Greetings from warm California! It is a privilege and an honor to serve as the SEAA president. First, I want to thank all the past presidents and board members for their hard work. I am really looking forward to working with all the members of this dynamic section that I care about deeply. I would like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce myself and the new columnists and web editor.
I received my PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University (1998) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center of Harvard University (1998-99). Currently, I am a professor and chair of Anthropology Department at UC Davis. My research covers a broad range of topics: urban studies (especially space-making, urban planning, and power dynamics); global middle-classes and consumption practices; mental health and well-being; selfhood and therapeutic processes; labor migration; postsocialism; and critique of neoliberalism. I grew up in Kunming, China and studied at Peking University for my B.A. and M. A, in Chinese Literature and Literary Theory. Over the past twenty years, I have been able to return to China almost every year to carry out ethnographic fieldwork. I appreciate the opportunity to live my life across the Pacific, which constantly refreshes me with new perspectives and vigor.
As the new president, I will work hard to achieve the goals I set out in my election statement. First is to develop innovative strategies to further increase the visibility of SEAA within AAA and among our colleagues and students based in not only North America but also East Asia, Europe, and beyond. We need to engage new internet based social networking technologies for broader outreach and foster more research collaborations. Second, with the growth of our membership, I will seek to secure more slots for our sessions and make sure that they are well-placed in the annual program. Meanwhile, it is important to promote collaboration with other sections to jointly sponsor sessions that can not only speak to regional issues but also address important theoretical questions concerning anthropology, STS, and other related disciplines. Third, I hope to enhance the communication between the executive board and section members so as to incorporate new and constructive ideas from everyone. In particular, I would like to encourage greater participation of graduate students who are a vital source of energy and insights. This year we have begun to include one student on the Hsu Book Prize Committee and one on the Plath Prize Committee. Our two new AN columnists are also graduate students who are working closely with me and Amy Borovoy. At this year’s AAA in Chicago, our graduate students organized a successful, well-attended dinner event. Next year, they plan to organize a breakfast or lunch conversation with some faculty about their research experiences, fieldwork, grant proposal writing, and preparation for the job market.
I am excited that we now have two new AN columnists. Heidi K. Lam is currently a PhD Student at Yale University. She is exploring the notion of cultural theming through her pre-dissertation ethnographic research in theme parks, museums, and commercial spaces within Japan. She received her BA in Anthropology with High Honors from Princeton University in 2008. She graduated from Harvard University in 2012 with an MA in Regional Studies: East Asia and was the recipient of the Joseph Fletcher Memorial Award for her master’s thesis “Enchanting Time and Nation: History, Nostalgia, and the Other in Japanese Themed Spaces.” Yi Zhou is a P.hD candidate in the anthropology department at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on Chinese women’s online writing and reading whose creative work has drawn significant investment from domestic companies that has turned their stories into pay-for-read commodities. Her project seeks to unravel what she calls “an affective economy” by exploring how the changing gender relationships in China’s postsocialist conditions, propel women to read and write. She also seeks to understand how companies’ subtle mechanisms co-produce female affective labor whose cultural creations and consumptions rely on the bodily and emotional capacities to affect and to be affected.
As contributing editors, Heidi and Yi plan to feature the ongoing research of young and established anthropologists, as well as special events organized by SEAA members that relate to the anthropology of East Asia. They will also invite section prize winners to talk about their award winning books and papers, interview faculty about their new research and publications, and provide graduate students the opportunities to report on their own research projects and exchange fieldwork experiences. They can be contacted at heidi.lam@yale.edu and yizhou@ucdavis.edu. In addition, Yi is also a new student councilor. She hopes to strengthen the connections among the members by organizing student activities and contributing to the development of SEAA as a space for mentorship. She will use social media such as the East Asian Anthropology Student group on Facebook as well as face-to-face meetings to facilitate dialogue among students and between faculty and students.
Finally, I am also thrilled to announce that Guven Witteveen is our web editor! He is outreach education consultant and evaluator, based in middle Michigan. His research interests began with museum representation and citizen groups in rural west Japan. Later work expanded his study to civil society, outreach from campus to citizens, and now from scholars to the wider public. Teaching research methods and producing multimedia has brought him to Korea and west China most recently. As the web editor, he will invite SEAA members to make their work known to us all in the form of 150-250 word articles with photo or clip (audio or video). The Web lets us make research easy to find, engage with, and build upon. This will help others share their work here, whether dissertation abstract, grant project, or collections of materials. Thumbnail ethnographic incidents of less than 500 words (events observed/participated in, sites or exhibits visited, interviews with fellow social scientists at home or abroad) also are welcome. Write directly with ideas to anthroview@gmail.com.