I. Moving beyond national character
Two examples that explain their subjects by identifying the circumstances, institutions, and power relations that continually shape and reshape people's behavior and beliefs:
A. William Kelly (an anthropologist): Explaining the persistence of "farm families" and the ways that technology and social relations condition one another beyond the stereotype of the "eternal rice farmer"
B. Peter Frost (a historian): Explaining the Japanese entrance examination system beyond the stereotype of "exam warriors"
II. Anthropology as "slow social science": The three hallmark activities of social-cultural anthropology
1. Doing long-term fieldwork: "participant-observation" of everyday life in a small corner of the world
2. Writing ethnographic monographs: case studies of patterns of "lifeways" of the people among whom one was a participant-observer
3. Using the culture concept to generalize about this "local knowledge" and these "meaningful patterns" and to compare with lifeways of other peoples
Among the readings in this course you will find many that are "ethnographic" in the above terms—that is, they are based on extended fieldwork in a particular site or locale, and aim to understand and elucidate the local structures of meaningful knowledge and behavior. These readings are generally by anthropologists, but a few are by sociologists and journalists who have also done this kind of fieldwork. Among the authors are the following, which will give you some sense of the range of research sites:
Elisabeth Bumiller, a freelance journalist (and spouse of then-Tokyo-based NYT reporter and Yale alumnus Steven Weisman), spent a year repeatedly interviewing and accompanying to many activities Mariko Tanaka, a woman whom Bumiller introduces as "stocky, earthy, and forty-four, overscheduled and sleep-deprived, a Tokyo woman of the middle class with three children, two part-time jobs, and one disengaged husband" (p. 3).
Thomas Rohlen, an anthropologist, worked for a year in a regional bank and then spent a second year as an observer in that bank; in a subsequent research project, which we will also read about, he spent a year observing classes in five separate Kobe-area high schools
Yuko Ogasawara, a sociologist, combined work as a clerical temp in the Tokyo headquarters of a leading bank with interviews of female office workers and male managers in other companies
Anne Allison, another anthropologist, worked as a hostess in an elite, expense-account bar frequented by corporate executives (and it was during this time that she also encountered the demands of obento making for her two young boys).
Rebecca Fukuzawa observed intensively a year in the life of a junior high school for her dissertation in anthropology
Diane Bethel lived, worked, and observed for a year in an old-age home, also as her dissertation research
I myself lived and worked with rice farmers and others in a rural region of northeastern Japan for two years, and then re-visited them and their region annually over the next fifteen years. More recently, I have been observing a professional baseball team in Osaka over four extended visits in the last five years.
III. Three uses of the "culture" concept that anthropologists find problematic
A. Culture as refined accomplishment: The dangers of elitism
This derives from nineteenth-century notions of culture as certain moral and aesthetic refinements that some individuals, some classes, some societies, and some "races" were claimed to have—and in which everyone else was more or less lacking, thus being distributed along a descending cline of moral worth. It is this elitist notion of culture that anthropology as a modern discipline set itself against, insisting that people everywhere are equally capable of producing elaborate and meaningful lifeways.
B. Culture as national character: The fallacies of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and homogenization
This kind of reasoning is what I have already called into question. Compare Nicholas Kristof's op-ed essay, which is an example of the deceptive charms of national character explanation, with the essays by Peter Frost and Tetsurô Kato. Frost is a historian, not an anthropologist, but his brief account of the development of an entrance-exam focused education system through twentieth-century Japan illustrates the contingent and contentious emergence of meaningful conventions (in this case, about the structures of evaluation and advancement that channel the aspirations of and determine the outcomes for millions of youth).
C. Culture as tradition: The dangers of reification
Compare Tetsurô Katô, "Workaholism: It's Not in the Blood," which appreciates and demonstrates how that which comes to be considered traditional is constructed and contrived, with David E. Sanger's short article, "Loyal Samurai's Suicide: An Alarm Bell for Japan?," which presumes "samurai loyalty," unproblematically, to be a singular, deep-seated, cultural motivation. Tradition, that is, is not that of the past which simply survives in the present, but rather traditions are strategic and selective appropriations of things past for present interests and purposes. We will be looking in more detail about "tradition" in later sessions of Part One.
IV. An anthropological concept of culture as meaningful lifeway: Convention, contingency, and contention
Culture for most anthropologists is understood to mean the pattern of meanings by which we live, or the meaningful organization of lifeworlds. Some of these meanings (including the knowledge and understandings that make interactions possible and life somewhat predictable) are implicit, below our everyday radar screen of consciousness. We are socialized into experiencing things in certain ways, and we don't often get beyond these ways we are accustomed to see and hear and think and feel. Do we acquire language, or does language acquire us? There is an equal measure of "conventionality" and "contingency" in our meaningful lives.
Equally importantly, these meaningful life-worlds are never stable, never entirely consistent; they are never entirely freely chosen, seldom wholly accepted. Culture, then, is not a seamless web of commonly-held and tightly-integrated values, but more a field of arguments about meaningful matters.
By this conception, Japanese "culture" is an unstable and unequal field of compelling yet contestable meanings about what is valuable and desirable and possible in life—about the arrangements for living in families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, ball fields, and elsewhere—and much of what we will be studying in the main body of this course is organized around this orientation.
V. "Breaking the frame" of conversation: Appreciating the interplay of the "conventional" and the "contingent" (Harold Garfinkel)
VI. And contention and change?
See Frost again on the play of political interests over the twentieth century that shaped the form and function of entrance exams.
VII. Why do the Japanese work so hard?
Compare Tetsurô Katô's account of the Japanese factory work ethic with Michael Shapiro's account of the hard-working Japanese baseball players.
For those interested, I have added an optional article by the Duke University anthropologist, Anne Allison. It is on a seemingly trivial topic--the box lunches made by mothers for their kindergartners, but it is actually an essay on some large issues of culture and power. She is asking, in effect, do Japanese mothers make lunches or do lunches make Japanese mothers? And her answer is, essentially, "both"! Here are a couple of points of interest if you do have time to read it:
A. Note her anthropological method (pp. 81-82)
B. "Culture is ... doubly constructive: constructing both the world for people and people for specific worlds." (82)
C. The several "orders of meaning" in producing and consuming preschool lunch boxes
1. The pragmatic meaning of food as nutrition.
2. Food as culturally coded: the importance of presentational style leads to an emphasis on certain cultural codes of food in Japan: (1) "smallness, separation, and fragmentation"; (2) opposition and contrast of "color, texture, and shape"; and the stylized reworking of nature.
3. The order of power and manipulation: "This order is instilled by the school system to socialize children as well as their mothers into the gendered roles and subjectivities they are expected to assume in a political order desired and directed by the state"(87)
D. What does eating the box lunches teach the preschoolers who consume them?
E. What does making the box lunches teach the mothers who produce them?
F. Why is making the box lunches a "double-edged sword" (96) for the mothers?