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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

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

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.

Copyright [2021] American Anthropological Association

Clinical Decision Making in Rural China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Xisai Song
September 16, 2020

This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through a lens of everyday ethics. 

As a life-sustaining treatment for patients suffering from kidney failure, hemodialysis has been ridden with controversies since its emergence. It is a “half-way technology” that can neither cure the disease nor provide a sense of comfort, but jams patients into a long and torturing status between life and death (see for example, Fox and Swazey 2001; Kaufman 2015). The life quality for patients on hemodialysis is extremely low: they have to constantly practice self-discipline in food and water consumption (only one small cup of water a day) and chronically experience a long list of complications such as itchy skin, sleeping problems, and bone diseases. Unless acquiring kidney transplants, patients have to depend on hemodialysis until death.

In 2019, I conducted fieldwork in the hemodialysis ward of a public hospital in Qiushui, a poor, mountainous county in northeastern Sichuan, China. There were 95 patients suffering from kidney failure who regularly visited the ward for a four-hour hemodialysis treatment two to three times a week. The majority of them were from the county’s rural areas, among whom most were former migrant workers. They used to work as laborers such as factory workers, construction workers, and truck drivers in coastal provinces in China, but returned to their hometown to receive hemodialysis treatments. Half of these patients were under 45 and 10 of them were in their twenties. In spite of their young age, only six patients in this ward were waiting to receive a kidney transplant. Why do so many patients choose the arduous hemodialysis treatment instead of kidney transplant? How is their clinical decision making formulated in the social-historical and political context of China today?

Photograph of the interior of a hemodialysis ward
Image description: There are about half a dozen beds in this corner of the ward, all accompanied by hemodialysis equipment. The ward is clean and well-lit. There is a large, partially opaque window stretching across one wall of the ward letting in a small amount of light.
Caption: A corner of the hemodialysis ward. Xisai Song

What shocked me when doing fieldwork in the hemodialysis ward was how grateful those patients were to the state, in sharp contrast to what has been documented in anthropological studies in other contexts where poor patients attributed their reluctance to receive kidney transplants to social and structural problems (for example, Hamdy 2012). Coexistent with their indebtedness to the state was patients’ intensive moral anxiety and self-blame. State-sponsored insurance schemes and the “Targeted Measures in Poverty Alleviation” (jing zhun fu pin) program cover 75 to 90 percent of patients’ medical expenses, making hemodialysis financially accessible. These state welfare programs made patients feel included into the political order. At the same time, although migrant workers are constitutive of creating the new socioeconomic landscape of reform-era China (Zhang 2001), they are displaced from it immediately as they lose their ability to work. Unemployment is common among these former migrant workers on hemodialysis because their bodies can no longer handle the heavy labor required to keep their jobs as blue-collar workers. As a result, families, both as a cultural source of support (Kleinman 1980; Yan 2017) and an agent of the biopolitical state (Ma 2020), become the default safety net that patients depend on for financial support and for care. Caring for a sick family member is a long-standing moral norm in China. In poor rural households, however, caring involves meticulous calculations and moral tensions; families strain to coordinate their limited resources including labor, money, opportunities, and life prospects. Consequently, clinical decision making, discursively framed as a private act of family responsibility, is in fact a dilemma of survival. Deciding on treatment options like kidney transplantation entails moral struggles of evaluating and comparing life values among family members.

For Shan, a patient in her early fifties, kidney transplantation was “meaningless.” Instead, her primary concern was her son’s marriage. Shan was from a rural village in Qiushui. She and her husband were factory workers in southern China. In 2013, Shan was suddenly diagnosed with kidney failure and came back to Qiushui to receive hemodialysis treatments. Shan’s husband also quit his job to take care of her, because Shan suffered from serious complications and couldn’t live by herself. Her son, who was 18 then, dropped out of school immediately and started working as a migrant worker to shoulder the financial responsibility of the family. In the past seven years, Shan and her husband had to rely on her son to pay Shan’s medical bills as well as their living expenditures. “I cried every time I received money from my son. I put too much pressure on him,” Shan once said to me. Shan’s son was 25 and remained single, which was absurd in rural areas where the marriage age was early. In Shan’s village, people called her “bottomless pits of trouble” (wu di dong) and no matchmaker ever introduced a girl to her son. Shan’s son also didn’t find a girlfriend in his workplace. Shan was extremely guilty that her son hadn’t finished school and blamed the difficulty of her son getting married on herself. Shan never considered kidney transplantation, refusing to add more burdens to her son. The financial cost of post-transplant medications was comparable to that of hemodialysis, while the possibilities of recurrent hospitalizations and relapse of kidney failure would further their trouble. Shan’s biggest wish was that her son would build a family of his own before her own death. Her family spent a large portion of their savings remodeling their house in 2019. A new house is an important cultural and economic symbol indicating that a family is ready to welcome a daughter-in-law. Bioethical principles of informed consents and patient autonomy have gained plenty of anthropological scrutiny.

In addition to worries over financial and caring burdens, many young patients regarded kidney transplantation as “useless.”  The story of Jinwei, a patient in his mid-thirties, is one example. Growing up in a rural village of Qiushui, Jinwei went to Guangdong, a southern province at the age of 16 in 1998. Jinwei aspired to make a fortune and to snatch a good place in China’s emerging market economy. He started as a factory worker, but later became a gang member. Although his income was much higher, he ended up getting imprisoned for three years. After his release, he went back to working in a factory. Jinwei described the 1990s as a golden age of opportunity. Seeing some of his old friends getting rich, Jinwei was determined not to be left behind. He went to Beijing and invested his life savings into running a restaurant. The business failed a few years later, and Jinwei returned to work in a factory. This was where he met his wife, a fellow worker. In 2018, they got married and his wife became pregnant with twin boys. However, in the same year, Jinwei was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD). His CKD quickly progressed to the end stage and he started hemodialysis in early 2019. His boys were only three months old. Jinwei firmly refused to sign up for a kidney transplant waiting list. People with kidney transplants should still avoid heavy labor. That is to say, transplantation would not change the fact that Jinwei had lost his ability to work. Reflecting on the past 20 years, Jinwei demonstrated a strong sense of regret and failure, thus having no confidence to build a new life with a disabled body if he were to receive a kidney transplant. Jinwei didn’t bother to undertake the risks of a transplantation surgery, but would rather spend the surgery fees on raising his boys. He was immensely remorseful for his inability to provide his boys with an adequate life. Jinwei strictly practiced self-discipline in everyday life in order to maintain his body in a stable condition and to prolong his life, which extended beyond following medical advice to his moral endeavor to be a good father.

Bioethical principles of informed consents and patient autonomy have gained plenty of anthropological scrutiny. Scholars critique bioethics’ underlying liberalism and science-centric frameworks that overlook the complexity of local moral worlds and obscure structural inequalities (see for example, Kleinman 1995; Mol 2008; Pinto 2014; Rapp 2000). For Shan and Jinwei, their treatment choices are neither autonomous nor orient toward themselves. Instead, they gauge the overall well-being of their families and prioritize the benefits of the ones with relatively better life prospects—their children in both cases. Their seemingly intergenerational moral acts such as the sacrifice of Shan’s son, Shan’s motherly love, and Jinwei’s pursuit of good fathering have, however, obscured these poor patients’ predicaments caused by socioeconomic marginalization. For Shan and Jinwei, the chronic effects after transplantation—including the inability to work, long-term medication, and dependence on care—outweigh the benefits that transplantation can bring. Thus, they deem kidney transplantation worthless. Like Shan and Jinwei, most former migrant workers in the hemodialysis ward of the hospital in Qiushui regard kidney transplantation as being of little help to their life hardships, which challenges biomedical standards of medical efficacy. Instead of applying to individual biological bodies, medical efficacy is unevenly distributed to patients of different social statuses.

Xisai Song is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. Her study examines how lower-class patients struggle with chronic kidney disease in China. Her research interests include chronicity, medical ethics, health inequality, and the ways in which biomedicine is contextualized into non-Western contexts.

Cite as: Song, Xisai. 2020. “Clinical Decision Making in Rural China.” Anthropology News website, September 16, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1498

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

Changing Mortuary Practices in Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Yohko Tsuji
August 13, 2020

The typical inscription on most Japanese tombstones does not show the names of the deceased. It says instead “Ancestral grave of the X family,” reflecting a lingering political heritage of the Meiji oligarchy (1868–1912). The imperial government established the ie (家), or the patrilineal family to which every citizen must belong, and mandated ancestor worship with the family grave as its locus to ensure the ie continuity (Tsuji 2002, 177-199). Hence, generations of family members in the direct line of descent—the family head, his wife, their heir, the heir’s wife, and so on—are buried together. Their descendants are responsible for looking after the family grave and worshipping their ancestors. A tale of two cemeteries in northern Osaka shows us much about recent changes in Japanese mortuary traditions.

The first is a municipal cemetery established in 1969. It had 4,000 graves by 1987 and was expanded to 6,364 in 2000. On the large terraced hillside overlooking the skyscrapers of Osaka City, one can see countless rows of traditional three-tier graves in which the cremains of several generations of family members are interred. Most inscriptions on them say “X family’s ancestral grave.” A few newer gravestones are carved with Chinese characters, such as serenity (寂), dream (夢), and appreciation (感謝).

Photograph of a cemetery.
Image description: Numerous stone grave markers line different levels of a cemetery. They all have wide, broad bases with smaller tiers stacked atop each other. The stone on the top tier of each grave is taller and narrower than those underneath and has a vertical inscription on it.
Caption: Traditional three-tier graves at the Municipal Cemetery. Yohko Tsuji

Yet this cemetery is not quintessentially traditional, because graves were not inherited but newly purchased; it is affiliated with neither Buddhist temples nor neighborhood communities; and it is an individual, not a family, who contracts a cemetery plot, though after the individual’s death the contract is transferable to another individual. This cemetery, like numerous public and commercial cemeteries, sprang up during Japan’s economic growth that began in the 1960s. The mass migration to urban areas at that time caused an acute shortage of graves because newcomers, whose family graves were located far away and hard to visit, tried to find alternative graves near their new homes. In 1971, the shortage and high cost of urban graves resulted in the construction of a columbarium with 552 locker-style repositories, adding another nonconventional feature to this cemetery.

More notable modifications of burial traditions occurred in 2019. The municipal government built a large monument to collectively entomb the cremains of 14,000 unrelated people in order to economize the burial space and to memorialize those entombed, thereby relieving each family from maintaining their own grave and worshipping their ancestors there. This monument helps to solve two major death-related problems in contemporary Japan: an increasing number of deaths as the baby boomer generation ages, and a growing number of people who have no grave or no family members to take care of their grave and afterlife.

Photograph of flowers placed on a monument.
Image description: A black sphere sits atop a raised circular platform that rests on a tiled circular pattern of dark grey stone. On the edge of the largest circle are four bouquets of flowers with colorful blossoms of yellow, pink, orange,and white.
Caption: Monument for Collective Burials at the Municipal Cemetery. Yohko Tsuji

The second cemetery,  established in 2012 and known as sakurasō (桜葬) or a cherry blossom cemetery, offers a different approach to resolve the same problems. Adopting the principle of jumokusō, or tree burials (Boret 2014), no tomb stones or monuments exist at the park-like site of this cemetery. Instead, cherry trees are planted to signify six burial areas, where unrelated people’s cremains are buried without markers. Each burial area has a few stones with small metal plates on them bearing varying inscriptions: some show the deceased’s names and dates of birth and death, and others include words of thanks or personal messages, such as “Good-bye. It was an interesting life.” A service to commemorate all of the dead is held annually.

Though the land of sakurasōcemetery belongs to a Buddhist temple, it is managed by a nonprofit organization (NPO) and is available to anyone regardless of religious belief. Like the monument at the municipal cemetery, these graves require neither maintenance nor descendants. The NPO offers support both before and after death by performing tasks that have traditionally been undertaken by next of kin but have become harder to do: checking on older people living alone, assisting with hospitalization, serving as the stand-in chief mourner for a funeral, and so on. The NPO also organizes regular meetings of those who will be buried together, creating a community of hakatomo which literally means “grave friends.”

This tale of two cemeteries illustrates the unmistakable transformations in Japanese mortuary tradition (Tsuji 2018, 17-30). They reflect and adapt to the changes in Japanese families, neighborhoods, workplaces, economy, ecology, and demographics that have occurred in the last half a century. Particularly, the family’s central role has diminished. Instead individual choices and decisions have become more important. Despite myriad societal changes however, death continues to be significant in people’s lives. Indeed, over 33 million websites are available to check the cost of a cemetery lot. Choosing a nontraditional grave and entrusting the care of the afterlife to extrafamilial entities, such as the municipal government and the sakurasōcemetery management, provides a tenable means of securing care of death and the afterlife. It does not necessarily mean that people have stopped practicing mortuary rituals. Rather, their nonconventional choices of graves and conformity to mortuary tradition coexist. During biannual religious weeks in the spring and the fall, extra buses are operated to the municipal cemetery for people who worship their ancestors. Some family members regularly visit the sakurasō cemetery, including on death anniversaries of their loved ones.

As Japanese society is rapidly aging, death and dying are becoming even more visible with the mass media constantly featuring pertinent information and people’s concerns about shūkatsu (終活), or preparation for death and the afterlife, escalating. Furthermore, as these cemeteries demonstrate, mortuary tradition is evolving and generating new types of practices.

Another such example is the practice of burial with one’s pet. Traditionally, pets are not allowed to be entombed with humans. Behind this ban is the Buddhist worldview, which places animals and humans in separate stages of the reincarnation cycle. However, in the last few decades, this clear demarcation has been blurred as pets have become increasingly regarded as indispensable family members. Called uchi-no-ko, or “our child,” just like human progeny, the pet shares daily life with many Japanese inside their residences rather than in a kennel outside. Uchi-no-ko is fed pet and human food rather than the leftovers given in the old days. People also clothe their pets with sweaters, caps, and socks and have them groomed regularly. They buy pet medical insurance and take them to veterinarians for illness and injury, not to mention check-ups and shots.

When uchi-no-ko dies, many Japanese have a funeral, hiring a pet funeral operator or asking a Buddhist priest to chant a sutra. They bury their fur child in a pet cemetery and visit it frequently, dismissing a more customary method of calling the health department to have the pets’ remains incinerated or, if the family has a yard, burying them in a hidden corner.

These pet parents suffer the loss of their children and are concerned about their pets’ afterlives as much as their own. Because the burial of pets in human graves is not permitted at most cemeteries, the everlasting separation from their pet and the uncertainty of the pet’s afterlife aggravate their grief. Buddhist priests frequently receive questions, such as: “Can uchi-no-ko rest in peace or go to heaven?” and “Can I and uchi-no-ko meet again after my death?” These pet owners strongly wish to be reunited with their pet in the same grave after their death. To address such sentiments, some cemeteries, including the aforementioned sakurasō cemetery, allow humans and pets to be buried together.

The tale of two cemeteries and the burial with one’s pet attest to the malleability of tradition. For its persistence, tradition must change, adapting to social transformations and accommodating people’s altered needs. Japanese mortuary tradition continues to evolve to handle death, “the supreme and final crisis of life” (Malinowski 1948, 47), in a contemporary world awash with immense changes.

Yohko Tsuji is an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of the forthcoming book, Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America. She has conducted fieldwork in America, Japan, and Thailand, and published articles on aging, death, conception of time, and social change.

The SEAA column is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Tsuji, Yohko. 2020. “Changing Mortuary Practices in Japan.” Anthropology News website, August 13, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1471

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

Cultivating the Ethical Self in the Way of the Sword

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jingyi Tian
February 26, 2020

For Hongkongers, kendo offers practice in the pursuit of self-cultivation and ethical work.

This piece is part of the SEAA series “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics. 

“Many people can’t control their egos in kendo. They hit one after one—pong, pong, pong! It’s pointless. This is where kendo mirrors their inner characters,” said a senior Hong Kong practitioner who has been practicing kendo, a Japanese combative martial art, consistently for more than five years. The practitioner told me that kendo helps him to cultivate a strong mind. Many practitioners had similar ethical reflections, which led me to ask, How does kendo serve as a tool of self-cultivation?

Hong Kong fans of Japanese culture are often drawn to the sport by the iconic image of samurai fashion. Although kendo is not the most popular sport in Japan (the All Japan Kendo Federation counted 1.8 million practitioners in 2017), the martial art is noteworthy because its practitioners devote themselves to the practice for years, even decades, in pursuit of moral self-cultivation. Like the man quoted above, many kendo practitioners regard kendo as a life practice (Cantonese: sau hang; Mandarin: xiu xing, 修行). This term has a strong connotation of spiritual exercise in Chinese, and an association with ascetic practices. It accurately reflects a feature of kendo—practitioners engage in a highly intensive, exhausting, and challenging combative activity that forces them to endure hardship and injuries. Yet, many dedicated practitioners are more than willing to endure such rigors.

Photo of a practice room with numerous people in kendo gear.
Hong Kong kendo practitioners in their regular practice. Jingyi Tian

The ideal status and traits of the better person produced through kendo practice vary from individual to individual. Practitioners have similar physical experiences, but their own interpretations and goals. Kendo works as a tool for personal growth for some practitioners. Others find kendo helpful in learning how to cultivate social relationships. I will highlight three examples to showcase the range of practitioners’ ethical desires: a financial trader who wants to become a person who can make sharp and accurate decisions at work through better control of his ego; a Christian who aims to practice compassion and love through kendo, which helps him to do a better job as a manager; and a young practitioner who seeks self-empowerment to cope with the harsh yet routinized work. They all have a telos in a Foucauldian sense, namely, a goal of pursuing an “ethical self”—a status or a state of being that they wish to achieve.

A financial trader
Edward is a financial trader in his forties. Before he began learning kendo, he read the book Gorinsho (TheBook of Five Rings), which is filled with stories of a famous Japanese swordsman, Musashi Miyamoto. Edward told me that both kendo and his job require making the right decision at the right moment under pressure. In kendo, a combatant needs to practice how to manage their fear or anxiety, which helps to build up inner power. Edward insists that kendo helps him make good decisions. In that sense, he believes that kendoinstills self-control and a tranquil mindset, both of which benefit his career. Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations.

A Christian
Christopher is a pious Christian and entrepreneur who opened his own business when he was in his forties. He adopted kendo as a training regimen that helps him learn how to get along well with his coworkers. Christopher has found that kendo’s moral messages align with his Christian beliefs—especially the call to show love and care in practice. When he spars with less experienced opponents, he tries to help them improve their kendo skills through courtesy, which he sees as another kind of training that he applies in his work life as well.

A young practitioner
Melissa is in her mid-twenties and works as a legal clerk. She told me that her routinized job made her feel powerless for not being able to make a difference. She wants to be more energetic and positive toward life, and kendo offers her a scheme in which she can transform herself.

To reach their goals, kendo combatants seek self-improvement and self-advancement through exhausting bodily practices that challenge their limits. They often trace kendo’s moral codes to Inazo Nitobe’s famous 1905 book, Bushidō:The Soul of Japan, which offers a genealogy of kendo’s moral framework that various practitioners’ find useful. Practitioners regard the moment they are faced with an attack as the moment to transcend their fear like a warrior; when presented with opportunity to initiate an attack, they practice self-control to repress the impulse. They strive to refine their inner selves in combat with a diligent attitude, and such refinement will not happen unless they keep practicing over the long term. In this process, physical combat not only trains the body but also constitutes ethical work, as the moment when one faces a challenge in combat is a good time to train “heart” (心). The written character of the heart is the same in Japanese (kokoro) and Chinese (Mandarin: xin; Cantonese: sam). In kendo culture, the heart represents inner power that can be obtained through training.

Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations. Recalling Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on ethics and self-formation, practitioners adopt the moral framework of kendo practice as a “technology of the self” through which they hope to transform themselves and attain an ideal state of being. Practitioners hold that kendo practice helps them find the weaknesses in their own characters and become better people.

The demand for self-cultivation through kendo reflects a larger neoliberal social milieu in Hong Kong where individuals are left to individually cope with intense pressure from their jobs, including finances, harsh demands in the workplace, and routinized work life. Kendo’s moral framework provides a means for practitioners to build up a strong mindset to cope with their anxiety and suggests a culture of the body that emphasizes self-reliance, self-improvement, adaptability, and individualism. Their experiences resonate with similar patterns of self-cultivation among practitioners of yoga, judo, wingchun, and taichi.

Joseph Alter’s study on yoga in India shows that middle-class yoga practitioners adopted yoga practice as a spiritual antidote to the anxiety and pressure in their fast-paced capitalistic lifestyle.  This work has inspired other scholars to contextualize bodily practices within a larger socio-moral landscape. The case of Hong Kong kendo practitioners suggests that kendo’s moral framework is particularly appealing to middle-class practitioners who experience extraordinary pressures in daily work life and culture.

Cite as: Tian, Jingyi. 2020. “Cultivating the Ethical Self in the Way of the Sword.” Anthropology News website, February 26, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1356

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

Family in the Ruins of Nuclear Risk

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho
April 29, 2020

This piece is part of the SEAA series “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.

“I chose to not worry about radiation anymore, for as long as I stay living here; to live normally again for my children and my family,” said Kazumi, a mother of two children, who had decided to stop trying to move out of her neighborhood for the time being. Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, I was listening to her confession of choosing to “live normally again” at a tea party for parents who were managing their anxieties in the face of long-term exposure to low-dose radiation in nuclear-affected areas. Employing the term “choice”, which has become all too familiar for people living in conflict-ridden areas that have not been evacuated (cf. Little 2019), Kazumi chose to give up “endless worries” as her own child-raising strategy. But what does this choice do for her in such an extraordinary environment? And what is this new normal life Kazumi is trying to make if it needs to be constantly chosen and confessed as such? Based on my ongoing fieldwork with families living with lingering post-Fukushima radiation, I take such choice as indexing an ethics of what I call balancing. Familial norms fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere.

Kazumi lives in Koriyama City, one of the regions slightly outside the officially demarcated evacuation zone in Fukushima. In such a shadow zone, a life amidst unrecognized forms of nuclear risks has been effectively normalized with a newly introduced level of permissible radiation exposure—20 times the pre-disaster level for Fukushima. Although public debates over the long-term effects of low-dose radiation have escalated over time, amounting to what one may call science wars among ministries, academia, and citizens (Kimura 2016; Polleri 2019; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2018), children’s health from the perspective of radiological protection has come to hold a central place in the imaginaries of biological vulnerability. However, those who have chosen to remain or return are left largely on their own with only limited help from central and local government (Lies 2017; McCurry 2017). Resources available for mitigating nuclear risks are differentially distributed along pre-existing lines of social, political, and economic inequalities; some could afford to leave while others were forced to make do by purchasing food from cleaner areas. Still others could scarcely afford anything. In a prolonged nuclear disaster, the matter at hand is not only the radioactive material itself, but also its construction as social facts, knowledge, and public feelings (see for example, Morris-Suzuki 2014; Hecht 2012; Masco 2008), all bearing on the actual lives of ordinary people.

Without doubt, living in the ruins of nuclear risk is a demoralizing situation for all the parents involved. Operating within the discursive domain of “family’s choice,” familial norms—specifically the injunction that parents should protect children until adulthood (Allison 2013; Borovoy 2005; cf. Doi 1973)—fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere. Because they could not do this, the parents I encountered felt stuck and immobilized in the face of unavoidable risk, both physically and socially, and were struggling to raise children with limited resources outside the officially designated evacuation zone. In such moral struggles, “striking a balance” (baransu o toru, or oriai o tsukeru), to keep living, was a phrase I heard time and again in interviews and conversations, as a practical way to live through unwanted nuclear risks.

Photograph of a child trying to catch an ant.
Image description: A photograph showing a small child’s arm extended, reaching down to the paved ground with finger and thumb extended in an attempt to capture an ant crawling on the ground.
Caption: A three-year-old girl trying to catch an ant when allowed to play on the ground during a retreat for families from nuclear-affected areas. Jieun Cho

Like hundreds of thousands of others, Kazumi fled to the home of a relative in another city in Fukushima Prefecture after the disaster. As revealed by data that had been published over the following months, both her home and that of her relatives were exposed to the fallouts of radioactive iodine, which was recognized as the cause of childhood thyroid cancers after the Chernobyl disaster by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1996 (for more on knowledge production surrounding Chernobyl, see Brown 2017). After returning home under a new standard of permissible airborne radiation (note here that other material forms of radioactivity like soil are discounted), she found with the help of an NGO that parts of her living environment measured 100 times the radiation of a pre-disaster estimate. Because she did not know what this would mean for her children’s health, Kazumi searched for information about the effects of long-term exposure to radiation on children of her son’s age, only to become more frustrated. Although experts diverge on how or even if prolonged exposure in shadow zones leads to ill health constituting the need for relocation (Normile 2011), all agree that distancing from the source of exposure is the best way to remain safe—an option unavailable to her due to her husband’s local business. After years of failed attempts to move out, she was left with “nothing but stress” and a deep sense of guilt towards her children. Her sons, then entering puberty, had started retreating into their own worlds. According to her, she was “infectious,” spreading “depression” in her family.

Kazumi decided to break off from this state by no longer worrying about how to live somewhere else, and instead, “to actually live.” As a parent, this meant accepting the premise that insulating her children entirely from any kind of radiation exposure, let alone removing the exposure that had already happened, was impossible. A risk-free body is out of reach, but a reasonably healthy body may be realizable, depending on how this is defined and pursued. What she could do was to “strike a balance” by, for example, not stopping her children from volunteering to help struggling farmers in more contaminated areas. Kazumi evaluated the change in her own children as “learning to be proud as children of Fukushima (by helping farmers)”—something that made them “healthier.” The mind (kokoro) here was less an individual psyche, but more a state of well-being gained from ongoing interactions with others. I heard many other parents echo this emphasis on balance “between the mind and the body” as they struggled to find a livable definition of health while staying in or returning to Fukushima for work, aging parents, children’s education, etc. The mind and the body are interconnected, and the connection is facilitated through engagement with the outside world (which entails risks for further exposure). Might one call this a form of “life lived as itself”? That is, life as “actualities” in which the means (action) and ends (health) are “one and the same?” (Lambek 2010). From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own.

What strikes me is the vitality Kazumi gained from her choice to “actually live.” If she was static in her previous, demoralized view about her own situation, her new normal life is forged by her own acts of balancing like giving permission to her children to do various things—what she calls “compromise” (dakyō) in a somewhat self-deprecating manner. These gestures in the everyday bring forth a worldview that in turn orients her to the everyday amidst nuclear risks. Forging a way forward like this has gotten Kazumi out of her house after a period of dormancy, both physically and socially, experienced by so many parents after the disaster who “caged” their own children (Bird 2013; Hanai and Lies 2014).

Such a form of life may be helpful in considering alternative approaches to the two extremes of reproducing the assumptions of false consciousness and placing relentless faith in scientific truth claims, as is often observed in political debates surrounding environmental uncertainty (see for example, Ahmann 2019; Hochschild 2016; Taussig 2019). In the bipolarized discourses of human rights, state failure, or scientific causality in post-Fukushima Japan, people like Kazumi appear to embody a position that is overdetermined by multiple trajectories of injustice. However, this emphasis on her victimhood says little about how Kazumi’s own choice leads her to new points of struggle in her daily efforts to live through the very conditions of overdetermination. From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own (see for example, Allison 2013; Mahmood 2005), despite all in the life of Kazumi and her children that cannot be lived properly. At least this form of life she has chosen is livable; a child can have a future within this life, albeit outside the prospect of a pure body.

Jieun Cho is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, her dissertation research concerns middle-class families who are trying to raise healthy children while living amidst low-dose radiation in post-nuclear Japan.

Cite as: Cho, Jieun. 2020. “Family in the Ruins of Nuclear Risk.” Anthropology News website, April 29, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1397

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

SEAA Highlights at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Shuang L. Frost and Hanna M. Pickwell
February 13, 2020

At this year’s Annual Meeting, the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) hosted a range of activities, presentations, and events. Highlights included 35 panels (including four co-sponsored invited sessions), the annual Business Meeting, a faculty-student mentoring workshop, and a student dinner.

SEAA panels

The SEAA program consisted of 35 panels, including four invited sessions, 23 volunteered sessions, and sessions built from 10 individual papers, and two posters. Of these, 12 were sessions with papers featuring research on different regions of East Asia. The panels explored a range of topics including politics, climate change, gender, activism, demographic transitions, popular culture, and intimacy.

This year, SEAA featured the following four invited sessions that were co-sponsored with other AAA sections:

  • “Bad Air and the Everyday Landscape of Asia” (co-sponsor: Society of Environmental Anthropology)
  • “Indigenous Psychology in China” (co-sponsor: Society for Psychological Anthropology)
  • “Toward the Establishment of a Network for Ainu and Indigenous Studies in North America” (co-sponsor: Association of Indigenous Anthropology)
  • “Trans Asia Pacific: Queering Climates I” (invitation to co-sponsor from the Association for Queer Anthropology) 

Business Meeting

SEAA members gathered for the annual Business Meeting, where the Board reviewed the activities throughout 2019 and announced prize recipients. Sasha Su-Ling Welland was awarded the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize for Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (2018). Graduate student Victoria Nguyen won Best Student Paper with her article titled “Designing Sustainability: Containment, Circulation, and Contingency in Beijing.” Honorable mention was given to Kaitlin Banfill’s “When the Han Came: Intergenerational Memory and History Making in Butuo County, Southeast China.”

Victoria Nguyen received the award for best graduate student paper. Jing Wang
Victoria Nguyen (center) received the award for best graduate student paper. Jing Wang

Sonia Ryang took over the “rice paddle” from former president Glenda Roberts and assumed the responsibility of SEAA president; and president-elect Ellen Oxfeld will assume this role at the end of Ryang’s term. We said goodbye to several outgoing members: Susan Brownell (treasurer 2016–2019), Shao-hua Liu (councilor 2016–19), Ayako Takamori (councilor 2016–19), Jing Wang (student councilor 2016–19), and Heidi Lam (Anthropology News SEAA section news contributing editor 2013–19). We welcomed five new board members to the SEAA team: Isaac Gagne as treasurer, Jie Yang and Marvin D. Sterling as councilors, Yifan Wang as student councilor, and Hanna Pickwell as SEAA section news contributing editor. SEAA thanked these members for volunteering their time and energy to keep SEAA a thriving forum for intellectual exchange. 

Outgoing Treasurer Susan Brownell received a Certificate of Appreciation from President Glenda Roberts. Jing Wang
Outgoing treasurer Susan Brownell received a Certificate of Appreciation from president Glenda Roberts. Jing Wang

Student activities 

This year SEAA hosted a mentoring workshop centered on the challenge of “Rethinking East Asia.” More than 25 members, including graduate students and early-career scholars, participated in the event. Professors Sonia Ryang and Beth Notar offered their insights and mentorship on researching across Asian contexts, applying to jobs, teaching and pedagogy, and the importance of rethinking the politics and genealogies of area studies today. Participants reported satisfaction not only with the workshop, but also with the delicious breakfast catered by the section.

For several years, SEAA’s student committee has organized a social gathering for students whose research interests fall under the broad category of East Asian anthropology. It offers an opportunity for graduate students to socialize with other young scholars from various institutions over food and drink. This year approximately 25 students joined the informal dinner, where they reunited with old friends and made new connections across diverse regional and theoretical research interests. 

Hanna M. Pickwell is a contributing editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include material culture, time, everyday life, and popular religion in China.

Shuang L. Frost is a contributing editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in social anthropology and science and technology studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include platform ethics, digital economy, social policymaking, and urban studies.

Cite as: Frost, Shuang L., and Hanna M. Pickwell. 2020. “SEAA Highlights at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting.” Anthropology News website, February 13, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1345

A Space for Laughter in Contemporary China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Aaron Su
October 10, 2019

This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics. 

Last year in Shanghai, I was taken by my friend Mei to an affluent corner of Songjiang District, an hour away from the city center. To our surprise, we encountered a poster of Lei Feng, a deceased People’s Liberation Army soldier known for his thrift and selflessness, hanging on the front gate of a housing community. I had been rambling about jobs and other frustrations when she seized the opportunity to stage a witty comeback by pointing and reading the text on the poster: “Xuexi Lei Feng, kuaile zhiyuan” (Learn from Lei Feng, a happy volunteer). She laughed a bit, and in that moment revealed to me the complex relationship between an ethical claim—one that is issued by the state, on full public display—and the less straightforward way that it came to be interpreted. Laughter, more precisely, bore the trace of Mei’s perception and interpretation, but it was also an opaque utterance that lacked the grounding of a defined conclusion.

Lei Feng poster in gated community.
Lei Feng propaganda campaign in Shanghai, China, 2018. Aaron Su.

I wanted her to explain to me the elements behind that humor, since comedy can tell so much about the perceived order of things, especially through implicit judgments about what the real or the serious actually is (Berlant and Ngai 2017). She started with a brief history: Lei Feng was a soldier in the early days of the socialist state, prized for his altruism and revolutionary allegiance. After losing his life from a truck accident at age 22, he became a mythic figure and the subject of a large-scale propaganda campaign. His life stories were substantiated by a diary, published in 1963, replete with praise for Chairman Mao. “I’m not sure why, but he’s still here today, and there’s so much of him around here,” she concluded. As the day progressed, this mismatch she was insinuating between history and the present grew more and more pronounced. Lei Feng’s face graced the front of murals, billboards, and banners everywhere in the wealthy suburbs. There seemed to be an underlying logic that persisted beneath the surface, but in practice it was dismissed by a brief chuckle and cast aside.Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.I continued to wonder why Mei met the situation with an ambivalent affect such as humor, rather than the possible range of more direct, more conclusive judgments—approval, disdain, disengagement—so I continued to probe about the posters and about experiencing street propaganda more generally. A haziness loomed over her response, again accompanied by a laugh: “I usually don’t have the time to look, but it feels like the historical campaigns are much stronger recently.” Her observation was reminiscent of my friend Allen’s comments a week earlier, who noted too that recent campaigns “are so blatantly of the past” to the point that their incongruence with the present comes off as “funny.” Allen’s and Mei’s statements share much in common: they both sidestep the quest for comprehension, making a diversion to comedy to fill in the gaps where a conclusive understanding of a political phenomenon doesn’t yet appear to be possible. Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.

Recourse to history is a growing trend in China, with Lei Feng representing just one instance in an emergent pattern of the state invoking history in order to stage ethical claims. As Angela Zito (2016) has observed, themes of Confucian filiality that were once not part of PRC dogma have made their way back into political campaigns, perhaps as a way to encourage forms of familial and elderly care that had been neglected in years past. On a similar note, Confucius has returned as a cultural theme and a mechanism of soft power, both in the expansion of mainland campaigns (Xi 2015) and in initiatives to establish educational institutions outside of China, although not without its discontents, some of whom are from the discipline of anthropology (Sahlins 2015).

But for many of those who experience these historically-inflected campaigns on a daily basis, attention is seldom devoted to contemplating their  magnitude or political origin. On the contrary, my interlocutors spend more time considering how they should interpret and respond to these ethical pleas, producing indirect responses such as laughter and humor, which play with narrative space afforded by ambiguity. As Mei pulled out a trove of experiences with past political campaigns, she could not summon up strong feelings for or against their injunctions; she didn’t experience responses that matched up to the ethical charge of what she was being faced with. The campaigns were quite straightforward in content, but there was a level of confusion about how she or other individuals would interpret them and incorporate them into their own daily practices. This fundamental ambiguity took the shape of a Chinese idiom she muttered to me at the end of our conversation—sidongfeidong (denoting something along the lines of “seeming to understand something at face value is to really not understand it at all”).

Propaganda poster on the streets of Shanghai
A banner with four Core Socialist Values and a promotion for the Chinese Dream campaign, Shanghai, China, 2018. Aaron Su.

Consider the Core Socialist Values and Chinese Dream campaigns of recent years, which permeate Chinese streets to a greater extent than any other government initiatives. As Christopher Connery’s (2019: 9) analysis demonstrates, the message is clear-cut: these billboards feature both dynastic and socialist graphics, and they link the ideal Chinese life to ethical values “whose historical scope is civilizational.” At the same time, public responses to these displays of ideal ethical virtue (responses that are formed out of brief, real-time encounters, rather than detached analysis) are not as easily reducible to the straightforward messages they convey. Mei talked to me about these posters, with roundabout statements interspersed with chuckles or shifts in her tone. She alternated between earnest, knowledgeable analyses—“it wants to keep a memory going of national history”—with other more fleeting and rhetorical comments—“it feels like an advertisement.” Despite these vicissitudes, there remained a deeper uncertainty about what to do with the broad ethical imperatives placed in front of her eyes. As my informants’ responses to these campaigns reveal, laughter and moments of comedic relief shift the register of conversation to one less tied to reality, where a direct political judgment need not be made and where closure need not be immediately attained. It therefore seems appropriate that  an op-ed in response to recent protests written by a mother to her child in the People’s Daily begins with, “In these tumultuous times in Hong Kong, only your innocent laughter can give me a brief moment of calm and peace.” Laughter, like its varied uses in twentieth-century China (Rea 2015; Zhu, Wang, and McGrath 2019), serves as an expressive device that opens up and sustains a space of indecision, inside of which ambivalences and frustrations can dwell during moments of transformative political change. 

Such a space exists now perhaps because of the dramatic shifts in lifestyle and subjectivity borne out of postsocialist transformation in China (Rofel 2007, Zhang and Ong 2008). These changes have widened the gap between the past and the present—unlike these posters, which seem to reconcile it so effortlessly—and scholars have often been left wondering how to bridge the so-called gap in ethics during this time of transition and volatility (Ci 2014, Lee 2014). In practice, as my interlocutors have demonstrated, the gap is often deliberately held open, without a need for resolution, through humor and rhetoric that refuses any concrete determination of the status of ethical claims made by the state. Holding this interregnum open through alternative forms of emotional engagement may even serve as a wellspring of agency.

Ethical values are at once too easy to identify and too difficult to decisively settle in contemporary China. Because of government campaigns that plaster every corner of the street, ethical claims often take the form of spectacles, readily accessible at the glance of an eye. But such visual noise might also conceal how they are interpreted and negotiated by the people who encounter them, in ways that may be ambivalent to political imperatives. Humor and other rhetorical tools are means by which the demand for political and ethical certainties can be suspended temporarily, without defaulting to conclusions too hastily. Because affects, emotions, and expressions are useful ways to understand how ethical engagements play out on the ground, they serve as important sites for anthropology to continue expanding its analytical work.

Aaron Su is a doctoral student at Princeton University whose research focuses on post-socialist China, with an attention to the afterlives of the twentieth century. His interests include social theory, visual culture, modern intellectual history, and gender studies.

“An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia” series is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu), Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Su, Aaron. 2019. “A Space for Laughter in Contemporary China.” Anthropology News website, October 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1277

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association