Summary of SEAA READS, session six, 7/2023
Lynne Nakano 2022 Making Our Own Destiny: Single Women, Opportunity, and Family in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. University of Hawai’i Press..
In his preamble to the book and the evening’s conversation, host Bill Kelly, described ethnography as an enterprise in both senses: a project of many parts (committee, fieldwork and rapport, drafting and revising, engagement with readers), but also fitting in the author’s own professional arc, a part of that lifetime enterprise, too. One’s writing may differ at the stages of dissertation, first book, mid-career, later career, and as a free agent in retirement. One of the creative, productive tensions in such writing is between trying to “fit in” and also to “stand out.” It is important to connect with related work, but also to assert one’s own interpretations and points of reference and comparison, too. With so many recent ethnographies to select for SEAA Reads this time, choosing one was a challenge. Nakano’s book pushes the boundaries of ethnographic writing in some ways and prompts our group to think about what sorts of things make a piece of writing carry ethnographic meaning. By comparing single lives of women in the cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo (but incidental citation from scholars of singlehood for Korea and for USA, as well) Nakano’s 12+ years of interviews and exploring contexts seems to expand the “monograph” idea to multiple monographs, a sort of multigraph.
The 12 readers joining the online conversation in July spanned multiple time zones and anthropological experiences in the field and for topics written about. As such in the space of 90 minutes we covered many related questions and issues, some tied to pages of the book and others springboarding from there to wider matters. In the context of live (and unrecorded, unscripted) scholarly conversation, it is fascinating to see thoughts composed on the fly; authoring in thin air; leaping from one phrase to another and forming an idea for others to respond to. In approximately chronological sequence, comments and questions included the following.
The difference between arranging and presenting the subject by interweaving cases from all three cities within each of the chapters versus, for example, dwelling on each setting alone to create separate analytical compartments. Consensus seemed to be that the rich texture of interweaving the many capillaries, as Nakano did, would be lost if the material were presented in a compartmental way.
That a comparative approach is inherently difficult, sort of like 3-dimensional checkers, since each ethnographic setting calls for care in getting personal voices, generalizations, mid-level (between individual and broad strokes) discussion, and the historical dimension, as well.
By training we imagine ethnographic monographs to be a complete picture, a frozen moment of depth and breadth in which the participant-observer demonstrates trust and commitment to those studied. Due to that relational layer, it is difficult to be completely analytical (head knowledge vs. heart knowledge). Therefore, when seeing a multi-site, multi-generational, long-term project like this, our imagination is stretched now to see the author-as-guide to a subject, not necessarily delivering a finished and final word on this subject but instead as a reading experience in which we explore ideas, lives, and issues together with the author. As such ethnography is less “carved in stone” and more like creative non-fiction; a readerly experience grounded in ethnographic work but no longer expected to be a clinical assessment by Positivist thinkers of another age.
The metaphor of “smoothie” was given as a way to show the result of mixing several original materials into a larger writing project. In this case the individual lives, surrounding national cultures and specific cultural terrain of the three cities were presented along with some synthesis to layer and compare/contrast the three places. That intermittent synthesizing is the smoothie effect in such a big, multi-generational, multi-lingual project. Rather than portraits for each place we are given clusters or bunches of cases with similarities along with important qualifications or differences.
Footnotes in this book were abundant and rich; by no means are they simply full-bodied citations since discussion comes up there, too.
The discussion of sociology and economics, along with anthropology, makes this book accessible to more readers; not just to fellow anthropologists. Being able to engage wider audiences can only be a good thing for the subject, the author, and the discipline, too.
Acknowledging differences in Socio-Economic Status (‘class’ in wide sense), gender and sexuality, and generational differences is briefly touched on in the book, but with so many variables already, the author sticks to the cities and never-married women to organize the book’s subject. Of these, generational differences is the distinction most often injected. Little analytical attention is applied to distinguish never-married, divorced, and widowed status. And even less mention of men’s experiences is made. But to fully explore these many threads of the larger subject probably would soon overwhelm readers.
Despite the recentness of the interviews and the keen use of Internet by many single women (and men) in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo there is not much (passing) reference to the way that relationships are begun, maintained, or ended in this thumb-typings, screen scrolling, digitally mediated way. One’s social capital is electronically distributed, contacts are dispersed instead of geographically nearby.
Parents as stakeholders in the daughter’s prospects for education, career, and then marriage is curiously having the effect of supporting at times and imposing obstacles at other times, jeopardizing the young person’s chances to form a couple.
Methodologically, the interview device tends to prompt particular types of answers: men (and younger women) tend to put their personal response in a larger context in something resembling an objective account, women in general tend to dwell on smaller episodes or details to telegraph larger meanings. By contrast, by spending time with informants and observing and listening, other sorts of expressions about a subject may come up, instead.
In conclusion, the title carries some irony. By asserting “Making Our Own Destiny” on the cover, the central aspiration of many interviewees seems to be faithfully expressed. But on the contrary, in each of the cities and their surrounding language-culture-society so many elements in those destinies already seem to be made up for the women, no matter their ages. Thinking of another recent book by anthropologist (and Financial Times columnist) Gillian Tett, Anthro Vision, the value and need and opportunities for creative ethnographies like Lynne Nakano’s Making Our Own Destiny is only growing more and more.
For reference (and with permission), Bill Kelly’s prompt questions sent in advance to participants are appended, below.
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On October 7 (8pm Eastern Standard Time) the new book written by Anne Allison will be featured, Being Dead Otherwise, published by Duke University Press. Dan White will host the conversation. The 30% discount code is valid for purchases, E23ALLSN.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/being-dead-otherwise
[Book club discussion questions for July 2023] …We’ll aim for that elusive middle ground between free-wheeling and focused, and hope that the virtual platform of our encounter can facilitate as many voices as possible.
In that spirit, I do not want to hold us to a particular agenda of questions or issues, but I do want to suggest in advance that we might want to share our assessments in at least three areas.
1. About the argument of the book and the nature of the evidence offered in support of that argument. This is an ethnographic analysis of single women (unmarried, or “yet to be married” as one folk didactic term has it!). Singlehood is a condition of life, but in several very different senses it is taken fretfully as a problem of life: to states and their official authorities, to public opinion, to scholars for whom it upsets the broad twentieth-century arc of demography, and in some forms and at some moments, to the women themselves who are living that condition and those close to them. The author is admirably clear in articulating her central message about singlehood, what it is and why it has become so common a condition among East Asian metropolitan women, and she details the field methods and research process that she marshals in evidentiary support of that. At the same time, scholars such as yourselves bring a range of experience and perspectives to bear on the monograph, and you may well draw other lessons from the book or have differing views of the relation between evidence and argument. Are there differences between what the author claims the book to be about and what you as a fellow-professional reader find to be the book is about?
2. About the forms and value of comparison in ethnography. Other social scientists are often quick to discount ethnographies as single-N “case studies” of questionable representativeness, but all of us who do extended fieldwork and write ethnographies know the multiple forms and multiple levels of comparison that we are engaged in, both in research and in writing. This monograph, working among three national societies, three metropolitan regions, three mixed samples of individuals, and a long time frame of research, strikes me as a particularly apt example for thinking about the constant presence and manifold ways of comparison in our ethnographic enterprise.
3. About how the monograph is put together as an ethnography—what strikes you as notable features of its structure and its strategy of exposition? We anthropologists talk about conventions and genres of ethnographic form and come up with broad categories like “classical” ethnography and “experimental” ethnography. In fact, however, compared to presentation conventions in all other social sciences, the ethnographic monographs we actually write are so elastic in expository style and rhetoric as to defy efforts to typify and standardize. The topics and methods of this ethnography are not entirely novel, but they do stretch some of the conventions and expectations of East Asian ethnography. What do you find to be the distinctive features of this monograph as scholarly writing and are there significant resonances between what it aims to say and how it says it?
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