Archives for 2014

Interview with Joshua Hotaka Roth

December 29, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

By Jennifer Bruno (Yale University) and Joshua Hotaka Roth (Mt. Holyoke College)

Jennifer Bruno: What inspired you to undertake your research with Japanese Brazilian migrants in Japan?

Joshua Hotaka Roth: There was a lot of excitement about globalization and transnationalism when I was in graduate school in the early 1990s. I had befriended several Japanese Brazilians when I was in university in Japan in 1989, just as the large labor migration from Brazil to Japan was beginning, so the project just presented itself to me. By the time I conducted research in 1995, there were about 250,000 Brazilians, mostly of Japanese ancestry, working in Japan. Some of the early globalization literature celebrated flows, the possibility of multiple identifications beyond the taken-for-granted local or national, and the rise of creole cultural forms. But I found that for many Japanese Brazilians, migration to Japan involved a reconfiguration of social relations in an attenuated form. I’m reminded of David Graeber’s reading of enslavement as involving the violent tearing the person, defined as a unique conflux of relations, from that web of relations. Of course migrants have agency while slaves do not, but it would be a mistake to assume freedom of choice when choices are always constrained, and when migrants keenly felt their displacement from established webs of relationships.

JB: How has the situation for Japanese Brazilians changed?

JHR: The Japanese Brazilian presence in Japan has shifted a lot in the last 20 years. The numbers of Brazilians in Japan peaked at about 311,000 just before the financial crisis in 2008. Today with the Brazilian economy doing better, only about half remain in Japan. In the 1990s, most were on temporary visas that had to be renewed every one or three years. Most worked in temporary factories positions that they really didn’t enjoy. The majority that remain are committed to a long-term residence in Japan, and some see it, much more than in the past, as their permanent home. Japanese Brazilian residents in Japan still face uncertainty, but compared to the past, more have moved into stable employment, started their own businesses, raised children, and established new webs of relationships.

JB: Could you talk about the transition from your first project to what you’re doing now? What questions have guided your research?

JHR: My current research is on Japanese automobility. I’ve published on the history of driving manners and discourses on emotion and risk. I’ve written about gender and driving, and am looking into a project on minorities and driving. But how did I first get into this? I’m not a car fanatic. I did work on a car assembly line for my first project. But the real link was the conceptual focus on acceptable levels of risk among Japanese and Japanese Brazilians workers that emerged in a chapter on work-related accidents. Subsequently, I wanted to go to Brazil and learn more about the communities from which many of the migrants I met in Japan had come. Among other things, I ended up writing an article on Japanese Brazilian gateball (a form of croquet) in São Paulo. At a time when the fear of crime was widespread among middle and upper middle class Paulistanos, it was curious that middle class Japanese migrants willingly occupied public spaces, rather than retreating behind the numerous fortified apartment blocks and gated communities. Once again, I found myself inadvertently writing about the circumstances that may affect acceptable levels of risk. But the risk literature often makes for pretty dreary reading. I decided on automobility because it involves questions of risk and its governance, but also of desire. Along the way, however, I’ve also become interested in questions involving maps, spatial orientation, and the cultural category of “hōkō onchi” (directionally tone-deaf) and currently am working on an article about getting lost in Tokyo.

Joshua Hotaka Roth is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His publications include Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Cornell Univ. Press), “Mean Spirited Sport: Japanese Brazilian Croquet in São Paulo’s Public Spaces” (Anthropological Quarterly), and “Heartfelt Driving: Discourses on Manners, Safety, and Emotion,” (Journal of Asian Studies).

Jennifer Bruno is an M.A. student in East Asian Studies at Yale University

Please send news items, contributions, and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

Space of Mediation: Why Do International Labor Recruiters in China Charge So Much, and Why are They Difficult to Regulate?

December 28, 2014 by Yi Zhou

Biao Xiang

Unskilled Chinese workers pay an average of US$8,000 (including US$ 3,000 “security bond” that would be confiscated if they violate any rules) in 2010 to secure a job in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, their top three choices. The high costs of international labor migration worldwide, but especially in Asia, have recently attracted high-level policy attention. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stressed that “there are enormous gains to be made by lowering costs related to migration” during the General Assembly High‐level Dialogue on International Migration and Development 2013. At the same forum Asia Pacific countries identified addressing recruitment costs as one of five policy priorities.

Why do migrants have to pay so much? A strong consensus among international organizations and national governments is: private labor recruitment intermediaries are to blame. International Labour Organization launched a high-profile “Fair Recruitment Initiative” in 2014 aimed at better regulating recruiters. The U.S. Department of State and a number of intergovernmental agencies make explicit links between fee-charging labor recruiters and human trafficking, arguing that the two should be addressed together. Concerns about the costs of migration became a policy anxiety fixated at recruitment intermediaries.

A recruitment fair held by a private recruitment company in Shenyang, northeast China, 2008 (by Biao Xiang)

Surely it is intermediaries who take the money, but should we explain the fact that domestic job search normally cost the worker nothing, and most international recruiters charge employers in the beginning, and only at a later stage do they prey on migrants? Furthermore, the fees went up sharply over the last two decades, in China as well as in many other Asian countries, at the same time as communication and travel became unprecedentedly affordable, and as the number of recruiters increased that should have encouraged competition and reduced the cost. The rise in recruitment fees also took place in tandem with the tightening of migration regulation and heightening of emphasis on migrant rights protection. Only detailed field research can make sense of these paradoxical developments. A veteran in the recruitment business in Beijing told me about changes in Chinese labor migration to the Middle East in the 1990s:

In the early nineties, when I talked to the foreigners [recruiters], they told me what workers they wanted, I told them the number of our foreign currency account. The commission must be paid to the account within ten days, otherwise forget it! Or, for some countries, you pay me the commission every month [after the migrant starts working]. But now the international society talks about human rights more and more. Foreign employers and intermediaries are not allowed to deduct workers’ wages. They must meet this criteria, that criteria. The employer doesn’t want to pay commissions anymore. Nowadays, we have to get our profit from the migrants here. […] And we have to get the profits for the foreigners here too!

What happened across countries was repeated within China. First of all, despite the government’s suspicion about recruitment companies, in practice it relies on them for achieving orderly migration and protecting migrants’ rights. This is because recruitment companies, by following through increasingly complex bureaucratic procedures and fulfilling paperwork requirements, are indispensable to make migration legible and therefore governable. Migrants are not “protectable” unless they are first bureaucratically documented. Licensed recruitment companies in big cities in turn rely on subagents in the countryside to find workers. The subagents are important also because they effectively discipline workers who are working overseas by pressuring the migrants’ families, making the licensed companies attractive partners for overseas employers without tarnishing the companies’ formal image. Once such a multilevel recruitment chains are in place, every intermediary makes its cut.

Thus, the costs of migration are high not only because private agents are greedy, but also because state regulation is complex and the pressure on rights protection is high. Rather than matching demand and supply, the intermediaries’ main function seems to be manufacturing migrant legality on the surface while hiding the irregular means that create and sustain the legality (such as the subagents’ withholding migrants’ property certificates in rural China to force them to comply with border control and employer requirements). The intermediaries are not working outside of laws as usually assumed, but are firmly embedded in the operation of regulations. How the intermediaries make money is how the state make order of migration.

My ethnographic research in China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea since 2004 makes it clear that, what mediate international labor migration is not recruitment intermediaries alone, but are many actors who are intricately inter-related. Without realizing that they are in the same space of mediation as commercial intermediaries, policy makers and NGOs have taken initiatives that make migration more instead of less costly. Recruitment fees in China are particularly high not because its regulation is ineffective, but precisely because the state capacity is strong.

An instruction issued by the Japanese authorities on how a form should be filled. A foreign worker has to fill up an additional 37 forms issued by the Japanese government with the same level of meticulousness when applying for visa (by Biao Xiang)

The mediation processes are not ephemeral or transient, passively bridging pre-defined demands of other actors and then disappear once others’ demand are satisfied; they have developed their own structure and quasi- autonomous dynamics, and actively shaped all the actors involved. The structure of the space of mediation is probably more important in effecting actual migration processes than market demand, state policy or migrant decision alone. It should be foregrounded and studied in its own right. Beyond migration, the notion of space of mediation may also provide a tool for investigating ethnographically more general social transformations that take place on multiple fronts that often appear contradictory, like what we witness in China today.

Biao XIANG teaches anthropology and migration at the University of Oxford

2014 Plath Media Award: Playing with Nan; Honorable Mentions

December 23, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

Playing with Nan
Dipesh Karel (University of Tokyo) and Asami Saito (Media Help Line, Kathmandu)
2013, HDV, color, 88 minutes

Synopsis:
Playing with Nan is the story of a young Nepali man who migrated to work in a Nepali restaurant in northern Japan. The film explores his daily life at work and his family at home, which reflects socio-cultural problems related to globalization. Twenty-eight years ago, Ram was born in a rural village in Nepal. Working on the farm, Ram saw little hope apart from surviving in poor conditions. One day, he decided to escape from the village and poverty. In Kathmandu he worked for 12 years at several restaurants. However, he could not change the family’s situation. He heard a beautiful story from a broker about the work and earning opportunities in Japan. He paid the broker US$20,000 to buy a work visa to enter in Japan. He borrowed the money from his relatives and friends with the commitment of paying them back later with 20% interest. Several dramatic consequences occurred within Ram’s life and his family’s after his migration to Japan.

From the jury:
Using a predominantly observational mode, punctuated with interviews and conversations, Playing with Nan tells a powerful story about global migration. The directors’ careful filmmaking and editing unpack the paradoxes and complexities of migrant labor in and between Asian countries. With its attention balanced sensitively between the receiving country (Japan) and the sending country (Nepal), this intimate portrait of lives, ambitions, and relationships sheds light on an aspect of globalization that is less frequently addressed in scholarship and news media. We all strongly agreed that this film would contribute immensely to courses on migration, global flows, and contemporary Japan.

Honorable Mentions:
1) Kiatsu: The Sound of the Sky Being Torn
Rupert Cox (Manchester University) and Angus Carlye (University of the Arts London)
Two-screen multichannel work, also presented online in side-by-side format

From the directors:
“Kiatsu” is a collaboration between anthropologist Rupert Cox and artist Angus Carlyle. It draws on their experiences of recording the activities of the last farming family living within the concrete and steel infrastructure of Japan’s largest airport, where noise – of taxiing and of take-offs and landings – exerts a constant pressure from before dawn until well after dusk.

From the jury:
We are excited to recognize “Kiatsu” for an honorable mention in this year’s David Plath Media Award Competition. This work sets a new, challenging example of the possibilities for collaboration between anthropologists and artists, particularly in its use of sounds and screens for investigating how one family near Narita airport in Japan negotiates the infrastructures of modernization. We encourage everyone to also explore their blog, where Cox and Carlyle detail their production process.

2) Sounds of Japan’s Antinuclear Movement
David Novak (UC Santa Barbara)
Podcast and website

From the producer:
Since the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11, 2011, Japan has exploded with an unprecedented series of spectacular public protests, with crowds of up to 200,000 citizens gathering in front of government buildings in Tokyo to beat on drums, play instruments, and chant slogans opposing the restart of nuclear plants across the nation. In the context of a near blackout of mainstream media coverage, the combination of social media, musical performance, and street protest took on increasing importance in generating public dialogue about the risks of radiation and articulating fears about the consequences of Japan’s energy policy.

From the jury:
This is a very detailed and well-told story of musical responses to the 3-11 triple disaster. The podcast and website are accessible to general audiences, with an impressive amount of information packed into a 15 minute podcast. The website is a very useful feature and models the possibilities of future media scholarship that combines videos, podcasts, texts, and visual images. We all would have liked to see even more materials linked online, given the potential of this platform for collecting, curating, and sharing resources.

2014 David Plath Media Award Committee:
Jenny Chio (Emory University), Chair
Timothy Gitzen (University of Minnesota)
Eleana Kim (UC Irvine)
Nathaniel Smith (University of Arizona)

2014 Hsu Book Prize: Tragic Spirits

December 18, 2014 by Yi Zhou

Tragic Spirits gives us a mesmerizing depiction of the revival of shamanism among the Buryats of Mongolia under tragic circumstances. Facing life-threatening economic misfortunes in an era of neoliberal reform, Buryats turn to shamans to explain the causes of their hardships. The shamans explain their clients’ bad fate in terms of neglected ancestral spirits and it is here that the subtlety and brilliance of Manduhai Buyandelger’s ethnography becomes apparent. Because of multiple forced migrations and historical displacements, at the hands of Tsarist and Soviet Russia, the Ch’ing dynasty Chinese empire and the socialist government of Mongolia, Buryats have often lost the history and the genealogies of their own families. The shamans’ search for neglected ancestral spirits enables the reconstruction of familial histories. Based on years of fieldwork in her home country, Buyandelger interweaves complex narratives of state violence and suppression with the voices of ancestral spirits, shamans, and their clients to produce a moving portrait of a long suffering people. By analysing how the gender dynamics of the present influence the activities of male and female shamans, she demonstrates the importance of gender to the reconstruction of history. While giving us multiple portrayals of Buryat life, Buyandelger theorises new ways of thinking about history, memory, and forgetting that are applicable to a wide range of societies. Buyandelger’s wide reading in anthropology enables her to make many nuanced comparisons to the work of shamans and the making of history in other places. Above all, she shows that history is a continual work in progress. Her work will inspire anthropologists concerned with problems of memory, forgetting, suppression, and the creation of historical knowledge for decades to come. It is for these reasons that Tragic Spirits richly deserves the 2014 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize.

Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia on Amazon

2014 Hsu Book Prize Committee:

Andrew Kipnis (The Australian National University), chair

Laura Miller (University of Missouri-St. Louis)

William Silcott (Wichita State University)

A Conversation with Christine Yano

November 28, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

Heidi Lam (HL): You’ve been making the rounds of the internet lately as the anthropologist who was told that Hello Kitty is not a cat. How does that feel?

Christine Yano (CY): I framed the book Pink Globalization in terms of headlines, because I’m talking about celebrity and iconicity through material and commercial culture. And then I became a part of it. I was terribly amused, somewhat horrified….It was a study about being in the crossfire of media. The news broke on a Wednesday and it became the #1 trending item on the internet. I was getting about five media requests an hour….When you’re thrust into the limelight, you realize how you’ll get positive and negative [feedback]. But the whole point, from the point of view of Sanrio or the Japanese American National Museum where the exhibit is happening, is that it’s good. This is a story about buzz. I think anthropology should talk to the public.

Christine Yano with Heidi Lam

HL: When writing about globalization, how do you define a field site?

CY: I would never propose this book as a dissertation project. I felt okay about it, because I did it over a long period of time. It gave me a historical perspective of 10+ years, [including one] of Hello Kitty outside of “Cool Japan.” This may not pass NSF methodology, but all I could do was to field a whole variety of people in as many places as possible. I didn’t publish every single interview, but wanted to be sure that I had at least one interview from each example of fandom.

In the book, I spelled out my limitations, because it wasn’t humanly possible to go around the world and speak especially a variety of Asian languages. The big hole [in my book] is not covering Asia sufficiently. I would love for a consortium of researchers to cover Korea, Taiwan, and other countries in Asia, including Southeast Asia. If I were only researching Hello Kitty in Hawaii or in San Francisco, it’s not book-worthy in terms of what kind of story I can tell. I can’t extrapolate enough of a story from such a small [project].

I’m involved in a new project that might be more dissertation-like—about the ukulele in Japan. I’m not trying to do ukulele in the world, which is probably a book that would sell better because it should be written. But for an anthropologist, life is too short. I would love to have sites all around the world in which I spend six months and try to understand ukulele culture in each.

HL: I’ve noticed that Pink Globalization uses a lot of voices. You have big sections of interviews where people speak for themselves.

CY: I really wanted that.

HL: That’s juxtaposed with text from Sanrio’s website, such as the philosophy statement. How did your fieldwork experience influence your writing style?

CY: I almost thought at times the book sounded too pop, too frivolous. But I wanted to match the topic and wrote it to channel a commercial and accessible voice. I was doing that deliberately and wouldn’t have done that in earlier works. I thought I would be criticized for that and to my surprise, I wasn’t. Instead, at least some people have said, it’s very readable and accessible….It’s reflective of the pop world from which Sanrio exists, including her fans.

HL: You’ve written about enka, the Cherry Blossom Festival Queen Pageant in Hawaii, Pan American World Airways’ Asian-American flight attendants, and a lot more. What’s the spark?

CY: After my initial fieldwork, what I thought I would do is not what I ended up doing. After doing enka, my career plan was to go from enka to gunka to shoka, to different song genres. I did a whole bunch of research on gunka. I abandoned that project and felt I was not the one to do it.

I was hired at the University of Hawaii, which put me in a situation where I could develop projects there. This allowed me to do research on the weekends. I didn’t have to wait for a grant to go to Japan. “Doing fieldwork at home” became the basis for these research projects. I had grown up there, so I already knew what things were of interest to me. Oftentimes, they were related in some way to my family. In each case, there was an incident that sparked my interest. For the Pan-American World Airways, there was an ad in the newspaper saying the flight attendants were celebrating their 50th anniversary and that there would be a luncheon. I called the number and got in touch with them.

If I had continued with the gunka project, maybe I would have written a book on it by now, but may not, because the topic might have worn me down.

HL: This is good to know. We always read the final product and it seems like everybody follows projects to the end.

CY: We should have a panel discussion with professors about the projects that they have abandoned and why they have abandoned them….It would teach students about listening to themselves and the project, to see if this is still a good fit.

HL: Do you have any words of wisdom for graduate students in anthropology, including those who work in Asia?

CY: I wish that Asian Studies and Asian-American Studies had more conversations. There’re real differences between the two, but also some commonalities.

For anthropology in general, I think getting away from the ivory tower and moving towards embracing what might be called applied anthropology. I’m hoping that current graduate students don’t see that necessarily as “the thing that I had to do because I couldn’t get a real job.” Anthropology can only be strengthened by making ourselves and the work we do accessible to the general public. The point is about creating bridges, rather than putting up walls. We have a lot to contribute to the present and the future, and it shouldn’t always exist in our educational institutions.

Christine Yano is visiting professor of anthropology at Harvard University (2014-15) and professor of anthropology at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her latest book is Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty and Its Trek Across the Pacific (Duke 2013).

Heidi Lam is a PhD student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.

Please send news items, contributions, and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

Conference on “Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Chinese Culture”

August 29, 2014 by Yi Zhou

The Minzu University of China hosted China’s first conference on “Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Chinese Culture” on June 21-22 in Beijing. Anthropologists, filmmakers, and NGO representatives from America, Germany, Mainland China, and Taiwan offered diverse perspectives that sought the theoretical and practical development of visual anthropology as an important lens to understand contemporary Chinese culture and social dynamics.

Conference on “Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Chinese Culture”

This two-day conference had five major panels: The Embodied Momentum of Ethnographic Film, Theory and Methodology of Visual Anthropology, Film-making in the Countryside and Local Communities, Visual Anthropology and Cultural Heritage Protection, and A Round Table Discussion on Visual Anthropology and Media Communication. Along with in-depth discussions focusing on visual anthropology as a new yet powerful research field, many panelists tried to braid it together with anthropological traditions and topics unique to China. Many of them, for instance, focused their research on the ethnic groups that constituted the multiplicities of China’s contemporary culture. The photographic and filmic images used in presentations reinforced their arguments and detailed the religions, human-nature relationships, and everyday lives of the Tibetan people, Wa people, and Amis tribe in Taiwan, etc. Another key anthropological study area in post-Mao China has been the interrelations between the cities and countryside which has drawn scholars’ attention to media and mediation. They discussed how media – the city mechanism– depicted and culturally translated life in the countryside for the audience, how life in the countryside has been (re)produced by the media discourses, and how media may possibly contribute to peasants’ new forms of subjectivity.

The conference also highlighted China’s social movements that have been put in motion by media and visual culture. The NGO of “Leimin Visual Studio – Youth Visual Plan and Action ” records the voices of the socially marginalized people and mobilizes the young citizens to pursue social justice. “Eyes of the village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project”, a group made up of anthropologists and filmmakers, aims at training villagers to use the film equipment. Villagers hence replace the visual anthropologists as ethnographic filmmakers and narrate their own stories. The representatives from these projects introduced their activities in the conference and also raised the ethical questions: how do anthropologists deal with films which are records of sacred rituals and ceremonies that only the villagers as cultural insiders could access and document? What are the results of showing the films to the local communities in which the “villager-directors” have recorded the private and personal aspects of their daily lives?

During the screening times, more than twenty ethnographic films were shown adding further depth to the discussions. Below are the links for several trailers with English subtitles that panelists kindly shared.

1. “Returning Souls” by Taili Hu：

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAEH-Gmq1pE

Description: In the historically most famous ancestral house of the matrilineal Amis tribe in Taiwan, the carved pillars tell legends, such as the great flood, the glowing girl, the descending shaman sent by the Mother Sun, and the father-killing headhunting event. After a strong typhoon toppled the house 40 years ago, the pillars were moved to the Institute of Ethnology Museum. Recently young villagers, with the assistance of female shamans, pushed the descendants and village representatives to communicate with ancestors in the pillars. They eventually brought the ancestral souls（rather than the pillars）back and began reconstructing the house. In an environment highly influenced by western religions, national land policy, and local politics, the dream of the young people for cultural revitalization and to bring back not only the ancestral souls but also the soul of the village encountered many frustrations. This documentary interweaves reality and legends as well as the seen and the unseen as it records this unique case of repatriation.（85 minutes)

Taili Hu: Researcher, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

2. “The Wonder of Water” by Wangta:

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcX6WYzlMXM

Description: Wangta is from Jisha Village of Xiao Zhongdian Town, Shangri-la country. Besides farming, he used to drive a huge truck to deliver cargo. He participated in the training workshop of “Eyes of the Village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project” which was organized by Shan Shui Conservation Center. He then picked up a video camera to record several environmental disasters that took place in Jisha Village which he later edited into a film titled “Jisha Chronicles”. He also likes to shoot daily life and festival ceremonies of Jisha Village and share his video clips with his community members. Through documenting various rites and Tibetan people’s narration about the role of water in their lives in Yunnan, his work “Wonder of Water” tells about the views of Tibetans about water in a poetic manner.

Wangta: Villager, Jisha Village of Xiao Zhongdian Town, Shangri-la country

Bing Lu: Representative, Eyes of the Village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project

3. “Peasants Family Happiness” by Jenny Chio

Trailer: http://vimeo.com/33633767

Please see Chio’s article on “Peasants Family Happiness”:

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/03/11/2013-david-plath-media-award/

Jenny Chio: Assistant Professor of Anthropology and associated faulty in Film and Media Studies, Emory University

The Korean Wave (Hallyu)

July 30, 2014 by Yi Zhou

by Youna Kim

In June 2011, Korea’s production company held its first European concert in Paris, singing for fans from France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and so on. The company initially scheduled only one show at Le Zénith de Paris concert hall which seats about 6,000, but the tickets sold out in 15 minutes, prompting hundreds of fans to organize flash mobs in front of the Louvre museum to demand an extra show. The company thus decided to arrange a second concert, then again the tickets sold out in minutes. An online-based fan club in the UK organized similar flash mobs in London’s Trafalgar Square to demand shows from K-pop acts. In 2012, Korean singer Psy became a global phenomenon with his song Gangnam Style and horse-riding dance move – the most watched video of 2012 on YouTube (2 billion views as of June 2014).

The Korean Wave (Book Cover)

Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture, exporting its own media products into Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The spread of Korean popular culture overseas is referred to as the “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu” – a term first coined by Chinese news media in the middle of 1998 to describe Chinese youth’s sudden craze for Korean cultural products. Initiated by the export of TV dramas, it now includes a range of cultural products including Korean pop music (K-pop), films, animation, online games, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, food and lifestyles. While its popularity is mainly concentrated in neighboring Asian markets, some of the products reach as far as the USA, Mexico, Egypt, Iraq, and most recently, Europe. This is the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history.

A revival of the Korean Wave is being anticipated by the development of digital media forms, the use of the Internet and online marketing. While the rise of satellite broadcast fueled the spread of the Korean Wave in the 1990s, social networking services and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now playing a primary role in expanding “digital Hallyu” to Asia, the USA, Europe and elsewhere. Korean dramas are being uploaded to the Internet and available with subtitles in various languages including English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Driven by a desire to “help” their idols, fans do real-time translations of idols’ performances on the social media.

The interest in Korean popular culture has further triggered an increase in foreign tourists visiting the locations where their favorite dramas and acts had been filmed. Its impact has reached into communist North Korea. In 2005, a 20-year-old North Korean soldier defected across the demilitarized zone and the reason given, according to South Korean military officials, was that the soldier had grown to admire and yearn for South Korea after watching its TV dramas which had been smuggled across the border of China. Similar cases have continued to occur, while the means of access to the Korean Wave media culture has expanded through the use of the Internet and cellular phones in North Korea. According to recent interviews with North Korean refugees, young people from the wealthy families of Pyongyang are willing to pay around $20 a month for private lessons to learn the fashionable dances of Girls’ Generation (Sonyosidae), one of the most popular girl groups in the Korean Wave music.

In the past, national images of Korea were negatively associated with the demilitarized zone, division and political disturbances, but now such images are gradually giving way to the vitality of trendy, transnational entertainers and cutting-edge technology. The success of Korean popular culture overseas is drawing an unfamiliar spotlight on a culture once colonized or overshadowed for centuries by powerful countries. The Asian region has long been under the influence of Western and Japanese cultural products. In the European imagination, Korea was once thought to be sandwiched between Japan and China and known only for exporting cars and electronics products, but now has made itself known through its culture. The Korean government sees this phenomenon as a way to sell a dynamic image of the nation through soft power, the ability to entice and attract. The sudden attraction of the Korean Wave culture has presented a surprise: Why has it taken off so dramatically at this point?

Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in global contexts? This book The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (2013) argues for the Korean Wave’s double capacity in the creation of new and complex spaces of identity that are both enabling and disabling cultural diversity in a digital cosmopolitan world. While not denying the obvious power of Western, particularly American, dominance over the international media landscape and the continuing significance of Western media imperialism, this book considers the Korean Wave in the global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the contexts of global inequalities and unevenpower structures. The emerging consequences at multiple levels – both macro structures and micro processes that influence media production, distribution, representation and consumption – deserve to be analyzed and explored fully in an increasingly global, cosmopolitan media environment.

For more details and references, please see:

Kim, Youna (2013) The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. London and New York: Routledge.

Youna Kim

Youna Kim is Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France, joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she had taught since 2004, after completing her PhD at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge); Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge); Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters (2011, Routledge); Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (2012, Palgrave Macmillan); The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (2013, Routledge); Global Nannies: Minorities and the Digital Media (in preparation).

Semi-Native Anthropologist?: Fieldwork Encounters and Positionality in An Ethnic Village in Southwest China

July 4, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

By Yu Luo (Yale University)

During the initial stage of my fieldwork, I spent most of my time learning how to draw Buyi ethnic batik with my village hostess, while watching Korean idol dramas dubbed in Mandarin. Perhaps commonly seen elsewhere, this scene nonetheless does not merely represent the globalizing circulation of Korean dramas, or mass media alike, to a remote corner of southwest China. Nor does it simply capture the ways in which some locals are maintaining their unique handicraft skills and ethnic identities. My lived experience with what seems to be a juxtaposition of “tradition” and “modern,” of “local” and “global,” in retrospect, served as a reflexive arena to ponder on my positionality, vis-à-vis the people and the community I study. Mirroring the world that has enabled me to be in this particular place studying this group of people, fieldwork encounters embody the complex ways in which systems of difference intersect.

Born and raised in Guizhou where I returned for fieldwork, I was not a complete “outsider” to the landlocked, multiethnic province in China’s southwestern periphery region. Despite being registered as a Buyi minzu (nationality) on my citizen ID, I have grown up in the city to which where the elder members of my family had moved decades ago. Unable to speak Buyi (a northern Tai language), I have had seldom contact with our Buyi kinspeople in the countryside. Whereas villagers in other Buyi areas that I had visited earlier labeled me as “more advanced Buyi” or “pseudo-Buyi,” the villagers in my fieldsite kept referring to me as the “Han girl,” no matter how I tried to justify myself with a Buyi background. Such boundary drawing and differentiating made me feel a power dynamic in which I was the one being marginalized and Othered.

An everyday scene of my village hostess drawing batik. Photo courtesy of Yu Luo.

Needing to study the Buyi language, I took down in a notebook all the words and phrases my village hostess taught me. Meanwhile, watching her draw batik was among the initial fieldwork experiences that sparked both my intellectual interest and an interest in learning the craft. As I exhibited my willingness to try batik making, she found me a piece of cloth to work on. Learning to draw batik from a local senior female relieved my uneasiness at the outset of my fieldwork, as I tried to “fit in.” For many young female anthropologists, the question of “What is the socially acceptable role in the local context?” not only exists as a methodological inquiry, but also often poses logistic challenges. A young female traveling alone from a fair distance to their village seeking to study local “culture” seemed questionable to some villagers, as I appeared out of a seemingly random context. Hanging around and having conversations with various male villagers, moreover, did not help me from being regarded as an anomaly. It turned out that a young woman learning handicrafts from senior females may be more appropriate in local perception.

The process of learning batik-making as well as the language indeed became a rite of passage for me seeking to transform into an “insider.” As I continued to pick up Buyi vocabulary while making batik with my hostess, the intensive immersion contributed to the locals’ gradual inclusion of my presence. In the meantime, I learned about the interesting ways in which they discussed the characters and settings in the TV dramas we were watching in reference to their worldviews and family ethics. My hostess started calling me “our village girl” in conversations with elderly women, who saw me drawing batik and were amazed by my ability. Our batik-drawing was later joined by my hostess’ daughter-in-law, who married into the family from a nearby Buyi village during my fieldwork year. Nostalgic for the bustling days doing migrant labor in the coastal areas, which contrasted with the “tedious” countryside, the daughter-in-law nevertheless grew to be interested in making batik. My hostess said that it is what every Buyi girl used to do.

My village hostess wearing the Buyi traditional costume and displaying batik-drawing during an annual Buyi festival. Photo courtesy of Yu Luo.

Alongside with language as an explicit identity marker, locals regard the Buyi batik and costume in general as pertaining to a group of “authentic” ethnic people, especially in regards to the Han and other ethnicities. Moreover, the batik drawing scene has become tokenized in the production of all sorts of photographic and artistic compositions exhibiting local Buyi culture. In the recent few years, female villagers have been asked to put on the Buyi costume while making batik at festivals for the purposes of state promotion and tourism development. What’s more, my hostess has also suggested taking a photo of me drawing batik in the Buyi costume, akin to recording an in-situ souvenir.

What are the broader implications here? Historical and contemporary connections between the community and the anthropologist working and writing about it do matter. If what we call culture is the essential tool for making self and other, then how shall I construct an ethnographic self, given that the “other” I study is a changing part of me to some extent? It is a self that is caught in between, at the intersection of identity and power difference, in a shifting ground of knowledge production and cultural representation. If there is a certain common set of perceptions and “local knowledge” shared by the villagers and me, what about the complex values and structures of feeling that differentiate us? Could the other be simultaneously represented as a self through ethnographic engagement without repressing or dismissing other forms of difference as in “native blindness”?

As an anthropologist with lived experience in the region, I find it crucial to understand the productive shifts between the anthropologist’s self-identity and the fieldwork process, as well as the multiply-positioned roles that the anthropologist assumes in the field. The batik-making experience I encountered sheds light on the dynamics of the fieldworker’s rapport, acceptance, and access to ethnographic information. This reflexive stance would continue to inform me in the actual process of ethnographic writing, as I pursue the textual modes and meanings of representation and juggle between speaking “from” and speaking “for.”

Yu Luo is a Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at Yale University. With a focus on the Buyi ethnic minority, her dissertation research looks at how cultural and natural landscapes are reconstructed and branded under conservation and development schemes in late-socialist southwest China.

Please send news items, contributions, and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

The Anthropology of Confucius Institutes

May 5, 2014 by Yi Zhou

By Jennifer Hubbert ( Lewis & Clark College)

In a 2010 episode entitled “Socialism Studies,” Jon Stewart of The Daily Show humorously skewered the American controversy over China’s Confucius Institutes (CIs). This episode highlighted a California resident–speaking against these Chinese government funded language and culture programs–who declares: “If it comes from communist China, it is tainted with communism…We should not be teaching our children about Mandarin language and Chinese culture…That’s brainwashing.” To confirm, Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi then visits a middle school Confucius Institute, where he discovers an “army of tiny Maoists who had to be stopped.”

CI Opera Masks

While The Daily Show clearly intends the viewer to express skepticism over the California resident’s lingering Cold War fervor and to understand that Mandvi winks at us with his suggestion that 12-years olds are primed to abolish western democracy, the program’s mockery mirrors controversies over the CIs’ perceived threats to western academic freedom that in turn reflect wide-ranging perceptions of China as a general threat to global well-being.

The debates over CIs are encapsulated in a cautionary article by University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in a November issue of The Nation and a rebuttal by George Washington University historian Edward McCord.¹ Both scholars work on campuses with CIs. McCord welcomed George Washington’s, Sahlins wishes to have Chicago’s disbanded. Although methodologically similar, drawing upon policy documents, interviews with institute directors and concerned American faculty, and media reports, their perspectives represent opposing ends of the spectrum. For example, Sahlins (who has long championed ethical engagement in anthropology) envisions the specter of Chinese state censorship when he invokes the CI’s sole use of simplified characters, suggesting that readers will be denied access to dissident writing that uses traditional characters. In contrast, McCord contends that American Chinese language departments teach simplified characters “of their own volition.” Similarly, while Sahlins finds suspicious a perceived lack of American control over CI teaching staff assignments, McCord argues “the low rate of [teacher] rejection may suggest that the process is working effectively to provide top-quality instructors for CIs.”

What can an ethnographically-grounded anthropological perspective offer to this debate? I’ve been doing research on CIs for three years, sitting in on classrooms, travelling with CI groups to China and interviewing administrators, teachers, parents and students. This research provides a glimpse into the complex workings of a disaggregated Chinese state and its CI policies that privilege actual policy practices and the people who implement them and are targeted by them. What this research suggests is not that we stop interrogating CIs’ soft power intentions or wholeheartedly embrace the programs, but that perhaps we are asking some of the wrong questions. Rather than assume congruence with policy intention and effect, what do we learn by considering what actually happens in the classroom? I offer here a few examples of how we might proceed.

Marshall Sahlins is not the only scholar to be concerned about the singular use of P.R.C.-based simplified characters in the CI classroom. Yet, this perspective overlooks the fact that most of us trained in Chinese read in both character sets; as such training in one does not preclude access to the other. At the same time, McCord’s characterizing the dominance of simplified characters in U.S. texts as pure volition ignores how the Chinese state has marginalized Taiwanese language publications, censored Hong Kong writings and pressured the global publishing industry in other more pernicious ways. Of more concern than the visual medium of instruction I would argue, is the content of the CI language courses and materials. And from this angle, like foreign language classes and texts in other languages, CI texts provide a vocabulary for shopping and assessing the weather, not an recitation of unsavory national history. As my own high school French texts failed to include a detailed discussion of guillotine use during the French Revolution, neither do CI curricular materials chronicle Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the classrooms I’ve visited, when conversations veered toward the politically controversial, teachers answered questions briefly and returned to language study. We might call this censorship, or we might understand it as common pedagogical strategy. We also might look at the effect rather than the intention. Students and their parents sometimes perceived this disinclination to discuss politics in the classroom as a form of “totalitarian” control. Teachers disputed this perception and I witnessed teachers who both engaged in political discussions outside the classroom and used alternative materials in the classroom. Regardless, if this perception of censorship is the resultant image of “China,” it is arguably the opposite of what the Chinese state desires for its CI soft power policy. This suggests that the programs as a form of power for China are ineffective at best.

We might consider the rapid and expansive growth of the CIs as a second example of how asking different questions offers conflicting understandings of policy effect. McCord argues that the growth of the programs is a result of “China’s rising global profile,” something that Sahlins compares to China’s “technological and military accomplishments, and its newfound status as the second-largest economy in the world.” Neither of these claims are factually incorrect. While McCord portrays the increase in Chinese language studies as a function of this growing profile, my own research implies that more important questions to ask are what are students getting out of studying Chinese and how does that outcome relate to Chinese state power? Are students truly succumbing to a new global order targeted by China’s soft power policy or abiding by an American-based “social contract” in which students strive for academic success in a competitive educational environment? My research suggests that it is the latter that more effectively drives student choices. In many ways the “Chineseness” of the Chinese language matters because of its perceived ability to protect students from the rapid shifts of late capitalism not because of student affinity for “China.” Thus students often study Chinese as a “magic bullet” to enhance chances for admissions to Stanford or a job a Nike, not because of soft power effectiveness. Within this context, Chinese emerges as the latest do-it-yourself project to manage the future.

The CI controversy, despite its extremes, is therefore instructive on multiple levels. I laud Marshall Sahlins’ commitment to guarding against the corporatization of the university and appreciate Edward McCord’s tempering of the ubiquitous “China threat” trope that pervades western media. Grounded anthropological research does not ignore these perspectives but pushes us to detach policy intentions from assumptions about policy effect, to understand the disarticulated nature of state power, to move beyond policy documents as our dominant sources of knowledge, and to examine the effects of implementation on the people who are the objects of policy itself.

1 Marshall Sahlins, “China U.” The Nation, November 18, 2013. The McCord references are to a draft version of “Confucius Institutes in the U.S.: Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom; Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” originally published on: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/files/response-to-sahlins-6.pdf. An abbreviated version can be found under the title “Confucius Institutes: Hardly a Threat to Academic Freedoms,” The Diplomat, March 27, 2014. http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/confucius-institutes-hardly-a-threat-to-academic-freedoms/.

Jennifer Hubbert is associate professor of anthropology and director, East Asian Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. Her recent work has examined the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo, published in Modern China, City & Society, and positions: east asia cultures critique. Jennifer’s current book project examines Confucius Institutes.

Evolving Funerals in Japan

April 19, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

By Yohko Tsuji (Cornell University)

Funeral hall in an Osaka suburb. Image courtesy of Yohko Tsuji

In 2013, I attended a funeral of the Yamada family in an Osaka suburb. The deceased, age 89, was the widow of the family head whose funeral in 1992 provided the data for my article on Japanese mortuary rituals (Tsuji, “Mortuary Rituals in Japan: The Hegemony of Tradition and the Motivations of Individuals” Ethos 34(3), 2006). The article revealed both continued compliance with traditions and recent modifications of them. This mixture of the old and the new was also evident in the 2013 funeral of Mrs. Yamada.

Some changes I noted in 1992 were funeral halls becoming the common funeral venue and hired specialists playing a major role in dealing with death (Suzuki, The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan, 2000). I also learned that three families in the Yamadas’ neighborhood defied the tradition of kôden, or incense money exchange by refusing to receive it at their funerals.

In the ensuing years, the practice of declining kôden has spread much further. For Mrs. Yamada’s funeral in 2013, the family received kôden only from their relatives, but not from neighbors and other mourners. Professionalization of mortuary rituals intensified. While the family home was the site of her husband’s funeral, Mrs. Yamada’s funeral was held at a funeral hall, and professionals played indispensable roles from her death to her 49th- day-after-death memorial. When her remains were brought home from the hospital, funeral hall workers changed her into a kimono, laid her on the futon, and set up the altar for an urn and incense with flowers and lanterns around it. Later, the funeral director came to discuss options as well as prices of the funeral and other related issues (e.g., meals, transportation). He also gave the family a long to-do list, which included notifying banks and insurance companies, filing the deceased’s income tax returns, and settling her estate.

Professionals also contributed to the dramatization of rituals. For nôkan or placing the remains in the coffin, a trained young woman moved Mrs. Yamada’s body from her futon to the coffin in the same choreographed manner as her counterparts did in the movie, Departures. Mrs. Yamada’s coffin was not a conventional rectangular box of white pine like that of her husband. Though the shape was the same, its outer face was of patterned pink brocade. The dramatization continued into her funeral. It opened with a short video that highlighted her life from childhood to old age.

Another change occurred in shôkô or the incense burning ceremony. Previously, mourners proceeded to the altar as the funeral director called their names according to the pre-arranged order reflecting the hierarchical nature of kin relationships and the social status of mourners. However, at most funerals today, shôkô is done in a random order except for the chief mourner who is first, followed by next of kin, and the last incense burner for tome shôkô which marks the end of the ceremony.

The significance of work-related mourners was noticeably diminished at Mrs. Yamada’s funeral compared with at that of her husband’s. This may be because her former colleagues were either deceased or in poor health, and her daughters and son-in-law were retired. Neighbors constituted the largest group of mourners, but professionals took over most of their traditional roles except staffing the reception desk.

What accounts for these changes? Some changes may be adaptations to contemporary lifestyle, which ease the burden of hosting and attending funerals. Random shôkô order relieves the bereaved family from making the often difficult decisions on who goes before whom. As hierarchy among mourners is the guiding principle of shôkô order, does this indicate the decreasing significance of hierarchy as a dominant value? No more kôden saves money, not only for mourners, but also for the bereaved family who need to reciprocate. But this might shrink the enduring social circles that are bound by giri or obligation. In other words, do the modifications of the mortuary tradition reflect the changing nature of Japanese society that is regarded to become muen shakai or a society of people with little or no social ties, where annually over 32,000 isolated people die without anyone looking after their death and only the stench of their decayed remains prompts the discovery of their deaths (NHK Muen Shakai: “Muen-shi” Sanman-Nisen-nin no Shôgeki 2010)?

Anthropologists have been studying rituals as a strategic window for understanding other cultures. I believe the evolving Japanese funerals offer just such a window, allowing us to explore many different aspects of Japanese society, such as families, marriages, workplaces, neighborhood, consumerism, gift exchange, and social change.

Yohko Tsuji is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is a cultural anthropologist, whose research includes aging, mortuary rituals, conception of time, and social change in Japan, the U.S., and Thailand.

Please send news items, contributions, and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).