A01=Joseph D. Hankins
anthropology
asia pacific modern series
Author_Joseph D. Hankins
buraka rights activists
buraku people
Category=JBSA
Category=JHMC
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic research
global politics
historical
history
history of japan
international advocates
japan
japanese
japanese culture
japanese politics
labor
labor of multiculturalism
leather production
liberalized markets
managing difference
meat production
minority groups
multicultural japan
national homogeneity
political
prejudice
social movements
south asia
stigmatized groups
tanners
united nations
Product details
- ISBN 9780520283299
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jul 2014
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
