Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan

Abstract

independent data for the construction and verification of theory, is in fact a very com plicated compound of local realities and the contingencies of metropolitan theory (5:360).A third front has recently been opened in the assault on the edifice of ethnography. Having deconstructed ethnographic form and historicized the ethnographic subject, some have now turned to regionalizing its conceptual claims. Their presumption is that all ethnography is regional, a local transposition of general disciplinary concerns. It must be read critically for the problems it highlights through the mutual adaptation of anthropological dis course and locally prominent features and issues: prestige economy in Melanesia, marriage rules in Australia, lineage in Africa, caste in South Asia. "Localizing strategies" is Fardon's felicitous phrase (81) for the complicated dialectic of region and problematic, which was illustrated so effectively in Abu-Lughod's review (2) of "zones of theory" in Arab world anthropology.Some of the work I consider in this essay may be so analyzed. I Yet I argue IThis review is limited to social-cultural anthropology (for archaeology, see 77, 109; for linguistic anthropology, see 244; for primatology, see 9, 97:244--58). I deal only with English language works. The disciplinary surveys in the periodic but misnamed Introductory Bibliogra phy for Japanese Studies provide helpful English-language reviews of anthropology in Japan (114,197, 261,262,288,289; see also 17,124, 183, and 157). Long (157) has surveyed family sociology. 395

Instrumental Culturalism: The Work of Comparisons across Japan, ‘the West’ and Myanmar

“…The ability to use words adeptly was a supposedly Western value that he thought Japanese people, including OISCA's development workers, needed to learn. These kinds of comparisons that waver between a pride about Japanese exceptionality and a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West are common in the nihonjinron ideologies of Japanese uniqueness, and accordingly, in essentialisations of the West (Kelly 1991; Moeran 1996). Making comparisons between Japaneseness and Western-ness seemed to create opportunities for Watanabe-san and other actors involved in OISCA's activities to assess what constituted Japanese values, how to learn from an essentialised West and, most significantly, how Japanese values combined with some Western wisdom could become the basis for a universal movement.…”

Occupational Differences in Job Strain and Physiological Stress: Female Nurses and School Teachers in Hawaii

“…Finally, there may well be ethnic differences in culturally based expectations about job-based autonomy. Traditional Japanese culture is highly stratified, and people expect to take and give orders at many different social levels (31,32). It is unclear to what degree this has changed in the third-and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans in this sample.…”

Conflict as interactional accomplishment in Japanese: Arguments in university faculty meetings

“…To be sure, Nakane's views have been criticized as too extreme (see, e.g., Befu 1980, Dale 1986, Kelly 1991, Mouer & Sugimoto 1986, Sugimoto & Mouer 1989, and there are now a number of studies that describe episodes of conflict within Japanese society (Bestor 1992;Hamabata 1994;Honda 1999;Iwai 1996;Jones 1990Jones , 1995Kondo 1994;Noda 1990). Nevertheless, there remains a tendency in accounts of conflict to refer to cultural predispositions toward harmony and hierarchy that supposedly underlie and constrain communication.…”