Book review: Crafting Selves
Mar. 23rd, 2011 21:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Kondo, Dorinne K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Main Argument: Dorinne Kondo, a Japanese American, Harvard-trained anthropologist, spent nearly two years in Japan working as a part-timer in a small confectionery factory in the shitamachi of Tokyo's Arakawa ward. Her experiences there suggest that identity is multiple and relational and that the famed Japanese ideology of the workplace as a family does not go uncontested by workers, who are quick to resist it and to use it to criticize their bosses on its own terms.
Historiographical Engagement: Various influential anthropological texts as well as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In Part One Kondo relates, in sometimes interminable detail, various factoids about the flexible usage of pronouns in Japanese as well as about the purported Yamanote/shitamachi divide in central Tokyo (i.e. the 23 wards) before recounting at length her experience on an "ethics retreat" in western Tokyo, an all-expenses paid workshop which she attended with several other employees of the confectionery and in which participants were re-educated into normative discourses of the family/ie.
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In Part Two Kondo explores the discourse of the ie, which survives extra-legally in Japanese society as a powerful normative force in family life and which is applied equally ready to the workplace: companies are seen as families, even though (thanks to the legal postwar dissolution of the ie system) they are much less familial than they theoretically were in the Tokugawa period. Even as the confectionery company officers attempted to impart the workplace a familial feel, workers were able to deploy and take advantaged of that same familial discourse to resist their positionings--up to a point.
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Part Three is arguably the strongest in the book; in its first chapter, Kondo explores the myth and discourse of the independent artisan, which still survives at a certain level in Japan even as modern capitalism increasingly leaves it a hollow set of ideals. Similarly, female employees, who are all part-timers, are a crucial part of maintaining the familial discourse at the workplace even as they are systematically disregarded, disadvantaged and underpaid compared to their male counterparts. Significantly, female workers at times cooperate in the maintenance of their disadvantaged position for the greater benefits it provides them outside the workplace, i.e. more free time with their families.
Critical assessment: This is a good, thought-provoking book that emphasizes a number of points about (gendered) labor in Japan that bear emphasizing. That said, it needed an editor hard-core; there are several sections in which Kondo provides altogether too much background information than is relevant, and she--well, in her review Jennifer Robertson said that Kondo's experiences frequently came across as too general and stereotypical, which I would certainly agree with based on their basic similarity to many of my experiences doing research in Japan. Given all the things that separate me and Kondo, this "terrible familiarity," in my advisor's words, is not felicitous. Similarly and in the words of another reviewer, Kondo often comes across as--naive is probably too strong a word, but she takes a number of phenomena at face value that ought to be further unpacked, perhaps most obviously when she refuses for the entire book to call the confectionery workers' exploitation exploitation. It's a tough balancing act to tread the line between researcher and participant, but I think she tends to err on the side of participant most of the time.
All of this is not to actually discuss the book's merits, namely its unpacking a workplace that is far more typical in Japan than that of the salaryman or the permanently employed union worker. Still, Kondo's analysis is focused almost monomaniacally on this one particular enterprise, to the point where her analysis is not readily generalizable; given that there is literally nothing to set this particular confectionery apart, that seems questionable. Still, she succeeds in making her central argument about identity, which doesn't seem as radical as it may have in 1990, and in interlacing theory with her account, even as she leaves some aspects of it undertheorized--all in all, a worthwhile read.
Further reading: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Meta notes: 家 being read uchi is a metonym for 内.
Main Argument: Dorinne Kondo, a Japanese American, Harvard-trained anthropologist, spent nearly two years in Japan working as a part-timer in a small confectionery factory in the shitamachi of Tokyo's Arakawa ward. Her experiences there suggest that identity is multiple and relational and that the famed Japanese ideology of the workplace as a family does not go uncontested by workers, who are quick to resist it and to use it to criticize their bosses on its own terms.
Historiographical Engagement: Various influential anthropological texts as well as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In Part One Kondo relates, in sometimes interminable detail, various factoids about the flexible usage of pronouns in Japanese as well as about the purported Yamanote/shitamachi divide in central Tokyo (i.e. the 23 wards) before recounting at length her experience on an "ethics retreat" in western Tokyo, an all-expenses paid workshop which she attended with several other employees of the confectionery and in which participants were re-educated into normative discourses of the family/ie.
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In Part Two Kondo explores the discourse of the ie, which survives extra-legally in Japanese society as a powerful normative force in family life and which is applied equally ready to the workplace: companies are seen as families, even though (thanks to the legal postwar dissolution of the ie system) they are much less familial than they theoretically were in the Tokugawa period. Even as the confectionery company officers attempted to impart the workplace a familial feel, workers were able to deploy and take advantaged of that same familial discourse to resist their positionings--up to a point.
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Part Three is arguably the strongest in the book; in its first chapter, Kondo explores the myth and discourse of the independent artisan, which still survives at a certain level in Japan even as modern capitalism increasingly leaves it a hollow set of ideals. Similarly, female employees, who are all part-timers, are a crucial part of maintaining the familial discourse at the workplace even as they are systematically disregarded, disadvantaged and underpaid compared to their male counterparts. Significantly, female workers at times cooperate in the maintenance of their disadvantaged position for the greater benefits it provides them outside the workplace, i.e. more free time with their families.
Critical assessment: This is a good, thought-provoking book that emphasizes a number of points about (gendered) labor in Japan that bear emphasizing. That said, it needed an editor hard-core; there are several sections in which Kondo provides altogether too much background information than is relevant, and she--well, in her review Jennifer Robertson said that Kondo's experiences frequently came across as too general and stereotypical, which I would certainly agree with based on their basic similarity to many of my experiences doing research in Japan. Given all the things that separate me and Kondo, this "terrible familiarity," in my advisor's words, is not felicitous. Similarly and in the words of another reviewer, Kondo often comes across as--naive is probably too strong a word, but she takes a number of phenomena at face value that ought to be further unpacked, perhaps most obviously when she refuses for the entire book to call the confectionery workers' exploitation exploitation. It's a tough balancing act to tread the line between researcher and participant, but I think she tends to err on the side of participant most of the time.
All of this is not to actually discuss the book's merits, namely its unpacking a workplace that is far more typical in Japan than that of the salaryman or the permanently employed union worker. Still, Kondo's analysis is focused almost monomaniacally on this one particular enterprise, to the point where her analysis is not readily generalizable; given that there is literally nothing to set this particular confectionery apart, that seems questionable. Still, she succeeds in making her central argument about identity, which doesn't seem as radical as it may have in 1990, and in interlacing theory with her account, even as she leaves some aspects of it undertheorized--all in all, a worthwhile read.
Further reading: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Meta notes: 家 being read uchi is a metonym for 内.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-24 22:39 (UTC)---L, still trying to get a handle on the distinctions.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 00:59 (UTC)This is part of an ongoing conversation with some of my friends in the China subfield who can't deal with the irregularity of pronouncing kanji.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 02:04 (UTC)But, I wonder whether there wasn't a sense of "inside" in the original character. I mean, even aside from how it's a pig inside a roof. I have more than a little trouble navigating hanzi etymologies, but Wiktionary does list 家里 as a Mandarin synonym of 家. (It also lists the etymology of the うち reading as "cognate with uchi," meaning with 内.)
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 03:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 04:07 (UTC)Oh.
;-P