Tom McDonald In the summer of 2016, I and my students were in the industrial city of Shenzhen, South East China, conducting a small exploratory study aimed at gaining an overview of migrant factory workers’ attitudes towards digital money platforms. Over two weeks, we had spoken to many migrant factory workers, uncovering a range of […]
Situated Digitalization
Introduction to the Series of “Digital Anthropologies in East Asia” Yi Zhou In 2012, the Google policy analyst Andy Yee claimed that East Asia finally began a second digital revolution which was transforming the region from manufacturing digital hardware to creating digital content and services. According to Yee, this second stage of digitalization was more […]
Digital Outsourcing and Japanese Call Center Workers in Dalian, China
Society for East Asian Anthropology Kumiko Kawashima May 16, 2017 Editors’ note: This is the fifth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.” In 2003, the first Japanese-staffed call center opened in Dalian, a north-eastern city of six million people dubbed China’s “Green Silicon Valley.” Thousands of Japanese workers have served consumers […]
Empire of Sound
Guangtian Ha A foundational moment in the historiographical study of Islam in China was marked by a light scorn. “You cannot alter the text at will and still claim it is from the original,” the prominent historian Chen Yuan thus expressed his frustration with Hui Muslim scholars in 1928. “Each generation had its own way […]
English Teaching in, out, and through Japan
Society for East Asian Anthropology Raluca Nagy Editors’ note: This is the fourth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.” Various life courses emerge from teaching English in Japan: short-term and long-term stays, transformation into other professions or increasing precarity among a cohort of mostly uncontracted freelance workers. In this piece, I highlight those […]
Bakugai! Explosive Shopping and Entangled Sino-Japanese Mobilities
By Martina Bofulin and Jamie Coates Editors’ note: This is the third piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.” Chinese mobile subjects and their practices occupy an ambivalent role in contemporary Japanese society. They are the saviors of Japan’s sluggish economy but seen as the instigators of social problems: mass tourism, intensive shopping […]