Society for East Asian Anthropology Jing Xu June 27, 2018 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…
The Society for East Asian Anthropology awards the 2017 Ted Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper to Gil Hizi for his paper “Marketized ‘Educational Desire’: Shifting and Reproduced Meanings of High-Education in Contemporary China.” Hizi is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia. The 2017 Ted Bestor Prize also had two…
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…
Crystal Abidin Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia. In August 2016, a minute-long video of a middle-aged man flamboyantly singing and dancing to an upbeat number known as “PPAP” or “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen” went viral globally on YouTube. Singing in Japanese-accented English about a mutant combination of…
HyunJoo Mo Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia. It was around the late 2000s and early 2010s that young people of South Korea started to talk about the quasi-mythical story of online Yingyeo (superfluity) humans. It is said like, “In the online world, many Yingyeo humans can be…
Jamie Coates Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia. In 2008 a small group of Chinese business owners gathered together to propose the official declaration of a new Chinatown in Tokyo. Ikebukuro, the second busiest station in the Northwestern corner of Tokyo’s central loop-line, had attracted growing numbers of…
東北からの声https://tohokukaranokoe.org/ David H. Slater Note: This project was supported by grants from Toyota Foundation, a Kaken grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, and various sources from within Sophia University. A more detailed outline of the archive can be found here: Public Anthropology of Disaster and Recovery : “Archive of Hope”(希望ア–カイブ) Of all of…
Ryo Morimoto Although much has been said about the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns—in Japan in March 2011 (hereafter, 3.11), the upsurge of digital records and efforts to archive them in and outside of Japan after these events have been less discussed. These archives are populated not only with born-digital artifacts (e.g., photographs, audio files, video footages, websites and blogs) but also digitalized artifacts (e.g., bureaucratic documents, pamphlets circulated in temporary shelters, 3D renditions of tsunami-damaged buildings). As of…
Shuang Frost The rise in economic inequality associated with technological displacement is one of the defining issues of our time. Last year the White House reported that recent advances in AI will result in the obsolescence of millions of low and medium-skill jobs and the depression of wages for ordinary workers. This prediction echoes an emerging consensus…
