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Making Waste Visible in Qinghai

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Yanping Ni
November 18, 2022

A heavy metal band seeks to counter state imagery and bring issues of waste management and pollution to the general public.

Even those least familiar with Qinghai would be shocked by the scene of waste burning all over the province. Most evenings by the Winter Gecuo Na Lake, “the sacred lake” for Tibetans, fires are lit inside rusty dustbins, burning plastics, papers, foods, metals, and animal remains into ash. Smoke spreads in the air before being swallowed by the blue sky. Toxins sediment into the ground and are slowly absorbed by the soil. Home to Indigenous Tibetans and source of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers and called the “water tower of Asia,” Qinghai was once portrayed by the poet Hai Zi as a pure, pristine heaven. Yet residents describe a life of smoke and foul smells. As environmental activists captured in their survey of the locals, “We are living in a gas room. Such strong stenches make me dizzy. We never dare to open the windows.”

And yet the issue of piling waste in Qinghai has remained largely unseen by the public. For one, only a small proportion of waste is produced by locals; the majority is left by domestic tourists, who neglect their behaviors’ long-term impact and how these undesirables flow back into their own cities via water, air, and soil. Without a proper waste management system, Qinghai residents often resort to Tibetan customs and burn the unaddressed waste. But, unlike the clean spaces created by burning fallen tree leaves, incinerating modern materials like plastics and metals pollutes the environment further, rather than purifying it.

Image Description: Bright flames and smoke rise from a large trash can with two open doors on top. The orange and yellow flames stand in stark contrast to the cold grey of the ground and walls surrounding it. Just beyond are housing estates. The slogan painted on the can reads “Let the harmonious and beautiful environment be more beautiful because of us” (rang hexie youmei de huanjing, yin women er geng meihao!).
Caption: Trash cans burn in densely populated residential areas, sometimes as close as 10 meters from peoples’ homes. Image credit: Tian Xi.

The two conflicting portrayals of waste in Qinghai by state media and grassroots activists show how the issue’s visibility is actively contested. On the one hand, the state’s recent politico-ecological agendas have reinforced Qinghai’s image as “heaven.” In 2015, the Three-River-Source Park was chosen a pilot site for China’s ambitious National Park project, and in 2021, it was made an official one. State channels such as CCTV have created four celebratory documentaries on Qinghai in just the past two years (e.g., Qinghai: Our National Park). Such promotion of Qinghai as a place of “pure[ness], innocence, and eternity” makes it hard to openly discuss issues like waste, rendered invisible in circulating images of Qinghai despite its devastating impact on the ground. On the other hand, environmental activists, artists, and NGOs (e.g., Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association and Green Rivers) have been countering the state’s agenda by making Qinghai’s waste issues visible to the general public.

“Waste Qigong” as a new daily norm

“People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage / In Qinghai, from south to north, toxic gas follows you /… / People produce waste, waste produce toxic air / stink, stink, stink / poison, poison, poison / … / one year, five years, ten years, years after years.”―Lyrics from “Waste Qigong” by Bing Huang (translated by the author)

In the summer of 2021, a group of musicians arrived in Qinghai for a special performance, as one stop on their “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour.” Heavy metal bands were invited to tour the country’s most polluted areas, their audience local villagers and viewers watching the live stream online. The band’s slogan was, “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music!” By linking heavy metal toxins with a musical genre, the musicians combined their performance with environmental activism, critiquing the exploitative nature of China’s industrial development and proposing a new way of taking immediate, public-facing actions.

Tian Xi, a key figure in the project, was a tourist business owner in Qinghai for many years. As a semi-local, he identified waste discarding and burning as Qinghai’s most severe and urgent crisis, which inspired the flash composition of a song titled “Waste Qigong.” Intended as a pun on Qigong, a traditional healing practice combining breathing, meditation, and bodily movements for balance and peace, “Waste Qigong” indicates how breathing waste has become a new daily norm, poisoning Qinghai residents. “People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage,” the song repeats. Bing Huang, the lyricist, explained her creative intentions in our interview, “Qigong is systemic. And waste management should be as well…. But in Qinghai, this system involves no public discourse or voices from below. I use Qigong to critique this irony.” Surrounded by rank grass and in front of piles of rusty trash bins, the musicians performed with their hazmat protection suits on and gas masks covering their faces.

Image Description: A screenshot of the band Laotoule performing their song “Waste Qigong” in a deserted patch of land in Qinghai. Five musicians wear hazmat suits and gas masks. Behind them are two banners: one (above) reads “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour” and the other (below) reads “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music.” The song’s title, in white, has been added to the music video post-production.
Caption: A screenshot from the “Waste Qigong” music video. Image credit: Laotoule

What influence can this experimental performance have? While Nut Brother, the well-known performance artist who initiated this campaign, achieved remarkable success in the Xiaohaotu water pollution case, he understands the unpredictability of practicing activism in China and embraces the strategy of taking “one step at a time.” Online forums are one avenue where further conversations can take place between those committed to keeping this movement forward, slowly yet daringly. On one forum, an anonymous user writes, “I don’t know what kind of spirits sustain their actions. How many, among 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, can do this?” In the chat group maintained by Nut Brother, people from diverse backgrounds, including Chinese diaspora communities, ask, What does Qinghai need (funding or human resources)? Who should be responsible for waste management (the state or citizens)? What can we learn from other countries’ waste governance models? Answers diverge, unsurprisingly. But the bottom line is, one member writes, “to increase exposure and draw the public’s attention;” another echoes, “we need to offer support, engagement, and advice, as a collective.”

Tian Xi’s fieldwork and stumbling blocks en route

Bridging music and activism to raise public awareness isn’t new, and one may be reminded of The Beatles and Bob Dylan in the 60s, or Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen since the 80s. Yet Nut Brother has added his own flair to the tradition by initiating what the group calls “fieldwork heavy metal (tianye zhong jinshu),” meaning that field research lays the foundation for his themed performances. Specifically, Bing Huang’s lyrics are based on two months of ethnographic investigation conducted by Tian Xi. Tian did his fieldwork while regularly interviewing locals, observing their daily interactions, sampling 20 kilograms of toxic chemicals, and documenting scenes of waste running amok.

Image Description: A photograph of an overfull trash can. In the foreground a large rusty trash can is full to the brim with beige- and black-colored plastic garbage bags. The sweeping yellow and grey roofs of two traditional buildings stand in the background, and behind those, dark mountain peaks.
Caption: An overfull trash can near the Rwa Rgya Dgon Monastery (Lajia si), the most well-known Gêlug Ba Monastery by the Yellow River. Image credit: Tian Xi.

Despite his familiarity with Qinghai and years of experience in activism, Tian’s fieldwork was full of stumbling blocks. Running out of funds, Tian experienced days with no food or gas. Spotted by local security staff, he had to deal with threats and physical violence. But what concerns him the most are the conditions of doing environmental activism in today’s China. Activist projects involve constant negotiations of what can be done and how to reach that end when such actions are inevitably conditioned by political dynamics that penetrate daily life. In their proposal stage, Nut Brother and Tian tried to seek funding from established environmental NGOs who showed interest in their project. But the plan was rejected for being “too radical” in its aims to expose ecological and human costs by economic development of local industries (see Chen Gang’s Politics of China’s Environmental Protection for discussion of the challenges facing Chinese ENGOs). On other occasions, Nut Brother had to turn down enthusiastic sponsors because having “western” connections could make their projects and those involved vulnerable to accusations of colluding with anti-Chinese powers. When international rivalries are broadly defined and perceived, nationalist sentiments may quickly translate into vehement attacks on social media.

In today’s mainland China, grassroots activists face increasingly limited choices for what can be done. Under these circumstances, as shown by the essay collection edited by Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds, figuring out how to change tactics is simply the norm or necessity. According to Tian, in the “environmentalist community (huanbao quan),” one unspoken rule is that “one shouldn’t intervene in environmental affairs close to one’s home.” By “home,” Tian means the province in which one’s residence is officially registered in the hukou system and thus the judicial authority one is subjected to. In Tian’s case, he isn’t registered in Qinghai; even if he was identified as “suspicious,” Qinghai’s government might be deterred from taking significant actions against him because of the complicated inter-province extradition process. Centralized power ironically provides a shield for non-locals like Tian. Reporting a chemical plant miles away in one’s own residential area would be more dangerous than flying hours to investigate issues in other provinces, he explained.

Our long interviews were filled with Tian’s resolutions and witty remarks as well as feelings of disorientation: “Born in the age of ‘reform’ (gaige) and growing up in the wind of ‘opening up’ (kaifang), our generation was told the country was prospering and moving up… Now the world is pushed frantically by something invisible and powerful. It’s sliding to the abyss, and you’re on the train rushing to that end. Other than screaming in horror, what can you do?” From Deng Xiaoping’s “development as the top priority” to Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization” agenda, just how much so-called progress has been made and in what sense remains an open question. Over four decades of changes in China, one thing that hasn’t changed is the oppositional framing of economic interests against environmental ones in most development practices. This is manifested in today’s Qinghai: the state sells Qinghai’s image as “heaven” to boost tourist revenues at the expense of actual environments by obfuscating issues such as waste. Grassroots activists experiment with strategies of exposing and mobilizing in their restricted positions.

In archiving these frontline efforts, it’s important not to heroize any activist practices on the one hand and on the other not to assume the repressive nature of certain environments, thus closing off a critical eye to alternative voices. Navigating shifting political landscapes and tracking these dynamics at various scales might be a major challenge for those who study activism in today’s mainland China or in other highly and complexly politicized places.

Yanping Ni is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research interests include material, space, ecology, and activism. She has published in the journals China Information and Asian Bioethics Review.

Ni, Yanping. 2022. “Making Waste Visible in Qinghai.” Anthropology News website, November 18, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

SEAA Highlights from the 2022 Business Meeting

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su
December 1, 2022

SEAA members gathered virtually on November 19 for the annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed activities throughout 2022, announced new positions, and awarded book and media prizes.

Fancis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

Committee Members: Jennifer Prough (chair), Yi Wu, Lyle Fearnley, Miriam Driessen

Winner

The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan, written by Chikako Ozawa-De Silva, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, published by the University of California Press. 

Honorable Mentions

Glossolalia and the Problem of Language, written by Nicholas Harkness, Professor of anthropology at Harvard University, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul, written by Seo Young Park, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Scripps College, published by Cornell University Press.

The David Plath Media Award 2022

We are pleased to announce the following winner and two honorable mentions for the biennial David Plath Media Award.

Winner: 

206 UNEARTHED  

Director: Chul-nyung Heo
Producer: Sona Jo, SonaFilms

This stunning film blends documentary-style footage, interviews, and metavoice commentary to tell the searing tales of a voluntary group of amateur archaeologists, seeking the remains of civilian dead from the Korean War.  The 206 of the title references the 206 bones of the human body, at best unearthed with painstaking care and pieced together to bring the past to a final reconciliation with the present.  At worst, however, these are bones whose hauntings remain unearthed, unfound, and unresolved. The film astonishes with its elegance, ranging from the philosophical to the deeply personal to the scholarly.  It brings to the fore contemporary anthropological discussions of memory, emotion, trauma, and healing, here rooted in a particular time, place, and group of people, but reaching far more broadly.  In doing so, the film invokes the power of the medium itself to achieve its visual and auditory profundity.

Honorable Mention: 

Miles to Go Before She Sleeps

Producer/Editor: J. Faye Yuan, New Circle Films

This intense and emotionally charged film follows an activist, Ms. Yang, in her fight for the welfare protection of dogs and against the practice of dog meat eating in China. The central ethnographic conundrum of the film (China becoming the largest pet market while being world’s largest dog meat producer) is made clear within the first minutes and immediately captures attention. We are quickly drawn into thinking about the tension between perceiving non-human animals as companions versus perceiving them as food, and consequently the limits of animal—and human—rights. Compellingly combining documentary-style filming with TV news clips and ‘silent’ street scenes overlaid with music, the film is praiseworthy for being both activist-oriented and well-balanced in its approach, and for its careful and courageous way of engaging in this contentious and potentially dangerous topic.

Honorable Mention:

Hengdian Dreaming

Director: Shayan Momin

It is a lively film about hope, dreams, freedom and precarity of life as a background actor in Hengdian, a movie capital of China. As the film skilfully blends online and offline footage to address an unspoken aspect of media production and youth struggles in China, it asks us to consider the nature (and price) of hope, the relationship between mobile technologies and presentation(s) of self, and the relationship between agency and exploitation. A compelling use of visual and audio elements from the ground accentuates the lived conundrum of the background actors and attests to the close engagement of the researcher with the people he represents. There is therefore much that the film can provoke for the classroom not only in relation to the topics evoked, but also in relation to the relationship between the researcher and the people they work with and the politics of representation.

New Anthropology News Column Theme, and Open SEAA Positions

The SEAA Column in Anthropology News will be publishing pieces in 2023 under a new theme, after receiving several submissions during a call for papers: “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” The column publishes SEAA members’ reflections and photo essays based on original ethnographic research.

In addition, new SEAA positions will be open soon. Two Councilor positions and one Student Councilor position are available for those who wish to run. Please contact Ellen Oxfeld (oxfeld [at] middlebury.edu) announcing your intent to run as soon as possible.

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Jie Yang, Marvin Sterling, Isaac Gagne (Treasurer), and Tim Quinn (Student Councilor). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Jun Zhang (Treasurer), Claudia Huang (Councilor), Kunisake Hirano (Councilor), Sojung Kim (Student Councilor).

Thank you to all of these members for volunteering their time and energy to keep SEAA a thriving forum for intellectual exchange! We also thank Guven Witteveen, who has deftly overseen SEAA’s Digital Communications.

Jieun Cho is an editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and currently writing up her dissertation on children’s health, everyday life, and radioactive uncertainty in post-nuclear Japan.

Aaron Su is an editor for the SEAA section news column. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University with interests in medical and environmental anthropology, urban design, and contemporary China.

In Memoriam of David Plath (1930-2022)

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The below prose was offered by Christine Yano on November 19th as part of the annual SEAA business meeting online to honor the work and the life of our dear colleague.

— 

It is with deep sadness and gratitude that I offer these few words in memory of David Plath who served as mentor, friend, and inspiration to many of us.  David taught many of us through his scholarship, which often veered off the beaten path to the marginalia of culture, to the “after hours” of human life.  In this, he wished to give the messy emotional, social, and aesthetic side of culture its due.  Equally, David moved many of us through his warmth and integrity, as well as his generous spirit, which was as acerbic as it was empathetic.  His contributions to the field of East Asia Anthropology are many, but for today when our wounds are still so raw, let me place his memory in the hands and words of his many friends. 

Laura Miller, past president of SEAA:  David was one of the smartest, wittiest, kindest Japan scholars I ever met.  His undergraduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University is reflected in his wonderful writing.  He served as an officer in the US Naval Reserve’s Pacific Fleet (1952-55) before earning a master’s degree (1959) and a PhD (1962) from Harvard in anthropology and Far Eastern languages.  He often ruffled the feathers of theoryhead anthropology by being outspoken about his impatience with jargon (at a conference he once called it ‘intellectual masturbation’).

Instead of trendy “intellectual masturbation”, David preferred straight talking, from-the-heart-to-the-heart insight and expression, including poetry.  He valued beauty and integrity that shed light on the human condition, both in words and images.  And he produced both words and images in his rich body of work.  Thus SEAA named the biennial award for the best multimedia work on East Asian anthropology. the David Plath Media Award.  He loved that tribute.

Here is one of his favorite poems, bestowed upon friends, from the pen of a farmer-poet, Wendell Berry.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought

Of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 To David – now resting in the eternal grace of the world, and utterly free.  Remembering the knowing twinkle in your eye of droll humor and sly wit, we thank you.

Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sara M. Bergstresser
November 7, 2022

The movement of and controversy around items as common as baby formula powder tell a story about the changing political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China.

In Hong Kong’s New Territories, directly attached to the Sha Tin MTR subway station, there is an enormous indoor complex of continuous shopping malls. Products available to buy range from groceries and personal care products to luxury jewelry, watches, and clothing. In 2019, it was a commonplace experience for me to find clusters of people in front of the Mannings drugstore packing products into large suitcases, to the point that the entrance to the store was completely blocked. While these suitcases sometimes contained luxury products or tins of butter cookies, by far the most common sight were cans of baby formula powder, known colloquially as “baby milk.” The baby milk was not being bought by new parents; rather, it was being purchased by shoppers from mainland China to transport over the border and resell for profit. For many years, the movements of baby milk have signified changing relationships of trust between Hong Kong and China.

From 2017 to 2019, I studied changing configurations of medical ethics, public health, and regulatory governance in Hong Kong. Though my initial focus was on the workings of large institutions such as the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, I soon discovered that baby milk, a simple everyday product, was a substance that inhabited the interface of complex regulatory intersections—including food, medicine, commerce, and border control—at a time of immense change. Following mass protests, government crackdowns, and two years of a pandemic, a city that once prided itself on freedoms of speech and the press is now the subject of international criticism for its turn to authoritarianism. The commercial landscape has also shifted, with widespread concerns about erosions in economic freedom. In parallel, my reflections on this time shifted from ordinary research to an act of “witnessing” the radical politico-economic and social transformation of a city that I had known (see Wang 2021).

Image Description: A crowded hallway filled with people and their suitcases outside of Mannings drugstore.
Caption: Commodity shoppers outside Mannings at Sha Tin Centre, January 2019. Sara Bergstresser.

The “Chinese milk scandal”

In March 2008, consumers in mainland China began to complain that their children were sickened by Chinese brand Sanlu’s baby milk powder. Action was not taken by the government until months later, when international complaints prompted widespread scrutiny, leading to global recalls. These events became known as the “Chinese milk scandal.” Melamine is an industrial chemical that in large doses is toxic to kidneys, and at least six babies died from ingesting the contaminated infant milk powder, while at least 290,000 others became ill. It soon became clear that the melamine had been purposefully added to watered-down milk to make it falsely appear to have a high protein content. Chinese consumers became extremely distrustful of both the milk industry and China’s food regulatory systems. These scandals highlighted contradictions between China’s rapid economic development and its continuing political messages of Communist solidarity.

Hong Kong played a unique role in the crisis. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, the city had established extensive public health infrastructure, resuming the role of “public health defender” (see Keck 2009). Mistrust drove people from the mainland to Hong Kong to buy baby milk powder of imported European brands, which were not available in the mainland. Baby milk emerged as a cross-border commodity for the rising Chinese consumers to mitigate against their mistrust surrounding the government’s regulatory failure in the market in mainland China.

As more people travelled to purchase more baby milk up until the 2010s, baby milk came to mark the tension surrounding the increasing permeability of the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. There were formula shortages in Hong Kong, which contributed to a growing sense that Hong Kong was being turned into a “city-sized outlet mall” for shoppers from mainland China. Some regarded this as a threat to Hong Kong’s autonomy as an independent political, judicial, and regulatory entity under the “One Country Two Systems” principle.

Image Description: Two banners in orange and pink at the Kowloon side of the Bay, reading “Hong Kong Asia’s World City.”
Caption: In 2018, Hong Kong advertised itself with the slogan “Hong Kong, Asia’s World City.” Sara Bergstresser.

In Hong Kong, under these circumstances, baby milk powder tins became iconic components of artworks, often highlighting the fearful dissolution of the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. In 2013, artist Ai Weiwei released a gallery-wide map of China made out of tins of baby milk powder in an exhibit in Hong Kong. He described the piece as relevant to many problems, including the Chinese milk scandal, the failure of the Chinese food safety regulatory system, the subsequent bans of the mass internal importation of foreign formula, and the increasing tensions between Hong Kong and the mainland—which have only escalated since then. He stated, “Hong Kong people make profits from these problems, and are also victims,” pointing out both the embeddedness of the problem in systems of commerce as well as cross-border mistrust and tensions. The mistrust stemming from the 2008 milk scandal did not abate in the subsequent years; to the contrary, it only compounded focus on newer resentments.

New manifestations of mistrust

Since mid-2019, there have been dramatic changes in Hong Kong, including multiple periods of unrest, the arrival of COVID-19, selective border closures, vaccines, the enhancement of National Security Law, and major changes in Hong Kong-mainland relations. The Hong Kong administration’s attempt to allow legal extradition to mainland China sparked a series of public protests, involving millions of protesters and aggressive police intervention in the coming months. In this landscape, the situation surrounding the border has been substantially reconfigured once again; the current Hong Kong administration declared to politically prioritize reopening the border to the mainland while scaling down trade with the rest of the world.

The iconic images of baby milk appeared again. At a protest outside of the West Kowloon Rail Station, planned specifically for gaining support from mainland shoppers, artist Badiucao released a poster of a giant baby milk tin that read, “Formula Baby Safe.” According to Badiucao’s comment on his Instagram page, this meant: “The best message for mainlanders is ‘If Hong Kong’s gone, so is your baby formula.’” In another image, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who once stated herself as Hong Kong’s “Mother,” appears with guns emerging from her breasts where nipples should be. In a final illustration, titled, “Instruction: Nursing a baby in Hong Kong,” the mother is instructed to be wearing gas masks while nursing to protect the baby against tear gas, which was widely used to suppress protests. Badiucao’s focus on the dual imagery of baby milk—first, as a salient symbol of cross-border commerce, and second, as a substance associated with food, health, babies, and motherhood—shows the ways in which the protests over Hong Kong’s independence were also interwoven with everyday family life and its emotional complexities.

Image Description: Shop at the Macau Ferry Terminal prominently displays tall stacks of baby formula cans in the front window.
Caption: Baby milk formula displayed in Macau to entice mainland shoppers. Ferries from this location travel to destinations including multiple locations in mainland China. Sara Bergstresser.

Regulatory failures in areas of food and medicine continue to occur in the mainland; new scandals continue to disrupt systems, putting the health of populations at risk. For example, cross-border births are another focus of tensions over perceived encroachment. Like baby milk, places of birth are bound with symbols motherhood and hope for the next generation. In 2012, a national controversy erupted in China when professionals in Hong Kong “took out a newspaper ad depicting incoming mainland Chinese as locusts and asking, ‘Are you willing to pay 1 million HK dollars every 18 minutes to take care of mainland children born in Hong Kong?’” After the 2014 “Umbrella Movement” protests, concerns about increasing border permeability were not assuaged; instead, the mainland engaged in clear messaging that it was taking more interest in Hong Kong’s political affairs. Other regulatory shortfalls, vaccine scandals, and shortages linked to medical tourism have further stoked existing resentments. In addition, Hong Kong has become a node of global distribution for counterfeit drugs and illegally imported medicines. Across different manifestations, baby milk imagery continued to be invoked to indicate growing discomfort with the Hong Kong-mainland China relationship.

As it struggles with new outbreaks and pressure from mainland China to adhere to the “Zero-Covid” strategy, the international character of Hong Kong continues to shift. The once permeable border between Hong Kong and the foreign world has intensified through the implementation of strict travel restrictions and long quarantines, and the internal border with the mainland has become the primary focus for reestablishing traffic. The Hong Kong Free Press, one of the few remaining independent news outlets in Hong Kong, recently published a picture of a workman squatting on the ground to roll up the “Hong Kong Asia’s World City” banner while looking back at three masked policemen walking by. Instagram user otaku_5354 commented: “in 20 years’ time whenever anyone wants a photo to summarize the fall of Hong Kong, they will refer to this!” Border flows and political relationships between Hong Kong and the mainland have been reconfigured in the past few years, are these shifts are both negotiated and presaged by controversies over materials as ordinary as baby milk.

Sara M. Bergstresser is currently lecturer in the Masters of Bioethics program at Columbia University. She works at the intersection of medical anthropology, health policy, and bioethics. From 2017 to 2019, Sara was lecturer and program coordinator for Bioethics Education in the Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Bergstresser, Sara M. 2022. “Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface.” Anthropology News website, November 7, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of human rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Hanna Pickwell
April 11, 2022

Aging residents of a Beijing neighborhood give new value to old and used household objects, creating a community space rich with a feeling of belonging in an ever-changing city.

When entering the Guest Living Room (GLR) in a narrow hutong alleyway in Beijing’s old city, you would immediately find yourself encircled by glass cabinets crowded with colorful, outmoded stuff: old phones and video games, painted pigs’ knuckle bones that had once been used to play a game like jacks, collections of ration tickets from the 1950s through the 1980s, and candy wrappers from the 1970s. In the large main room extending behind this display, you might encounter a group of senior citizens chatting over tea or making crafts together. From time to time, tourists or visitors to the neighborhood are drawn inside by the items on display and exclaim that they haven’t seen something like that since they were a kid. How do outmoded objects come to have a renewed appeal to neighborhood residents and tourists, old and young alike, rather than being seen as junk? By giving value to otherwise valueless objects, regulars and visitors at the GLR produced a sense of warmth and hominess in the midst of disorientation and disconnection in an ever-changing urban environment.

Image Description: Shelves and cabinets, bedecked in old telephones, storage tins, televisions, clocks, thermoses, books, and other items are surrounded by brightly colored hanging paper décor. To the right of the frame is a plant, close to a large window that is partially obscured by the many objects in the photo.
Caption: One part of the collection, comprised of objects from neighbors’ homes, at the Guest Living Room. Hanna Pickwell.

Although the GLR somewhat resembled a shop or a museum with its displayed collection of interesting objects, it was more akin to a community center where aging neighborhood residents would come to socialize. I had never visited anywhere like it. Everything in the space had been brought to the GLR by regulars there. They told me that when the space opened in 2017, the founder had appointed it with old furniture, including the glass cabinet they recognized from 1980s and 1990s shops, which displayed a few items and had plenty of space for more. Over the next two years, community members filled every surface and empty stretch of wall with old things they no longer had a use for. As things accumulated there, the GLR became a metonymic extension of the neighbors’ homes. The everyday objects they had once lived with now intermingled on the shelves, sometimes receding into the background as ambient décor, and sometimes drawing attention to prompt commentary or stimulate personal or shared memories.

Some of the items remained in use. More than a dozen drinking vessels, each belonging to a different GLR regular, were kept clustered together in a tray, ready to be used when their owners stopped by, indexing the many cups of tea they had shared and would share together in the future. Even marks of inhabitation like scraps of food, the resident cat, or excess items stacked tightly into corners made the space feel inviting to the neighbors, who referred to it as a second home or a niang jia—a woman’s natal family home that she would move away from after marriage, but that she could return to intermittently and always feel like she belonged. In his study of a London neighborhood, Daniel Miller found that lives rich in relationships with material things were often also the richest in their relationships with people, since the routines and patterns that built up around things provide comfort and stability. This was also the case at the GLR, where objects were not passive decorations or mere clutter; they were integral to the sociality that unfolded in the space.

Image Description: A neat pile of clementine fruit peels and leaves are gathered at the center of the frame, on a brown table. There is a second pile of peels and a few peanut shells in the left foreground. In the background, a blurry television set can be seen on a table crowded with indistinct objects next to a glass display cabinet and a wooden bureau. There are banners, and décor hanging on the wall behind, leaving very little white wall showing through.
Caption: Fruit and nut peels on a table at the GLR. Hanna Pickwell.

A staff member told me that neighbors were eager to donate excess things to the GLR; they had limited space in their small homes, and besides, rapid development and increasing financial resources had produced an appetite for new, modern styles of home décor that didn’t match the aesthetic of old things. According to him, the things that people tended to donate had “no value” (meiyou jiazhi), and were not even worth 10 kuai (approximately $1.50 USD). Even junk collectors wouldn’t want the stuff in the GLR. But these things must have some worth, I replied, since the neighbors had brought them to the GLR rather than simply throwing them away. He conceded, smiling, that the stuff in the GLR did give off renqingweir—a “flavor of human feeling.” I often heard regulars and visitors use this word, which combines the warm emotions of a personal relationship (renqing) with the sensation of smell or taste (weir), to describe GLR’s atmosphere.

The staffer’s simultaneous denial and acknowledgement of the value of the old, used things in the GLR—that they had no exchange or monetary value and yet gave off this homey flavor of human feeling—resonates with contradictions I had been investigating through the changing value of secondhand commodities in post-socialist China. Everyday objects like old clocks, lamps, and basins which I had seen as junk on the street and or sold for next to nothing in secondhand markets a few years before are now framed in museums, public art, and on postage stamps as nostalgic heritage. Meanwhile, historic hutong neighborhoods like the one surrounding the GLR remain popular destinations for tourists seeking a unique Beijing atmosphere. How could it be that the same things were at once seen as valueless and also key to a place’s specificity and warmth?

The objects that accumulated in the GLR, then, told a complex story of value. It was true that most of the items populating the GLR lacked exchange value and use value in contemporary Beijing. The knuckle bones have been displaced by flashier plastic toys; ration tickets can no longer be exchanged for rice or cooking oil; even a beautiful quilt, handmade from fabric scraps fifty years ago, can no longer fit with the desirable aesthetic of a modern home. This quilt was made by the GLR founder’s aunt, who had considered throwing it out since it wasn’t being used. When her nephew installed it in the GLR as a door partition, the aunt was so pleased to know that it could be “useful” again.

Thrift and resourcefulness were especially important to the aging GLR regulars, who had lived through times when material plenty could not always be expected (see also artist Song Dong’s Waste Not). The oldest among them had been children during the scarcity of the Great Leap Forward; younger neighbors were born around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and grew up accustomed to rationing of food, cloth, and other essential resources, coming of age just as economic reforms began to marketize and globalize the Chinese economy. Regulars who had donated seemed delighted by the new uses their old things had found as décor and as instigators of interest or conversation. Spared from the rubbish heap, they could remain part of the social world (see Wang 2012).

Image Description: A calico cat crouches inside a glass display case. On the glass shelf above her we can see an old video game, a tambourine, a jianzi—a toy that is meant to be kicked and passed between players—and other miscellaneous objects. On the same level of the cat are several balls, an abacus, a toy drum, and several wooden objects.
Caption: A cat crouches amongst the GLR’s collection in a display case. Hanna Pickwell.

The GLR collection also kept the past present. Younger tourists and students often had no idea what the objects filling the GLR had once been used for, and older regulars were eager to tell them about how these things once fit into their everyday lives, bridging generational difference. Moreover, China’s cities, and especially Beijing, have undergone accelerated material transformations that accompanied the dramatic political and social changes of the past century. Although they are now seen as rich with historical charm, hutong neighborhoods like this one have aging and inadequate infrastructure, and many were targeted for demolition in the 1990s and 2000s. They are now often redeveloped into more upscale versions of themselves, and purged of lower income residents, migrants and their small businesses, and unauthorized buildings. In this context, history and community feel continually at risk of being blasted away.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that I often heard renqingweir, that “flavor of human feeling” that evokes the sensory and emotional warmth of relationships, invoked to name what is often lost in the processes of rapid development and modernization. Brought together by a community of aging residents in a neighborhood that has seen its share of change in a rapidly changing city and society, the gathering of objects at the GLR was a stabilization of an atmosphere of renqingweir. Like the domestic objects in Miller’s research, collections do seem to have a special power of shoring up identity by externally objectifying the collector’s senses of self and of control in the world (Baudrillard 1996[1968], Stewart 1992). In this case, the collection was collectively authored. Like the collection itself, any “identity” or quality that the GLR helped to stabilize was not fixed but continually being altered and added to by community members. But the most dramatic change came when the GLR closed its doors due to the pandemic in early 2020. After months of uncertainty, the space was eventually permanently closed, and the collections were moved to into storage, where they will remain until a suitable place can be found. Renqingweir is indeed a fragile quality.

The mostly outmoded things, brought to the GLR from nearby homes, set the scene for a particular flavor of social life to unfurl there. Casual social drop-ins, collective meals, handicraft workshops, and holiday celebrations took shape organically in a space that felt like it belonged to the neighborhood regulars and where they felt they also belonged. The regulars shared the GLR, which they called a second home, with a diverse array of objects of little economic value that seemed to materialize the hominess and “inclusivity” (baorong) that they said set this place apart. The atmosphere of renqingweir, then, was produced both materially and socially, ineluctably linked to broader political, economic, and social contexts beyond the particular place where it was, however briefly, given space.

Hanna Pickwell is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research on the social efficacies of used and outmoded commodities in China has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, and the China-US Scholars Program.

Cite as: Pickwell, Hanna. 2022. “A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing.” Anthropology News website, April 11, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

SEAA Highlights at the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Aaron Su and Jieun Cho
December 15, 2021

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) convened a vibrant virtual business meeting and featured many stimulating panels in its program for this year’s AAA. Membership and finance increases revealed a productive year of accomplishments, while numerous announcements, awards, and transitions took center stage at the business meeting.

Also announced at the meeting were a new theme for SEAA’s Anthropology News column and a call for open SEAA positions, each listed at the end of this recap.

SEAA-sponsored Panels

SEAA received a total of 31 individual paper and panel submissions this year, exploring pressing themes ranging from the resurgence of pandemic nationalisms in East Asia to the cultural and affective economies of tourism in China, Japan, and Korea. From these submissions, SEAA offered 2 invited sessions and 1 co-sponsored session with the Association for Queer Anthropology.

Business Meeting

SEAA members gathered virtually for the annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed activities throughout 2021, announced new positions, and awarded book and essay prizes.

Silvia Lindtner from the University of Michigan was awarded this year’s Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize for Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020). The award’s Honorable Mention was given to Lyle Fearnley from the Singapore University for Technology and Design, for his book Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press, 2020). This year’s book prize committee was chaired by Marvin Sterling.

In addition, the 2021 SEAA Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize, chaired by Nicholas Harkness, was awarded to Ruiyi Zhu (University of Cambridge) for her essay, “Aspiring to standards: Mongolian vocational education, Chinese enterprise, and the neoliberal order.” Timothy Y. Loh (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was awarded Honorable Mention for his paper, titled: “Mother Tongue Orphan: Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Sign Language in Singapore.”

A virtual yet spirited shamoji (rice paddle) ceremony reigned in this year’s transitions in SEAA board positions. As the incoming present, Ellen Oxfeld took over the shamoji from former president Sonia Ryang; Christine Yano, the president-elect, will assume this role at the end of Oxfeld’s term.

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Satsuki Kawano (Secretary 2019-21), Andrew Kipnis (Councilor 2019-21), Nicholas Harkness (Councilor 2019-21), Yifan Wang (Student Councilor 2020-21), and Hanna Pickwell (Anthropology News SEAA Section Editor 2019-21). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Teresa Kuan as Secretary; Zachary Howlett, Beata Świtek, Jennifer Prough, and Yi Wu as Councilors; Yookyeong Im and Tim Quinn as Student Councilors; and Aaron Su and Jieun Cho as Anthropology News SEAA Section Editors.

Thank you to all of these members for volunteering their time and energy to keep SEAA a thriving forum for intellectual exchange! We also thank Guven Witteveen, who has deftly overseen SEAA’s Digital Communications.

New Anthropology News Column Theme, and Open SEAA Positions

The SEAA Column in Anthropology News will be publishing pieces in 2022 under a new theme, after receiving several submissions during a call for papers: “Materialities and Movements in a Changing East Asia.” The column publishes SEAA members’ reflections and photo essays based on original ethnographic research.

In addition, new SEAA positions will be open soon. Two Councilor positions, one Treasurer position, and one Student Councilor position are available for those who wish to run. Please contact Ellen Oxfeld (oxfeld [at] middlebury.edu) announcing your intent to run as soon as possible.

Aaron Su is an editor for the SEAA section news column. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University with interests in medical and environmental anthropology, urban design, and contemporary China.

Jieun Cho is an editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and currently writing up her dissertation on children’s health, everyday life, and radioactive uncertainty in post-nuclear Japan.

Digital Sociality in COVID-19 Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Kimberly Hassel
December 7, 2021

How has the heightened digital mediation brought about by the pandemic reconfigured sociality, intimacy, ideas of “normalcy,” and even ethnographic practice itself?

In the summer of 2019, I set off to begin my yearlong dissertation fieldwork on Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and digital sociality in Japan. During the first half of my fieldwork, I was immersed in in-person interactions with my interlocutors—high schoolers, university students, and postgrads in their mid-twenties who were avid users of platforms such as Instagram. In our conversations on the role of SNS (the local term for social media) and smartphones in everyday life, youths told me that social media and smartphones were often a “normal,” or even “natural,” part of their lives. However, this perception has changed due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, which coincided with the second half of my fieldwork. The pandemic has reconfigured the embeddedness of digital mediation. Youth interlocutors came to question what they used to think as “normal” in pre-pandemic digital sociality, even reconsidering the idea of normalcy itself. They confessed a desire to share the same space as their friends, to be able to touch and hold them. This seemed to suggest the extent to which digital sociality is constituted by in-person sociality. This was highlighted by the pandemic, when social media and smartphones became the primary means of communication. In turn, I began to deeply consider the ethical implications of my own digital communications with interlocutors.

Although social media and smartphones are perceived to be ubiquitous, these technologies are localized within particular historical and societal contexts. In their ethnographic projects spanning across multiple countries, Daniel Miller and colleagues have highlighted how the nuances of local context impact how people use and transform these technologies in their everyday lives (Miller et al 2016; Miller et al. 2021). Japan has been at the forefront of mobile Internet technology since the 1990s. The smartphone fits within the rich genealogy of keitai (mobile phones)—what Mizuko Ito calls a “snug and intimate technosocial tethering” that translates literally to “something you carry with you” (2005, 1). Prior to the pandemic, young interlocutors spoke enthusiastically of the informative, communicative, and entertaining functions of social media and smartphones. Different iterations of the phrase “I can’t imagine life without it” emphasized the necessity of both technologies in daily life. At times, they cultivated a corporeal connection with the device itself, expressing this as smartphones being “part of my body.” For example, Haru, a postgrad in her mid-twenties, once dropped her phone on the train tracks during her morning commute. A day without her phone impacted her daily rhythm; she was unable to entertain herself with videos during her lunch break and was unable to receive work communications. Since this “traumatic” experience, Haru now wears her phone on a strap around her neck wherever she goes.

Youths also had particular characterizations for popular social media platforms. For example, LINE, a popular messaging platform, was “the norm” in communicating and arranging general logistics of everyday life because it provided “quick” (subayai) chat and call functions. Instagram was identified as the most popular social media platform in Japan throughout my fieldwork, for its role in allowing people to stay in touch with friends by letting them view each other’s daily updates, and “follow” accounts of shared interests. Without Instagram, my interlocutors told me, it would be difficult to stay “on top” of trends or happenings in acquaintances’ lives. Despite their deft use of various platforms, young interlocutors emphasized that social media and smartphones are useful tools that should supplement in-person sociality, though never replace it. According to interlocutors, digitally mediated communication could cause miscommunication because facial expressions, bodily cues, and the general atmosphere of the conversation might be hard to read. In actuality, they often misinterpreted text messages, emoji, or “stamps” sent by acquaintances on LINE. This decentering of the digital contests the often hyper-technologized imaginations of Japanese society worldwide.

Image Description: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone, protected by a black cloth phone cover. The phone cover bears an image of a cat, followed with the caption: “Don’t touch my cell phone.”
Caption: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone personalized with an amusing cover.

As digital sociality became the form of everyday sociality amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, young interlocutors began to reconsider the presence of digital technologies in their lives as a taken-for-granted part of the everyday, completely integrated into the rhythms of daily life through work and personal communications (see Ling 2012) for a detailed discussion of this “taken for grantedness.” Interlocutors appreciated how social media such as Instagram and LINE became crucial avenues for ensuring the safety and health of their friends and family. For many, social media was also often the only way to feel “like a part of society” due to the inability to engage in activities outdoors or physically meet with others. This counters the pervasive pre-pandemic perceptions that social media is the culprit of “shallowing” relationships. Rather, the pandemic suggested a variety of possibilities as to how one can strategically recalibrate social/digital life. Young interlocutors relied on their friends’ own social media profiles to seek information during the early stages of the pandemic, fully aware of the caveats of misinformation and disinformation. Some refrained from uploading any photos or videos on their Instagram Stories that might reveal that they had been going outdoors, in fear of being judged by their friends and followers, including critical online users nicknamed “quarantine police” (jishuku keisatsu). In this case, the portable intimacy provided by smartphones and social media transformed into a site of hostile criticism and surveillance.

In the ensuing global health crisis, my fieldwork transitioned from an online and offline mixture of in-person interviews and participant observation to purely “remote” digital methodologies. Follow-up video interviews with interlocutors bore a more somber and fatigued air, yet were reflexive and intimate. I reflected deeply on what ethical implications there may be for digital methods when they have become the new “norm” in ethnography in the wake of the pandemic, in and beyond Japan. The digital poses opportunities for forms of intimacy and sociality as well as new challenges regarding boundaries. Video interviews often meant that I would be virtually “present” in interlocutors’ homes. I had to be mindful of those with whom my interviewees were living and what topics might be “risky” to speak about out loud.

This caveat became apparent during a video interview with Riko, a university student. In a previous interview, Riko spoke extensively of the role of social media in her life, particularly her use of a “secret” Instagram account as a diary. Riko’s sister perceives social media as “her private universe,” while her mother is a flip phone user and does not use social media at all. During our follow-up interview via video call, I began to ask Riko about her sister. “She’s right here!” Riko said aloud. I froze, not knowing that her sister had been there for the entire interview. Riko was not wearing headphones. Riko offered to relay any questions that I wished to ask her sister, to which I responded that I would at a later date. I then began to ask about her mother, but was quickly cut off by Riko. “Wait a second, wait a second!” Riko suddenly exclaimed, while frantically unwrapping a pair of headphones and plugging them into her iPad. I realized at that moment that I had committed a blunder. It was permissible to ask about Riko’s sister, but discussion of her mother was off-limits without headphones. Once Riko had her headphones on, she smiled and let me ask questions. After apologizing profusely for the mishap, I asked if her mother had purchased a smartphone. Leaning into the camera, Riko then whispered: “She bought one!” We laughed in unison.

Image Description: The author, a woman with a voluminous afro, is facing the camera in mid-laughter. She is wearing a blue headband and hoop earrings. She is holding her field notebook. A bed, a hanging plant, and three stuffed animals are visible in the background.
Caption: A photo of the author during the moment of shared laughter within Riko’s video interview.

In being transparent about my blunders, I wish to continue dialogue on the ethical considerations that accompany digital methodologies, particularly the manners and practices related to video calls. At the start of interviews, ethnographers should gauge if a video call is an accessible medium for the interlocutor. When video calls do take place, respect and privacy should be at the core of virtually entering the interlocutor’s space, and should be maintained when representing the encounter unless explicit permission is granted. Ethnographers should respect the interlocutor’s decision to leave the camera on or off and be flexible with switching to other modes of communication. Finally, ethnographers should be mindful of the context of the interlocutor’s space and the figures who may be present, and formulate their questions and responses accordingly.

The digital is sometimes begrudgingly framed by ethnographers as a lackluster alternative to “on-the-ground” fieldwork. This is similar to interlocutors’ pre-pandemic characterizations of digital sociality as lacking. Rather than focusing on what is lost by the digital, perhaps we can reflect on what is gained, and experiment with its potential to create new ethnographic socialities. I felt closer to my interlocutors as a result of our video check-ins throughout the pandemic. While some of our digital interactions involved formal interviews, it also involved more creative interactions: for example, jointly participating in an online yoga session. The intimacy that was afforded by video check-ins and virtual presence means that we, as ethnographers, may have to reassess the boundaries of our relationships. This can involve navigating our positionality as both friend and ethnographer, which are not mutually exclusive—as Fiona Murphy points out in her discussion of friendship and fieldwork—but still have ethical implications.

I feel deeply indebted to my interlocutors for their patience and for keeping me company throughout the pandemic. Our screens ultimately facilitated intimate moments of empathy and compassion during the solitude of the times.

Further reading on digital ethnographic methods

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor

Digital Anthropology, edited by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller

Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, by Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi

The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell

“Notes from the Great Quarantine: Reflections on Ethnography after COVID-19,” by Tom Boellstorff

“Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic,” crowdsourced document initiated and edited by Deborah Lupton

Kimberly Hassel is a PhD candidate and digital anthropologist within the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her dissertation, funded by a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, examines Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and the (re)configuration of notions of sociality and the self among youths in Japan.

Cite as: Hassel, Kimberly. 2021. “Digital Sociality in COVID-19 Japan.” Anthropology News website, December 7, 2021.

Copyright [2021] American Anthropological Association

Awardees for 2021 Announced

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Find extended citations from this year’s selection committees for the Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize and the SEAA Outstanding Graduate Student Paper at https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/past-seaa-awards/

2021 Francis L. Hsu Book Prize
Winner
Sylvia M. Lindtner. Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Honorable Mention
Lyle Fearnley. Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Heath at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press, 2020).

2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize
Winner
Ruiyi Zhu, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
“Aspiring to Standards: Mongolian Vocational Education, Chinese Enterprise, and the Neoliberal Order.”

Honorable Mention
Timothy Y. Loh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS)
“Mother Tongue Orphan: Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Sign Language in Singapore.”

Japan’s Disaster Artisans

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Aaron Delgaty
September 28, 2021

How do craft breweries in Japan and the United States weather unforeseen crises?

Summer 2012, Iwate, Japan. Among the skeletal foundations of former residences and businesses on Miyako City’s coastline was a saké (rice wine) brewery, the lone establishment left standing following the wave. A desiccated brown sakabayashi (a bundle of cedar needles) hung above the main entrance announcing the end of the brewing cycle. July marked the brewery’s first vintage since the disaster. A pyramid of professionally labeled amber bottles stood on a makeshift display fashioned from a shipping crate.

The owners, a young couple smartly dressed in business casual, accented by scuffed rubber boots, waited outside for the tour group. We were a group of tourists and mourners from farther inland on our way to a memorial service up the coast. Our stop was part promotion for the recovering business district, part uplifting brace against the somber undertaking ahead. The owners escorted us through their small brewhouse. They pointed out the gray watermark etched nearly two stories up on the brick wall, close to the vaulted ceiling, indicating the sea’s temporary apex. They showed off a new stainless steel kettle, juxtaposed with the former copper kettle, which had been crumpled nearly flat between the force of the water and the wall against which it now rested. Stepping outside, the owners donned black happi jackets (loose-fitting coats traditionally worn by laborers) emblazoned with the brewery’s seal and began handing out liberal samples in paper cups. Encouraged by alcohol, the quiet reverence of the tour steadily gave way to exaggerated compliments and conversation punctuated with hearty laughter. Soon, guests began opening their pocketbooks, buying bottles to take home as souvenirs. When it was time to part, we bowed and expressed our gratitude for the hospitality and delicious saké. Some shook hands, promising to return with family and friends. Others intoned “gambatte”—hang in there, keep at it, do your best.

Reflecting on this moment, I am impressed by the intricate weave of grief and hope, guilt and ambition that underscored that tour. To the tourists, the brewery stood as an icon of local, regional, even Japanese hardiness in the face of extreme hardship. The Japanese spirit as spirit. For the owners, the neatly arranged bottles and the money exchanging hands set against the backdrop of the ruined district served as tangible indicators of personal recovery, of possibility for the future. They were not out of the hazard—in a sense, no small business ever is—but revenue and good publicity gave means to move. To the customers, buying a bottle of saké was the least they could do, a small effort toward a crisis in which they were—and largely still were—powerless. For the brewers, whose skills could not be washed away, artisanship was empowerment, crafting a taste of hope from a landscape saturated in pain and loss.

Nearly a decade removed, the struggle of the Miyako brewery has taken on new relevance professionally and personally for me as both an anthropologist and artisan. I began researching Japan’s craft brewing scene in 2015; the United States was enjoying its third craft beer boom, the previous two having sputtered out due to a combination of technical mishandling and waning consumer patience (Grossman 2013). Craft beer, variously called jibīru or kurafuto bīru, was blossoming in Japan, due in part due to its American popularity, the growing availability of imported malted grain and hops (domestic sources of these key ingredients continue to be monopolized by macro breweries in Japan), and the increasing affordability of brewing equipment specially designed for small-scale operations.

Image Description: The image shows a stone floor walkway lined on either side by a row of stainless steel fermentation tanks. Blue hoses hang limply off a tank on the left side, and two buckets stand upturned at the photograph’s top edge. The brewhouse is dimly lit, the atmosphere calm and still.
Caption: A brewery floor. A mostly idle brewhouse. A source of overwhelming anxiety. June 2020, North Carolina. Aaron Delgaty

More critically for my collaborators, brewers and business owners hanging their shingles in metropolitan Tokyo, craft beer represented a professional haven for university-educated young Japanese disenchanted with the status quo. In a sense, the Japanese craft beer community was born of crisis: the breakdown of lifelong employment, the grinding competitiveness of coveted and increasingly scarce stable government or industry jobs, and the mounting existential dissatisfaction for traditional corporate culture have inspired a growing number of students and early-career professionals to pursue nontraditional employment in a host of cottage industries (Allison 2013). In this way, the liberating allure of Japanese craft remarkably parallels its American counterpart (Ocejo 2017).

The escape plan has not gone seamlessly. Japan’s craft industry has weathered its share of crises in its short tenure: laws and regulations that strongly favor large-scale producers, antagonism from macro breweries, the added costs of importing ingredients and specialty equipment, and customer apprehension to try untested brands. Even so, many of my collaborators claimed to take inspiration from their constraints. Some have transmuted cramped urban real estate into cozy brewpubs, the tight quarters accentuating the communal aesthetic. Others have substituted less accessible mainstream ingredients for accessible, yet unconventional adjuncts, creating brews that evoke a terroir of adaptability. (I know a place with a wonderful curry beer.) Many have compensated for what they lack in space and resources by forging deep bonds with local institutions and residents, patron communities hardened against consumer capriciousness.

Through determination and creative compromise, Tokyo brewers have carved out a comfortable niche catering to similarly adventurous souls dissatisfied with ubiquitous super-dry drafts. But even the most optimistic could not shake an anxiety common to craft communities in Japan and the United States alike. Operating within the natural uncertainty of small business and the volatile precedent set by their American forebears, Japanese brewers grapple with an underlying fear that the craft bubble will suddenly burst, that operational costs will become untenable, that customers will move on to the next fad. When, not if, that time comes, Japan’s lost generation will lose their refuge in brewing, and be left adrift once again.

These fears seemed to materialize in the spring of 2020. I was working professionally as a brewer in North Carolina while I wrapped up my PhD. The day before my defense, I was furloughed as a result of the governor’s March 14th shutdown order, along with everyone else at my brewery and so many others across the state. In the weeks that followed I saw an increasing number of breweries in Japan posting similar notices to social media: updated business hours, information about take-out and to-go options, assurances that they and their communities would hang in there and keep doing their best. Gambatte.      

This was a delicate ethnographic moment. As an anthropologist, I wanted to know how the Japanese craft scene was faring, and if it was coping differently than its American counterpart. Yet as a brewer, I knew how insensitive this line on inquiry would be to colleagues presently scrambling to develop to-go protocols, find alternate employment for their staff, and coax cans from backordered suppliers. I tested the waters, texting a brewer friend in North Carolina a couple weeks in to see how he was doing. “How do you think?” A curt reply but the circumstances warranted curtness. In time, I developed a more detailed picture of the situation facing Carolinian brewers through private guild crisis meetings and virtual happy hours. Most had furloughed staff. Some were brewing and running take-out services alone. Some weren’t brewing at all. Brewers were working for half or quarter pay, volunteering at times, trying to keep their businesses afloat so there would be a place to come back to when the vaccine finally landed. Some breweries had commissioned expansions prior to the shutdown and were now sitting in swanky taprooms or massive brewhouses with no way to pay down the loans. Government aid was slow coming and impenetrable, nonprofit grants hotly competitive. My interlocutors in Japan faced similar austerities, with trendy breweries in Tokyo and Okinawa facing the added strain of decreased domestic and international tourism. A number of Japanese and American brewers and brewery owners considered career changes: real estate, accounting, joining the military, moving back to the countryside, anything more stable than brewing.

Image Description: The image shows a close-up view of a beer mash, a combination of malted barley and wheat steeped in water in order to create the foundation of a beer. The mash is a warm light brown with black accents. Quartered donuts added to the mash stand in contrast to the grainy malt and light brown foam. Stainless-steel elements of the brewing vessel frame the top border.
Caption: Brew in progress. The brewery in motion. Creativity begets hope. December 2020, North Carolina. Aaron Delgaty

At the outset, a brewery manager in North Carolina had bullishly claimed, “A two-week vacation and we’ll be back in business by April.” COVID-19 proved to be a slower-burning crisis. But time’s passage inured my American and Japanese collaborators to the precariousness. They more readily swapped stories of hardships, strategies for tackling new anxieties, and wry jokes poking fun at their and others’ misfortunes. A Japanese friend, the brewer of the aforementioned curry beer, reached out. He noted that small businesses were still struggling well into September, and likely would continue. His brewery had closed its second location before it even opened. He had truncated his tap lineup to four of their best sellers. “It’s difficult,” he wrote, “but I’m still somehow doing what I can.” Then, taking an optimistic tack, he signed off with, “When I can travel from Japan, I definitely want to come and play!”

My friend’s resolve to somehow do what he could suggests a slowly swelling undercurrent of hope beneath the present precariousness. This hope is not baseless. Japanese and American brewers alike have endured over a year of operating in crisis. With restrictions lifting, multiple vaccines rolling out, and more customers walking through the doors, it feels like the worst is behind them even as they struggle to stay afloat. This hope manifests in the moments where a battered artisan looks back and realizes they’ve come through the storm, a little bent, a little broken, but still brewing.

Working with brewers in a pandemic recalls the Miyako brewery on that hot July afternoon. I ask a question now that I asked then: What does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to roll with a crisis, take it into you, and come out a functioning system on the other side? The Miyako brewers stood on that other side, the scars of the wave etched into their brewery and their hearts, disaster artisans crafting a taste of hope in amber bottles. I do not know what tastes American and Japanese brewers will create when the current crisis recedes, but I would offer that maybe the taste of resilience is simply to continue creating a taste at all.

Aaron Delgaty is a teaching assistant professor in anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2020. His research explores craft brewing, distilling, and drinking culture as a means to navigate crisis. He is currently examining the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on breweries in Japan and the United States Outside of teaching and research, Aaron also works as a professional brewer.

Cite as: Delgaty, Aaron. 2021. “Japan’s Disaster Artisans.” Anthropology News website, September 28, 2021.

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