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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 18 from October 3, 2026

Seeing like a Child , Inheriting the Korean War by Clara Han (Fordham U. Press) The fall book club was hosted by Nan Kim for the ten colleagues across several time zones. With the prospect of the author joining the online discussion after the first hour an innovation was to invite readers to send in a question or impression to the host ahead of time so the author would have a sense of the group. One of the recurring topics in those responses was “inheritance” (emotional, cultural, familial, historical, and so on), which also formed the subtitle to the book. The main title points to the mode of absorbing one’s surroundings and forming ideas about how this world works - not with neat categories, published theories, or other grown-up methods, but in the emergent way that a child’s understanding and level of trust shapes the subject at hand. In other words, much of the book is formative rather than summative; more participant than observation. Readers, much as the author herself, grow page...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 17 from June 26, 2026

Fragile Kinships : Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan by Kathryn Goldfarb (Duke U. Press) The summer book club was hosted by Merry White for the seven colleagues across several time zones. The idea of "rhetoric versus reality" ran through the pages and the session (what is supposed to be, in this case a model/normal/unremarkable family, versus what is actually experienced and structured, in this case young people fostered from babies in some situations through adulthood or almost adulthood). The earliest field notes go back to 2009 and the book was published in 2024. So the span of long relationships between some of the people interviewed and the author is truly longitudinal. Emotion enters into many parts of lived experience but not so often into social science subjects where it is so central to the larger theme of human development and sustaining a person's well-being in the chapters of this book. Whether similar conversations, and formulating similar questions woul...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 16 from April 4, 2026

Emergent Genders : Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies by Michelle H. S. Ho. (Duke U. Press) Starting in 2026 SEAA Reads is depending on anthropology students to select one of the books for SEAA Reads and to host the book club conversation online. On April 4 there were a dozen anthropologists ranging from graduate students to emeritus professors located in a wide span of time zones who were co-hosted by the currently in service student councilors for the Society for East Asia Anthropology, Xinyu Guan and David Tsoi. We began with brief self-introductions since only part of the readers are returning book club regulars. Then going from person to person each one was able to bring up a facet of the book that interested them most, to which others could reply or add onto. Since Michelle Ho herself is a USA based Asian woman, not Japanese, and not transgender, the focal sites in Tokyo's Akihabara (cultural capital for otaku, and fans of manga - anime - and games) at a nightclub fo...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 15 from February 7, 2026

Seeking A Future for the Past; Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City by Philipp Demgenski (U.Michigan 2024) open access epub or PDF This evening our circle counted five colleagues in all stages of scholarly life, from graduate school and fieldwork to emeritus point of view. Laurel Kendall hosted and began by describing the Hsu Book award committee’s highlights, along with some of the defining features of this long-term ethnography composed of long periods in residence and intermittent returns, too. The formal commendation appears among SEAA past awards for the Hsu Book Prize . Unlike other ethnographic observers of the tension between developers and heritage/preservation advocates, the author weaves in many, many more voices and experiences: the colonial period families and individuals in residence (with or without documented title to the property), urban migrants (with or without registration/working and residential permission), civil servants, tourists, former residents now ...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 14 from October 18, 2025

Passport Entanglements - Protection, care, and precarious migrations . Nicole Constable, 2022 (University of California Press) During the fall session hosted by Nan Kim, there were eight social scientists --including host and also the featured author-- on the Zoom meeting online, among which were researchers on Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) and migration matters. Our small grouped allowed us to begin with brief self-introductions at the onset of the first hour before doing so even more briefly in the final 45 minutes when Nicole Constable beamed in at the end of today's "No Kings" marches around the country. Since some participants had already shared initial impressions about the book during the round of self-introductions, the starter question was about Constable's writing voice: weaving in the nature of her relationship to the interviewees on the government/administrator side and the FDW side. She made clear the limitations and sometimes delicate middle ground she...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 13 from June 21, 2025

Selling the Kimono - An ethnography of crisis, creativity and hope . Julie Valk, 2021 (Routledge) During the summer session hosted by Bill Kelly, there were eight anthropologists at the Zoom meeting online. The session started with the larger topic of kimono as a cultural icon inside and outside of Japan, including the "kimono Wednesdays" at the Boston Museum in 2015. Thinking of Kyoti, there have been various reactions by observers and by residents when overtourism spills over to rental kimono for short-term visitors to wear in their walks around town. Valk's ethnography touches on many topics and includes close-up and more wide-angle views of the people, places, and issues connected to the business and traditions of designing, making, wholesaling and retailing, then selecting and wearing and storing them before bequeathing them to descendants.     Our host pointed to the distinction between ethnographic inquiry (the book spends some time on methods and the mix of...
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Summary of SEAA Reads, session 12 from February 1, 2025

Akiko Takeyama 2023 Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/involuntary-consent   Our book club discussion was co-hosted by Amy Borovoy and Chris Yano and began with readers briefly introducing themselves and giving a single word or phrase about the book. After the first 60 minutes of discussion the author joined in and many of the readers’ remarks and questions were addressed in an extended and thoughtful way. The free association of short impressions offers a kind of distilled droplet of the rich reading: precarity, illusions, “middle voice”* [chudou-tai; neither completely coerced nor completed consensual; hence the book’s title, “involuntary consent”], moving & well-written, liminality [between choices, none of which are good], intimacy problematics, methods [such rich dialogue like a “fly on the wall”; rapport; notetaking?], dignity in all interviewees, free choice ~ agency in critical light. Taken ...
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