Tag Archives: East Asia

Taiwanese Aborigine Memories of Japan

Memories of its fifty years of Japanese colonial rule are very complex in Taiwan. When the Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist (KMT) party took over the island after World War II they used the term “retrocession,” emphasizing the return of Taiwan to China. “Retrocession day” is still a national holiday. However, since the eighties there has been a revisionist historiography which seeks to emphasize the unique history of Taiwan as distinct from that of China. Central to this unique history are three things: Taiwan’s Aborigine population, its long history of resistance to imperial Chinese rule, and the important role of Japan in modernizing the island. You can usually figure out what political party a Taiwanese person supports simply by asking them about the Japanese era. This is more complicated, however, with Taiwan’s Aborigine population.

The Japanese wanted to prove that they could govern Taiwan more efficiently than the British ruled in India or the Americans in the Philippines. As a result, the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was much milder than that in Korea or Mainland China … for the Han Chinese. It is thus possible for many Taiwanese to romanticize this era, as one sees in the rampant Japanese-era nostalgia that is consuming Taiwan. For the Aborigines, however, it was a different story. At the dawn of the twentieth century the mountainous parts of the island where still largely under the control of the Aborigines. The Japanese forcibly took over those areas in a genocidal campaign of violence. There is no record of the number of Aborigine lives lost, but the Japanese recorded 10,000 Japanese dead as a result of what was a largely one-sided battle. Once under Japanese rule, however, schools were set up throughout the region and many Aborigines first gained literacy at schools run by the Japanese police. When missionaries later came into the region (under the KMT), they found it easy to use Japanese language bibles. In the end, Aborigines became some of the most loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, many even volunteering to serve in the Japanese armed forces during World War II.

All this is the background for a curious political event which took place earlier this year:
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Chinese in the Pacific: a bibliography

Recently some people on the Anthropology of Oceania listserv that I subscribe to compiled a bibliography of work on the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific. It turns out that we had had this conversation before, but because our archives are so difficult to search we ended up having it again. Since I thought such a list might be interesting for SM readers I am including the bibliography here below the fold — there’s some interesting stuff in there!

Thanks to Rene van der Haar for compiling the bibliography and to everyone who contributed to it: John Barker, Niko Besnier, Neriko Doerr, Haidy Geismar, Alex Golub, Jamon Halvaksz, Paul Heikkila, Robin Hide, Stuart Kirsch, Larry Lake, Lamont Lindstrom, Jacob Love, Margaret Mackenzie, Moana Matthes, Nancy Pollock, Christine Stewart, Jaap Timmer, and Matori Yamamoto.

Some fancy formatting may have gotten lost through my cutting and pasting. Deal.
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Doing Research on Subways in Taiwan

Kerim Friedman invited me to guest blog on Savage Minds. I thought about throwing out for discussion some questions that I encountered while doing research on the subway systems in Taiwan.

My current research focuses on the subway systems in the two largest cities in Taiwan: Taipei, the capital and economic-cultural center of Taiwan, whose first subway line was completed in 1996; and Kaohsiung, the country’s hub of heavy industries and one of the world’s largest container ports, whose subway system is now under construction. I use the subway systems as a focal point to understand the regional, national, and global processes that are unfolding in Taiwan. Given that many Asian countries are investing heavily on infrastructure including highways and subways (to boost the country’s global economic competitiveness), my research is not just about Taiwan but carries comparative angles.

In the course of my research — as well as on occasions when I presented my work at professional conferences — I repeatedly faced the question: How do you do research on the subway system in a big city? Indeed, metropolitan Taipei has a population of 6 million, whereas Kaohsiung is a city of 1.5 million people. Over time, I sort of worked out an answer. My involvement with Taipei’s subways was as both a passenger and an ethnographer. That is, the subways constituted the nearly exclusive means of transportation during my stay in Taipei, except for the times when I took a taxi or was driven by friends or families (Research in Kaohsiung is a different story, as the subways are sill under construction). To acquire a broader understanding of the system, I also rode the different routes of Taipei’s subways at different hours of the day as well as on different days of the week, to observe who rode from where, and how and when. The subways also entered in literally every conversation I had with people, both native Taiwanese and foreign-born residents and visitors, in Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan (and frequently in North America). This fieldwork was blessed with the fact that the subways were, and continue to be, a novelty in the social life of Taiwan; almost everybody had something to say about their personal experience with, or perception and knowledge about, the subways. By extension, with few exceptions, my subway project seemed to generate genuine interests among the people I met, who were often eager to talk to me about the subways. In addition to participant observation, I also had formal interviews with (past and present) government officials who were in charge of the subway construction and of the making and implementation of Taipei City transportation policy prior to the subways, and with civil engineers and urban planners involved in the planning and building of Taiwan’s subway systems (in Taipei and Kaohsiung). In addition, I read intensively literature, popular reports, newspaper and magazine articles on the subways.

But again, at what point can I claim that I have a full understanding of the subway system in Taipei — or Kaohsiung? How many people do I have to interview or talk to in order to say that I have had enough? Or, to put it generally, when can one call it an end when one’s research site is a city with a few million people?

[Anru Lee is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (2004) and a co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (2004).]

Anthropology Against Its Subjects

David Price reports in “Counterpunch” on a 1943 OSS (the precursor to the CIA) document he discovered entitled “Preliminary Report on Japanese Anthropology” , a compilation of anthropological research into racial and/or cultural characteristics of the Japanese that could be “weaponized”. The report verges on the genocidal in its cold, detached consideration of means of destroying the Japanese:

The report considered a series of Japanese physical and cultural characteristics to determine if weapons could be designed to exploit any identifiable unique “racial” features. The study examined Japanese anatomical and structural features, Japanese physiological traits, Japanese susceptibility to diseases, and possible weaknesses in Japanese constitution or “nutritional weaknesses.” The OSS instructed the anthropologists and other advisors to try to conceive ways that any detectable differences could be used in the development of weapons, but they were cautioned to consider this issue “in a-moral and non-ethical terms,” with an understanding that, “if any of the suggestions contained herein are considered for action, all moral and ethical implications will be carefully studied.”

Although Ralph Linton and Harry Shapiro objected to these instructions, others — including Clyde Kluckhohn and Ernest Hooten — embraced the project, examining cultural traits like food production as well as “racial” traits like “inner ears morphologies, taste bud densities, laryngeal musculatures, intestinal lengths, and arterial systems”. In the end, little of use was turned up — a slight proclivity for respiratory infections led the anthropologists involved to recommend using anthrax as a weapon, the importance of rice in the Japanese diet and the short viability of stored rice led to recommendations aimed at the destruction of the agricultural system — and the project seems to have been abandoned. But, Price asks, “what recommendations would have been made if significant characteristics had been isolated”? And more to the point, for me: can anthropologists afford to defer the moral and ethical implications of their (our) work, trusting that such implications will be “carefully studied” by others down the line?

Perceptions of Asian Perception

A recent AP news story (discovered thanks to Photoethnography.com) claims that “Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time science has attempted to prove the uniqueness of the Asian mind. There was Swarthmore President Alfred Bloom’s 1981 book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought which claimed:

that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore “counterfactual” conceits (for example: if Gisele were fat, she wouldn’t be a supermodel).

When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans.

However, his research methodology was seriously flawed. In fact, poor translation may have been the problem:

Terry Kit-Fong Au, a native Chinese speaker and psychologist at Harvard, did not take kindly to this linguistic slight of his presumed powers of reasoning. He repeated Bloom’s experiment with one crucial change: he asked Chinese bilinguals to translate an idiomatic Chinese version of the story into English. With this translation his results were in the reverse direction from Bloom’s. Only 60% of American high school students who read the nonidiomatic versions understood the counterfactual, whereas 97% of Au’s monolingual Chinese subjects who were given an idiomatic Chinese version grasped the significance of the counterfactual.

More recently, there have been claims that Japanese have unique brains as a result of their language.

A lot of these discussions invoke the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Unfortunately, they rarely have anything to do with what Sapir or Whorf actually said.

I can’t get online access to the original scientific article cited by the Associated Press story for another six months, so I can’t tell if what we have here is poor science or (more likely) simply poor reporting. But I have a big problem with the conceptual leap taken between the following two statements:

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students — 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese — to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

“They literally are seeing the world differently,” said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

There is a big difference between how we see pictures and how we see the world. I am ready to accept that there are cultural differences (perhaps dependent upon our various traditions of visual representation) that affect how we “read” a picture, but I’m not sure that these translate into differences in how we see the world – or even what that might mean.

Paul Messaris’ 1994 book, Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality has a fairly good discussion of the state of scientific research on reading images at that time. He is primarily concerned with debunking the myth that people who have never seen a picture need to be taught how to understand visual representations. Accordingly, he recounts several studies which suggest that understanding two dimensional, black-and-white representations of the world, even abstract ones, is fairly intuitive. He highlights how such issues as the materials used and the nature of the images being portrayed can have a huge impact on reader’s ability to interpret an image.

A 1960 by William Hudson study found South African miners having difficulty interpreting smaller animals in the background as being further away; however, his study turned out to suffer from many of the same problems as Bloom’s study of Chinese counterfactuals:

The Africa depicted in these pictures — a loincloth-wearing, spear-carrying hunter in a landscape populated by big game — might still have been a reality in some parts of the continent when the research of Hudson and his successors was taking place, but it seems doubtful that the kinds of people who were actually studied in this research — South African mine laborers, Ugandan farmers — would have much direct contact at all with such situations. On the contrary, it is possible that, for many Africans, familiarity with that particular version of Africa may actually be more likely to occur secondhand – for example, through pictorial media.

Consequently, those subjects who were more experienced with pictures might also have had greater previous experience with the kind of hunting scene depicted in Hudson’s pictures, and this familiarity, rather than knowledge of pictorial codes, might account for their superior ability to form an integrated, three-dimensional percept. Data supportive of this possibility occurred in the Kilbride and Robbins study (1969), in which 10 percent of the rural residents accurately identified the picture of the elephant as that of a large animal but were apparently uncertain as to the exact nature of the animal, calling it a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, and so on. This uncertainty is consistent with the fact that the only large animal likely to be found in their own immediate environment would be a cow.

So, when Japanese and American’s are asked to look at underwater scenes and Japanese spend more time describing the background, it may not be because of “differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years,” it may just be something simple – like the fact that Americans eat a lot less seafood and aren’t used to seeing pictures of fish. It may also be that differences which have been observed in eye movement when reading Chinese and English may account for different habits of visually scanning a printed page – whether text or image; but these differences might not necessarily reflect how we visually scan the real world around us.

The Representation of Aborigines in Taiwanese Baseball

This is the third in a series of Savage Minds posts on sports and ethnic representation. The first was Oneman’s post on ethnic mascots, followed by my earlier post on ethnic soccer clubs in Australia.

This post draws on a 2000 paper (PDF) by Andrew Morris, presented at the conference Remapping Taiwan: Histories and Cultures in the Context of Globalization, as well a more recent (2004) version of Morris’ work, “Baseball, History, the Local and the Global in Taiwan,” which appeared in the book The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan.

MapleLeaf

Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 till the end of World War, when the Nationalists (Guomindang, or KMT) took over. Baseball had become popular under Japanese rule, but managed to survive KMT efforts to de-Japanify the country.
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Studying Keitai (or ‘Mobile Phones’ in Japanese)

Mizuko Ito, an anthropologist who specializes in technology and youth culture in Japan, has announced on her website that she with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda (a psychologist and a sociologist based in Japan) has co-edited a volume titled Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. (via her brother, Joi Ito)

Aside from making available the table of contents (in her post), she has also posted the introduction to the volume as a pdf file. See also some of the backcover endorsements at MIT Press, the book’s publisher.

In reading through this introduction, the following two paragraphs caught my attention. She discusses how keitai (the Japanese word for mobile phone) technology, despite the fact that it was first targetted for the savvy business person, has effected a new kind of interpersonal “intimacy.” Then from this focus on intimate social relationships she opens up her analytical aperture to discuss how it has been used “outdoors.” There she observes the way these tiny communication devices have “coloniz[ed …] the small and seemingly inconsequential in-between temporalities and spaces of everyday life.”

One cross-cutting theme is the salience of “the personal” and discourses of intimacy in keitai communications. Decisive was the shift in the late nineties from keitai primarily identified as a business tool to identification as a tool for personal communication and play. Now, even when being used for “serious” work purposes, keitai in the workplace and in public places generally (and often negatively) invoke “personal business.” Even before the keitai Internet, voice communications created a juxtaposition between private affairs and public place, tagging the keitai as a narcissistic device that invaded the communal with the demands of the personal. Now, widespread mobile email and other online communication tools mean that these intimate spheres are even more pervasively present; mobile text and visual communication can colonize even communal places where telephony would be frowned upon (ie., public transportation, classrooms, restaurants). The micro-coordination between family members and the ubiquitous spaces of intimacy between young couples and peers are the most evocative of these new dimensions of always-on intimate connection. Even workplace studies have documented the keitai’s now indispensable role in coordinating small and tightly coordinated workgroups. These tele-cocoons and full-time intimate communities represent an expansion of the long-standing sphere of intimate relations. The papers in this volume have only just begun to explore the profound implications for the production of social identity, the experience of public and urban spaces, and the structuring of institutions such as the households, couples, and peer groups.

This dimension of the pervasively personal is tied to an out-of-doors and low-profile vision of informational and communication networks which goes against the metaphors of indoor, immersive experience that have dominated our imaginings of virtual reality, cyberspace and Internet social life. The keitai’s social value is tied to its colonization of the small and seemingly inconsequential in-between temporalities and spaces of everyday life. Whether it is the quick text reminder sent by a multi-tasking housewife, the service technician who wants to keep track of which of their team members is out to lunch, or young couples texting sweet nothings as they take the bus to school, keitai connectivity is a seeping membrane between the real and virtual, here and elsewhere, rather than a portal of highfidelity connectivity that demands full and sustained engagement. Metaphors of keitai engagement are as often side-by-side as they are face to face, as much about ambient and peripheral awareness as they are about demanding attention in the here and now.

This is thought-provoking for me and it resonates with what I had always thought about the use of mobile phones. The way people (at least in Japan, although this I guess might be catching on in the U.S.) keep photos of friends in their keitai had always reminded me of Christian Metz’s discussion about how photographs are akin to the Freudian notion of the fetish, in part because of the portability of printed images (as opposed to film) (Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” October, Vol. 34. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90.

Lisa Rofel’s Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism

Lisa Rofel’s Other Moderities has been mentioned a few times in comments on recent posts, so, as it is one of my favorite recent ethnographies, I thought I would post the text of a classroom presentation I gave on the book some years ago. Since this was originally written for a seminar in which my colleagues were assumed to have also read the same material, there may be some gaps where I could count on the rest of the class to understand — for example, there’s some heavy borrowing from Appadurai, which we had read immediately prior to Rofel, but I do not mention him by name here. However, I do not trust myself to make edits all these years later, when the book is not fresh in my mind anymore.

In Lisa Rofel’s words, Other Modernities “addresses the cultural politics of modernity in the late twentieth century. It suggests how modernity is imagined, pursued, and experienced… in those places marked by a deferred relationship to modernity” (3). She offers us an at least introductory definition of modernity the following: “…an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness” (3). As the central project of the book, Rofel presents us with a conception of modernity which is local and particularistic while placing those local forms of meaning in increasingly larger spheres of class, ideology, nation, and global capital, in ways which are, frequently, frustrating in their complexity. In addressing this complexity, I’ve found it useful to adopt a distinction suggested by [a colleague] between Rofel’s presentation of modernity as an academic or theoretical construct, mainly calling on Foucault and Althusser and addressing the modern human condition in the context of global and transnational forces, and modernity as the object of desire for the people whose lives make the subject of Rofel’s ethnographic work. Although this division is wholly artificial — which is part of Rofel’s point — it does have a precedent in the structure of her own (challenging) introduction, in which she moves back and forth from 1st-person descriptions of Hangzhou and its inhabitants to 3rd-person academic inquiry. Artificial as it is, I think that this approach helps to compensate for Rofel’s introduction which, for me at least, was highly confusing in its multiple use of multiple concepts of modernity invoked to account for each other. This is not all Rofel’s fault — the lack of specificity in academic concepts of modernity, which Rofel challenges, has produced a somewhat limited vocabulary.

So for the moment we sidestep the question of modernity as a theoretical position and look at the lives described by Rofel. On this level, modernity becomes the desires of the state and of its subjects, a local imaginary grounded in local conditions even as it looks elsewhere for its inspiration. But Rofel shows that this desire and its inspirations have neither remained constant nor been mobilized in constant fashions over time. Furthermore, the vision of modernity strived for by both Zhenfu workers and the Chinese party/state is necessarily and irrevocably intertwined with constructions of labour, gender, age, social networks, and geographical location. Rather than forming separate and separable parts of local identities, these factors are each constituted in and through the others. For example, Rofel is challenged by the oldest cohort of women workers’ unflinching adherence to the doctrine of their own liberation. How can they remain so convinced of their liberation, she asks, while they recognize the bitterness of their lives, both with regard to their work in the factories as silk workers and their work in their homes as mothers and wives (aside: which is, unfortunately, largely ignored, even rejected as important, by Rofel, who is almost ecstatic about women’s reports of their lack of affection for their children….)? However, as Rofel discovers, for the elder women of the Revolutionary era, the criteria by which Rofel and her fellow Western feminists judge “liberation” were not applicable — unsuited to the particular history of pre-Revolution Chinese industrialization and capitalization, they fail to adequately account for the specific projects of modernization and subject-formation undertaken in the establishment of the Chinese socialist state from the late ’40’s. Although Rofel does not give a lot of background information about pre-socialist China, she does hint at the collapse of traditional sources of income (e.g. the difficulties faced by Yu Shifu following her father’s death and her early entry into the silk factory [64-70]) and the pressure this put on women, especially young and unmarried women, to enter the workforce where, as sexualized (feminized) bodies inhabiting an “outside” space (not contained within the social network of ostensibly responsible parents and relatives) they were subject to disrespect and humiliation. By stressing labour as a foundational element, rather than gender, the Revolution liberated women from the imposed boundaries of “inside” and “outside” work. (Incidentally, note that this concept, used either ethnographically or theoretically, never ignores the presence of “work” in the home, the way Western concepts of “private” and “public” spheres do — partially explaining the lack of affection and the importance of raising children out of “maternal” desire which Rofel so blatantly admires later on, as the invention of “maternality” mystifies the “work” aspect of Western women’s household activities.)

Modernity in the desires of these women, then, is immediately tangible, even as it turns to imagined futures in its attempted realization — that is, it deals with the particular hardships or “bitterness”-es experienced by particular people at particular times and places. Although State policies may slavishly admire and imitate Western or Soviet models of modernity, Rofel shows that in the implementation of these policies by individual subjects there exists a space of interpretation and misrecognition (on which, more momentarily) which alters and can even challenge the conceptions of the State. For the cohort of women closely identified with the Cultural Revolution, the elaboration of this space became a primary concern, even as they became disillusioned with the promises and practices of that time — consider, for example, Xiao Bao, the shift leader who protested her lack of promotion to an office job by setting up her own office on the shop floor. Given authority over the women of her shop, Xiao Bao exercises that authority by not exercising it, subverting the very power which she exercises. Although it is unclear for how long she can continue to non-exercise her authority, in the meantime, she has constructed around herself (or rather, around her desk) a space of non-participation in the imagined modernity of the state, instead enacting her own contradictory desires in that space.

Rofel’s analysis of this act of subversion owes a lot to her understanding of an undertheorized (in fact, virtually ignored) aspect of Althusser’s concept of “interpellation”. Rofel mentions Althusser earlier in her discussion of the construction of Liberation-era female subjectivities and, for those unfamiliar with the concept, I’ll rehearse the main points of Althusser’s theory. In his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser is concerned with the way a State (in his conception, Western States, despite the fact that he describes Stalinist Communism almost to the letter…) creates appropriate subjects. On the one hand, he notes, there are Repressive State Apparatuses, such as the military, the police, mental institutions, and so on, which serve to impose certain behaviours and exclude others. The use of such apparatuses is costly, however, both in resources and in the potential threat of resistance. Ideally, then, domination is achieved through the creation of self-regulated subjects, accomplished though the Ideological Apparatuses of education, vocation, religion, and so on. The goal is the production of subjects who “recognize” themselves in terms of the state ideology. Althusser uses the metaphorical illustration of a police officer hailing a man in the street—yelling out “You, there!” into the crowd of pedestrians. The man who turns — who recognizes the hail as meant for him — immediately admits his guilt and takes on himself the identity of the criminal (note that it is not necessary for the police officer to know anything about the hailed man’s guilt — it is the act of recognition which makes him guilty, rather than any previous knowledge on the part of the officer). In this sense he becomes subject to the domination of the legal apparatus. But, as well, in his recognition, he acts — he turns. In becoming subjected (relative to domination), he also becomes a subject (relative to agency). Rofel discusses the agency of the Liberation-era cohort in terms of their recognition of and identification with the ideology of the early Socialist State, from which their agency as women and as labour is derived. But Althusser hints at something else: in a one-phrase, parenthetical aside, he mentions “misrecognition”, a mention which is never followed up, leaving it entirely open to interpretation (ironic, that). Misrecognition would imply the construction of subjectivity at odds with the structure within which it resides. In their various challenges and subversions of State policy, the workers Rofel describe enact such a subjectivity — not necessarily consciously resisting State domination (although there is an element of that at times, too) but in subjecting the official significations to personal and positional interpretations which produce other modernities than originally intended.

The history related by Rofel is one of unfinished State projects of modernity. Each of the cohorts described corresponds to an incomplete modernization project: the original optimism of Socialist progress, cut short apparently by the disasters of the Great Leap Forward (which Rofel leaves perturbingly unclear) and the breaking off of relations with the Soviet Union, the hoped-for but unrealized perpetual revolution of the Cultural Revolution, cut short by the death of Mao Zedong and the overthrow of the Gang of Four, and the present (re-)introduction of Free Market Capitalism, as unfinished in China as elsewhere. In the wake of each of these projects was left a body of subjects formed and informed by the future modernity imagined and imaged by the State in each period, and by the local interpretations of those modernities. Rather than an undifferentiated Modern toward which the Chinese people as a whole are converging, Rofel shows the multiplication of modernities at every turn, with their concomitant genderizations, class-ifications, and localizations.

This divergence is already suggested by Rofel’s simultaneous use of and criticism of Foucault’s analysis of modernity and it’s investment in “biopower”. Rofel pretty consistently uses a Foucauldian definition of modernity which has at it’s core the penetration of State power into the lives of its subjects or, to be more precise, the entanglement of subjects at every level with the apparatuses of the State. For Foucault, one of the primary manifestations of this involvement is in State surveillance of its subjects — the panopticon of state control, constructed through normative discourses of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, sexuality, biology, and so on. Rofel shows in detail the refinements of these methods and their implementations in post-Revolution China, adding to the mix an understanding of the role of labour ideology and the ways that the work of the individual (for lack of a better term) has been used to integrate them into the workings of State power. With each shift in State conceptions of modernity, the forms and uses of bio-power have shifted, culminating in the radical individuation and re-gendering of bodies illustrated by Rofel’s description of the contemporary “family planning” office at Zhenfu. But in her particularistic analysis of the deployment of such power, Rofel challenges Foucault for both his Eurocentrism and his failure to understand the shifting meanings such power could hold at the local level. In effect, she says, Foucault assumes the homogenizing nature of modernity — an assumption which is not upheld by the reality of local situations, but is rather informed by ethnocentric assumptions about the efficacy of European civilization and the converse weakness of non-Western others. As Rofel points out, the heightened awareness of sexuality and the personal pleasure promised in its name — as well as the technology of statistics and display through which sexuality is monitored by the State — have not in fact produced a more efficient work force. Instead, the re-feminized female workers at Zhenfu are well-known as the worst labourers — increased absences, off-hours partying, “uncontrolled” or “inappropriate” pregnancies, and a refusal to construct their subjectivities through labour make the newest cohort of silk workers highly unlikely candidates for carrying China to an approximation of Western wealth. Rofel’s analysis thus widens and supplements Foucault’s, calling for a consideration of the modernities constructed in local subjectivities, rather than one which encompasses and supplants those local configurations.

The one thing that nags at me is Rofel’s’ discussion of hyper-masculinity. Although it all sounds OK to me, she never really gets into a discussion of masculinity per se — although she does note the presence of male workers in the silk factory, and not always in exclusively male spaces. Why this bothers me is this: the hyper-masculinity she refers to seems explicitly oriented towards local conceptions of Western business practices, as well as local conceptions of femininity since the introduction of economic reform. As such, fine. But it fails to account for the more everyday forms of masculinity, as illustrated by local interpretations of weft-threading as women’s work, while warp-threading is exclusively men’s work—or why men in the weaving shop hang their scissors from their ear while women tuck them into the pocket of their apron. These little considerations — the ways in which virtually identical tasks are differentiated — form an underexplored territory of gender in Rofel’s book. While the hyper-masculinity of market trade may represent a desired modernity of the men in the shop, it is not a realized desire, and the opposition of feminine and hyper-masculine leaves out the everyday gendered lives of the real men involved.

Is Anthropology Global?

A wonderful thing about cyberspace is that it allows for greater exchange of ideas across national borders. And I know SM gets visitors from around the world.

Yet as Joi Ito notes on a post about international Internet protocols, there are some linguistic barriers so formidable that, as he puts it, makes George Bush’s confused phrase “the internets” make sense.

What about in the academic world of anthropology? We’ve all heard of the linguistic imperialism of the English language, and this term might aptly describe the academic world of anthropologists. I have noticed that scholars in non-anglophone settings are well-read in U.S. anthropology but U.S. anthropologists (myself included) aren’t as conversant in the traditions of other national anthropologies (except for the British and the French ones), sometimes even in the scholarship of their own fieldsite.

So do you think that there are anthropologies, not one single discpline of anthropology? Is the Internet is bringing these separate “worlds” of anthropologists closer? Or further driving them apart? And what’s the role of Savage Minds in all this?

These questions occurred to me when I came across a few writings in Japan Studies (and East Asian Studies in general) that look at the Japan field in the global academic scene.

The Japan-centered duo Masao Miyoshi (literature) and Harry Harootunian (history) have edited a volume titled Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, which includes some articles that discuss the hegemony of the English language on the production of academic knowledge (see for example articles by James Fujii and Rey Chow).

Takami Kuwayama, in his recent book Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony, promises to bring the insular world of Japanese anthropology into the international marketplace of ideas. On his website he writes:

Anthropology originated in the West, and it has mainly developed as a field that studies other cultures, many of which are radically different from the West. Among these cultures is Japan, a country that has fascinated generations of Western scholars for its exotic beauty. At least, this is how Japan has been regarded by many foreign visitors, both lay and professional. Japan, however, is not simply a tourist site or a field for scholarly investigations. It has, in fact, a long tradition of anthropology. With the second largest anthropological association in the world, Japan has produced, since the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of reputable scholars specializing in the study of foreign cultures. This situation, both inside and outside Japan, has brought about a curious result — the scarcity of Japanese anthropologists studying their own culture, which contrasts with the ever increasing volume of the anthropological literature on Japan produced by foreign, especially Anglophone, scholars who are not familiar enough with Japan’s academic culture.

This last sentence feels to me a bit incendiary and I don’t fully agree with his take on the history of anthropology, but he does point to the basic problem of the way national anthropologies are set apart by linguistic barriers. He hopes that his book will spark a dialogue between Japanese anthrologists and non-Japanese anthropologists.

I appreciate his effort to build a bridge across this linguistic divide, but isn’t this ultimately self-defeating in that by the sheer act of translation Japan’s “long tradition of anthropology” will be placed in a universal discourse and hence lose its singularity (that is, if it already posssessed it)? What does it exactly mean for there being different national traditions of anthrology?

Or are my concerns quite silly, and can be brushed off as silly self-reflexive musings of a blogger?

A field guide to anthrobloggers

It isn’t often you get to see anthrobloggers in their natural habitat. I just happened to meet Marc Joseph Francois Jacquin last week while visiting his fieldsite.

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He is working towards his master’s degree, spending the summer as a research assistant for Scott Simon. Scott is an old Taiwan hand, having now written a couple of books on Taiwanese female entrepreneurs and the leather industry. Now he is researching the movement to create an Aborigine autonomous region.

Mark is documenting his research experiences on his blog. It is something of a letter home to his loved ones, but there are some genuine anthropological insights as he discovers, like this one about how Aborigine culture is genuinely different:

The point here is that one of the issues that exists between this indigenous community and the outside world is that the way of life here is seen as a ‘problem’ by outsiders. Working to have enough food to treat your family (extended family in Western terms) and then having nothing is perceived as irresponsible by us Westerners. In their culture, it’s the way things work: you work to have enough to survive from day to day with your family. If you suddenly come into a lot of money from the sale of livestock or land, it is understood that you will share that ‘success’ with those upon whom you have depended in the past or will depend in the future. The situation is thus that one culture’s lifestyle doesn’t jive with the majority’s concept of how to live..so we call them poor (though they would say they are not suffering) and lazy when they refuse to take a full time job – many who don’t could because they have a solid high school education, probably equal or better than in Canada.

In a followup comment he clarifies the difference between this way of living and “insurance”:

It is also different from insurance because money does not often come into the equation. Exchange labour refers to actually going to someone’s home and helping them do something (example: building an extension on their house for a day or two, or helping a kid in the family with school work). It’s as if time, energy and labour power were flowing from people to people within the group….a very interesting way of living.

Commodifying Girls, Harajuku Style

I wanted to avoid writing about Japan in my first post on Savage Minds (because I do that all the time at my own blog), but alas I am a creature of habit. But I hope I will be pardoned: I’m reporting about an anthropologist in a major print publication. And this will be sort of a riff on Kerim’s earlier mention of the clever parody on the African village planned at a German zoo.

Anne Allison, a Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, is mentioned in this week’s the New York Times Magazine in an article titled “Love. Angels. Product. Baby.” The piece is written by Rob Walker, who regularly writes for the magazine about consumerism and the money-centric culture of the capitalist society we live in. His column, “Consumed,” is in the “Way We Live Now” section of the NY Times Magazine).

(By the way, here’s another anthro connection: in this interview, Walker describes his endeavor as a “hybrid business-and-anthropology column.” Hmm…)

Walker writes that popstar Gwen Stefani‘s new album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, and the entire marketing carnivalesque surrounding it (including an HP digicam branded as “Harajuku Lovers“), can be summed up by this neat phrase: “the commodification of commodification.”

Stefani’s latest album prominently figures “The Harajuku Girls” and is a paean to Harajuku, a section of Tokyo known as a neighborhood where hip youngsters come out dressing up in the strangest mixture of goth, tribal, haut-couture, and seemingly every other trend in the world history of fashion. Along with Shibuya, which has more love hotels and generally feels a bit more “adult,” Harajuku is the testing ground for Japanese marketers trying out their ware: they know that if a product catches on among the young hipsters who loiter there, it will sell well and perhaps conquer the world.

To Stefani, Harajuku Girls are hip. Why does she think this? Walker clues us in:

What is unusual is tha Stefani does not seem drawn to this subculture by ideology, rebelliousness or even a dance style. She seems drawn solely to a group’s apparent skill as shoppers. The song “Harajuku Girls” is a cross between a fashion-magazine trend story and an expositional number from a Broadway musical.

So Stefani, whose earlier persona in her band No Doubt was the punked up bad girl who bansheed around and shouted her head off to ska beats, is now all starry-eyed about shopping for the latest trends. Walker continues:

So what we really have here is not just a pop star endorsing a product but a pop star paying tribute to a consumer tribe. The real star behind the camera is not Stefani, but a specific breed of global hyper-consumer — as translated by Stefani. […] It is the commodification of commodification.

At this point Walker cites Anne Allison as a critical observer of the way Japanese subcultural icons have been swept up by the global mediascape (she examines, for example, Pokémon, in an article in this book), and asks a loaded question: “But […] does that mean that Japan has a real currency now? Or is it just a cool brand?”

Walker’s article is insightful in many ways. But I have a few problem with his interpretation of the Harajuku Girls.

For one, I don’t think Walker addresses the fact that these girls are represented in an exploitatively orientalist manner. When Stefani came out with the Harajuku Girls back in April, the blogosphere was flooded with feminist and Asian-American critiques of how these four dolled up cyber-ghetto-geisha girls have become a harem-like accessory piece of a white girl (much of this criticism launched by a Salon article by MiHi Ahn and reproduced here by Howard French). The poster up top is a photoshopped expression of this critical perspective.

Yet there is another set of stereotypes being evoked here by Stefani, which has to do with Japan as somehow beyond the present, without history, and self-absorbingly capitalist in some techno-utopian state of bliss. This kind of thinking has its roots in Alexandre Kojève‘s oft-noted declaration that Japan is a post-historical society (retracted I think later in his life) and Roland Barthes‘s otherwise great masterpiece, The Empire of the Sign. (I won’t go into details here, and I know I’m reaching a bit if I claim that the following also applies to the Harajuku Girls, but this line of thinking also resonates with 1. Japan’s wartime fascist ideology, which cast Japan as already beyond the West and” post-modern”, and 2. the contemporary triumphalism of neoliberal economics as in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of the History.)

A few years back Japanese critic Toshiya Ueno, writing about Japanimation, called the representation of a technologically utopic Japan as “Techno-orientalism.” In the case of the Harajuku Girls, some “consumer-orientalism” may be at work: a representation of a nation and its people as serious shopaholics to the point where girls would be willing to “whore up.”

Walker, whose sole criterion for judging good products seems to be “about figuring how to remake a subcultural style into something salable on a mass scale” (from the NYT Mag article), joins Stefani and her marketing team in celebrating this “commodification of commodification.” He understands that commodification involves not only buying (such as the act of girls accessorizing) but also selling. Yet he seems unfazed about what it is that they’re actually selling.

Walter Benjamin, in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” writes of the prostitute as a figure of pure commodity: “a saleswoman and wares in one” (Reflections, p.157). It is difficult for me to not see these Harajuku girls as a similar figure of the prostitute as commodity, one that mixes racism, sexism, and the technologies of consumption into one bold entertainment package.

Now whenever a blogger debunks exploitative images in mass media, someone has to make a comment that is a variation of the following: “this is only a video/movie/pop song, so don’t take it so seriously.” To this I reply: I am not the one who might take this seriously, but rather the little boys and girls watching Stefani videos and taking in all this stereotyping as reality.

I’m usually not one for identity politics. But the Harakuju Girls is just a bit too over the top for me. So what do y’all think, am I just over-reacting?

Image Ethics

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura, who writes the Photoethnography Blog, has posted a photo essay about a disability protest in Japan to her web site gallery. While I loved the essay, as a good pro-sharing netzen I naturally questioned her decision to use a restrictive license on her photos. Here is her license:

All of the photographs on this site are copyright 2005 Karen Nakamura and cannot be used without prior written permission.

In response, I wrote:

Karen, Why did you choose to use such a restrictive license for your work? There are many other options, which allow people to use your work without getting written permission as long as they give you proper aknowledgement, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and use the same license that you have chosen. Otherwise you are treating anyone who e-mails one of your pictures to a friend, or downloads one to their desktop, or posts a copy to their blog, as a criminal unless they go to the extraordinary step of contacting you first. Since you would presumably give permission for anything which fell within “fair use” you could easily provide a creative commons lincese which stated all this explicitly and has the full force of US copyright law behind it, but avoids the problems associated with restricting all use outright.

To which Karen then replied:

Good question. I want to protect my informants right to control how their image is used. The Creative Commons license protects against commercial re-use but not against non-commercial but still malicious re-use.

For example, there is nothing in the Creative Commons license that would prevent one of the photographs in my blog being used in another blog with a derogatory caption; or re-used in other non-commercial ways that would upset the people who I work with.

I prefer to err on the side of requiring re-use consent be given so that I can control how the images are used. If this blog were just photos of Minnesota mosquitoes (our state bird), it would be licensed differently.

This is something I have not seen Free Culture types discuss. It isn’t an attempt to limit copyright for commercial profit, but in order to protect her informants images from being misused. While I wonder if it is truly possible to limit such “malicious re-use” in the sense that Karen discusses, I understand her motivations in seeking to do so. I would very much like to see more discussion about how anthropologists might put work into the public domain, or Creative Commons, without reneging on our responsibility to protect our informants and ethnographic collaborators.

Global Assemblages

I just heard Aihwa Ong talk at a conference here in Taiwan on transnationalism. She was drawing on her MacArthur funded research into “how neoliberal forms are taken up in the transformation of East Asian cities.” These ideas are presumably also discussed in her contribution to a new edited volume: Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

Her talk started off in a rather funny manner. Her microphone didn’t work and nobody could hear her, but the Taiwanese audience was too politely reverential to tell her. They tried rigging up a microphone stand, which didn’t work. Then they decided to send a woman on stage with a chair to sit next to Dr. Ong and hold a microphone for her. It was at this point that she began to realize that nobody could hear her, and she took up the microphone in her own hand, clearly freaked out by the idea of having someone sitting there holding it for her.

Even with the microphone, however, Aihwa Ong is still difficult to understand. I don’t believe that academic discourse need always be understandable to the non-initiated, but I do believe scholars should make an effort in that direction. Academic jargon and neologisms can be useful short-cuts for complex ideas, but they can also short-circuit the analytical process by allowing one to avoid critically reexamining certain key assumptions. Fortunately, once she moved from theory to the specifics of her research, her main argument became much more comprehensible.

At its core, Ong is applying the analytical techniques of governmentality to the discourse of management “gurus” in Shanghai and Singapore. That is to say, she is looking at how American management companies and experts attempt to reengineer the behavior of white collar workers in order to better align them with the needs of global capital. Central to this is the ideology of neoliberalism, which Ong defines as the promotion of self-governing rationality and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

What particularly interested me was the comparison between Shanghai and Singapore. In China the state remains officially critical of neoliberal ideology, even as it encourages the forces of neoliberalism, while Singapore openly embraces neoliberalism. In particular, the Chinese state counters neoliberalism with nationalism, while Singapore, Ong argues, is moving away from the ethnic state. Ong discussed how Singapore is actively encouraging expatriates and global talent, throwing out the “Asian values” rhetoric of the 90s.

In discussing the rhetoric of foreign management gurus in Shanghai, Ong said that any behavior which deviated from the standards of American corporate culture was treated as irrational, and blamed on “Chinese culture.” Workers were seen as lacking motivation, not identifying with the company, and lacking the communication and self-presentation skills necessary to function in a global economy. At the same time, Ong also made it clear that the workers resented the different pay scales awarded to foreign and local workers, and explained that many workers saw corporate work as a way of gaining the necessary knowledge to go into business for themselves, with no long term plans to remain within the corporation.

Ong seemed to take the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism at face value. As her own account seems to make clear, these management gurus are not actually interested in producing rational self-motivated individuals. They want a disciplined white-collar work force. These workers “irrationality” is in fact rational and entrepreneurial. They would rather go into business for themselves than be treated as second class workers in the corporate hierarchy. Just as the Bush administration selectively invokes neoliberal ideology to promote its own agenda, quietly abandoning neoliberal principles whenever it suites them, so too do Shanghai’s management gurus seem to invoke neoliberal values in order to produce team-players willing to subordinate individual gain to corporate interests. It is when they act rationally in their own self-interest that they are somehow being “Chinese.”

Despite my reservations, it was a thought provoking talk, and I will definitely be checking out Aihwa Ong’s new book. Hopefully I might have a chance to meet her before she leaves the country, and maybe even discuss this further.

Missing Women Found

In two recent posts I referenced the use of life expectancy statistics by economist Amartya Sen to highlight social inequality. So I feel compelled to report on a new paper which is critical of another set of data used by Sen: the gender gap in birth rates.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, have an article in Slate on Emily Oster’s work (PDF) which establishes a link between hepatitis B and birth gender.

This is an important link because it goes a long way towards explaining the 100 million “missing women” Amartya Sen had noticed when examining statistics on childbirth in Asia. In fact, it seems to account for about half of them; although primarily in China, not India. Basically, pregnant women with hepatitis B are much less likely to give birth to boys than the general population. Hepatitis B can account for “roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China,” but “less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap” in India.

The article is also worth reading for a nice coda regarding Emily Oster’s contribution to the study of child language acquisition.