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This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. The author of this book gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. The text weaves together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world. As the book explores the culture of the kazoku, it places each subject in its historical context, and analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders. But the book is not simply about the elite, but about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, this book focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers lived. The book explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. It highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The book brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period—a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. It focuses on what it calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies, and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. The book casts its net widely. It not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, the book argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.

What does it mean to live a life that is knotted with other lives for better or worse? This ethnography of everyday multispecies relationships in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayan region traces how human pasts, presents, and futures come to be bound up with those of the many nonhuman animals who share this world with them, creating ties of relatedness between them that trouble the “naturalness” of categories such as human and animal, nature and culture, kinship and biology. This multispecies relatedness does not erase the differences and hierarchies that exist between different animals in the social world of the Central Himalayas, but leads individuals to constantly and carefully negotiate their difference from one another through shifting turns to love, care, neglect, avoidance, and violence. Questions of interspecies ethics and justice, the book argues, are not imagined as transcendental, but are situated in this complicated world of everyday relatedness across difference. The book traces how such everyday forms of relatedness are shaped by and engage the broader political, religious, and environmental currents at work in contemporary India. At a time when people’s relationships with animals have become the subject of strident political and cultural debate in India, this book demonstrates how through their everyday encounters, people and animals create intense knots of relatedness that complicate and enrich our understandings of the nature of mutuality, ethics, and love.

Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island's economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes. Indonesians also move across the border in search of work in Malaysia and Singapore as plantation and construction workers or maids. Export-processing zones such as Batam are both celebrated and vilified in contemporary debates on economic globalization. The book moves beyond these dichotomies to explore the experiences of migrants and tourists who pass through Batam. The book portrays globalization in terms of relationships that bind individuals together over long distances. It offers a unique ethnographic perspective, drawing together the worlds of factory workers and prostitutes, migrants and tourists, and creating an account of everyday life in a borderland characterized by dramatic capitalist expansion. The book uses three Indonesian concepts (merantau, malu, liar) to shed light on the mobility of migrants and tourists on Batam. The first refers to a person's relationship with home while in the process of migration. The second signifies the shame or embarrassment felt when one is between accepted roles and emotional states. The third is used to identify those who are out of place, notably squatters, couples in premarital cohabitation, and prostitutes without pimps. These sometimes overlapping concepts allow the book to move across geographical and metaphorical boundaries and between various economies.

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? This book answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.

“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.

This book uses a scholar's intellectual journey to India to look at how, between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century, the discipline of history turned its focus from high politics and formal intellectual history toward ordinary lives and cultural rhythms. It shows how, during this time, the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experiences. Through this process, the people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of historic inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narratives. The intersection of these two disciplines also helped scholars reframe the legacies of empire and the roots of colonial knowledge. The book focuses on the study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle. It discusses the archives that provided the sources and boundaries for research on these subjects, and shows how they revealed the limits of colonial knowledge and of the single disciplinary perspective. Drawing parallels with the way in which American universities balance the liberal arts and specialized research today, it encourages scholars to continue to apply multiple approaches to their research and to build a more global and ethical archive.

A study of the political, social, and cultural history of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan, this book treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial site for the development of new state structures and new forms of social power. Focusing on the years of rapid industrialization and imperialist expansion (1895 to 1945), it challenges widely held conceptions of a Japan that did not, until recently, experience delinquency and related youth problems. The author reconstructs numerous individual life stories in the worlds of home, school, work, and the streets, and relates the changes that took place during this time of social transformation to the broader processes of capitalist development, nation-state formation, and imperialism.

Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

The Yunnanese from southwestern China have for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in particular has served as a “back door” to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers. Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have fled to Burma. This book is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Since the 1960s, Yunnanese migrants of Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily consumption goods. The book details the trade's organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use of modern transportation, and reconstructs trading routes while examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants' mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further afield by land, sea, and air.

Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. This book explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. The family remains a pivotal feature of Singaporean society and the primary unit of support. It focuses on the middle generation, caught between elderly parents who grew up speaking dialect and their own children who speak English and Mandarin. In analyzing the forces that bind these generations together, the book deploys the idea of an intergenerational “contract,” which serves as a metaphor for customary obligations and expectations. It examines the many different levels at which the contract operates within Singaporean families and offers striking examples of the meaningful ways in which intergenerational support and transactions are performed, resisted, and renegotiated. The book provides insights into the complex interplay of fragmenting and integrating forces and makes a critical contribution to the study of intergenerational relations in modern, rapidly changing societies and the challenges that Singaporean families face in today's hypermodern world.

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.

This book provides a fascinating look at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihādists. Drawing on a long-term fieldwork in the disputed borderlands between Pakistan and India, the book explains how refuge-seeking has become a socially and politically debased practice in the Kashmir region and why this devaluation has turned refugee men into potential militants. It reveals the fraught social processes by which individuals and families produce and maintain a modern jihād, and how Muslim refugees have forged an Islamic notion of rights—a hybrid of global political ideals that adopts the language of human rights and humanitarianism as a means to rethink refugees' positions in transnational communities. Jihād is no longer seen as a collective fight for the sovereignty of the Islamic polity, but instead as a personal struggle to establish the security of Muslim bodies against political violence, torture, and rape. The book describes how this new understanding has contributed to the popularization of jihād in the Kashmir region, decentered religious institutions as regulators of jihād in practice, and turned the families of refugee youths into the ultimate mediators of entrance into militant organizations. This provocative book challenges the idea that extremism in modern Muslim societies is the natural by-product of a clash of civilizations, of a universal Islamist ideology, or of fundamentalist conversion.

Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of migration laws and labor policies, the often poignant and painful experiences of migrant mothers, and the ambivalent roles of fathers. Within the context of contemporary global capitalism, this research yields a deeper and fuller understanding of the practical problems and the cruel disappointments faced by those who take part in “guest worker” programs. New insights about the problem—or the crisis—of temporary migration, which is too often not temporary, are revealed through ethnographic research that attends to the everyday lives and stories of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies. The book’s arguments are threefold. First, temporary migrant workers are never only workers. They are people too. But the women who dare to become mothers are often deemed not only bad workers, but also ungrateful or immoral women. Second, the laws and policies designed to enforce a rotating door for workers and to prevent overstaying and illegal work, often create the opposite results. Some women overstay and become pregnant, and many overstay because they are pregnant. Third, women who return home as “single mothers” face severe stigma and economic pressures that propel them to continue in a migratory cycle of atonement: an ongoing, self-perpetuating, precarious pattern of migration. Mothers and babies thus reveal the inequalities of citizenship and belonging and the precariousness of migrant labor.

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. This book explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The book examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the custom of burning paper money has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology.

The moral practices and concepts that circulate in Minangkabau society in West Sumatra, Indonesia articulate and help manage tensions between conflicting values and conflicting experiences of selfhood, particularly the tension between social integration and individual autonomy. The book examines these tensions ethnographically in multiple arenas: the structure of the city of Bukittinggi and its economic life, the nature of Minangkabau ethnic identity, the etiquette of everyday interactions, conceptions of the self and its boundaries, hidden spaces of personal identity, and engagements with Islamic rituals and moral conceptions. Applying the lessons of the Minangkabau case more broadly to debates on moral life and subjectivity makes the case that a deep understanding of moral conceptions and practices, including those of Islam, can never be reached simply by delineating their abstract logics or outlining the public messages they send. Instead, we must examine the subtle, sometimes intentionally obscured meanings these conceptions and practices have for the people who live them. Whether in the context of suffering or flourishing, moral subjectivity always confronts the challenge of responding to and managing the enduring tensions of human selves, which necessarily entail bodily, relational, and reflective dimensions.

What are people's life experiences in present-day Japan? This book addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. The book examines work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in the book vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven chapters explore these and other questions here. They concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. The chapters that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies which must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.