The Ecology of Place in Neil Gunn’s Highland River and Nishida Kitarō’s basho

Abstract: This essay describes similarities between the 1930s work of Neil Gunn – particularly the novel Highland River (1937) – and the work of the Kyoto School of philosophy from the same time – Watsuji Tetsurō, Nishitani Keiji, and particularly Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s concept of basho , roughly place , from the same time shares much with Gunn’s understanding of an ecological locality, of a non-dualist belonging that binds person and world – as in other ways does 1930s work by Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. This essay argues that such a grasp of basho across both situations is post-imperialist, wresting particular ecologies, forms of experience, and active histories, from a Newtonian concept of absolute space whose aim is to open all places to a universal evaluability. It reads Scottish and Japanese understandings of basho as responses to the British empire in particular, and argues that this is not coincidental: Japan’s rising universalism during the Meiji Era, often taken as the country’s modernity as such, was in large part an official thinking planted by representatives of the long Scottish Enlightenment; and the scandalous overcoming of this narrowed modernity was really the overcoming of Scoto-British unified space. Numerous accounts of the ecology of Scottish writing of the early twentieth century, and of the millennial era, have recognised something like this commitment to basho in a reverence for place that tends towards the non-egotistic, non-proprietorial, and even animist; what has gone relatively unremarked so far is the extraordinary chiming of this emplaced consciousness with Japanese philosophy of the same time.