Arjun Appadurai Research Articles

Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Postgrowth Society by Susanne Klien

Reviewed by: Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Postgrowth Society by Susanne Klien Michael Strausz (bio) Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Postgrowth Society. By Susanne Klien. SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2020. xxviii, 203 pages. $95.00, cloth; $32.95, paper. Early in Susanne Klien's recent book on lifestyle migration in Japan, she makes an interesting observation: the meaning of "rural" in Japan is changing. Instead of Japanese people discussing rural areas as "backwaters of civilization," Japanese people are increasingly treating rural areas as "fields of experimentation and pioneering grounds for diverse lifestyles" (p. 25). Who are these pioneers, and what is the nature of their experiments? To address [End Page 456] these and many related questions, Klien conducted participant observation research and 118 semistructured interviews with urban migrants to rural Japan between 2009 and 2017 (p. xxiii). The book she has produced as she analyzes these data combines careful analysis of the details of the lives and choices of her interview subjects with intriguing observations about the bigger picture both for Japan and for broader theories of migration and mobility. The migrants Klien discusses in this book are not a part of a "back to the land" movement. Indeed, more than one of her interview subjects describe themselves as "indoor" people who do not enjoy spending time outside (p. 127). And, despite living in rural locations, the "indoor" subjects that Klien interviews (not all of her subjects) do not appear to spend much time outdoors. "Jun" works in an electronics shop (p. 126) and "Haru" lives in a collective housing project that he has founded where he develops computer apps (p. 127). Indeed, Haru notes that he "only ventures out rarely to buy tobacco products and occasionally joins common local activities in order to maintain good relations with the local community" (p. 128). Klien notes that many of her interview subjects "conceded that 'the countryside' and 'country lifestyle' was not the key incentive for their move. Instead, for the majority the countryside seemed the perfect setting for selfgrowth, challenge, and furthering their career goals" (p. 2). Despite their abstract commitment to furthering career goals, however, she often found interview subjects discussing their migration as an alternative to deciding on what they would like to do with the rest of their lives. Klien calls this approach "moratorium migration," "migration that is used by migrants as an instrument to gain time to postpone rethinking what they wish to spend their lives on due to a lack of more appealing alternatives" (p. 124). At first glance, "moratorium migration" may seem like a tool that migrants can use to resist conventional expectations of Japanese society. However, Klien paints a much more complex picture. She references Arjun Appadurai's distinction between an "ethics of probability," which is apparent "in the modern regimes of diagnosis, counting, and accounting," and an "ethics of possibility," which "is intricately related to hope, aspiration, and perspective as it 'expands the fields of the imagination'" (p. xv). While it initially may appear that lifestyle migrants like the ones Klien studies are operating with reference to an ethics of possibility and against an ethics of probability, Klien argues that "the line between these apparently dichotomous poles is not as clear cut as Appadurai suggests" (p. xv). Instead, Klien observes how her research subjects often inadvertently reproduce the ethics of probability-based institutions they are purportedly resisting. This is particularly clear in the case of a research subject Klien calls Motoki. Motoki moved to Kamiyama in Tokushima Prefecture after having worked full time in high-powered jobs in advertising for nine years. [End Page 457] In Kamiyama, he started a restaurant. This restaurant supports the local community, both by buying produce from local farmers and by giving a discount to locals who buy their food. While Motoki compares his new life in Kamiyama favorably to his life in Tokyo because he is able to work on something in which he believes, he has continued to work extremely long hours and has little time for his family or leisure. Klien argues that "Motoki's trajectory serves as intriguing evidence of the extent...

Mediascapes of Japanese Culture in Chinese Drama Series: Adaptations of Zhao Qianqian works

Globalization has encouraged the enhancement of media, so that various kinds of information are accessible. Hence, Japan is utilizing media to promote their pop culture globally. One of the countries whose media is influenced by Japanese pop culture is China. This study aims to determine the mediascapes of Japanese pop culture in Chinese drama series, specifically the ones that are adapted from Zhao Qianqian’s works; A Love So Beautiful (2017) and Put Your Head on Your Shoulder (2019). Theory used in this study is mediascapes–one of the five dimensions in Arjun Appadurai’s disjuncture globalization theory. The method of this research is descriptive analysis with qualitative approach. This study shows that mediascapes of Japanese pop culture can be identified through images of some anime characters that appear in A Love So Beautiful and Put Your Head on My Shoulder drama series. These images are shown to attract Chinese people’s interest of Japanese pop culture as well as to construct the idea of Japan’s positive image.

Food, Technology and Translocal Transformations of Taste: Industrial and Processed Food in Yucatán

Translocality as originally used by Arjun Appadurai was an evocative concept that appealed immediately to anthropologists and others who study global-local connections. Its use has been widely adopted in religious studies, music studies, migration studies and food studies, but it has continued to be rather undefined, which makes it difficult to apply to local data. Here, from the study of local food and gastronomy in the Mexican state of Yucatán, I investigate how translocality can help us look at the global in the local and the local in the global. I propose that when it comes to studying food and gastronomy in the Yucatán, translocality can help us understand the ways in which industrialization, which became both a production model and a way of life in the United States and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, rapidly extended to food everywhere, and Yucatecans fondly took to the consumption of industrially produced and processed foods, incorporating them into the local gastronomy. The results, in terms of taste, have been extensive but are not particular to the Yucatán, since food and gastronomy everywhere have been impacted in similar ways. However, when we analyze the changes in local dishes and preparations, we can see how ubiquitous industrialized food has become and how it has affected the particular configurations of ingredients in Yucatecan cuisine.

Ambivalencias y transformaciones de las fiestas neobakalas

Este artículo explora, a partir de fuentes etnográficas, la forma en que los miembros de la escena musical neobakala lidian, mediante prácticas rituales y carnavalescas, con los estados afectivos derivados de la vida urbana en el capitalismo tardío. Con este fin, este trabajo toma como referencia la propuesta teórica y metodológica sobre la afectividad de Alexandre Surrallés (2005 y 2009). En este sentido, este texto se adentra en el cuerpo y la persona capitalista para, a partir de ahí, identificar contextualmente sus estados de ánimo, sus relatos identitarios y los grupos sobre los cuales este relato se despliega y repliega. En este plano afectivo, este trabajo, donde la nostalgia es un aspecto central, también tiene en cuenta otros aportes hechos, de nuevo, desde la antropología, como son los de Appadurai (2001) o Hirai (2009). Por último, el artículo se adentra en las relaciones entre la nostalgia y la memoria y muestra cómo, en este caso, la memoria parece erosionarse por la acción de la nostalgia.

Socio-Economic Global Cultural Flow with Reference to Select Indian English Novels

The world is unified by the word ‘globalization’ as a result of the growing interdependence of the world’s societies, economies, technologies, cultures, investment and information. Today, everything is accessible at one’s finger tips, because the world is interconnected. There is networking in all walks of life. Communication has become easier than ever and technology has begun to replace human resources. On one hand, globalization claims to have simplified living by interconnecting different parts of the world, but on the other hand, life seems to have become more complicated in the name of sociocultural networking and technological revolutions. The circulation of ideas, culture, language, and material goods as a result of networking, the reason for globalization, has been identified as global cultural flows, according to the social anthropologist and globalization theorist, Arjun Appadurai. The paper aims to look into the socio-cultural, political and economic impacts of globalizationon developing countries like India, with the help of three contemporary novels of the twenty first century Indian English literature – The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, and Q&A by Vikas Swarup. It explores the aspects of globalization in the select novels, in an attempt to understand the modern world under the influence of globalization, liberalization and capitalization.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the machine of broken promises

A review of Failure by Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander.

TRUMP'S TRUTH: a comment on Arjun Appadurai

TRUMP'S TRUTH: <i>a comment on Arjun Appadurai</i>

Competing for privilege –aspirational youth at a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition

The recent expansion of the overseas education market in China has led to the rise of “Background Promotion Projects” designed to strengthen the applications of elite university aspirants. Based on ethnographic findings of a particular Background Promotion Project, a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition, this study analyses how international applicants to elite Western universities learn “the art of aspiration” by constructing and performing entrepreneurial subjectivities. Building a link between Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “the capacity to aspire” and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s theory of “the aspirational class”, this study reveals how deepening social stratification in China and the rise of a global meritocracy reinforce each other. Demonstrating how privilege is consolidated and justified through the (re)production of aspirations, this study further contributes to the theorisation of class reproduction and education during a time of post-industrial change and international mobility.

Education, globalization, and citizenship: reflections of Vietnamese local school teachers and overseas-educated academics

ABSTRACT Drawing on two research projects that include Vietnamese overseas-educated academics and local school teachers, the paper discusses these educators’ reflections on citizenship, citizenship education and Vietnam’s higher education reform in the context of globalization. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s knowledge/power and subjectivity, and taking on Arjun Appadurai’s social imaginary, we illustrate the contested values of education and complex meanings of citizenship in a market-based economy with socialist ideologies, and their effects on educators’ practices.

Response to Arjun Appadurai’s “Globalization and the Rush to History”

Response to Arjun Appadurai’s “Globalization and the Rush to History”

The Minoritized Yazidi Body as a Signifier

This paper reads the testimonies of Yazidi women who survived their slavery at the hands of ISIS (DAESH) to understand how this ‘minoritized’ body, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai, has become a worldwide signifier. Due to the circulation of images and technologies, the testimonies of those women who survived have become the only means that allows visibility; yet, the visibility of the violated minoritized body is a fact that still signifies power and instills worldwide horror. The paper attempts to understand how the minoritized individual body has become a body politic, onto which power relations are played out and where several discourses intersect.

Reinventing the Self: Cultural Negotiation of LuLing in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Chinese American mother LuLing involves in the self-exploration vacillating between her home and host cultures. The Chinese immigrant LuLing cannot remain totally independent of her indigenous culture of her native country China. Consequently, she demonstrates residual of Chinese culture in her diasporic life. Moreover, she forces her American born daughter to follow the same which sometimes renders conflict in mother-daughter relation. However, she cannot resist the influences of the culture of host country in the United States. She follows certain practices of American cultures. At the same time, she manifests an ambivalent attitude to both cultures. In such cultural interaction, her subjectivity encompasses multiplicities and pluralities by deconstructing the binary of the home and host culture. In this article, the formation of her subjectivity is analyzed through the critical postulations of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ of Stuart Hall and ‘third space’ of Homi Bhabha. Hall’s representation in Bhabha’s third space can be interpreted and analyzed in the light of Arjun Appadurai’s modernity of cultural globalization. Precisely, the cultural interaction in the third space of the diaspora renders fluid and unstable subjectivity of LuLing which simultaneously belongs to past, present and future.

Technoscapes and mediascapes influence on village and city relations in Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara

The development of infrastructure and information technology has a significant impact on the relationship between Ruteng, the capital of the Manggarai district, and the surrounding villages. The mobility of the people between the cities and villages has led to new problems which previously did not have a significant influence. The shrinking of the rural agricultural sector and the development of the informal sector in the city are indicative of the dynamic relationship between the two. In order to see the phenomenon of changes that occur in the relationship between Ruteng and the surrounding villages, a theory of landscapes by Arjun Appadurai is used. Interviews were conducted with two entrepreneurs who employed people from five villages, namely Wae Belang, Pong Murung, Purang, Lando, and Nanu, and ten workers from those villages. Observations and literature reviews were carried out to support and complement the data obtained by the interview method. Technoscape, in the form of physical infrastructure development in rural areas and mediascape in the form of television and radio shows, as well as social media, became a pull factor for migration to Ruteng. Meanwhile, the traditional view in the form of go’et (traditional expressions) and the similarity of culture become the push factors for urbanization to Ruteng.

Editors’ Letter

Editors’ Letter

Imagining ‘Asian’ higher education: visual campus gaze and global university rankings (GURs) websites

ABSTRACT Amid debates about global university rankings (GURs), very few have closely examined how GURs’ media outlets construct meanings of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We critically examine 135 publicly available visual media (photographs) in the Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian universities within global discourse. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s ‘imaginary,’ Stuart Hall’s heuristics of representation, and attending to photographic techniques, we posit that THE and QS GUR imagery constructs a ‘social imaginary’ of Asian HE simultaneously as a: 1) technological frontier, 2) site of educational prestige, and 3) environmental and cultural paradise. We argue that these constructed visual imaginaries of Asian HE serve as sites for social consumption, reproduce particular imagined communities and imagined selves, and serve as scripts for action, in an era of platform capitalism.

The spaces of luxury in global cities

According to Arjun Appadurai (1996), global flows are both economic and cultural, forming what he calls “scapes”: financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and ideoscapes. Within these...

The smell of Shōwa: Time, materiality and regimes of value in Japan’s second-hand kimono industry

This article maps the way second-hand kimono pass between different regimes of value as they move out of people’s homes and into second-hand shops. Joining recent calls for a greater anthropological focus on the processes of divestment and disposal, the author highlights how kimono move from the inalienable space of the domestic sphere and into the alienable domain of retail, and considers how their materiality – worn fabrics, dated aesthetics and musty smell – is an active agent in the transformation of value. When initially purchased, the symbolic and economic values of kimono are congruent. But with the passage of time and the deterioration of materials and fraying of kinship bonds, the value of kimono as treasured family possessions is diminished. Yet the very materiality that caused their loss of economic and symbolic value, their undesirable smells, colours and designs can cause them to enter a new regime of value as vintage fashion supported by fashion magazines. By rethinking Arjun Appadurai’s regimes of value with a greater focus on material properties and qualities, this article aims to link cycles of divestment and consumption practices with the generation, loss and re-creation of value.

Covidscapes The Pandemic in the Philippines

This introductory essay develops the notion of Covidscapes, taking a cue from Arjun Appadurai. Despite mutations, a single type of coronavirus has gone around the world causing the Covid-19 disease. Yet experiences with the pandemic have varied widely across and even within countries for reasons that go beyond the pathogen. The concept of Covidscapes captures the simultaneous sharing of a global phenomenon along with diversity and difference. Covidscapes are profoundly perspectival and disjunctive. State–societal factors suggest countries can have their own Covidscapes. The contributions in this issue shed light on the peculiar dynamics and contradictions of the Philippine Covidscape. KEYWORDS: COVID-19 • MIGRATIONS • HISTORY • STATE RESPONSE • MUTUALITY • ETHICS OF CARE

DISSENTING BODY AND ITS CREATIVE RECONTEXTUALISATION IN LITHUANIAN VISUAL ARTS

The body is an important starting point concept throughout deconstruction, reconstruction and recontextualization of the body’s concept. This change of focus in research that stems from the results to the process of contextualization means that the researcher should engage with texts or images, as they are reflected in the process of cultural development and exchange, through which decontextualization is exhibited. This article deals with the concept of new materialism and endeavors to explain, how discourses come to matter. It examines the issue of how new materialism tackles visual art in innovative ways – through the intersections of artistic practice, art-as-research, and philosophical analysis. Such definitions as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “a bodily being”, Julia Kristeva’s “the abjection of the self”, Arjun Appadurai’s “the aesthetics of decontextualization” and “singularized object”, Igor Kopytoff’s “the cultural biography of things”, and Nicholas Thomas’ “entangled objects”, constitute the methodological frameworks of our research. We will analyze such approaches as Hans Belting’s concept of body as a “living medium”, Giorgio Agamben’s view on body as an object of commodification and Jacques Derrida’s “trust in painting”. An attempt to understand body reconceptualization and deconstruction through the categories of new materialism is the most important aim of this article. Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (that implies a clear-cut subject-object distinction) is crucial to our research, which underlines that bodies have no inherent boundaries and properties and that the analyzed representations are “material-discursive phenomena”. The artworks under consideration will be confronted with a diagnosis that, according to Barad, all bodies come to matter thanks the intra-activity and its performativity. The case studies of Svajonė Stanikienė and Paulius Stanikas, Evaldas Jansas and Eglė Rakauskaitė works show how the image of the body is developed through the processes of their deconstruction and decontextualization.

Cultura e consumo: uma discussão socioantropológica

The article aims to carry out a bibliographic review capable of exposing and explaining the main categories and concepts developed by scholars of the phenomenon of consumption, in order to show, in a first moment, the anthropological thinking developed by Marshall Sahlins about why social agents consume, contrasting it with the utilitarian view and, in a second moment, conducting a socio-anthropological discussion on consumption through a synthesis of the contributions of Jean Baudrillard, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu and Arjun Appadurai.