SEAA Reads

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

 Monica Liu 2023 Seeking Western Men : Email-order Brides Under China’s Global Rise https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35148 Our book club discussion was hosted by Ellen Oxfeld and began with readers briefly introducing themselves and giving a few observations or responses to the book. Unlike some sessions that included time with the author, this evening the entire 90 minutes was open for wide-ranging discussion of the several points raised by readers at the start. To begin, everyone enjoyed learned from the book! It is easy for we academics to start picking things apart and finding the lapses not explored. But it needs to be stressed that all learned a tremendous amount from reading this work and it was impressive long-term research. Readers brought up several observations. These included comparisons to (pre-email) Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages  written about one generation earlier by Nicole Constable and another rea...

Ryo Morimoto 2023 Nuclear Ghost , The Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520394117/nuclear-ghost   Our bookclub discussion in summer again was hosted by Bill Kelly, who crafted a couple of questions for the group to consider ahead of the online conversation. (1) What might be distinctive features and requirements of anthropological fieldwork in a “disaster” site as opposed to what most of us encounter. And (2) what is it that anthropologists, among other researchers, might be contributing to our understandings of 3.11 [Fukushima prefecture's 2011 triple disaster in March] and its aftermath. The book distills its place and time out of the author's dissertation, together with several years involved on the database of the Japan Disasters Archive [ https://jdarchive.org/en ] that was launched to gather the hurricane of online sources during and after the Fukushima disaster from earthquake, tsunami, nuclear radiation release and persisting c...