This year’s regional conference of the Society for East Asia Anthropology is hosted in Hong Kong. Join the conversation about “East Asia and Tomorrow’s Anthropology.” See conference details and refer colleagues and students to http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~ant/SEAAconf/
S.E.A.A. annual business meeting & awards
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
SEAA has new URL
Our parent association, the American Anthropological Association, has revised its website with the address “AmericanAnthro” at www.americananthro.org and so, too, of the many sections the URL has changed, as you see in your address bar above.
During the transition your bookmark to the old address will automatically take you to the new one: https://seaa.americananthro.org
SEAA Conference – Hong Kong, June 2016
SEAA has had great success in hosting meetings independent of AAA sessions at the Annual Meeting.
Come to Hong Kong to engage with colleagues from 19 to 22 June 2016, where the conference theme is “East Asia and Tomorrow’s Anthropology.”
Download proposal forms for paper or panel at the “Call for Papers” tab, http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~ant/SEAAconf/
Deadline for registration is Dec. 1. After the program is announced in January, the conference registration will begin and accommodations will be arranged.
Consider presentations you can make or panels to join in. Please, also invite colleagues near and far to participate.
CfP due September 30 for IUAES held in May 2016
announcement for Inter-Congress of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
May 2016, the Institute for Anthropological Research from Croatia, in collaboration with Slovenian colleagues (Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Ljubljana, and Association KULA), will organize the Inter-Congress of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). As the IUAES’s fields of interest are similar to the ones SEAA has, we would like to invite them to participate in the Inter-Congress.
The IUAES Inter-Congress will be held from May 4th to 9th 2016 in Hotel Palace Dubrovnik, Croatia, under the title World anthropologies and privatization of knowledge: engaging anthropology in public.
Please note that the Call for panels is open until September 30th 2015 and submission of panel proposals is made via online form at www.iuaes2016.com.
We hope to see you in Dubrovnik! We are looking forward to many SEAA panels!
With best regards,
Saša Missoni, Ph.D. President of IUAES Inter-Congress 2016
INSTITUTE FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH Ljudevita Gaja 32 10 000 zagreb; P.O. Box 290 C R O A T I A
Phone: +385 1 5535 100 Fax: +385 1 5535 105
Send questions to:
Lucija Dodigović, lucija.dodigovic@inantro.hr
IUAES Inter-Congress 2016 Organizing Committee
Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb (Croatia)
TEL +385(0)15535119 FAX +385(0)15535105
www.iuaes2016.com
SEAA 2014 AAA Meeting Highlights
By Heidi K. Lam (Yale University)
SEAA-Sponsored Panels
The Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) sponsored 22 panels at the 113th AAA Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Of these panels, 12 engaged with topics across East Asia, six in China, two in Korea, and two in Japan. Three of the panels were poster sessions. The panels touched on a wide range of pertinent themes, including: cultural production and consumption, gender, identity, mobility, new media, popular culture, psychology, tourism and youth.
SEAA hosted two invited sessions, which took place on Saturday December 6, 2014. With Ralph Litzinger (Duke U) as chair, Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard U) and Li Zhang (UC Davis) organized the roundtable “Troubling the ‘China Dream’: Paradoxes of the Good Life in China Today.” Dan Lin (Chinese U Hong Kong) was the organizer, with Gordon Mathews (Chinese U Hong Kong) as chair, of “Africans in Guangzhou: Will China Ever Have Its Own Barack Obama?”
SEAA Business Meeting and 2014 Awards
At the business meeting, SEAA President Li Zhang and prize committee members presented the annual awards.
Manduhai Buyandelger (MIT) received the 2014 Francis LK Hsu Book Prize for her book Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press). She examines the revival of shamanism among the Buryat people in Monogolia against a backdrop of economic impoverishment and regime change, focusing on issues of historical memory, gender, and politics.
The 2014 David Plath Media Award recognized the film Playing with Nan, which was directed by Dipesh Karel (U Tokyo) and Asami Saito (Media Help Line, Kathmandu). The film follows the life of Ram, a 28-year old Nepali man, and his family after he migrated to work in Japan. Honorable Mentions were awarded to two works: Rupert Cox (Manchester U) and Angus Carlye (U Arts London) were recognized for Kiatsu: The Sound of the Sky Being Torn (blog), while David Novak (UC Santa Barbara) for the podcast and website Sounds of Japan’s Nuclear Movement.
Student Mentoring Workshop
On December 6, SEAA organized a mentoring workshop for graduate students. The workshop invited SEAA President Li Zhang (UC Davis), Amy Borovoy (Princeton U) and Jennifer Hubbert (Lewis & Clark C) to have lunch with and share advice with graduate students. Twenty graduate students participated in this mentoring workshop and were divided into three groups by academic stage (pre-field work, post-field work, and currently on the job market). Some of the issues discussed were: “strategies for conducting productive fieldwork,” “job searches, job talks, and salary negotiations,” and “balancing academic life and personal life.”
Participants indicated in the post-event survey that the workshop eased their “intellectual” anxieties, developed their skills in academic publication and job seeking, and helped build stronger connections between professors and students. SEAA will continue to organize its mentoring workshop at future AAA meetings.
SEAA Column: Goals and Upcoming Activities
The SEAA column editors, Heidi Lam and Yi Zhou, reiterated their goal of involving more graduate students in SEAA column’s readership and contributors, as well as interaction among scholars at different career stages. To that purpose, they are planning a series of columns centered on a pertinent topic, such as new media, tourism, and professionalization, and will solicit papers from faculty and graduate student SEAA members. Details will be announced at a later date.
Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).
2014 Plath Media Award: Playing with Nan; Honorable Mentions
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)