Organizer: Robert Oppenheim, University of Chicago
Chair: Christopher Nelson, University of Chicago
Discussant: John D. Kelly, University of Chicago
If the nation-state is dead, where are its citizens? This panel investigates how a number of different groups negotiate their role not only within the state but also in a transnational environment. In each of the situations discussed in these papers, communities are called upon not only to craft ideological arguments counter to a government position, but more importantly to create practices which allow them to reconfigure their shared memories and national location. These examples show that despite a strong nation-state image, there are numerous alternative arenas to draw upon in shaping images which counter the nation-state. In Mr. Nelson’s paper Okinawan citizens work to position themselves in contrast both to the Japanese nation-state as well as the predominance of the American military base culture, and yet in performing eisaa they are not enacting mere resistance but engendering an alternative moral order, drawing elements from both ideologies and yet unique in itself. Tapsa Yohaeng is the means by which Mr. Oppenheim sees local citizens in South Korea speaking back to the nation, by providing alternative narratives of history and political action. Mr. Mihalopoulos explores how a historical intervention prompts a reconsideration by the Japanese government of who is a citizen of the nation and what that designation entails. Ms. Hindman’s paper looks at how English speaking expatriates living in Nepal use commodity practices to negotiate a space for themselves outside the domain of both home and away. All of these situations show moments where projects of modernization and homogenization have, if not failed, certainly been diverted in new directions.
Dancing With the Dead: Practice, Value and Subjectivity in the Okinawan Eisaa
Christopher Nelson, University of Chicago
A late summer’s evening in Okinawa City. The cacophony of sounds from flight operations at Kadena Air Base, the congested highways and the construction projects that crosscut the city fade, replaced by the driving rhythm of massed drums and the chanting of dancers. At dozens of seinenkai (youth groups) throughout the city, thousands of young Okinawans practice eisaa, a dance performed during the festival of Obon. This paper is a preliminary inquiry into participation in the seinenkai and the construction of political subjectivity in contemporary Okinawa. Recent events have drawn attention to Okinawa’s history of colonialism, wartime genocide, modernization and incorporation into the Japanese nation state. Okinawa has also been subjected to nativist analysis, tourist development and cultural commodification. However, Okinawans have not simply endured these processes. Rather, they have engaged, contested and changed them in complex and often contradictory ways. The practices of the seinenkai are one such engagement. Eisaa is a manifold practice that mediates the relationship between the community and ancestral spirits; between local groups, regional government and the state; between conflicts ranging from contemporary political disputes to historical divisions between noble and commoner. It is a practice that produces a certain kind of value, transforming the participants and incorporating them in a moral economy that is more than a mere remnant of the past. At the same time, it articulates, if in an ambivalent way, with the modern capitalist system and the Japanese state.
Ambivalent Journeys: Tapsa Yohaeng and Locality in Kyongju, South Korea
Robert Oppenheim, University of Chicago
Among the scores of popular books on Korean history and culture that have appeared in South Korean stores in recent years, none has been more influential than Yu Hong-jun’s Naui Munhwa Yusan Tapsagi ("A Chronicle of My Field Investigation of Cultural Properties"). A bestseller from its appearance in 1993–94 to this day, Yu’s account combines lyrical travel narrative with critical analysis of various relics and historic sites and the scholarship that surrounds them. Many commentators hold it largely responsible for sparking a "boom" in the travel practice it represents, namely tapsa yohaeng ("field investigation travel"): individual and group journeys to admire and study cultural objects. At once tourism genre, consumption activity, and popular historiographical intervention, tapsa yohaeng as pursued by the urban middle class can also be seen as emblematic of a particular contemporary structure of feeling that interweaves enthusiasm for history and the local with a deep mistrust of the competence and motives of historians and local governments.
Yet tapsa also plays a part in the lapidary production of locality. This presentation will focus on tapsa as practiced by cultural, religious, and citizens’ groups in and around the historic city of Kyongju. I intend to discuss the ambivalent relationship of local practices to the wider discourses and practices epitomized by Yu. Within the context of a series of widely publicized development controversies that have seemed to pit "Kyongju people" against the outside world, tapsa has both mediated locality for outsiders (and vice versa) and been formative of politically-relevant local authority and community.
What is a Contract?: Law Meets the Doctor, the Migrant, and the Prostitute
Bill Mihalopoulos, New York University
This paper is a provisional investigation concerned with identifying a sequence of coordinates which lay the foundations for a transformation of Japanese governmentality. In particular, it focuses on articulations of Japanese women engaged in sexual labour as a problem of government to be made. This set of coordinates is compromised of a diverse set of issues such as territorial sovereignty, judicial practice, medicine, diplomacy and Japanese overseas migration.
The event that established connections between these diverse issues was arrival of the Peruvian ship, "Maria Luz," at Edo bay in July 1872, in need of repairs and carrying a human cargo of over two hundred Chinese coolie labourers. The discovery of the Chinese labourers aboard sparked off an international incident. The "Maria Luz incident" proved to be the historic moment which saw the alignment of Japan with the principles of national sovereignty as defined by Western judicial practice. Precedents were both sought and created for the way prostitution was to be regulated and managed domestically in Japan. This period saw the establishment of new institutions and principles to ensure that Japanese migrants engaged in work outside of Japan were not open to abuse and the loss of newly-recognized basic dignities afforded to ‘all human beings.’ Given the magnitude of these changes, I will argue that the incident and activity that surrounded it prompted a redefinition of the relationship between Japanese subjects and the Japanese state.
Taking It With You: Consumer Practice in the Kathmandu Expatriate Community
Heather Hindman, University of Chicago
The claim that individuals craft their identity through commodities is hardly profound, yet the disjuncture between desired commodities and available goods is rarely discussed. Within groups living apart from a self-defined ‘home,’ products are a way to maintain a link with another place as well as to establish a relationship with the new home. This paper investigates how English-speaking expatriates living in Kathmandu, Nepal express nostalgia for home, nationalist feelings and knowledge of the local environment through purchasing practices.
The wives of employees working in Kathmandu spend a great deal of time pursuing goods; a phenomenon which is built into their lives through the market-basket clause. This agenda is part of many expatriate contracts and gives employees salary supplements which are designed to allow them to purchase the same ‘market-basket’ of goods which they would in the home nation. Yet, this is only a monetary incentive; it is the spouses who utilize commissaries, black markets and coalitions of friends to acquire those goods.
The true identical shopping cart is rarely what is attained, or desired. Instead, the pursuit of goods is the focus of expatriate life and the goods purchased express the multivocality of their situation. Although some products are acquired purely for the memories of home they nurture, others are sought for iconic or instructional value—to show one is a real American. In addition, local products become a part of life, often demonstrating one is more than a mere tourist. I intend to show that not only do expatriates use their novel commodity field to create a place for themselves, but that the pursuit of those goods actively creates an expatriate community.