BULLETIN OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ETHNOLOGY Vol. 33 No. 3 2009
Special Section: Anthropology across the World II
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Takezawa, Shoichiro
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Preface
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301
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Yoneyama, Lisa
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Cultural Studies and “Anthropology” in North America:
The Cultural War over the Four-Fields |
311
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Tanabe, Akio
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Subaltern Studies and South Asian Anthropology
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329
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Ono, Akiko
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Anthropology in ‘Multicultural’ Australia
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359
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Mori, Akiko
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German Volkskunde and Cultural Anthropology
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397
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Niles, Daniel
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Moving Beyond the Orthodoxies in ‘Sustainable Agriculture’
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421
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Kawaguchi, Yukihiro
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Lineage Organization during the Social Upheaval of the Republican
Period:
Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province |
453
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Anthropology across the World II
Preface
Shoichiro Takezawa
This is the second special edition on World Anthropologies.
The first was based on the annual meeting of the Kansai Branch of the Japanese
Society of Cultural Anthropology held on October 15th 2005, and appeared
in volume 31(1) of the same bulletin. This second special edition is also based
on the annual meeting of the Kansai Branch, held on July 7th 2007.
Thus, the form of the two editions is the same, but their content is quite different. Following the development of anthropological thought in the four leading countries in Anthropology (the United States, France, Britain, and China), the first edition tried to make clear the characteristics of each Anthropology. Emphasis was put upon their educational systems, considering these to be a key to predicting the future of each Anthropology.
The second edition, in contrast, changes the target countries and the object of discussion. Taking up four countries, the United States, Germany, India and Australia, this edition focuses on the relationship between Anthropology and its related disciplines: Cultural Studies in the US, Ethnology in Germany, Subaltern Studies in India, and Multiculturalism in Australia. Why do we choose this topic? There are two reasons. Firstly, although they are branches of cultural studies like Anthropology, these other disciplines generally aim at culture on the national scale, while anthropological investigations are often carried out on minority or ethnic group cultures. Secondly, they show a strong tendency to focus on the political aspects of cultural practices, while anthropological studies often neglect these. If there is a methodological difference between Anthropology and these other disciplines, it will be fruitful to examine them closely to rethink Anthropology, which has been said to be in difficulties.
Thus, the form of the two editions is the same, but their content is quite different. Following the development of anthropological thought in the four leading countries in Anthropology (the United States, France, Britain, and China), the first edition tried to make clear the characteristics of each Anthropology. Emphasis was put upon their educational systems, considering these to be a key to predicting the future of each Anthropology.
The second edition, in contrast, changes the target countries and the object of discussion. Taking up four countries, the United States, Germany, India and Australia, this edition focuses on the relationship between Anthropology and its related disciplines: Cultural Studies in the US, Ethnology in Germany, Subaltern Studies in India, and Multiculturalism in Australia. Why do we choose this topic? There are two reasons. Firstly, although they are branches of cultural studies like Anthropology, these other disciplines generally aim at culture on the national scale, while anthropological investigations are often carried out on minority or ethnic group cultures. Secondly, they show a strong tendency to focus on the political aspects of cultural practices, while anthropological studies often neglect these. If there is a methodological difference between Anthropology and these other disciplines, it will be fruitful to examine them closely to rethink Anthropology, which has been said to be in difficulties.
Cultural Studies and “Anthropology”
in North America:
The Cultural War over the Four-Fields
The Cultural War over the Four-Fields
Lisa Yoneyama
The article concerns the relationship between cultural studies
and anthropology in North America. Despite some anthropologists' attempts to “otherize”
cultural studies, many cultural and social anthropologists since the mid-1980s
post-structuralist turn—exemplified by the discipline's incorporation of works
by such continental theorists as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-Franⅽฺois Lyotard, as well as such post-colonial scholars
as Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Spivak—have produced influential works
that in practice can be deemed cultural studies. The article then asks: what was
and is at stake in the still persistent effort to repudiate cultural studies when
in fact cultural studies has constituted an integral part of cuttingedge anthropological
investigations? The article begins by exploring a brief history of cultural studies
in English-speaking North America from the early 1990s, when cultural studies
emerged as a trans-disciplinary intellectual project that often instigated disturbances
within established disciplines, to the current moment in which cultural studies
has become accepted as a legitimate academic field and institutionalized into
programs and department curricula. A quick look at its trajectories over the past
two decades reveals how cultural studies has offered a site of knowledge production
that disrupts and decenters the taken-for-granted assumptions about the “West”
and the rest, national belongingness, and ideas about the self and other. I argue
that it is this selfcritical and unsettling nature of cultural studies knowledge
that feeds the anxiety of those who aspire to the idea of anthropology as a stable
and holistic discipline modeled after the positivist natural sciences. Drawing
on Daniel Segal's and Sylvia Yanagisako's observation, the article concludes that
the current debates over the “four-fields” in North America serves
as a surrogate “culture war” for anthropology, a discipline initially
built on clear demarcations of self/other, inside/outside, and home/field.
Key Words:cultural studies, cross-hemispheric,
four-fields, culture wars
Subaltern Studies and South Asian Anthropology
Akio Tanabe
This article discusses the relationships between Subaltern
Studies and South Asian anthropology. After surveying the mutual influences between
the two, the article argues the following: 1) the field of historical anthropology
that pays attention to the history and structure of workings of power, subjectformation
and the role of agency, has the potentiality of fruitfully combining anthropological
knowledge and inspirations from Subaltern Studies; 2) there is a need to pay attention
to the role of cultural re-imagination by the subalterns in the contemporary process
of political group formation; 3) in addition to understanding the social structure
and/or moments of change represented by revolts, it is necessary to consider the
dynamics of social “becoming”, that is, the process of transformation
of social relationships and patterns through every day events. Lastly, the article
argues that care should be taken to note the change in the semantics of the term
‘subaltern’ under the present day globalization. Attempts to locate
the presence of the ‘subaltern’ in the present situation can function
to identify a group as a holder of particular resources-e.g. genetic resources
or medicinal knowledge-instead of shedding light on alternative viewpoints. This
would only work to enrol the subalterns in global capitalism instead of appreciating
and respecting their way of life. We need to be extremely careful about studying
the subaltern under such conditions.
Key Words:subaltern studies, anthropology,
history, agency, social change
Anthropology in ‘Multicultural’ Australia
Akiko Ono
Australian society has been transformed from a settler colony
to a multicultural nation state, having passed through the racially discriminative
White Australia Policy. The problems of present-day anthropology in terms of disciplinary
survival among the competing social sciences derive from the historical particularities
which this process of transformation of Australian society has generated. This
paper briefly reviews the discourses of official Australian multiculturalism,
followed by a history of anthropology in Australia. It then explores the present-day
problems and possibilities of anthropology. Lastly, I offer some suggestions as
to what might be useful in the task of solving these problems.
Multiculturalism was introduced into Australia to serve the official policy of controlling the diversification of domestic ethnic minority groups. Its fundamental concept consists in maintaining integration into the public social system while aiming at controlling the ethnic minority groups of immigrants from hundreds of different cultural backgrounds. The official discourses of Australian multiculturalism have emphasised the national identity which is expected to grow on the basis of the mainstream ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture. As to the development of the institutionalisation of anthropology in Australia, it is important to look at past national expectations of the uses of anthropology for colonial administration at home and later in Papua New Guinea especially, and also, in the present, to the diversifying interdisciplinary enterprises and projects in the applied social sciences, although the history of the push to institutionalise Australian anthropology was driven by intellectual fascination with Aboriginal societies and cultures. There has never been an Australian school or even style of anthropology in Australia. Expatriates have occupied the majority of the Australian chairs over the years, which has led ‘anthropology in Australia’ (rather than ‘Australian anthropology’) to be influenced by most of the schools and currents to be found elsewhere. Postgraduate training, however, today seems to be overly project-centred, i.e., being exposed to a higher educational milieu in Australia does not necessarily mean one can internalise the discipline's own codes and standards of research, theoretical frames of reference and so on. Aboriginal studies have been resurrected by the need for involvement in land claims and native title cases regarding which anthropologists must deal with the frame of recognition of ‘unchanging’ tradition and culture imposed by legislators. Those who attempt to do anthropology at home are extending their research interests beyond ethnic minority groups and white Australian communities into such differences as gender, class and so on. I conclude by suggesting that anthropology's challenges lie in better appreciating the role of fieldwork and ethnography as well as rethinking the dichotomy between ‘home’ and ‘the field’.
Multiculturalism was introduced into Australia to serve the official policy of controlling the diversification of domestic ethnic minority groups. Its fundamental concept consists in maintaining integration into the public social system while aiming at controlling the ethnic minority groups of immigrants from hundreds of different cultural backgrounds. The official discourses of Australian multiculturalism have emphasised the national identity which is expected to grow on the basis of the mainstream ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture. As to the development of the institutionalisation of anthropology in Australia, it is important to look at past national expectations of the uses of anthropology for colonial administration at home and later in Papua New Guinea especially, and also, in the present, to the diversifying interdisciplinary enterprises and projects in the applied social sciences, although the history of the push to institutionalise Australian anthropology was driven by intellectual fascination with Aboriginal societies and cultures. There has never been an Australian school or even style of anthropology in Australia. Expatriates have occupied the majority of the Australian chairs over the years, which has led ‘anthropology in Australia’ (rather than ‘Australian anthropology’) to be influenced by most of the schools and currents to be found elsewhere. Postgraduate training, however, today seems to be overly project-centred, i.e., being exposed to a higher educational milieu in Australia does not necessarily mean one can internalise the discipline's own codes and standards of research, theoretical frames of reference and so on. Aboriginal studies have been resurrected by the need for involvement in land claims and native title cases regarding which anthropologists must deal with the frame of recognition of ‘unchanging’ tradition and culture imposed by legislators. Those who attempt to do anthropology at home are extending their research interests beyond ethnic minority groups and white Australian communities into such differences as gender, class and so on. I conclude by suggesting that anthropology's challenges lie in better appreciating the role of fieldwork and ethnography as well as rethinking the dichotomy between ‘home’ and ‘the field’.
Key Words:anthropology in Australia,
Australian multiculturalism, Aboriginal studies, Melanesian studies, anthropology
at home
German Volkskunde and Cultural
Anthropology
Akiko Mori
In order to introduce German Volkskunde as a neighboring
discipline to cultural anthropology, I try to shed light on the historical process
of this discipline at research institutes in German universities, especially after
World War II. German Volkskunde had established its position as an academic
discipline, with a chair of its own at a university, under the National Socialist
regime, and ideologically had played no small part in supporting Nazism. It naturally
follows that since the end of the war German scholars have had to keenly reflect
on and firmly criticize the discipline's past. They have begun to define and
redefine theoretically their conceptions of the discipline, as well as its boundaries
with related disciplines. They have brought many old concepts of Volkskunde
to an end and sought to turn the discipline into an applied cultural science,
concerned with the analysis of both the past and present. In this process German
Volkskunde has come to call itself cultural anthropology. This article
argues this process with special reference to the University of Tüingen,
and considers the current methodological orientation of professional education
referring to the Humboldt University of Berlin. I discuss in conclusion the developing
relationship between German Volkskunde and cultural anthropology.
Key Words:folklore, cultural anthropology,
European ethnology, history of discipline, methodology
Moving Beyond the Orthodoxies in ‘Sustainable
Agriculture’
Daniel Niles
The term ‘sustainable agriculture’ has much currency but
multiple and even contradictory meanings. It is often used to indicate small-
and mid-scale, agribiodiverse and farmer-centered agricultural production. At
the same time, in the context of global population growth and agriculture's
aggregate impact on the biosphere, the term ‘sustainable agriculture’ is mobilized
to justify further intensification of industrial agricultural systems. In this
view, current and future demand for food is writ large, and it is asserted that
only high-yield conventional agriculture can meet it. The key research question
is how to mitigate industrial agriculture's negative ecological impact while
retaining its productivity.
‘Demand’ is therefore critical to assessments of sustainability. Yet future estimations of demand rest on incomplete and often dubious figures of present agricultural production and greatly varying assessments of food availability, consumption, and waste. As a consequence, the widely forecast ‘doubling of demand’ is tautologous: it presumes present patterns of consumption which are themselves the result of industrial-scale agricultural production. An agenda for agricultural development predicated on the need to meet a ‘doubling’ of demand therefore diminishes the real and imaginary territories in which alternative food futures lie.
Both small- and large-scale visions of sustainable agriculture can be called ‘orthodoxies’ in that the adherents of each vision assume their preferred scale of analysis is the essential one, while dismissing the insight and analysis offered by the other. This paper should demonstrate that both perspectives offer important insights into the problem of agricultural sustainability, but that neither can fulfill its potential so long as it remains an orthodoxy. The research traditions surrounding smaller-scale and larger-scale agriculture can be brought into fruitful dialogue.
‘Demand’ is therefore critical to assessments of sustainability. Yet future estimations of demand rest on incomplete and often dubious figures of present agricultural production and greatly varying assessments of food availability, consumption, and waste. As a consequence, the widely forecast ‘doubling of demand’ is tautologous: it presumes present patterns of consumption which are themselves the result of industrial-scale agricultural production. An agenda for agricultural development predicated on the need to meet a ‘doubling’ of demand therefore diminishes the real and imaginary territories in which alternative food futures lie.
Both small- and large-scale visions of sustainable agriculture can be called ‘orthodoxies’ in that the adherents of each vision assume their preferred scale of analysis is the essential one, while dismissing the insight and analysis offered by the other. This paper should demonstrate that both perspectives offer important insights into the problem of agricultural sustainability, but that neither can fulfill its potential so long as it remains an orthodoxy. The research traditions surrounding smaller-scale and larger-scale agriculture can be brought into fruitful dialogue.
Key Words:sustainable agriculture,
alternative agriculture, industrial agriculture, demand, ecological impact
Lineage Organization during the Social
Upheaval of the Republican Period:
Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province
Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province
Yukihiro Kawaguchi
Lineage, called zongzu in China, served a crucial economic
and political function in village society from the sixteenth to the early twentieth
centuries. In this paper I discuss how lineage organization changed during the
social upheaval of the Republican period in the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province.
With the end of the Qing dynasty, the official examination service (ke ju) was abolished, and the Republican government launched the tax and administrative reforms. As a result, gently elites, leaders of lineages and village society, declined and local bosses called “dai tin yi” gained power. The latter strictly and excessively collected taxes and various other fees to enrich themselves.
This transition in the relationship between state and village, and the turnover of village leaders, destabilized the lineage norm. In the Republican period, ancestral halls were no longer constructed and lineage genealogies were not written. Lineages could not be united to prevent bandit invasions. In addition, in collusion with outside forces, local bosses struggled fiercely among each other for power. By the late Republican period, the social order supported by the lineage had collapsed.
With the end of the Qing dynasty, the official examination service (ke ju) was abolished, and the Republican government launched the tax and administrative reforms. As a result, gently elites, leaders of lineages and village society, declined and local bosses called “dai tin yi” gained power. The latter strictly and excessively collected taxes and various other fees to enrich themselves.
This transition in the relationship between state and village, and the turnover of village leaders, destabilized the lineage norm. In the Republican period, ancestral halls were no longer constructed and lineage genealogies were not written. Lineages could not be united to prevent bandit invasions. In addition, in collusion with outside forces, local bosses struggled fiercely among each other for power. By the late Republican period, the social order supported by the lineage had collapsed.
Key Words:lineage, kinship, Late
Imperial China, Republican period, Pearl River Delta