Of Skins and Workers
Of Skins and Workers
Producing the Buraku
The tannery produces leather; the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) produces webpages, U.N. documents, and other representations of the Buraku situation. As much as these processes produce objects central to the contemporary Buraku situation, they also demand certain practices from the people who produce these objects. Following the jobs of Tanimoto-san in the tannery and Malaya-san at IMADR, this chapter provides an ethnographic description of the work, the people, and the institutions involved in the day-to-day operations of the current Buraku situation. It revisits linguistic anthropology’s contention that signification is an achievement, discussed in the introduction, to examine how people and objects, as much as words, are also achieved in concrete interaction. It explores the uneven dynamic between these two types of labor—the labor of representation and the labor represented. This chapter contends that the work entailed in this split between narrating and narrated creates not only commodities or information but also a relationship between kinds of subjects, who are recognizable as either political actors or as evidence of discrimination.
Keywords: factory labor, NGOs, immaterial and material labor, humanitarianism
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