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Curating Peninsular Destruction

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Timothy Gitzen
November 28, 2018

Editor’s Note: This piece opens a SEAA column themed series on “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

While assisting with a campus tour of Seoul’s Yonsei University in the summer of 2008 for a group of American social studies teachers, the Korean-graduate-student-turned-tour-guide stopped in front of the famed statue of Yonsei’s founder, Horace Underwood. The graduate student explained that the statue, first erected in 1916, was destroyed during the Korean War (1950–1953) when North Korea took Seoul and used Yonsei’s campus as a base of operations. The only part of the statue that remained was the base, he said, pointing to it and the discoloring that indicated soot and ash. Fervently, the teachers began taking pictures of the statue’s base and discoloring, as if to photograph a site of “history.”

The base of the original statue of Horace Underwood. Horim Yi

Why is the base of the statue so fascinating for these American teachers, and why did the graduate student find this story interesting enough to share in the first place? Echoes of the Korean War adorn the landscapes of Seoul and South Korea. Some are more spectacular, like the De-Militarized Zone; but most are just ordinary sites akin to the statue’s base. These historical markers, however, represent not only a finite period of active war between 1950 and 1953, but the long durée of Cold War militarization on the peninsula. Sites like the statue’s base are temporal markers of past destruction that simultaneously remind us of the possibility of future catastrophe. Yet these temporal markers rely on active recognition as a site of war, incursion, or security. Curating these sites thus calls forth their past, but the interest and fascination lie not only in what happened in that place at that time, but in the proximity and potentiality of future peninsular destruction. The fascination and interest in the sites—and indeed, the curation itself—are part and parcel of the banality of militarization borne of Cold War insecurities of national destruction. At a time when it seems that North-South relations are substantially improving, it is crucial to recognize the power and pervasiveness of militarization that encourages Koreans to tell stories of sites like the statue’s base and the audience’s fascination is violently etched and burned into the physical landscape of the peninsula.

The unending

This is the unending not only of a war or permanent confrontation, but also of spaces and objects that simultaneously remind us of disaster while compelling us to forget, only to be repeated infinitely.

The banality of continued militarization depends first on what some call the “unending Korean war” (Hong 2015). While the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement ceased active combat, North and South Korea are still officially at war. This permanent confrontation provides the South Korean state with justification for continued military conscription of all able-bodied men and the violent and undemocratic policies and actions of former authoritarian leaders Park Chung-hee (1961–1979) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980–1987). The constant fear of yet another North Korean incursion or attack, evidenced by, for instance, North Korea’s artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in November 2010, naturalized the on-going confrontation and made banal South Korean responses and precautions. That banality of militarization seeps into the built environment, in part because the state built safeguards for a potential North Korean invasion into urban infrastructure, including overpasses that could fall onto roads to prevent tanks from rolling into Seoul.

Fear and the banality of militarization are also  well-adapted to  the art of forgetting or even misdirection. While taking Korean language at Sogang University, we read and discussed the Bugak Mountain Fortress Path. Bugak Mountain sits in the northern part of Seoul and the Fortress Path is a popular walking or hiking trail for Koreans and tourists alike. The description in Sogang’s textbook includes the many sites to see along the path, including a more than 200-year-old pine tree with several bullet holes. The textbook explains that on January 21, 1968, several North Korean spies infiltrated South Korea with the intent of making it to the Blue House, the presidential resident, before they were killed by South Korean soldiers (known as the Blue House Raid). The military limited public access to this area for more than 40 years, but now it is part of the popular hiking trail. Yet the tree still acts as a temporal marker, a reminder of past incursion and the possibility for future attack. This is the unending not only of a war or permanent confrontation, but also of spaces and objects that simultaneously remind us of disaster while compelling us to forget, only to be repeated infinitely.

On curation 

These sites of peninsular destruction are not limited to sites from the Korean War or North Korean incursions. In 2005, construction workers uncovered an underground bunker in the Yeouido neighborhood of Seoul. There were no records of a bunker in the Seoul Metropolitan Government archives, but experts were able to determine that the bunker was built between late 1976 and early 1977 when inter-Korean tensions were high. Furthermore, given the placement of the bunker, the city government believes that former president Park Chung-hee and his government built the bunker should armed conflict reignite. On October 1, 2015, the city government opened the bunker to the media for the first time, and from October 10 to November 1, public visitors were able to schedule tours of the bunker (Eum 2015). On October 19, 2017, the bunker reopened under control of the Seoul Museum of Art as the SeMA Bunker, showcasing exhibitions that speak to the space’s history and significance (Yoon 2017).

This bunker was a preparatory space, one that never saw its intended use fulfilled, but now acts as a curated reminder of that preparation. Each space and object are historical markers, but are only made so upon curation. In each case—the statue’s base, bullet-laden pine, bunker—curators, broadly conceived, asked audiences to remember a period of war, North-South tension, and security protocols indexed by the object or space. Silently, though, we also remember the possibility of future North Korean belligerence, thus imbuing these historical markers with a future-looking temporality that make them even more fascinating. In that fascination, though, the sleight-of-hand of militarization’s banality takes hold, as we forget that militarization orients people towards violence.

Timothy Gitzen is an anthropologist and Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Korean Studies at Indiana University. His research focuses on national security, militarization, and queer activism in South Korea. His work has appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and the forthcoming Duke University Press volume Queer Korea.

Cite as: Gitzen, Timothy. 2018. “Curating Peninsular Destruction.” Anthropology News website, November 28, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1045

If you want to submit your essay ideas to us, please contact Shuang Frost ([email protected]) and Heidi Lam ([email protected]).

Announcing the SEAA regional conference in August 2019, Tokyo

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wordcloud in frame of WiFi icon

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Regional Conference 2019 – Tokyo

East Asian Anthropology Now and into the Future:
Transformations, Dynamics, and Challenges

[update 29 April 2019: registration begins on June 1]

The region of East Asia offers a fertile ground for anthropologists who seek to understand the pulse of a new modernity, whether it be the effects of economic restructuring, new modes of living and being, new ways of relating, technologies and human interfaces, population dynamics, understandings of well-being, the life well lived or the ‘good’ death, mobilities in the region, and much more. We hope to assemble a variety of papers from the latest anthropological research on the transformations and dynamics as well as challenges people in the region face as they go about their daily lives in the 21st century.  


August 2-3, 2019 hosted at Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies (GSAPS) of Waseda University

Conference Aims

The conference aims:

  1. to provide a platform for anthropology teachers and students and scholars in related disciplines to share their latest research findings;
  2. to provide an opportunity for building academic networks and for exploring possibilities of research collaboration among scholars and between institutions; and
  3. to promote anthropology in East Asia.

 

Organizers

The Society of East Asian Anthropology (SEAA), an officially recognized section within the American Anthropological Association (AAA), consists of close to 400 anthropologists whose primary area of study is East Asia.  SEAA is committed to developing international channels of communication among anthropologists throughout the world. It seeks to promote discussion and share information on diverse topics related to the anthropology of Taiwan, PRC, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea; other societies/cultures of Asia and the Pacific Basin with historical or contemporary ties to East Asia; and diasporic societies/cultures identified with East Asia.  Its website is http://seaa.americananthro.org/ 

 

Call for papers

The Executive Committee of the Society of East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) invites proposals for panels and individual papers to be presented at the conference. All presentations are to be delivered in English.

Proposals for panels or for individual papers should be submitted to [email protected] before February 28, 2019. Results of the selection of papers will be made by March 31, 2019.


Panels:

A panel will consist of either 3 or 4 paper presenters and 1 discussant (non-presenter); however, double-sized panels of up to 8 papers and 2 discussants will also be considered.

To submit a panel, please provide a 200-word abstract for each individual paper and a 200-word statement for the theme of the panel. Only full panels will be considered for acceptance. In middle January an online form to help self-organize panels (interested individual papers seeking fellow presenters to form a full panel) will be hotlinked here.


Individual papers:

To submit an individual paper, please provide a 200-word abstract. We will cluster together papers that broadly fit theoretically. Junior scholars are given priority.

 

Registration

Registration starts on June 1, 2019. Refer to the information page of instructions here.
Participants will arrange and pay for their own lodging and transportation. Some general advice will be developed for Tokyo at http://bit.ly/about2019seaa-tokyo

Many restaurants near the conference venue are available at lunchtime.
A reception, the cost of which will be included in your registration fee, will be held on Saturday, August 3, 2019.

 

I look forward to welcoming you at GSAPS!

Glenda S. Roberts, SEAA President
Professor, GSAPS at Waseda University
Tokyo, Japan

A Seductive Power Disturbing #MeToo

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Shanni Zhao

Echoing the global #MeToo movement, Chinese social media have raised a new wave of debates on issues of sexual harassment in Chinese educational institutions. Most critiques attend to the unequal power relations in which faculty members offer scholarly opportunities or advancement in exchange for sexual contacts with students, mostly female. Student victims and classmates of deceased victims are courageous enough to confess their experiences, and demand the punishment of the sexual offenders. Feminist activists organize social media campaigns, urging university administrators to establish preventive and investigative mechanisms against sexual misconduct, and demanding student participation in policy making and investigation. People are acting to empower female voices, destigmatize sexual harms, and bring attention to the loopholes in the protective mechanisms against sexual harassment on campus.

Alongside my admiration of these efforts, I would like to further reflect on the cultural and psychic dimensions of the issues of campus sexual harassment. Institutional frameworks—such as law, policy, and bureaucratic procedures—aim to exert a sort of repressive power against sexual misconduct, setting limits on words, behaviors, and interactions, and punishing their violation. However, these institutional frameworks often fail to take into consideration the forces of sexuality, such as desire, fantasy, and sentiment, when they tackle with sexual harassment. Since these forces often play a key role in sexual interactions, ignoring them can be problematic. Understanding the role of these forces requires recognizing power as seductive. Admittedly, the psychic and cultural dimensions that I intend to reflect on can be ambiguous and transgressive. These dimensions often elude current feminist debates in China, probably to avoid trespassing the boundary of political correctness. However, it is this ambiguity that I often see in the post-facto interviews of victims. Recognizing the psychic and cultural processes will improve people’s capacity of discretion and judgment about sexual interactions, and may forestall unpleasant happenings.

A victim rejecting her victimhood

One of the most widely discussed cases labeled as sexual harassment on Chinese media outlets is about Taiwanese female writer Lin Yi-han. Born in 1991, Lin committed suicide in 2017. Over the course of her 26-year life, she was diagnosed with depression at 16, maintained a sexual relationship with her Chinese tutor from 17, and at 26—two months before her death—published Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, a novel about four teenage girls who were seduced by their Chinese tutor. While Lin denied the public’s identification of her with the characters, her parents later confirmed that Lin’s tutor had debauched her and three of her schoolmates.

What draws my attention in this event is how Lin interprets her intention to write about the sexual experiences of her characters, experiences that the public often categorizes as “debauchery.” In press meetings and public readings, she claims, “This is a book not about anger, but a girl’s love, desires, and erotic fantasies. My writing is disgraceful. It is to do things I know I should not do. I am like my heroines who do things they know they should not do.” While she identifies the relations between the underage heroines and the male tutor as seductive and violent, she refuses to recognize the former as “victims”: “For feminists without experiences of sexual violence, they can lightheartedly claim patriarchy rapes feminism. However, for women who fall in love with a sex offender, it is too complicated to say so.”  Lin explains that the feminist anger is too simple and pure an emotion to represent the sexual experiences and power relations trapping her heroines. Here, how do Lin’s words challenge the political concept of victimhood?

Lin, Yi-han, the author of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Public Domain

Examining the 1960s feminist consciousness-raising movement in the United States, Webb Keane (2015) explains that, to make the intimate political, people need to learn a language that allows them to swap speaking roles from the first-person stance of “I” to  the first-person-plural stance of “we,” namely “me too,” in discussing sentiments and experiences. Meanwhile, consciousness-raising also relies on cultivating the emotion of anger. As Keane articulates, affect, or neuro arousal, has to be transformed into the emotion of anger to have ethical valence. Lin Yi-Han exists as a token of the first-person who consciously refuses the first-person plural and the categorized emotion of anger. She thus poses a challenge to the political call of “MeToo.” How does such a refusal to victimhood and will to be independent of larger structural forces come into being?

The aesthetic pleasure

To understand this refusal, I consider the structure of feeling (Williams 1978) and the cultural materials shaping the psychic processes. Lin’s attitude towards sexual violence is not without anger, but anger based on a different structure of feeling from Western feminism. She chews on the event of “aesthetic pleasure”— the entanglement of pain and happiness—in relation to morality, instead of the event of sexual victimhood to politics. She identifies the harm in her characters’ relationships as primarily semiotic, and then psychological and physical. He also reduces the rich semiotics of desire and sentiment to bleak sexual instinct, and thus pollutes the rhetoric. Yet, Lin adds, “How can one deny the beauty of his words?” Her anger also reveals her recognition of and preoccupation with a seductive power connecting the tutor and students, mediated by language and knowledge.

This recognition and preoccupation with the seductive forces of the intellectual  are probably rooted in a collective aspiration for modernity dating back to the intellectual movements in early-twentieth-century China. Memoirs, correspondence, and novels of the period show that sexual affairs between male intellectuals and female students indexed the modern ideals of humanity, liberty, and progression, as opposed to the Confucian strictures on women’s marriage and sexuality, which were deemed “inhumane.” Even today, movies, dramas, novellas, documentaries continue transforming modern female students—together with their romantic and sexual relationships, their sufferings of miscarriage, abandonment, illnesses, or death at an early age—into legends. These media valorize the form of love, romance, and womanhood modeled on this master-student relationship in Chinese modern literary tradition, contributing to a structure of feeling, in Lin’s words, on aesthetic pleasure.

Power as a seductive mechanism

In a number of accusations of professors’ sexual misconduct echoing #MeToo, victims often admit their ambivalent distinction between love and violence, recognition and harassment. In a post-facto interview, a female student reflected on her relationship with the vice director in her department. When asked why not end the relationship at the very beginning, “I got Stockholm syndrome,” she explained. Her later words indicate that their initial sexual intercourse was unexpected; nevertheless, she didn’t categorize it as violence. Her awareness of harm and anger arose only after she discovered that he maintained multiple sexual relationships. Here, the sense of harm arose primarily from his violation of the cultural expectation of exclusive love, rather than his abuse of institutional power. In such cases, the question of harm is more than a legal question of consent. The power mechanism also functions at the psychic level, producing the attachment to “sexual offenders” and disavowing this abusive power.

When studying power relevant to issues of love, desire, and sexuality, scholars have criticized the conceptualization of power relations as “capture” and “escape,” dominance and resistance (Foucault 1978, Berlant 2011, Mazzarella 2017), because it assumes individuals and institutions act as sovereign entities, standing in opposition with clear boundaries. However, we as human beings have empathy—the capacity to suspend immediate judgment and share others’ feelings and affects. In suspending critical faculties, we can establish unconscious proximity even with people who may be harmful to us (Borneman 2015). This is one way to see power as seductive. Individuals inevitably develop unconscious proximities with peer fellows and larger structures. This makes people vulnerable and penetrable. Power, more than pre-existing, is often enacted in an encounter when the unconscious proximity is activated as a felt resonance with the person on the spot, our cherished desires, larger structural promises, or age-old cultural scripts. The complicated affective, moral, political values therein pose an excess to discursive meaning.

Michel Foucault (1978) reminds that discourse as a means of resistance may not empower us, but rather energize power to further subject us to its grid. For the #MeToo movement, the striking force that its confessional mode of resistance generates is undeniable. However, the belief in discursive power should not overshadow the psychic struggles confronting sexual misconduct. I hope a knowledge of this seductive mechanism of power will make more intelligible the ambivalent forms of affect activated by sexual encounters, and encourage ethical reflections on the psychic processes generating the attachment to the potentials of harm. I also hope this will help conceive preventative strategies against sexual harms that applicable to the moments of intimate encounters prior to rational consent.

Shanni Zhao is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Before starting her PhD, she spent a year in a feminist NGO in Beijing as an intern and researcher. Her research explores intimacy and affect, citizenship and belonging, and (post-) socialist state formation.

Cite as: Zhao, Shanni. 2018. “A Seductive Power Disturbing #MeToo.” Anthropology News website, July 26, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.935

Looking Ahead by Going Back

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Looking Ahead by Going Back

The Sections Edition: Society for East Asian Anthropology

Jennifer RobertsonJuly 18, 2018

Japanese robotics is imagineering a future dominated by nostalgia and nationalism.

“Chair of the Future.” Seventy years ago, Margaret Mead confirmed her futurist leanings by proposing that universities should promote the study of profound social transformations by appointing Chairs of the Future. Research on historical cultures and societies—“the Middles Ages and Classical Greece”—was already well established, she argued. The acceleration of social change together with the lengthening of the human life span meant that “no one will live in the world into which [they were] born, and no one will die in the world in which [they] worked in [their] maturity” (Mead in Cornish [1977]1983, 128–129). In her numerous writings about human futures, Mead (2005) aimed at a broad readership; her work remains relevant and demonstrates why anthropologists especially are well positioned to engage “future futures.”

A collage that illustrates Prime Minister Abe’s vision of a future extended family with human and robot members. Jennifer Robertson.

Mead contrasted “prefigurative” (new) culture with “postfigurative” (traditional) culture. The former refers to societies in which the elders learn from youngers; the latter to one in which the youngers learn from elders. Current culture is “cofigurative” in that young and old alike learn from their contemporaries or peers (Mead 1972, 31). What Mead did not grok was the extent to which future technology, as I have argued in the case of Japanese robotics, would be deployed to salvage a traditional status quo—an agenda I characterize as retro-tech and retro-robotics.

Robots are associated with the future and/or the imagination of a future. But industrial robots, Roombas, humanoids, and animaloids are now very much part of the present. Not a day goes by without media coverage about robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The fictional robots populating anime and manga have a decades-old subjecthood in cultural studies. As I elaborate in Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018), a major task I faced was to call attention to the disconnect between actual robots and the robots that populate comics, novels, and movies. Although technologically complex, actual robots are clumsy, slow, and underwhelming compared to their fictional counterparts. Video PR footage of actual robots moving is typically speeded up significantly, sometimes ten to thirty times their original speed, and is heavily edited to create the illusion of smooth, coordinated movement. Robo-hype needs to be tempered by robo-reality checks.

I also had to deal with the fact that the field of robotics and related technologies is evolving so quickly and in so many directions that research focused solely on highlighting the newest gee-whiz models is quickly outdated. How to keep my book relevant even after the robots featured in it were obsolete was a major concern. In addition, while seeking to analyze cross-cultural differences in attitudes toward robot-human interactions, I was careful to avoid fueling the stereotype of “the Japanese” as gadget obsessed and culturally prone to desiring robot companions over human ones.

The impression “out there” that commuters in Tokyo share sidewalk and office space with humanoids requires a concerted effort to dispel. Most robots are still in the prototype stage and interact with humans only under limited, controlled conditions, mainly in settings such as laboratories, corporate showrooms, shopping malls and department stores, science museums, and in closely monitored test situations within select schools, nursing homes, and hospitals. My solution to these quandaries was to explore and interrogate the type of national-cultural, social-institutional, and family structures within which roboticists, manufacturers, and politicians alike assume that humans and robots will coexist. I also excavated substantive historical backstories in order to help contextualize the imagineering of human-robot relationships since the mid-1920s when the newly coined “robot” (robotto) became a household word.

The Inobes represent the ideal household—and more specifically, the traditional stem nuclear family (ie)—in which a married couple lives with their children and parents.

Aptly described as wary of immigrants and refugees, Japan has one of the fastest aging populations and shrinking labor forces among postindustrial nation-states. Young women and men increasingly eschew marriage, and, for the past decade, the birthrate continues to remain below the rate of mortality. In his first term in office (2006–2007), Prime Minister Abe Shinzō debuted Innovation 25, a visionary blueprint for the robotization of Japan by 2025. Reelected in 2012, Abe has renamed the proposal Innovation Japan, without an end date, and most recently, Society 5.0—the latter is described as an “ultra-smart” society in which all things will be connected through the Internet of Things. Abe is also planning to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to showcase robots in a separate “robot Olympics.” Although the robots displayed will be those made for the civilian market, the Japanese state, like its US counterpart, is also keen on parlaying robotics and associated spin-off industries in the lucrative weapons economy.The byword “innovation” in Innovation 25 is misleading; renovation is a more accurate term, for the proposal reifies the conformist values represented by the male-headed household as a microcosm of Japanese society. Innovation 25includes an illustrated fictional ethnography of the Inobe Family of 2025 that was also published separately as a graphic book in 2007. Their name is an abbreviation of inobēshon (innovation). The Inobes represent the ideal household—and more specifically, the traditional stem nuclear family (ie)—in which a married couple lives with their children and parents. The household’s many robots, from the humanoid housekeeper to robotic appliances, relieves the home-based wife of housework and child and elder care tasks that Japanese women today are not interested in giving up their careers and independence to assume. Abe and his ministers argue that a robot-dependent society and lifestyle insures safety, comfort, and convenience. Implicit in the rhetoric of robotization is the assumption that a woman will be more willing to marry, have more than 1.3 children, and live with her elderly parents and in-laws if she can rely on robot maids, nannies, and caregivers (Robertson 2018: 50–79). Moreover, she could remain at home andretain her career by telecommuting to work. Abe’s vision of future society is but a nostalgic dream of the traditional extended family system—with the addition of robot members (see accompanying image).

In Japan, the family or household (ie) is the site where robots will be domesticated and even granted citizenship, irrefutable proof of which is a household register (koseki), possession of which is limited to Japanese nationals. The therapy robot, Paro, modeled after a baby harp seal, received a koseki in 2010 in which the inventor was listed as “father.” Although gimmicky, that Paro could have a koseki demonstrates that the sociodynamics of human-robot coexistence is determined not by their species difference, but by the manner of their bonding, which is informed by the ie system.

Only in the past few years have roboticists in the United States imagined their robots as family members. In 2014, a US robotics team based at MIT introduced Jibo, shaped like a Unidyne microphone, as “the first family robot.” Mother, a six-and-a-half-inch, one-pound robot shaped like a matryoshka doll, was introduced in 2016 by Sen.se (now incorporated into SoftBank, sponsor of the humanoid, Pepper). When activated by “motion cookies,” Mother monitors multiple events and behaviors in keeping with the stereotyped gender role after which she is named. Advertisements for both robots place them in upper middle-class homes inhabited by white, heteronormative nuclear families. In Japan and the United States alike, robots mirror and embody the conservative, status-quo ideologies endorsed by the state and corporations, from whom funding for research and development is crucial. The takeaway futures forecast for both societies is that, to circle back to Mead, “cofigurative” culture is transmuting into a robo-technologically enhanced version of “prefigurative” culture, in which the future is dominated by tradition.

Jennifer Robertson is professor in the Departments of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her books include Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family and the Japanese Nation (2018); Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City; and Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Robertson is the Japan editor of Critical Asian Studies and was president of the Society for East Asian Anthropology, 2009–2011.

Cite as: Robertson, Jennifer. 2018. “Looking Ahead by Going Back.” Anthropology News website, July 18, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.921

Culture and Mind in Moral Development in China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology

Jing Xu

June 27, 2018

Book Cover. Jing Xu

Why don’t Chinese socializers want their children to be compassionate and altruistic, or, at least, not too much? Why don’t young children share things in an egalitarian fashion, despite being told to do so by teachers and parents? Do these singleton children take for granted that everything belongs to them, or do they learn to negotiate ownership disputes and establish fairness rules? Are these children self-centered “little emperors” or are they well-disciplined students? My book, The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool, examines these and other puzzling questions I encountered during my fieldwork in Shanghai, from 2011 to 2012.

The book is inspired by a larger theoretical adventure of bridging anthropology and psychology in understanding fundamental questions facing humanity: How do we become moral beings? How do culture and mind intersect in the emergence of morality? First, while the emerging anthropology of morality and ethics is saturating nearly all social contexts, how children learn and acquire morality in their early years is an understudied direction in this field. Past anthropological studies on children’s diverse socialization experiences, however informative they are, have yet to figure into today’s mainstream anthropological discourses on morality. Moreover, exciting new discoveries on the emergence of morality in early childhood have inspired debates across biological, psychological, and social sciences (one can get a glimpse of its significance, by surveying top journal publications or mainstream media coverage), but this line of research is confined to experimental methods on mostly “WEIRD” populations (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic), without attending to children’s everyday socio-moral experience.

Author’s son, also a student in the preschool. Jing Xu

Driven by this theoretical ambition, I was especially fascinated by the case of China, where the relationship between children and moral norms—a topic that has concerned a previous generation of sinological anthropologists—deserves new ethnographic research, as longstanding Chinese moral education traditions are complicated by profound social transformations in contemporary China. Chinese academic traditions take zuo ren—moral cultivation—as the ultimate goal of learning, and education is seen as a crucial element in the edification of a better society. However, there is a widespread perception that China is in the midst of moral decay. Furthermore, the new generation of singleton children in urban China have distinctive moral experiences, different from those of previous generations or in other cultures.

Through the case of a middle-class private preschool (ages 2–6) community in Shanghai, my book aims to answer this central question: how do Chinese children, born under the one-child policy, alternately seen as China’s greatest hope and derided as self-centered “little emperors,” navigate their social world and developing their moral senses, at the height of a widely perceived “moral crisis” in China?

A unique feature of this book is the creative combination of anthropological and psychological theories and methods. For example, integrating psychological experiments into ethnographic fieldwork, I discovered the tension between the ideology of egalitarian sharing promoted by educators and children’s practice of sharing for strategic favors; I then illustrated the joint influence of adults’ guanxi practices and children’s nascent psychological dispositions for mutualistic cooperation on such sharing behavior. My book further brings together fine-grained analysis of social interactions among children, educators, and caregivers; questionnaire survey on child-rearing beliefs and practices; and salient cultural discourses and moral events in the broader society. For example, in the broader context of “soul-searching” in contemporary China, such as the discussion of the death of toddler girl Xiao Yueyue, I explored how socialization processes tune and twist children’s nascent empathy, thus creating a tension between cultivating empathy in the familiar school environment and suppressing empathy in the “dangerous” real world.

My book demonstrates that parents and educators are caught up in profound quandaries in moral education, as they live with extraordinary aspirations of children’s future success in an increasingly competitive environment, and tremendous anxieties about raising a moral child—their “only hope.” The heightened tension between cultivating morality and securing future success, and the proliferation of negotiating contradictory moral visions and childrearing values, doubtlessly, have profound impacts on child development, and will ultimately shape the future of China.

Moreover, it places young children at the center of analysis; reveals how cultural experience and psychological mechanisms together shape children’s moral development in multiple domains, including empathy and altruism, equality and strategic favor, fairness and ownership; and contextualizes such development in everyday socialization and disciplinary (guanjiao) practices. Although childhood is a prominent theme in the anthropology of China, the voices and experiences of young children themselves, especially those before elementary school age, are nonetheless obscured, for theoretical and methodological reasons I have alluded to. My book highlights children’s own agency and creativity: for example, I examined how some singleton children aptly updated their ownership heuristic from “everything is mine” to the first-possessor bias and strategically used ownership and fairness rules in navigate property disputes. In sum, they can proudly function as the center of universe at home, while also quickly adapting to the collective life at school and strive to become good students in teachers’ eyes. Thus my book presents how children construct their own moral universe that differs from both adult ideals (e.g., of returning to traditional “Chinese” values) and adult fantasies (of essentially selfish “little emperors”).

A child looking to the future. Jing Xu

Ultimately, the story of one community speaks to fundamental issues facing all human societies: the concern for cultivating moral personhood, the tension between cooperation and competition, and the role of children as cultural learners and innovative agents. It is in this spirit that I wrote the book, a story that connects anthropological inquiry to broad, interdisciplinary conversations on the emergence of morality, and an ethnography that focuses on young children—they are perhaps the least studied population in cultural anthropology, yet they are the future.

Jing Xu received her PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and conducted postdoctoral research in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, and Chinese studies, her research examines morality, childhood, and cultural transmission in contemporary China and comparative contexts.

Letter from SEAA President Glenda Roberts

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Glenda S. Roberts
May 7, 2018

Glenda S. Roberts

Greetings from Paris!

The theme of the summer issue of AN, Anthropological Futures, has been much on my mind as I took up residence in this historic city far from my home in Tokyo. So why does an anthropologist who has spent nearly her entire career in Japan decide to take her sabbatical in France? By way of self-introduction as your new SEAA President, let me try to provide some food for thought on the future of East-Asian anthropologists through my answer to that question.

I strongly believe that our future as anthropologists, and the future of anthropology as a discipline, rests in our ability to carry out fine-grained, complex and transnational studies.

As an anthropologist, I’ve focused on gender, work, and family as they are constructed in urban Japan. From the mid-1990s, I added migration and migration policy to my interests, as these became more important to the workforce as Japan entered the age of rapid demographic decline. These two areas have kept me occupied ever since I moved to Tokyo from Hawaii in 1996. I spent two years at the University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science (ISS) helping launch the Social Science Japan Journal while finishing up research on NPO support for foreign workers. Then Waseda University hired me as one of two anthropologists on the inaugural faculty of twenty of its first independent graduate school, the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies. The GSAPS multi-disciplinary faculty teaches a diverse body of students from all over Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Africa.

Spending most of my career in multidisciplinary social science departments has given me tools to “talk across” disciplines, as Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield (2008) put it. I strongly believe that our future as anthropologists, and the future of anthropology as a discipline, rests in our ability to carry out fine-grained, complex and transnational qualitative studies that address pressing issues of common concern that cannot be sufficiently answered by experts in other fields, but requires maintaining a dialogue with them. Furthermore, we need to reach across borders to others whose societies face similar social problems yet who deal with these problems differently. So, that’s what brought me to Paris—well, that and the food and a museum or two!

In Japan, government rhetoric urges women to “shine” as executives, yet the social norm of intense, hands-on mothering is still quite strong, and government support for families, beyond rhetoric, is less than fulsome. I wanted to see how families in France, known for its quite strong government policies for family support, and relatively short working hours, manage their work and family lives.

Since January 2018, with funding provided by Waseda, I have been doing an interview-based study with Hiroko Umegaki-Costantini on this topic. This research has enhanced our perspectives greatly, giving us a window on how people in this city confront and negotiate some similar constraints, while bringing to the table often quite different attitudes from Japanese dual earner families. I feel like a kid in a patisserie, having this opportunity at this point in my career to learn from an environment that is at once incredibly stimulating and one which I hope will also yield fruitful comparisons.

In this globalized world, we face so many of the same problems—time famine, aging societies, economic decline, care demands for the young and for the elderly, precarity in employment, mental health and its governance, social inequality, homelessness, nationalism, populism and migration, food security. . . the list is endless, yet all these are problems we see nearly everywhere. The future of anthropology to me is one that recognizes these common problems and engages in comparative study that will point to outcomes that lead to a better world.

I hope that our anthropological future will be one of increasing SEAA interaction and engagement with French scholars, as well as with scholars all over Europe who are researching East Asia.

I can’t end this letter without mentioning another aspect of my engagement with Paris that has enriched my outlook. That is, a (gradually, I admit) increasing understanding of some of the French scholarship on East Asia. France, like Japan, has a population that is big enough to foster its own publication industry and its own global francophone intellectual universe, from which Anglophones have profited greatly—courtesy of English translations. French social science giants such as Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault have influenced our discipline immensely. Being here in Paris under the auspices of the Fondation France-Japon of the EHESS has introduced me to the thriving scene of East Asian Studies in France.

While learning French is a longue durée project for me, many French researchers are also engaging actively in intellectual production in English. Increasingly, they are sponsoring Asian Studies conferences and symposia where both English and French, and East-Asian languages as well, are the mediums of communication. The interest in East Asia here is strong, and my colleagues who teach East Asian language courses tell me their classrooms are full. I hope that our anthropological future will be one of increasing SEAA interaction and engagement with French scholars, as well as with scholars all over Europe who are researching East Asia.

I will be spending the last three months of my sabbatical leave courtesy of the University of Hawaii’s Center for Japanese Studies and the Population and Health program at the East-West Center, then it’s back in the saddle at GSAPS in September. I’m very much looking forward to meeting you all at the SEAA meeting in San José. And, please think of joining us at Waseda in early August of 2019 for the regional conference of the SEAA.

I would be happy to entertain any ideas you have to foster our SEAA community. Please contact me at [email protected]. If you would like to contribute to our section column, please contact our contributing editors Heidi Lam and Yi Zhou. Please don’t hesitate, as well, to share with us the news of your latest publications by way of our listserv, Easianth. Finally, I would like to thank our executive board, and especially Gordon Mathews and Li Zhang, as well as our webmaster Guven Witteveen, for making the transition to my post a smooth one. I look forward to working with all of you!

Glenda S. Roberts is Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies of Waseda University in Tokyo. Her major areas of interest are gender, work, and family, and migration in Japan. Currently she is on sabbatical leave at the EHESS in Paris, researching work/life balance and well-being for French families.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam([email protected]) and Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

Roberts, Glenda S. 2018. “Letter from SEAA President Glenda Roberts.” Anthropology News website, May 7, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.852

SEAA at the 2017 AAA Annual Meeting

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SEAA had an active presence at the past 2017 AAA Annual Meeting, from sponsoring panels to hosting mentoring workshops and member gatherings. This past meeting, the section sponsored a total of 20 panels that covered topics such as tourism and heritage, media, politics and subject formation, labor, and mobilities in a wide range of areas that also define East Asia beyond conventional geographical terms. Two of these panels were invited sessions, “Citizenship Matters!: Movement, Time, and Precarity in Asia-Pacific” and “From ‘History and Magical Power’ to ‘Filial Obsessions’: A Tribute to Professor Steven Sangren.”

June Hee Kwon (New York University) communicates with students about writing issues at the mentoring workshop. Tianyu Xie.

Continuing the practice of connecting members at all career stages—graduate students as well as junior and senior scholars—SEAA held several workshops at the 2017 AAA Meeting. The section’s student councilors Tianyu Xie, Jing Wang, and Yukun Zeng, organized a mentoring workshop on proposal writing and grant applications for early-career scholars and graduate students and an informal graduate student dinner. SEAA also hosted a workshop on “Publishing Your First Book,” organized by Priscilla Song, where panelists—most of whom have recently published Asia-related monographs—spoke about and worked with participants on topics such as the process of transforming the dissertation into a book and the review process.

The 2017 SEAA prize recipients, whose scholarship were judged to have contributed significantly to the field of East Asian anthropology, were announced at the Business Meeting. Yukiko Koga (Hunter College, CUNY) was awarded the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize for her book Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire. The winner of the Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper was Gil Hizi (PhD candidate, University of Sydney), who wrote “Marketized ‘Educational Desire’: shifting and reproduced meanings of high-education in contemporary China.” Victoria Nguyen (PhD candidate, University of Chicago) and James Wright (PhD candidate, University of Hong Kong) received honorable mentions for their papers, respectively titled “Slow Construction: Alternative Temporalities and Tactics in the New Landscape of China’s Urban Development” and “Human Embrace, Mechanical Hugs: Japanese caregivers and robotic lifting devices.”

2017 Hsu Prize Winner Yukiko Koga with outgoing SEAA President Gordon Mathews and Hsu Prize Committee Chair Jie Yang. Jing Wang.

2017 Bestor Prize recipient Gil Hizi with outgoing SEAA President Gordon Mathews and incoming President Glenda Roberts. Jing Wang.

 

Victoria Nguyen, 2017 Bestor Prize Honorable Mention recipient with outgoing SEAA President Gordon Mathews and Bestor Prize Committee member Andrew Kipnis. Jing Wang.

Several SEAA members also celebrated their publications in print at the university press booths stationed at the AAA Meeting.

Jing Xu (University of Washington) with her book The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (2017) at the Stanford University Press booth. Jing Xu.

 

Susan Brownell (University of Missouri-St. Louis) and Niko Besnier (University of Amsterdam) next to the poster for their co-authored book (with Thomas F. Carter, University of Brighton) The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (2017) at the University of California Press booth. Susan Brownell.

Heidi K. Lam is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Yale University and a contributing editor for the SEAA section news column. She is writing her dissertation on commercial historically-themed experiences in Japan and their impact on tourism, the performing arts, and affective labor in the Japanese culture industries.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam([email protected]) and Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

 

Cite as: Lam, Heidi K. 2018. “SEAA at the 2017 AAA Annual Meeting.” Anthropology News website, March 1, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.775

AAA 2018 CFP: submission portal open until April 16

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theme for 2018 Annual Meeting

Ahead of the AAA submission portal details, below, the SEAA is experimenting with an online form for you to post your title and abstract being proposed in order to discover possible co-presenters. Sessions that are seeking an additional presenter, but also individuals looking for others to form a new session, will be able to see what topics are in play during the run-up to the AAA’s submission deadline. Enterprising individuals or session chairs can use the online form to discover others to work with.

After the AAA’s submission deadline closes and final program decisions are made later in the summer, then the SEAA will again experiment by posting those finalized titles and abstracts online so that Annual Meeting attenders can look ahead to the presentations. And those who can’t be in San Jose in person can also get a glimpse of the line-up, or enter into correspondence with some of the presenters. As well, this online experiment will serve as a kind of archive as years go on.

Therefore, please join this SEAA experiment by going to the google-form to fill-in your individual subject in search of others; to to fill in your session in search of an added presenter:
<><> Supply your presentation information at https://goo.gl/forms/MeRE3fxp7AIEPaq93
<><> After your form is filled, the results will appear at bit.ly/seaa-2018-april

=-=-= ANNOUNCEMENT of AAA Submission Portal =-=-=

The Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) welcomes proposals for the 117th American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, to be held in San Jose, CA from November 14-18, 2018.

Proposals submitted to SEAA for review should explore issues of contemporary anthropological importance and relevance concerning East Asia (including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, other areas of the world with historical or contemporary ties to East Asia, and diasporic societies/cultures identified with East Asia).

Submission/session types may include the following:

> Oral presentation sessions (standard and retrospective)
> Roundtables (standard and retrospective)
> Individually-Volunteered Papers
> Group Gallery submissions
> Individual Gallery submissions, and
> Group Flash presentations.

All presentation types are welcome, but note that organized panels (such as the oral presentation sessions and the roundtables) have a greater likelihood of being accepted on the program. Individually volunteered paper and gallery submissions will be grouped together by the SEAA program committee into cohesive sessions if possible; these sessions will then be evaluated by both the SEAA as well as the AAA’s Executive Program Committees.

The deadline for submission is Monday, April 16 at 3:00 pm EDT (no new submissions will be accepted after 2:00 pm EDT). You must also register and pay for the 2018 AAA Annual Meeting before this deadline.
The online submissions system has been problematic in the past, so please submit your proposals as soon as possible to avoid any potential technical issues.

For more Annual Meeting information and to submit your proposal online to AAA, please visit the AAA 2018 submission portal:

http://www.americananthro.org/AttendEvents/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1695

We look forward to receiving your submissions and hope to see you in San Jose!

The SEAA 2018 Program Committee:

* Priscilla Song, Program Chair [[email protected]]
* John Cho [[email protected]]
* Ayako Takamori [[email protected]]
* Yukun Zeng [[email protected]]

–Society for East Asian Anthropology
(a section of the American Anthropological Association)

SEAA Mentoring Workshop and Graduate Student Dinner

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Tianyu Xie, Jing Wang , and Yukun Zeng

In the past decade, SEAA has dedicated itself to the support of robust and rigorous research and the growth of anthropologists in East Asia and beyond. We have consistently worked on providing graduate students with opportunities to communicate with junior and senior scholars and better preparing them for professional development. Since its very beginning, SEAA has hosted mentoring workshops and informal graduate student dinners during the AAA Annual Meeting.

We aimed to not only provide practical knowledge and techniques, but also to offer more opportunities for mentees to cultivate a long-term relationship with potential mentors.

In the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election the previous year, we held a workshop titled “Anthropology with an Attitude” and discussed questions such as: What is the relationship between politics and anthropology? To what extent has the intellectual substance of anthropology—its methods and techniques, as well as its concepts and theories—been affected by the complex relations of power as we study in the world now? Lisa Rofel (University of California, Santa Cruz), Eleana Kim (University of California in Irvine), Akihiro Ogawa (The University of Melbourne) and Jessica Lockrem (St. Edwards University) joined the workshop as mentors. We had 25 participants from a diverse range of anthropology programs based in institutions both in the US and elsewhere. They included PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior scholars.

In 2017, given the disturbing news on possible cuts in funding for the social sciences and humanities, graduate students and early career professionals are encountering significant difficulties in the areas of grant applications and career development. To address this issue, we proposed and organized a lunchtime mentoring workshop for graduate students and early career professionals centering on the issues of proposal writing and grant applications. We aimed to not only provide practical knowledge and techniques, but also to offer more opportunities for mentees to cultivate a long-term relationship with potential mentors.

Glenda Roberts speaks with students at the 2017 SEAA Mentoring Workshop. Tianyu Xie.

For this workshop, Matthew Kohrman (Stanford University), June Hee Kwon (New York University), John Osburg (University of Rochester), and Glenda Roberts (Waseda University) kindly accepted our invitation to serve as mentors and shared their insights and experience about the process of proposal writing and grant applications. Like last year, we distributed a call for workshop participation within the SEAA network. Twenty five PhD students and post-doctoral fellows from a range of institutions and degree program backgrounds took part.

With the support of both the SEAA and AAA, we were able to hold the workshop in a quiet Japanese restaurant close to the annual conference site. Mentors emphasized that it is crucial to understand the audience’s needs and to flesh out major research statements accordingly. The mentors all highlighted the importance of illustrating one’s scholarly contribution—how one’s research addresses a gap in current academic conversations. At the same time, they cautioned students against using buzzwords as a way of signaling; big words should be incorporated, but not used without contextualization. Mentors also shared their insights about the changing environment of academia.

John Osburg shares his insights with mentoring workshop participants. Tianyu Xie.

After the workshop, we received numerous positive feedback and constructive suggestions for holding similar events in the future. Quite a few student participants explicitly expressed their appreciation for such workshops and agreed it was an “invaluable learning and socializing experience for students” (quoted from a student participant). They liked the workshop’s format, which provided the opportunity for every participant to communicate with  the mentors. In such a convivial and comfortable setting, exchanges of intellectual opinions are found to be more engaging, effective and vibrant, and thus, “no awkwardness” (quoted from a student participant).

Participants also proposed possible improvements for future workshops. One major suggestion is to have more discussions and guidance for graduate students on career development, not only within academia but also beyond. What pace should a PhD student adopt in order to pursue an academic position? How might anthropologists engage more with the general public? Another suggestion pertains to involving scholars who conduct research in the Far East, such as Russia and its regional connections, as possible mentors for the workshop. We find this suggestion particularly exciting as it may expand our horizons and break out of the conventional China-Japan-Korea triad.

What pace should a PhD student adopt in order to pursue an academic position? How might anthropologists engage more with the general public?

Besides the lunchtime mentoring workshop, we also organized a graduate student informal dinner during the conference. It was not only a night of knowledge exchange, but also a time for building relationships and developing a community of future anthropologists.

For the benefits of students and the sustaining development of our community, SEAA will continue to hold both the mentoring workshop and informal graduate student dinner at future AAA Annual Meetings. We want to express our sincere gratitude to all the mentors who generously provided guidance to our students. Also, we appreciate the continuous effort of SEAA board members in supporting our student mentoring activities. Lastly, thank you to everyone who participated in the workshop and informal dinner! We will keep feedback and suggestions in mind and work hard to facilitate the growth and development of students and junior scholars.

 

Tianyu Xie is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. Her research studies a group of Chinese women venture capitalists who have channeled transnational venture network between China and the United States. She askshow gender and kinship have shaped entrepreneurial relationships and the way transnational venture capitalism operates.

Jing Wang is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Rice University. Her research interests include anthropology of religion and state, nationalism and globalization, media, museum and cultural heritage, and documentary production. Her dissertation looks at the historical memory and contemporary connection between the Sinophone Muslims in Central Asia and China.

Yukun Zeng is a third-year PhD student in the Anthropology Department at University of Chicago. He studies how traditional Confucian literacy practices re-articulate Chinese parents’ concern for their children and how they are adopted as educational, religious, or other social space given China’s contemporary sociopolitical situation and value landscape.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam([email protected]) and Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

Cite as: Xie, Tianyu, Jing Wang, and Yukun Zeng. 2018. “SEAA Mentoring Workshop and Graduate Student Dinner.” Anthropology News website, February 7, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.755

Click and Touch: South Korean Missions in the IT Age

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Heather Mellquist Lehto

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

As I walked through the corridor at Onnuri Church in Seoul, South Korea, I nearly passed by a bespectacled man holding a sign that read, “IT Missions School, 2nd floor” (IT sŏn-kyo-hak-kyo). Seeing the sign, I paused and asked him what kind of people would be attending the event, whether it was a conference for missionaries or whether it was open to anyone. “Can you use a smart phone?” he asked warmly. “Anyone who can use a smart phone is welcome.”

Over the next six weeks, several professional missionaries and around twenty students (myself included) met to train in IT missions at the school. We discussed how Korean Christians might use information technologies to evangelize and to “fight ISIS,” whom in 2015 the participants saw as winning the “spiritual war” (chŏng-sin-ŭi chŏn-chaeng) being waged through social media. Sessions included lectures by religious leaders and small group projects to develop and/or use mission technologies, intermingled with worship and prayer.

The lectures framed the IT Missions School—and South Korean Christianity—within a particular global history of technological progression. IT missions were deemed the appropriate response to the “new paradigm” (sae-lo-un p’ae-lŏ-ta-im) that accompanied the “IT age” (IT si-tae). The lectures detailed the “IT infrastructures God had built” (ha-na-nim-ŭn IT in-p’ŭ-la-lŭl ku-ch’uk-ha-syŏss-sŭp-ni-ta) to equip Christian missions throughout history, culminating in discussions of the media technologies the leaders were currently developing. Drawing upon Max Weber’s famous thesis of the elective affinity between Protestantism and rational capitalist development, these lectures argued that South Korean Christians had a unique calling to become IT missionaries. Weber, they said, demonstrated the close relationship between Protestantism and industrialization as they developed in Europe and North America. The historical coincidence of technological innovation at Korean conglomerates like Samsung and LG and the late growth of Protestantism in Korea (now the world’s foremost missionary-sending nation) signaled that “It’s Korea’s time,” as Loren Cunningham of Youth with a Mission (YWAM) announces in one IT Mission School video. In this context, the lectures communicated that the fate of both the nation’s tech industry and global Christendom depended upon South Korean Christians embracing the marriage of Christianity and technological invention.

Two leathery hands cradle a smart phone whose screen, like the hands themselves, is cracked. On the phone appears the image of a smiling Jesus Christ amidst a throng of disciples. This picture appears in a video advertisement for “Smart Bible,” an IT missions project that uploads Christian media onto donated smart phones such that short-term missionaries can leave these devices with people in their mission field. FMnC. 

I participated in a small group project on social media evangelism, the title of which roughly translates to “Missions at the End of One’s Hand” (son kkŭt’ sŏn-kyo). We were asked to create evangelism projects with the guidance of an experienced, professional missionary. Participants began cautiously posing ideas to turn their daily activities on social media into something of a mission field. One woman offered that she could use her Instagram and Pinterest accounts to spread positive, Christian messages. People spend time on these apps, she noted, because they may feel bored or perhaps are attracted to pretty images, designs, and inspirational quotes. “A couple of users I follow post touching [kam-tong-chŏk-in] pictures. Paintings of scriptures, too. Often, these posts really touch my heart [ma-ŭm kam-tong-si-k’i-ta]. So I think for my project, I can pray over Pinterest and ask God to tell me with whom I should share certain pictures.”

The unique place of Korean technology missionaries in the world was reinforced repeatedly, for example, through the project leader’s slogan for such work: “CLICK & TOUCH: Through the IT God put in our hands, click and touch the whole world” (CLICK & TOUCH: han-na-nim son-e put’ tŭl-lin IT-on se-sang-ŭl k’ŭl-lik-ha-ko t’ŏ-ch’i-ha-ta). Repeatedly, our leader prayed that God would inspire projects to transform cyberspace into the Kingdom of God, particularly in this period when, he argued, ISIS was successfully bending cyberspace in their own spiritual direction. At once a plea to God and a motivational speech to his team, his prayers advanced a vision of cyberspace allowing IT missionaries to do the kind of missionary work befitting God’s omnipresence—wherever, whenever, with whomever (ŏn-che-na, ŏ-ti-na, nu-ku-na).

IT missionaries place their hands on donated smart phones, praying that God would touch people through the use of these devices. FMnC. 

In a theological tradition in which hands and the sense of touch figure prominently in spiritual transmission and healing, the technologies that mediate religious practices come to mimic or take on the qualities formerly attributed to human hands. Large screens in telecasting churches are said to “embrace” (an-a chu-ta) congregations, wrapping around sanctuaries like the outstretched hands of a pastor giving a benediction. Many charismatic Korean pastors became famous for their ability to heal through laying hands on the sick, and now those same pastors are understood to heal through the broadcasts of their sermons. The ability for apparently distant or disembodied sociality to “touch” is emphasized, in slogans such as “Click and Touch” and “I.T.ouch.U.” In the words of one pastor featured in the IT missions promotional videos, “God will serve the coming world with Korean technology, and we should want to become the hands of God.” The idea that technologies alienate is well-rehearsed, as is the idea that social media use creates as much social distance as it presumes to overcome. But in these Korean Christian communities, the “digit” of “digital technology” is clear and unironic, reconfiguring at once the perceived role of South Korea in the global course of Christian history and how souls might feel a spiritual touch with each click from an IT missionary’s hand.

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley, with a master’s of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her dissertation explores technology in religious practice through ethnographic research at transnational churches in South Korea and the United States.

Cite as: Mellquist Lehto, Heather. 2017. “Click and Touch.” Anthropology News website, November 15, 2017.