G., & Newton, M. S. (2017). Sherlock Holmes: A Character of the City. MA Thesis, Leiden University.
Wong, W. S. (2006). Globalizing manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and beyond. Mechademia, 1(1): 23-45.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Rachel Suet Kay Chan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): This license allows for non-commercial use, sharing, and distribution of the work, but prohibits modification, adaptation, and derivative works.
