Organizer and Chair: William W. Kelly, Yale University
Discussant: Mary C. Brinton, University of Chicago
Although there were several important precursors, the anthropology of Japan is a post World War II field of study, and it is the objective of this panel to promote a broad review of its developments over the last half century. The form of this review is based on my premise that Japan anthropology, like many other social scientific specialties, has been delicately and productively poised between a substantial area scholarship and its own discipline.
That is, on the one hand, we share with Japan economists, Japan sociologists, Japan historians, and other area specialists common interests in many of the same social patterns: employment practices, family forms, schooling, political organization, legal attitudes, gender ideologies, religious beliefs, etc. At times, this has produced convergent insights and conceptual cross fertilization; at other times, it has provoked contentious debates and partisan polemics. However, the development of Japan anthropology cannot be understood or assessed apart from its engagements with other scholarly disclplines of and in Japan.
On the other hand, though, as anthropologists we form one of the discipline's many regional specialties (together with Africa anthropology, Native America anthropology, South Asia anthropology, etc.), and we must constantly move back and forth between issues of local significance and the general theoretical concerns of the discipline. Over time, we and others have evaluated our relationship to our discipline in sharply divergent terms. To some, Japan anthropology has always been a backwater, devoid of analytical sophistication and unable to contribute to the pressing debates of anthropological theory. To others, it has been at several leading edges of the discipline: for example, early on, Japan community studies contextualized local life in regional and national arenas; Japan anthropologists pioneered the ethnography of modern institutions like companies, schools, and urban neighborhoods; and we have been contributors to substantive topics of the discipline such as exchange, ritual, lineage, gender, and ethnomedicine, and to theoretical orientations like structural functionalism, semiotics, feminism, and poststructuralism.
Over the decades, Japan anthropologists, individually, have been often more drawn to areal interests or disciplinary priorities, but Japan anthropology as a field of inquiry can be critically assessed as continually suspended between the demands and agendas of area and discipline. Thus, the two parts of this panel bring together a group of scholars who are willing and able to think about the connections of Japan anthropology in these two directions - towards our colleagues in Japan studies from other disciplines and towards our fellow anthropologists more generally.
The juxtaposition of the two connections through a double session is intended to allow some triangulation on the nature and achievement of Japan anthropology. I have encouraged the panelists to think both retrospectively, in taking stock of our contributions and our silences as Japan anthropologists, and also prospectively, in advancing what they see as an agenda of what must be done.
A subject as broad as this cannot be comprehensively treated by a meetings panel, but the topics have been selected to insure representative consideration of strategic issues. The panelists themselves are notable for their diverse and accomplished research backgrounds. The two discussants have also been selected for their ability to offer both informed and critical commentary. The discussant for Part 1, Mary Brinton, is a Japan sociologist whose own work has both borrowed from and criticized anthropology. Yoshinobu Ota, the discussant for Part 2, is unusually well versed in the disciplinary structures of anthropology in both North America and Japan, and can thus bring a valuable comparative perspective to his commentary.
The tension between area and discipline that has so decisively shaped Japan anthropology is hardly unique; indeed, for this reason, I would hope that the panel would have broad appeal beyond fellow Japan anthropologists. I believe it is a productive way to think about many other Asia specialties, which might be motivated to undertake their own reviews. It is also an appropriate moment within anthropology itself, which has seen a number of recent individual and collective efforts to think critically about the engagements between regional ethnography and "metropolitan theory," between local insights and theoretical problematics.
John Singleton, University of Pittsburgh
Japan has been much used by American anthropologists, and our scholarly allies, as a site for exploring many aspects of education, including schooling, spiritual training, extramural teaching and informal learning. We have extended our studies of schools, juku, and rural youth groups to include learning practices in corporations, artisanal workshops, traditional arts, and various adaptations of "traditional" practice for contemporary preoccupations. In the process, we have discerned cultural patterns of learning and teaching that lead us to question conventional wisdom about education. Our humanist colleagues in Japan studies have helped us to better understand the connections of these practices with the rest of Asia, especially as they compare educational procedures in the arts and religion with our more commonplace case studies. They also enhance our appreciation of the historical context of educational practices. Anthropologists have been drawn into art history and comparative literary concerns about the transmission of traditional arts in Japan, even while our education colleagues want to know about mathematics teaching in the classroom.
Learning is always situated in local contexts; it is a strength of our studies in Japan that this is always made evident. The lesson has not been that there are unique patterns of teaching and learning in Japan, but rather that there is a societal enthusiasm for learning as a lifelong endeavor. This has led to different organizational choices; different strategies for enhancing intrinsic motivations in learning; and the elaboration of culturally influenced pedagogies. In anthropology, these studies have underscored the educational foundation of culture, conceived of as the shared products of human learning. It has helped educational anthropology move from an applied orientation towards a recognition of its centrality in culture theory.
Anthropologists' study of education in Japan has expanded asumptions about where one finds significant pedagogical processes and sites of teaching and learning. This paper reviews its contributions both to allied scholarship on Japan education and to educational theory within anthropology.
Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
Sex, gender, and sexuality, in the singular and plural, contitute different yet overlapping and even collapsed categories of practice with attendant ideologies and theories thereof. In the context of this panel on Japan anthropology, I will treat gender and sexuality as a particular site of discourse and exploration in Japan and anthropology alike, keeping in mind that these categories are linked inextricably to all of the other featured topics of the panel. With a view to the time constraints, I will present an overview of the recent status of anthropological research on gender and sexuality and the influence of this research in Japanese studies. I will also chart an agenda for the recovery, uncovering, and discovery of the manifold operations of gender and sexuality in Japan, with an emphasis on twentieth century practice.
Theodore C. Bestor, Cornell University
The clash of analytical perspectives on Japanese economic behavior resembles the Japanese children's game of jan ken pon: rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock. Culture frames institutions, institutions shape the economy, the economy re calibrates culture; or, in reverse, the economy spawns institutions, institutions produce cultural meanings, culture generates economic preferences. But even if one analytical viewpoint can temporarily demolish another, no single perspective can permanently clear all other contenders from the field. This paper will sketch anthropological approaches to culture, social institutions, and the economy in contemporary Japan to suggest integrated rather than oppositional frameworks for analysis.
Probably the economic system of no society is subjected to as much scrutiny, analysis, and speculation regarding its "special character" as is Japan's, implying a widespread recognition that cultural values and social patterns condition economic systems. The exact nature of the relationships among culture, society, and economy, however, remains the source of much debate. Attempts to account for the distinctiveness of Japanese economic behavior and the ways in which it is embedded within systems of cultural values and patterns of social relationships usually fall into several broad and generally unreconciled explanatory categories. The first give analytical priority to purely economic factors and views both the cultural meanings attached to economic activity and the social relationships within which economic activity occurs as simply the products of underlying economic reality. A second perspective argues that institutional factors, including a high degree of governmental intervention into economic life, give Japanese economic activity its distinctive character. A third outlook is culturalist, viewing economic action and the institutions that sustain it as embodiments of cultural processes. Culturalist perspectives range from rudimentary stereotypes of values and behaviors, to arguments based on historical continuity, to analyses of contemporary cultural dynamics and the reproduction of meaning. All of these perspectives, however, share the premise that cultural factors are not residual in the analysis of Japanese economic behavior.
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