Prizes

Greetings from Sonia Ryang, SEAA President

November 20, 2020 by Liz Rodwell

In Lieu of the Annual Business Meeting for Members

Dear SEAA members,

I hope this finds every one of you safe and healthy.

Due to the pandemic, the American Anthropological Association annual meeting for 2020 was cancelled and thus, in lieu of the SEAA business meeting, I am reaching out to you to recap the SEAA activities this year.

The SEAA election yielded two new councilors who start from January 1, 2021, Jennifer Prough (Associate Professor of Humanities and East Asian Studies, Valparaiso University) and Yi Wu (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Clemson University), and one new student councilor, Timothy Quinn (PhD candidate, Rice University). The current board members are shown here. The list will be updated in the new year reflecting the new member details. The 2021 board is as follows:

President: Sonia Ryang
Incoming President: Ellen Oxfeld
Outgoing President: Glenda Roberts
Secretary: Satsuki Kawano
Treasurer: Isaac Gagne
Councilors: Andrew Kipnis, Nicholas Harkness, Marvin Sterling, Jie Yang, Jennifer Prough, and Yi Wu.
Student Councilors: Yifan Wang and Timothy Quinn.
Media Manager: Guven Witteveen (by appointment)

Our current SEAA Column Editors for Anthropology News are Hanna Pickwell and Elizabeth Rodwell (by appointment).

The SEAA board thanks the outgoing councilors, John Cho and Gavin Whitelaw, and student councilor, Yukun Zeng. Also, we thank Shuang Frost and Heidi Lam for their past service as SEAA Anthropology News column editors.

For the 2021 SEAA election, we currently have a list of candidates interested in running for officer positions. At this time, I would like to ask SEAA members to sign up if they would like to run for officer positions during the 2022 election. Nominations are also welcome. If elected, the work starts on January 1, 2023. If you are interested in adding your name to this list (or nominating someone else), please get in touch with me directly (Sonia.ryang@rice.edu). Often this ends up on the first come first served basis and so please write to me sooner rather than later.

This year, we held competitions for the Francis L. Hsu Book Prize, Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize, and David Plath Media Award. The committees had a difficult task because the submitted works were all of high quality and impactful. After careful consideration, the committees reached their conclusions, and the winners’ names, along with short comments from each committee, are posted on our website. I will repeat the names of each winner here:

2020 Francis L. Hsu Book Prize
Winner: Suma Ikeuchi, Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2019)
Honorable Mention: Miriam Driessen, Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019)

2020 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize
Finalist: Justin Haruyama, Reconfiguring Postcolonial Encounters: A Pidgin Language and Symbolic Power at A Chinese-Operated Mine in Zambia (University of California, Davis)

2020 David Plath Media Award
Winner: Untold (기억의 전쟁) (2018, documentary, 79 min.)
Director: Bora Lee-Kil
Honorable Mention: Sending Off (おみおくり) (2019, documentary, 76 min.)
Director: Ian Thomas Ash

Turning to SEAA activities, in August 2020, amidst ongoing police brutality and racial oppression in the US and elsewhere, our section posted the SEAA statement against police brutality and anti-Black racism. I want to thank again the members who expressed their support for this statement. In this statement, we made specific pledge and I want to repeat that here:

To organize a round-table discussion on race and racism in Asia in the next annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, with similar discussions potentially held on a regular basis in future meetings.
To promote the participation of African American and other African diasporic peoples in their anthropological research of East Asia in our home departments and institutions.
To consciously promote the participation of other racial and ethnic groups traditionally under-represented in the anthropological study of East Asia. These include Latinx and Native American peoples and perspectives. For instance, the SEAA recognizes that a Latinx-Asian scholarship that traverses Latin America and East Asia, or the comparative study of global indigeneities (Native Americans, Taiwanese aboriginal groups, and the Ainu of Japan, for instance), might represent rich arenas for further scholarly research and another dimension of the global solidarity against racial discrimination.
To promote research and other forms of scholarly reflection comparing the complicities between the colonial and anthropological enterprises as commonly reflected in the African and Asian diasporic experiences.
To create a culture of inclusion in the SEAA as well as in the home departments and institutions of all members. This includes addressing how white supremacy operates within our Society and in East Asian Studies generally. It includes recognizing how Euro-American epistemologies dominate the discipline, in ways that potentially crowd out other approaches to understanding and exploring the region and its peoples.
To support lectures, film screenings, and other public events by scholars and artists whose work center on the exchanges between African and Asian diasporic peoples, especially those works that bear an anti-racist concern.
To encourage and facilitate an ongoing exchange amongst our members in order to develop inclusive syllabi, reading lists, and relevant materials and where possible, create a repository of such materials on the SEAA website.

Although the statement was posted in August, the actual work toward our pledge is ongoing. At this point we are not sure just yet in what form the AAA meetings will be held in 2021, but if you are planning on organizing a panel (just in case the meetings go as usual), please do keep the above pledge in mind. And, please keep us posted, via SEAA website or EASIANTH, about what kind of changes you are making in order to address diversity and inclusion and fight racism in your teaching and research.

The challenges of the year 2020, starting with COVID-19 pandemic and closing with the US presidential election, showed us that more than any other time in modern history, we are faced with the need to reach out and work together with diverse groups and individuals in our effort to promote inclusion and fight against racism. This also applies to intellectual endeavors; in searching for new and more effective tools to critically explore our world, we need to reach out and find partners for collaboration and sometimes, we may find collaborators in rather unexpected quarters. Such a meeting would be the first step toward the culture of inclusion in research.

In a strange twist, because the pandemic created a work environment that connects us across continents and different time zones, via Zoom and other remote communication means, we are in fact discovering new possibilities and potentials for fruitful collaboration that we did not think was possible in the past. This is the key to the upcoming year 2021—that we engage, creatively and effectively, in international and interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching and research on a scale we have not seen before. Toward this end, I would like to encourage members to post their views, opinions, and reflections, in addition to news and event announcements, on EASIANTH in the coming year. Let’s use the listserv more. Needless to say, the SEAA board is always open to suggestions from its members regarding its activities. Should you wish to make any suggestions, please feel free to write to me directly (Sonia.ryang@rice.edu).

Finally, but not least important, I wish to draw your attention to the SEAA column in Anthropology News. Since the 2019 AAA meetings, our editors have published seven pieces written by SEAA members. The SEAA column continues to solicit submissions from members at all phases of their careers. If you would like to pitch an article idea relating to your original research, please email a short abstract to column editors Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) and Liz Rodwell (erodwell@Central.UH.EDU).

I wish you all the best for the holiday season and joyful and productive New Year.

Sincerely,

Sonia Ryang
President, SEAA

2016 Bestor Graduate Paper Prize: Adam Liebman (Winner) and Megan Steffen (Honorable Mention)

November 29, 2016 by Priscilla Song

The Society for East Asian Anthropology awards the 2016 Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper to Adam Liebman for his paper entitled “Waste-Product Trading and Colloquial Urban Sociality in Kunming, China.” Adam is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at University of California, Davis.

Megan Steffen, who recently received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University, was awarded honorable mention for her paper entitled “The Value of Emptiness: Zhengzhou’s Empty Houses and the PRC’s Housing Bubble.”

Named after the first president of SEAA, the Theodore C. Bestor Prize is awarded annually for the best graduate student paper on any aspect of East Asian anthropology and/or East Asian anthropology’s contribution to the broader field. Carolyn Stevens (SEAA Secretary and Professor of Japanese Studies at Monash University) chaired the 2016 Bestor Prize Committee, which included Gordon Mathews (SEAA President and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Sealing Cheng (SEAA Councilor and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong).

The deadline for submissions for the next Bestor Graduate Paper Prize (for papers written by graduate students in 2016) is May 1, 2017. For more information: https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/bestor-prize-for-outstanding-graduate-paper/

*****

2016 Bestor Prize Citations:

2016 Bestor Prize selection committee chair Carolyn Stevens awards prize to Adam Liebman

Winner: Adam Liebman (Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at University of California, Davis)
Paper Title: “Waste-Product Trading and Colloquial Urban Sociality in Kunming, China”
Award Citation: This paper was distinguished by its clarity of argument, ethnographic richness and theoretical sophistication. Liebman’s topic is of importance to those in Chinese Studies but the concept of ‘colloquial urban sociality’ is highly applicable to all anthropologists looking at the ways in which people forge lives for themselves in cities around the world, and outside ‘formal’ labor and economic structures that are promoted by their governments. Firmly connected to theoretical and ethnographic literature that comes before, Liebman’s paper makes fresh contributions to our understanding of ‘class consciousness’ and individual in changing urban Chinese society as well as injecting new insight into the materiality and the meaning of ‘waste’ objects in people’s daily lives.

Carolyn Stevens awards Bestor Prize honorable mention to Megan Steffen

Honorable Mention: Megan Steffen (Ph.D. 2016, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University)
Paper Title: “The Value of Emptiness: Zhengzhou’s Empty Houses and the PRC’s Housing Bubble”
Award Citation: This paper, also on a timely and provocative topic in contemporary Chinese society, was chosen for honors because it particularly highlights the meaningful and vivacious relationship between the ethnographer and informants through examples of vivid personal dialogue as argument. The prize’s namesake, Theodore C Bestor, is an anthropologist whose writings have always highlighted and valued respectful personal relationships with his informants; Steffen’s paper continues and excels in that engaged ethnographic tradition. As Steffen eloquently gives voice to these Chinese young women through her writing, we are reminded that ethnography comes from the people, freely given to the anthropologist as a gift of friendship as well as information.

2016 Bestor Prize Selection Committee:

Carolyn Stevens (SEAA Secretary and Professor of Japanese Studies at Monash University), Chair
Sealing Cheng (SEAA Councilor and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Gordon Mathews (SEAA President and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Chinese University of Hong Kong)

2016 Hsu Book Prize: Jie Yang’s Unknotting the Heart

November 29, 2016 by Priscilla Song

Unknotting the Heart (Jie Yang, Cornell University Press 2015)

The Society for East Asian Anthropology awards the 2016 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize to Jie Yang, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, for her book Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China (Cornell University Press 2015).

Unknotting the Heart is an extraordinary ethnography that charts new territory in our understanding of the ways in which neoliberal governance, psychotherapy, and affective labor come together to shape subjects and subjectivities during mass unemployment as former socialist-style industries in China transform into global manufacturers. Based on many years of in-depth fieldwork in urban China, Jie Yang explores the plight of laid-off workers as the state psychologizes their condition and promotes what Yang calls “fake happiness.” Jie Yang brilliantly shows the tension between the Chinese state’s “therapeutic governance,” which employs western-style psychology, and the workers’ own attempts to deal with the astonishing transformations taking place around them. Jie Yang shows how therapeutic governance disrupts existing values and habits by promoting self-enterprising and self-reflective subjects who are expected to fit current market needs. This process further genders the population, often in traumatic and disturbing ways. As external and connected selves are pushed to transform themselves into internal and self-reliant selves, the therapists, not surprisingly, solidify their position as Communist Party authorities. Their combination of political and therapeutic roles legitimates and naturalizes their psychological knowledge and authority. Unknotting the Heart is an innovative, ethnographically nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated book about the contemporary condition. It is anthropology at its best. This is a contribution to anthropology at large, and it will inspire anthropologists and students of all sub-disciplines and all regions to think creatively and deeply for decades to come.

Hsu Book Prize committee chair Manduhai Buyandelger awards the 2016 Hsu Book Prize to Jie Yang for Unknotting the Heart.

The SEAA’s annual book prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former president (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association. The Hsu Book Prize is given to the English-language book published in the previous calendar year judged to have made the most significant contribution to East Asian anthropology. 18 books were submitted for consideration for the 2016 prize from a diverse range of scholarly publishers.The 2016 Hsu Book Prize selection committee was chaired by Manduhai Buyandelger (2014 Hsu Book Prize recipient and Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT) and included Jong Bum Kwon (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Webster University), Glenda Roberts (Professor of Anthropology at Waseda University), and Priscilla Song (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis).

The deadline for submissions for the next Francis L.K. Hsu Prize (for books published in 2016) is May 1, 2017. For more information:

https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/francis-l-k-hsu-book-prize/

*****

2016 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize:

Yang, Jie. Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China (Cornell University Press 2015).

Book description: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100984600

2016 Hsu Book Prize Selection Committee:

Manduhai Buyandelger (2014 Hsu Book Prize recipient and Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT), Chair
Jong Bum Kwon (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Webster University)
Glenda Roberts (Professor of Anthropology at Waseda University)
Priscilla Song (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis)

2016 Plath Media Prize: Aya Domenig’s The Day the Sun Fell

November 28, 2016 by Priscilla Song

The Society for East Asian Anthropology awards the 2016 David Plath Media Prize to Aya Domenig’s “The Day the Sun Fell” (Als die Sonne vom Himmel fiel).

This remarkable film begins as a personal quest to uncover the history of the director’s loving, yet enigmatic, grandfather, who was a physician for the Red Cross in Hiroshima the day of the bombing. Domenig powerfully melds that traumatic past with the contemporary nuclear devastation of the March 11, 2011 triple disaster, which took place during the course of the film’s production. Featuring compelling characters and a finely paced narrative, “The Day the Sun Fell” brings to light a repressed history of Japanese victims of the nuclear bomb and the medical personnel who served them, by following two elderly survivors, a doctor and nurse from Hiroshima. Delicately interwoven with these portraits are interviews with the filmmaker’s widowed grandmother. The film demonstrates the power of ethnographic cinema to capture a big story with intimacy and nuance, and would be effective for teaching courses on war, illness, trauma, nuclear culture, and contemporary Japan.

Named for David Plath, renowned Japan scholar and producer of award-winning documentary films, this biennial prize is awarded for the best work (film, video, audio, and/or multimedia/interactive media, such as websites) in the preceding two years on any aspect of East Asian anthropology and/or East Asian anthropology’s contribution to the broader field. Eligible submissions include a diverse range of forms including research footage and documentation that adds to the historical and/or ethnographic record, or is used for further analysis (such as linguistics, dance, and art); ethnographic media that contributes to theoretical debate and development; media designed to enhance teaching; and media produced for television broadcasting and other forms of mass communication.

The 2016 David Plath Media Prize Selection Committee was chaired by Eleana Kim (SEAA Councilor and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine) and included Julie Chu (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago), Dodom Kim (Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, University of Chicago), and David Novak (Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara).

The next David Plath Media Prize will be awarded in 2018 for works produced in 2016-2017.

* * * * *

2016 David Plath Media Prize:

“The Day the Sun Fell” (Als die Sonne vom Himmel fiel). Written and directed by Aya Domenig. 78 minutes.

The Day the Sun Fell film trailer: https://youtu.be/MzokWoZ3FBI

The Day the Sun Fell film website: http://www.thedaythesunfell.com/

2016 Plath Media Prize Selection Committee:

Eleana Kim (SEAA Councilor and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine), Chair
Julie Chu (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago)
Dodom Kim (Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, University of Chicago)
David Novak (Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara)

Annual SEAA awards — Book prize, Best Graduate Student Paper, Media work (even-numbered years only)

December 18, 2015 by Guven Witteveen

At the SEAA business meeting at the AAA annual meeting in Denver the winners were announced for Book Prize, Best Student Paper, and (even numbered years) Media Production.
A short description follows, together with a link to the full description by the selection committees.

The 2015 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize Winner is Rian Thum. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Harvard University Press.

Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History is an extraordinary accomplishment that advances our understanding of sacred traditions of pilgrimage, local senses of history, and politics of nationalism. The book redefines the fields of Xinjiang history and Uyghur studies in a way that scholars in these fields will now have to take into account…
… Indeed the relative paucity of historical sources on the region in Turkic languages that Thum works with (rather than Chinese) may well be a source for the book’s creative methodology and a reason the book is so good.
Amazon entry, http://tinyurl.com/hsu2015thum

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The 2015 Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Best Student Paper was tied between:

“Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” (Leksa Chmielewski Lee, U.C.-Irvine) and

“Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University” (Siyu Chen, U. Oslo)

For this year’s Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper, there were 23 applicants. Most of these were remarkably good papers indeed, and could, with a little polishing be publishable within a wide range of anthropological journals. In a unanimous decision the three judges for the Bestor Prize—Sealing Cheng, Joshua Hotaku Roth, and Gordon Matthews— found that three papers stood out for closer comparison. The result was an award tie and one honorable mention.

In a tied vote the judges awarded this year’s prize to Leksa Chmielewski Lee (University of California, Irvine) who wrote “Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” and to Siyu Chen (University of Oslo) who wrote “Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University.”

For honorable mention the judges chose Suma Ikeuchi (Emory University):
“Of Two Bloods: Nation, Kinship, and Religion among Nikkei Brazilian Pentecostal Migrants in Japan.” Like the authors above, this paper is another example of the artful weaving together of ethnography and theory in a whole that transcends the sum of its parts.

Full discussion and description by selection committees [Annual Awards 2015 from SEAA: MS-Word document downloads to view or print]

S.E.A.A. annual business meeting & awards

November 9, 2015 by Guven Witteveen

browse by SECTION

This year’s theme is at the heart of the anthro project – making the familiar strange (and the strange familiar)

Our annual business meeting takes place at 7:45 p.m. Friday, November 20.
The room location does not display online, but on-site you should have all session room locations.

Come to learn this year’s awardees:
—Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize
—Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper
—David Plath Media Award

4-1560 SOCIETY FOR EAST ASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY (SEAA) BUSINESS MEETING
Organizer: Li Zhang (University of California – Davis)

See the full list of SEAA sessions in the online program, “browse by section”
https://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2015/webprogrampreliminary/SEAA.html

2014 Plath Media Award: Playing with Nan; Honorable Mentions

December 23, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2014 Hsu Book Prize: Tragic Spirits

December 18, 2014 by Yi Zhou

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

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

2014 Hsu Book Prize Committee:

Andrew Kipnis (The Australian National University), chair

Laura Miller (University of Missouri-St. Louis)

William Silcott (Wichita State University)

Interview with Junko Kitanaka, 2013 Hsu Book Prize Recipient

April 5, 2014 by Heidi K. Lam

Junko Kitanaka was awarded the 2013 Frances L.K. Hsu Book Prize for her book Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress.

Junko Kitanaka (Keio University). Photo courtesy of Junko Kitanaka

Heidi Lam: What drew you to the issue of how depression has been defined in Japan?

Junko Kitanaka: Since my undergraduate days, I have always been interested in how people placed in extreme situations can still find meaning in life. I was influenced by the works of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who wrote of his own experience in concentration camps. As an undergraduate psychology major, I did volunteer work in a children’s unit at a cancer center in Tokyo, where death was real and imminent. Children there were the most considerate, kind and artistic people I’d ever met. At the same time, I was meeting people who seemed to have everything and yet were psychologically so distressed that they were even suicidal. So I became interested in the question of how people driven to the edge can recover meaning in life and how others like psychiatrists take part in this process of self-transformation. Depression seemed like a perfect entry point for exploring these issues.

HL: How did you decide on the three analytical frames of history, the clinic, and societal conceptions?

JK: The three frames were born out of the puzzles I faced in my fieldwork. Upon entering psychiatric institutions for fieldwork, I immediately encountered seemingly strange notions about depression that Japanese doctors and patients seemed to share, which I had never heard of when conducting fieldwork in Canadian psychiatric settings. I couldn’t find any books that would answer my questions—Japanese psychiatric textbooks on depression would explain its history by starting with melancholia in ancient Greece, shift to medieval Europe and then, modern Germany, and then tie it to the present “scientific” notion of depression. So I had to dig up archival materials to see how the local notions about depression had been shaped. The social section also grew out of fieldwork, as I began to follow the “social course” of depression, which was just then beginning to acquire economic and political currency as it became adopted by lawyers, activists, industrial leaders, and policy makers who almost seemed to be trying to lift Japan out of economic depression by treating individuals’ clinical depression.

HL: You examine how psychiatrists frame depression in tension with patient narratives about “suicide of resolve” and the overlooked depression of women. How do your interlocutors view your framework of the social and biological?

JK: My book first came out in English, then in French. I’m currently working on a Japanese version so it’s hard to say what the general reception will be. But a paper I wrote on overwork suicide in an influential magazine in Japan has been featured in the national Asahi Newspaper and the responses to it and to my book from experts in Japan so far have been all very favorable.

The most receptive audience in Japan for my work has been Japanese psychiatrists. From the mid-2000s, prominent psychiatrists began to invite me to conferences, to contribute to their journals and textbooks, and serve on a special committee of the Japanese Society of Depression. They would cite my paper on neurasthenia to discuss how they shouldn’t repeat the same mistakes of turning depression into another illness of personality. Doctors would often come up to me to tell me how my analysis of the gender relationship in psychiatry has made them more reflexive, for instance. I’m often surprised how much doctors seem to enjoy a critical anthropological perspective.

HL: What were the influences on your work?

JK: The biggest influences are, undoubtedly, Margaret Lock and Allan Young. My goal was to write a book like theirs. I’ve also been deeply influenced by those who established the anthropology of medicine as it is today, particularly Emily Martin, Jean Comaroff, Michael Taussig, Byron Good, Judith Farquhar, and Arthur Kleinman, as well as scholars like Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Povinelli. Because I began studying anthropology at the University of Chicago at the height of postmodernism and postcolonialism, my initial concern, as a native anthropologist, was how to incorporate reflexivity in my own work. As I began to do my fieldwork, however, I became more interested in the power relations between global science and local psychiatry, and started to work with historians of medicine and science. My current passion lies in helping more firmly establish the social studies of medicine in Asia.

HL: What ethical issues did you face in the field?

JK: Intruding into the most private aspects of people’s lives was a major concern for me at the time I did my fieldwork, but the patients I met were typically very explicit about wanting to help me as a way of reciprocating those who had helped them. They wanted me to not only write about how they’ve struggled but also about how they recovered, so that others who are suffering now can have hope. The ethics committees of the hospitals where I conducted fieldwork were also very helpful. They taught me that even a seemingly bureaucratic act like giving informed consent can be part of a therapeutic process for patients.

HL: In the conclusion, you discuss the alternate framings of depression through the concept “ground-up medicalization.” What narratives do you preview?

JK: Depression has been made a popular category in Japan through “medicalization through social movement,” in part by workers who see depression as emblematic of their social predicament. More recently, however, there has been potentially a reverse trend, as we see with the rise of new psychiatric regimens such as “Rework,” which is a crossover between medical treatment and occupational training designed to restore workers’ productivity. There is also a national move to introduce mental health mass screening for workers. As such local changes seem to resonate with the global rise of preemptive psychiatry and so-called “resilience” training, I’m keeping a close eye on how new treatments of depression may be indicative of new technologies of surveillance and self-governance.

Junko Kitanaka is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University. Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress is based on her McGill University doctoral dissertation, which won multiple awards. Her current project explores the psychiatrization of the life cycle.

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

2013 Hsu Book Prize: Depression in Japan

December 19, 2013 by Fuji Lozada

Junko Kitanaka’s book, Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress, presents a fascinating story of the use of biologizing discourses to make “patients” out of individuals who would otherwise resist psychological treatment.
It carefully balances the mobilization of critical cultural analysis with an understanding of the real suffering of depression that, in the hands of a less empathetic writer, could easily have become obscured.
It is based on years of research and a deep immersion in and understanding of the fields of psychiatry in both Japan and the United States.
It offers fresh and interesting theoretical insights that extend our understandings of nationalism, gender, and local-global relations.
It is also sensitively and thoughtfully written in a way that speaks to multiple audiences: not only those in Japanese studies and medical anthropology but also psychiatrists in Japan and the United States themselves.
It is a model of how one might think about how ideas and medical practices travel and yet take root in different ways in different places, revealing both links and differences among psychiatry in Japan, the United States, and Europe.

Depression in Japan on Amazon

2013 Hsu Book Prize Committee:
Vanessa Fong (Amherst), Chair
Lieba Faier (UCLA)
Laura Nelson (UC Berkeley)