Browse

This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. The author of this book gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. The text weaves together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world. As the book explores the culture of the kazoku, it places each subject in its historical context, and analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders. But the book is not simply about the elite, but about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, this book focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers lived. The book explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. It highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The book brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period—a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. It focuses on what it calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies, and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. The book casts its net widely. It not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, the book argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? This book answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.

“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.

A study of the political, social, and cultural history of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan, this book treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial site for the development of new state structures and new forms of social power. Focusing on the years of rapid industrialization and imperialist expansion (1895 to 1945), it challenges widely held conceptions of a Japan that did not, until recently, experience delinquency and related youth problems. The author reconstructs numerous individual life stories in the worlds of home, school, work, and the streets, and relates the changes that took place during this time of social transformation to the broader processes of capitalist development, nation-state formation, and imperialism.

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.

This book provides a fascinating look at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihādists. Drawing on a long-term fieldwork in the disputed borderlands between Pakistan and India, the book explains how refuge-seeking has become a socially and politically debased practice in the Kashmir region and why this devaluation has turned refugee men into potential militants. It reveals the fraught social processes by which individuals and families produce and maintain a modern jihād, and how Muslim refugees have forged an Islamic notion of rights—a hybrid of global political ideals that adopts the language of human rights and humanitarianism as a means to rethink refugees' positions in transnational communities. Jihād is no longer seen as a collective fight for the sovereignty of the Islamic polity, but instead as a personal struggle to establish the security of Muslim bodies against political violence, torture, and rape. The book describes how this new understanding has contributed to the popularization of jihād in the Kashmir region, decentered religious institutions as regulators of jihād in practice, and turned the families of refugee youths into the ultimate mediators of entrance into militant organizations. This provocative book challenges the idea that extremism in modern Muslim societies is the natural by-product of a clash of civilizations, of a universal Islamist ideology, or of fundamentalist conversion.

Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of migration laws and labor policies, the often poignant and painful experiences of migrant mothers, and the ambivalent roles of fathers. Within the context of contemporary global capitalism, this research yields a deeper and fuller understanding of the practical problems and the cruel disappointments faced by those who take part in “guest worker” programs. New insights about the problem—or the crisis—of temporary migration, which is too often not temporary, are revealed through ethnographic research that attends to the everyday lives and stories of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies. The book’s arguments are threefold. First, temporary migrant workers are never only workers. They are people too. But the women who dare to become mothers are often deemed not only bad workers, but also ungrateful or immoral women. Second, the laws and policies designed to enforce a rotating door for workers and to prevent overstaying and illegal work, often create the opposite results. Some women overstay and become pregnant, and many overstay because they are pregnant. Third, women who return home as “single mothers” face severe stigma and economic pressures that propel them to continue in a migratory cycle of atonement: an ongoing, self-perpetuating, precarious pattern of migration. Mothers and babies thus reveal the inequalities of citizenship and belonging and the precariousness of migrant labor.

How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven chapters explore these and other questions here. They concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. The chapters that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies which must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.

The past two centuries have witnessed tremendous upheavals in every aspect of Chinese culture and society. At the level of everyday life, some of the most remarkable transformations have occurred in the realm of gender. This book is a mix of illuminating historical and ethnographic studies of gender from the 1700s to the present. The chapters are organized in pairs that alternate in focus between femininity and masculinity, between subjects traditionally associated with feminism (such as family life) and those rarely considered from a gendered point of view (like banditry). The chapters provide a wealth of interesting detail on such varied topics as court cases involving widows and homosexuals; ideal spouses of early-twentieth-century radicals; changing images of prostitutes; the masculinity of qigong masters; sexuality in the era of reform; and the eroticization of minorities.

Based on official Chinese sources as well as intensive interviews with Hong Kong residents formerly employed in mainland factories, this book's neo-traditional image of communist society in China covers topics with respect to China and other communist countries, but also industrial relations and comparative social science.

Nation building and the construction of citizenship, so often conducted—or coerced—from the center, are all too commonly studied from the center as well. This book moves the view of cultural citizenship to the periphery—specifically to the perspective of hinterland groups in Indonesia; the Philippines; and Sarawak, East Malaysia—to show that notions of nationhood and citizenship are not given, but created in dialogue between the state and local communities. Written by an emergent generation of anthropologists, its chapters address the question of how the identities of peoples whose lives are “marginal” to the modern nation-state have nonetheless been shaped by the impingement of the nation-state on their worlds. Together, the chapters contribute to understanding how cultural diversity in some parts of Southeast Asia has been reconfigured as modern states have promoted distinctive and powerfully backed “imaginings” of nations.

More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today—the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in Japan. The book explores commonalities and contradictions in the Korean diasporic experience, touching on such issues as citizenship and belonging, the personal and the political, and homeland and hostland.

The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. With this in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, the book looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. This analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. This book shows how and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.

Diva Nation explores the constructed nature of female iconicity. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, each chapter critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate, or censure. Diva Nation stems from our curiosity over the insistent presence of female figures who refuse to sit quietly on the sidelines of history but have not been admitted into mainstream scholarship or routine knowledge. Our case studies move beyond archival portraits to consider historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. We ask how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics. She is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, yet her unavoidability also makes her a special problem for patriarchal culture. Charting the waxing and waning of the diva story helps illuminate national narratives and assists us in understanding the ways the nation is imbricated with notions of gender, nostalgia, and identity politics.

While many have studied China's recent rise as an economic power, China itself does not exist solely in the economic realm. Ordinary Chinese still place intense value on moral obligations and the nature of the social ties that connect them to others. This study explores the moral sphere as a key to understanding how rural Chinese experience and talk about their lives in this period of rapid economic transformation. The author, who spent time in a village in southeast China's Guangdong Province over the course of a decade and a half, examines both continuities and changes in the local culture. Although some have suggested that the reform period in China has been characterized by moral cynicism, this book finds that villagers appeal to a vibrant array of moral discourses when choosing a path of personal action or evaluating the behavior of others.

This book challenges the notion that globalized social formations emerged solely in the Global North prior to impacting the Global South. Instead, such globalized formations have been constituted, transformed, and propelled through diverse, site-specific social interactions that complicate and defy divisions between “global” and “local.” The book brings the reader into the lives of Chinese experts and scientists, officials, villagers, and expatriate conservationists who were caught up in environmental trends over the past twenty-five years. It reveals how global environmentalism has been enacted and altered in the People’s Republic of China, often with unanticipated effects, such as the rise of indigenous rights, or the reconfiguration of human/animal relationships, fostering what rural villagers refer to as “the revenge of wild elephants.”

Life on the frontier suggests excitement, danger, and backbreaking labor. In this book, the frontier is the Highlands region of what is now Papua New Guinea—a part of the world largely unexplored by Westerners as late as 1950. In the next five years, a dozen pioneering anthropologists followed closely on the heels of “first contact” patrols. Their innovative fieldwork is well documented, and now, in this intimate and detailed autobiographical collection, we learn what being on the frontier was like for the ethnographers themselves. The concluding chapter to this book points out that early work among the peoples of the Central Highlands not only influenced all subsequent understanding of Highland cultures, but also had a profound impact on the field of anthropology.

This book analyzes new configurations of marriage, immigration, and sovereignty emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Focused on marital immigration from China to Taiwan, the book documents how Taiwanese bureaucrats and policymakers produce much-desired sovereignty effects through regulating Chinese spouses’ migration trajectory and managing the threat of similarity they represent. Through tracing parallels between the predicaments of marital immigrants from China and Taiwanese state actors, the book examines the tensions that arise when similarity becomes the starting point from which states craft legal and regulatory remedies to de facto sovereignty. It argues that this group of exceptional immigrants has become necessary to Taiwan’s fragile integrity as a recognized nation-state, and it shows how intimate attachments and affective investments infuse the governmental practices that regulate immigration and produce citizenship and sovereignty. The book exposes the social, political, and subjective consequences of life on the margins of citizenship and sovereignty.