CEAS Anthropology Colloquium Series
Japan’s internationally famous contemporary artist, Murakami Takashi, coined the term “Superflat” to refer to an indigenous lineage of art that emphasized surface over depth, motion over stasis, playful aesthetic effects, and a proliferation of perspectives over so-called one-point perspective. “Superflat,” in Murakami’s formulation, also refers to the lack of distinction between high art and mass culture, culture and subculture, and art and craft in Japanese society. Murakami curated three important exhibitions using this rubric of the “Superflat,” including one in 2005 at New York’s Japan...
This talk examines situations in which local people thinly disguise certain illegal activities while local officials avert their gaze. Examples range from religious rituals claiming to be athletic or agricultural competitions in Taiwan to large and public “underground” churches or extra-legal religious NGOs in China. This governance by turning a blind eye has grown increasingly common in China in the post-Mao period and was very common in Taiwan under the colonial and later authoritarian Nationalist regimes. As a form of responsive authoritarianism, blind-eye governance offers some...
Professor Tsuda will speak on the history of Japanese migration to Brazil and return migration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan during the Late 1980s
This lecture will explore the question of where one looks for Buddhism in contemporary Japan. How do sects and temples actually operate? What is the relationship between institutional forms (training monasteries, sectarian research centres, universities, and sect administration) and the local temple manifestations of Buddhism? How do sectarian ideals (teachings, doctrine) actually play out in contemporary Japanese Buddhist organizations? In this paper I will limit my exploration of these issues to tensions over ideas of “edification” or “propagation” (kyōka 教化) between sect intellectuals and...
As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country, it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy in a context where its status as a sovereign nation-state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan’s largest immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions across the Taiwan Strait and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses’ marital motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and marital...
Copying and counterfeiting dominate contemporary porcelain production in Jingdezhen. A set of ideas about markets and a specific organization of production encourage ceramists to copy and counterfeit as they try to make a profit from producing porcelain. Jingdezhen ceramic industry workers view market relations as impersonal, market actors as privatized, and market activity as dishonest and potentially extremely lucrative. They produce porcelain using a highly specialized, multi-part division of labor that is unregulated by the state. These ideas and this method of ceramics production...
In the context of the restructuring of the economy, the re-shaping of urban space, and a new culture of consumption, this paper examines the mobility and views of mobility of two different groups of drivers in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming: taxi drivers (who drive to earn a living) and “day trippers” (who drive primarily for weekend leisure excursions). The paper highlights the contradictions of “automobility” – where new forms and ideas of mobility emerge along with new boundaries and conceptual limitations. The paper argues that most taxi drivers, formerly laid-off factory...
Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in – let alone organize – public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf states. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong - mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women – have become highly active organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong’s migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied...
This presentation explores how the privatization of home ownership and a rising material culture of consumerism reconfigure the intimate realm of self-worth, love, and marriage in urban China. Through several ethnographic cases, my research shows how owning a private house has gradually become the decisive factor in considering marriage and a focal point of contention in dissolving that relationship. In this context, I suggest that self-worth has become more and more individualized and materialized through the idiom of property possession. After thirty years of economic reform, the socially...
Citizens of the developed world can enjoy developed world privileges in almost any country-even if they’re not citizens of that country or even of any developed country. My talk examines how and why only-children who grew up in the People’s Republic of China tried to become such developed world citizens through study abroad. I look at how they made decisions about transnational migration, and how their decisions illustrate how the global neoliberal system shapes and is shaped by the experiences, agency, and lifecourses of individuals. My research is based on 33 months of participant...
Professor Cohen will present a new paper (to be distributed to the audience), as well as discuss his recently published book, Kinship, Contract, Community and State, especially chapters 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9.
The talk will explore postwar Nihonjinron writings as a way of translating prewar national ideologies into ideas that could be compatible with postwar democracy. The humanistic portrayals of community put forward by Nihonjinron writers drew on prewar notions of familiality and homogeneity, ideas closely associated fascism. The talk considers the importance of Nihonjinron in forging a language that could accommodate the past while at the same time offering ideas about community that could challenge Western liberalism, specifically its division between public exchange and private beliefs....
Hundreds of Okinawans still pay annual memorial pilgrimages to Micronesian island sites where their loved ones perished in the American attack in June, 1944. Their reception by indigenous communities is partly conditioned by postwar patterns of Japanese investment and tourism, as well as by widely sensed bonds of enduring kinship across many indigenous and Okinawan family networks. On Saipan, an elderly Chamorro man, who still speaks fluent Japanese learned during the Japanese colonial period from 1914-1944, explains his continuing efforts to care for a Shinto shrine on his land in terms of...
Death and what lies beyond is unknowable for those who are alive: “After all, no one has ever come back from there to tell us what it’s like.” However, death and the world beyond is imagined in this world, and this imagination may itself be of considerable analytical importance, in understanding not just individuals, but the sociocultural structurings of society. In this paper, based on extensive interviews with Japanese adults about death and what lies beyond, I examine the Japanese dialectic of individual and society in the imagination of the other world and the ongoing creation of society...
There have been many challenges against the assumption that humans indeed “communicate” with language and other symbols. Today’s talk is, first, to suggest that we often fail to notice that we do not communicate and, second, examine the negative power of no-communication, while exploring factors responsible for non-communication, including the “field of meaning” (beyond multivocality) and quotidian aesthetic assigned to some symbols. Objectified and non-objectified symbols will also be compared and contrasted in reference of political/religious power. The examples chosen are the roses...
In this paper, I turn to an intense Japanese public debate about the nexus of neoliberal economic reforms and the loss of hope in society. In particular, I attempt an ethnographically inspired reading of the internationally acclaimed Japanese novelist Murakami Ryu’s 2000 novel,Kibo no kuni no ekuzodasu (Exodus from a country of hope) and other writings on hope, neoliberalism and financial globalization. I draw particular attention to Murakami’s distinctively ambivalent stance toward the condition of no hope. I juxtapose Murakami’s ambivalence toward this widely shared sense of loss with...
This talk highlights the underground world of Japan’s increasingly popular host club scene, where mostly young, working-class men “sell” romance, love, and sometimes sex to indulge their female clients’ fantasy, often for exorbitant sums of money. I explore this commercialization of feelings, emotions, and romantic relationships - what I call “affect economy”- in the context of Japan’s recent socioeconomic restructuring, a reaction to globalization that is reshaping the nation’s labor and commodity forms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Tokyo between 2003 and 2005, I argue that...
The notion of “quality” (suzhi) has become a cultural determination of the value form of labor in China’s economic reforms, marking the divide between material and immaterial labor. As a specifically Chinese articulation of the concept of human capital, suzhi must be understood within the frame of the global economy. In addition, an accounting of its cultural formation in the Chinese context offers a critical perspective on new conceptions of value circulating more globally.
Japan has a constitution guaranteeing a civilized standard of living to all and was once admired for combining high economic growth with equitable distribution of wealth. Nowadays, however, fubyōdōka (widening inequality) and wākingu pua (working poor) are media buzzwords, and poverty issues are being treated with new urgency. Homeless people are the most dramatic and noticeable symptom of poverty and inequality. From the late 1990s, blue tents and shacks in parks and on riverbanks, and cardboard boxes around stations and public buildings, have become an inescapable feature of city life. More...
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