aaa meeting

SEAA Highlights from Cyberspace to Asia

July 24, 2017 by Heidi K. Lam

The Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) promotes discussion and shares information on diverse topics related to the anthropology of East Asia broadly conceived. We are committed to developing international channels of communication among anthropologists throughout the world who share an interest in East Asia both as a topic of academic inquiry and as a site of academic activity. Here, we highlight our activities over the past year and invite you to join our lively community online (through our website and listserv) and offline.

SEAA column series

Our monthly column for the Anthropology News website features curated series, bringing together scholars in the SEAA around a central theme. Our current series on “Digital Anthropologies in East Asia” examines how digital technologies impact the everyday lives of ordinary people and transform social relationships, labor structures, and youth culture. Previous themes include “Living through Waste and Waste as Lively,” which provided a critical understanding of China’s “trash crisis” and contributed to anthropological studies of the environment. The “In and Out of Japan” series examined mobility against the backdrop of Japan’s population decline. We welcome your proposals for individual articles and thematic series to feature in future columns.

SEAA regional conferences

Keynote speakers at the SEAA regional conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chinese University of Hong Kong

Periodically SEAA brings together scholars for a dynamic regional conference, including Berkeley in 2004, Hong Kong in 2006, Taipei in 2009, and Seoul in 2011. Our 2016 conference was hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and included a diverse group of 160 participants from across East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America, who gave presentations on panels ranging from “Emerging Infrastructure of Immigration to China” to “Creative Human Reconstruction of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster” to “Confronting the ‘Grey Tsunami’” and “Ethics, Death and Beyond.” The keynote panel on “Overcoming the Gap between American Anthropology and East Asian Anthropologies” featured vigorous debate among leading scholars in the field on the cultural norms and structural challenges of academic knowledge production in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US. Ethnographic immersion in Hong Kong was a highlight of the

Exploring Hong Kong with SEAA President Gordon Mathews. Priscilla Song

conference, including a walking tour of urban renewal and high density dynamics, a field trip to Po Lin Monastery, and dinner at Chungking Mansions (described by SEAA President Gordon Mathews in his 2011 ethnography Ghetto at the Center of the World as emblematic of “low-end globalization”). We invite proposals from potential hosts for our next independent regional conference in Asia.

AAA workshops

SEAA holds professional development activities to nurture emerging scholars in our field, including yearly mentoring workshops and networking dinners at the AAA Annual Meetings. At our 2016 mentoring workshop in Minneapolis, Lisa Rofel, Eleana Kim, and Akihiro Ogawa met with SEAA graduate student members to discuss ways to connect anthropological research to political activism in the Trump era. Our 2017 mentoring workshop and networking dinner in Washington DC will continue to develop these themes; visit the SEAA website for updates.

SEAA is also organizing our first book publishing workshop at the 2017 Annual Meeting, featuring recent authors and acquisition editors from university presses at Cornell, Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford. Sign up at the AAA conference website to join us for a lively discussion on how to develop a compelling book proposal, find the right publisher, survive the review process, negotiate the contract, manage the production process, and market your book.

SEAA prizes

SEAA awards annual prizes for outstanding work in East Asian anthropology, including scholarly books, media productions, and graduate student papers. In 2016, SEAA awarded the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize to Jie Yang (Simon Fraser University) for her book Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Aya Domenig received the David Plath Media Award for her film The Day the Sun Fell (Als die Sonne vom Himmel fiel). The Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper was awarded to Adam Liebman, a PhD candidate at the University of California Davis, for his paper “Waste-Product Trading and Colloquial Urban Sociality in Kunming, China.” Join us at the SEAA annual business meeting in DC to find out the winners of the 2017 SEAA prizes.

SEAA: seaa.americananthro.org

Contributing editors: Heidi K. Lam, Yale University (heidi.lam@yale.edu), Priscilla Song, Washington University in St Louis (priscillasong@wustl.edu), and Yi Zhou, University of California Davis (yizhou@ucdavis.edu)

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/

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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/

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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)

SEAA 2014 AAA Meeting Highlights

February 8, 2015 by Heidi K. Lam

By Heidi K. Lam (Yale University)

SEAA-Sponsored Panels

At the SEAA business meeting. Image courtesy SEAA

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) receives the Hsu Book Prize. Image courtesy SEAA

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

SEAA Li Zhang and Prize Committee Chair Jenny Chio present the Plath Media Prize. Image courtesy SEAA

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).