Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su
January 10, 2025

On November 21, 2024, SEAA members gathered in Tampa for our annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed this year’s activities, announced new board members, and awarded book and paper prizes.

Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

Committee Members: Christine Yano (chair), Susan Brownell, Ellen Oxfeld, Hyang Jin Jung, and Heather Anne Swanson (2023 prize winner)

Winner

Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers by June Hee Kwon (Duke University Press)

Kwon’s book richly weaves the multidirectional, multilayered, multivocal stories of Korean Chinese migrant workers as they move restlessly between regions, countries, and households in pursuit of dreams of a better life.  Those dreams carry the precarity of borderlands in clashing claims to a future of in-betweenness.  Migrants often enter South Korea in low-end, dangerous and difficult manual jobs with precarious legal status.  Their family relations suffer as they are away for long periods of time, all in the hopes of bettering their futures. The author beautifully renders everything from the personal lives and tribulations of migrants to the way these are impacted by larger structural changes 

Importantly, the book situates ethnic migrations within the larger context of transformations in and through East Asia. The author renders macro and micro perspectives through three interactive lenses:  1) ethnicized bodies; 2) transnational money (remittances), and 3) transnational time (waiting).  Based on Chinese, Korean, and European language sources and on close fieldwork in multiple places, Kwon’s account traces multiplex tales that are both open-ended and circumscribed within political, economic, and regional structures.

Borderland Dreams makes a wonderful contribution to the literature on migration and borderlands, especially since much of the existing literature often focuses on the global south with respect to North America or Europe.  Kwon ably demonstrates not only the cogency, but the necessity, of placing global mobilities at the center of our consideration.  This work exemplifies where, how, and why Global Asias matters:  as a frame for this elegant ethnography, it yields the yearnings, instabilities, and intimacies constituting borderland dreams. 

Honorable Mentions

The Space of Religion: Temple, State, and Buddhist Communities in Modern China by Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank (Columbia University Press)

This magisterial work is based on over thirty years of fieldwork, archival research, and interviews in a Buddhist temple in Xiamen, Fujian, China.  The “space” of religion refers to physical, institutional, and semiotic space, all of which are illuminated in rich detail.  The authors consider the networks that bind this temple to other local temples, to the local population, to diaspora communities, and to the state.  It is based on an impressive ethnography of worshippers, monks, lay monks, state personnel, and many others.  Readers will come away with a better understanding of the multitude of ways the practice of Buddhism has changed from pre-liberation times to its suppression during the Cultural Revolution, to its revival in the reform period, and ultimately (to some degree), its transformation into a form of “culture” denuded of its religious underpinnings during the Xi Jinping era.

David Plath Media Prize

Committee Members: Beata Świtek (chair), Nan Kim, and Yi Wu

Winner

Beneath the Rubber Trees. Directed by Song Qu

This outstanding ethnographic film offers an intimate portrait of the Jinuo people by exploring the lifeworld that surrounds rubber tapping in the mountainous areas of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, China. Since the early 1950s the cultivation of rubber trees and harvesting of rubber have been a major economic pillar among  the Jinuo, China’s most recently recognized ethnic minority. Bookended by breathtaking sequences that both speak to the natural beauty of this region and its ongoing transformation, the film is otherwise a closely observed visual ethnography that moves seamlessly between scales: from the methodical rhythms of rubber tapping to the vibrant expressions of cultural festivities, from the intimate spaces of family life to the broader canvas of community celebrations. Positioning the Jinuo vis á vis the state and development in the post-Mao reform era, the film builds upon the attentive explorations of the lives of the main characters, the He family. Their experiences are situated in a wider setting where villagers strive to navigate rapidly changing and precarious economic circumstances while also negotiating their Jinuo identity during a time of intense commercialization and marketization. This film invites a reflection upon the implications of development for ethnic groups who rely heavily on local environmental resources and have been confronted with the disruptions and uncertainties posed by economic as well as touristic development. The film provides a nuanced teaching resource for discussions about labor, identity,  political ecology, and the complex dynamics of development in rural China.

Japani. Directed by Dipesh Kharel and Asami Saito

This highly accomplished multi-sited ethnographic film documents the lives of Nepalis who have migrated to work in Japan as well as the lives of their family members—particularly the children—they left behind. The film begins with documentary footage and candid interviews shot in the agrarian villages and at newly built schools of rural mountainous Nepal, then later shifts to apartment complexes and street scenes in urban Japan. A primary storyline in the film follows members of an extended family in these juxtaposed sites, framed by reflections on perceptions of monetary value and the emotional toll of family separation as experienced in both places. Taken together, the film explores the paradoxes and complexities of global migration through personal stories, including dilemmas that are at once intimate and transnational, as faced by family members among a community in diaspora. While building upon the filmmakers’ earlier film Playing with Nan (2013), which won the 2014 Plath Award, Japani represents an excellent resource for teaching about globalization, labor migration, parenting, kinship, and family.

She is Still Waiting for an Apology. Directed by Hong Xiaoxin

This poignant and deeply moving documentary focuses on Luo Shanxue and Wang Zhifeng, who are a generation apart but are both victims of the system of sexual slavery imposed by the imperial Japanese army during WWII in China. Luo Shanxue is the only descendant of a ‘comfort woman’ who is openly public about his identity in China, and the film initially reflects on Luo’s life shaped by stigma. In 1944, his mother Wei Shaolan gave birth to him after escaping from a Japanese comfort station, and for more than 70 years, he and his mother depended on each other, until her death in 2019. The film later bears witness to the life of Wang Zhifeng as a survivor who has long advocated for fellow victims to attain justice and who is among the eldest of activists engaged in the struggle to secure an official apology from the Japanese government. By documenting these survivors’ final years, the film provides an invaluable historical record of the legacies of wartime sexual slavery and is an essential contribution to the understanding of historical trauma and its reverberations across generations.

2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize

Committee Members: Zachary Howlett (chair), Xinyu Guan, Kunisuke Hirano, and Claudia Huang

Winner

“Afterlife of Closure: Victimhood and Redress after Toxic Exposure in Japan” by Shoko Yamada (Department of Anthropology, Yale University)

Dr. Yamada’s critical historical perspective and long-term ethnographic lens shed new light on the politics of redress, innovatively approaching them through the lens of performativity and situating them within the larger context of post-War memory. In this way, Yamada’s work unpacks the complex aftermath of chronic illness and settlement agreements in the wake of toxic exposure from industrial pollution in the Jinzū river basin in Toyoma, Japan. Using sensitive ethnography and gripping prose, she demonstrates how so-called closures and settlements dramatize the tension between irreparable injury and the performance of finality. Her piece delivers a fresh and eye-opening argument about how such closure can become a potent ground for future redressive work, enabling people to unsettle dominant notions of victimhood and re-imagine redress.

Honorable Mention

“The (Im)possibility of Indigenous Politics: Collaborative Medical Design and the Limits of Settler Democracy in Taiwan” by Aaron Su (Department of Anthropology, Princeton University)

Dr. Su’s work advances critical discussions on settler colonialism and Indigenous politics, sovereignty, and refusal. Chronicling the way that an Indigenous Amis community in Taiwan engages with settler-state initiatives to improve public health through community-based participatory design, Su’s paper illuminates the tensions between Amis participants’ usage of these arrangements to pursue revitalization and settler-state bureaucrats’ claiming of these occasions as collaborative successes. Artfully integrating ethnography and theory, he highlights the blurring of the lines between the possibility and impossibility of Indigenous politics. In so doing, his piece makes a compelling and thought-provoking argument for the urgency of strategizing and theorizing beyond the binaries of assimilation and transcendence in articulating an Indigenous politics for the contemporary moment.

New Board Members and Anthropology News Column Updates

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Teresa Kuan (Secretary), Beata Switek (Councilor), Zachary Howlett (Councilor), Sojung Kim (Student Councilor), Jieun Cho (SEAA Column Editor), and Aaron Su (SEAA Column Editor). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Hyang Jin Jung (Incoming President), Edward Pulford (Secretary), Lynne Nakano (Councilor), Lihong Shi (Councilor), David Kok Kwan Tsoi (Student Councilor), Yanping Ni (SEAA Column Editor), and Alex Wolff (SEAA Column Editor).

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 was an editor for the SEAA section news column from 2021-24 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. Her research investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Aaron Su was an editor for the SEAA section news column from 2021-24. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University writing up his dissertation on how new participatory design movements are transforming fields as far-flung as healthcare, environmental remediation, and Indigenous politics in Taiwan.