Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (Asia Pacific Modern, 13, Band 13) - Softcover

Hankins, Joseph D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520283295 ISBN 13: 9780520283299

Verlag: University of California Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Since the 1980s, arguments for a multicultural Japan have gained considerable currency against an entrenched myth of national homogeneity. Working Skin enters this conversation with an ethnography of Japan’s “Buraku” people. Touted as Japan’s largest minority, the Buraku are stigmatized because of associations with labor considered unclean, such as leather and meat production. That labor, however, is vanishing from Japan: Liberalized markets have sent these jobs overseas, and changes in family and residential record-keeping have made it harder to track connections to these industries. Multiculturalism, as a project of managing difference, comes into ascendancy and relief just as the labor it struggles to represent is disappearing.

Working Skin develops this argument by exploring the interconnected work of tanners in Japan, Buraku rights activists and their South Asian allies, as well as cattle ranchers in West Texas, United Nations officials, and international NGO advocates. Moving deftly across these engagements, Joseph Hankins analyzes the global political and economic demands of the labor of multiculturalism. Written in accessible prose, this book speaks to larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, Asian and cultural studies, and examinations of liberalism and empire, and it will appeal to audiences interested in social movements, stigmatization, and the overlapping circulation of language, politics, and capital.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph D. Hankins researches the politics and productivity of labor. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego and is affiliated with the UCSD Critical Gender Studies Program and the UC Center for New Racial Studies. He was raised in Lubbock, Texas, one source of the rawhide processed in Japanese tanneries.

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"A fascinating mediation that weaves between the making of leather and the making of a multicultural Japan. Masculinized forms of industrialized tanning intersect with the feminized work of website design and solidarity tourism in efforts to turn 'Discrimination Based on Work and Descent' into imaginations of a world free from racism and built on global solidarity and 'complete liberation.'"
Charles L. Briggs, author of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare

"A product of ingenuity, scrupulous considerations, and ethical commitment, Working Skin suggests, through the analytics of critical multiculturalism and labor, new possibilities of transnational Japanese ethnography as part of the ongoing project of politicizing anthropology for the modern world."
Lisa Yoneyama, author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory

"Working Skin is an extraordinary ethnography on the contemporary politics of the Buraku people in Japan. Hankins narrates the lives and experiences of the Buraku people inescapably entangled with and transformed by global circulations of capital and of the liberal discourse of recognition. This is a must-read for students and scholars interested in global multiculturalism and transnational cultural politics of the disenfranchised."—Miyako Inoue, author of Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan

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Working Skin

Making Leather, Making A Multicultural Japan

By Joseph D. Hankins

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28329-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface: Hailing from Texas, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Labor of Multiculturalism, 
PART ONE RECOGNIZING BURAKU DIFFERENCE, 
1. Of Skins and Workers: Producing the Buraku, 
2. "Ushimatsu Left for Texas": Passing the Buraku, 
PART TWO CHOICE AND OBLIGATION IN CONTEMPORARY BURAKU POLITICS, 
3. Locating the Buraku: A Political Ecology of Pollution, 
4. A Sleeping Public: Buraku Politics and the Cultivation of Human Rights, 
PART THREE INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF SOLIDARITY, 
5. Demanding a Standard: Buraku Politics on a Global Stage, 
6. Wounded Futures: Prospects of Transnational Solidarity, 
Conclusion: The Disciplines of Multiculturalism, 
Epilogue: Texas to Japan, and Back, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Of Skins and Workers

PRODUCING THE BURAKU

FRAMING DISCRIMINATION

In July 2005, Doudou Diène, United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on contemporary racism, officially visited Japan to examine the socioeconomic and cultural status of minority groups in Japan. Among the groups he visited on his nine-day trip were the Buraku people. Diène met with leaders of Buraku political organizations and visited Buraku neighborhoods. He was warmly welcomed with emblematic displays of Buraku ways of life: he attended a drum-making workshop, visited a tannery, and was guest of honor at a dinner that featured motsu nabe (offal stew) and local dances.

Diène's office used these visits, along with historical and contextual research, as the basis for a report later submitted to the United Nations that provided recommendations for the Japanese government as to how it might improve the situation of domestic minorities. Throughout this process—of arranging and conducting Diène's visit, of searching out contextual information, and of scripting and revising the report—Diène's offices leaned heavily on support from the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), founded in 1988 by the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) as a conduit for internationalizing the BLL's mission to eliminate discrimination. IMADR has close relations with other Japanese minority organizations and populations, but its primary constituency remains the Buraku people.

In partnership with Amnesty International Japan, IMADR handled the minutiae of Diène's visits and provided assistance with drafting, revising, and circulating his report. IMADR staff members helped establish Diène's itinerary, using their network through the BLL to set up meetings withnational and local leaders of the organization and to arrange visits to the variety of Buraku and other minority cultural events Diène attended across Japan; they also organized the interpretation between Japanese and English, and sometimes Japanese and French, for Diène's entire mission to Japan. Effectively, IMADR created and maintained the logistical and linguistic framework through which Diène was able to experience and understand the situation of minorities in Japan; conversely, it created the framework through which Japanese minority groups, including the Buraku, achieved international representation.

This work of creating and maintaining the relationship between organizations such as IMADR and its Buraku constituency has formative effects on all involved. Organizations such as IMADR seek to create politically solvent representations of marginalized populations in Japan. They speak in the language of rights, culture, and identity; they maintain the company of like-minded organizations, both domestic and international; and they collaborate across the boundaries of the marginalized to effect political solidarity and to combat discrimination. In so doing, they make themselves recognizable as particular kinds of political and ethical actors. On the other side of this rhetorical frame stand populations that serve as evidence in arguments about the enduring presence of social marginalization. In the Buraku situation, this includes tannery and slaughterhouse workers; it includes people who might not work in a traditionally Buraku industry but who were raised by Buraku parents or in a Buraku district; and it, at times, includes people who might not have the inclination or the tools to recognize themselves as Buraku. Even as the nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers develop and fulfill desires, aspirations, and selves in their labor, so too do the people who lead lives taken up as evidence of the Buraku minority.

Between 2005 and 2007 I spent several months working in each of these kinds of venues. I served as an intern at IMADR for a year and a half and apprenticed in a tannery for half a year. I worked the trades that I was simultaneously studying, subjecting my body and time to the demands that these workplaces foist on those they employ. One of the tasks I collaborated on at IMADR was building a website that would represent Buraku and other minority issues to international audiences. I spent my time at the factory learning how to make leather, from utterly raw and still bloody hide to a finished sheet of tanned and dyed leather. My time in each of these locations was relatively brief, and my financial and emotional support came from other locations; in no way does my experience equal a lifetime spent slinging skin or preparing reports in the name of dismantling discrimination. However, devoting myself to the production of website and leather gave me a sense of the rhythms, demands, pleasures, and challenges operative in each situation.

These venues articulate two different regimes of labor and value, each associated with a particular historical moment, a complementary political formation, and each taking on a gendered aspect. The masculinized labor of the factory floor sits against the Internet-savvy, feminized care of the liberal, multicultural office work; Fordism is set against post-Fordism; the politics of labor and unions contrasts with the politics of identity and human rights. The work of this framing happens within these boundaries, simultaneously asserting them, policing who might be feminized and who masculinized, what might count as Fordist and what might count as beyond that moment. This is a work that cuts across any neat divide between the material and the immaterial. Both the knowledge-producer, who spends most of her day seated, typing at a desk, and the tannery worker, who spends his day hefting wet hide, must use their bodies in particular ways to produce artifacts that can circulate beyond them.

The uneven coupling of these trajectories—for the production of a website is always framing the production of leather, even as it depends on it—opens a window into the formative labor of multiculturalism, into the types of people and organizations, the ethical orientations and forms of life that are required in the labor of representing stigmatized labor. It also opens a window into the staging of the aforementioned contrasts—of a Fordist moment of factory labor against a moment of liberal care—so key in the staging of Japan's modernity.

This chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the book. It is a first pass at understanding the myriad, sometimes conflicting and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520283295
• ISBN 13: 9780520283299
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland