From: Reisel Mary (reisel@tuj.ac.jp)
Date: 2007/08/21Reminder: The Institute of Contemporary Japanese
Studies (ICJS) at Temple University, Japan Campus,
will host the 10th annual conference of Anthropology
of Japan in Japan (AJJ).
The conference will be held in November 17th-18th 2007,
at Temple University campus, Minami Azabu, Tokyo.
Call for papers: Power, Identities and Relationships
in Contemporary Japan.
Special guest speaker: Prof. Roger Goodman, Oxford
University, author of “Japan’s `International
Youth`”(published in Japanese as “Kikokushijo”) and
“Children of the Japanese State” (published in
Japanese as “Nihon no Jidouyougo”).
Identities and relationships in contemporary Japan,
whether personal or professional, are negotiated
vis–vis authoritarian structures and institutions of
power. Individual choices of friends, family,
professions and lifestyles are constantly reshaped by
changing political realities, social movements and a
flux of images that shape self-perception under the
gaze of global media. Changes in the concept of the
self as well as new forms of societal organization
reflect complexities of power and new forms of
acceptable behavior that govern our modes of identity.
The most recent example can be seen in the diffusion
of a new discourse regarding individuality into the
Japanese ideology and the attempts to adopt the
concept in a way that would fit the Japanese sense of
self. Still within its formation, different
conceptions of individuality are evolving, and the
social/political reactions surrounding it are
attempting to make sense of individual modes of
identity and their relations to mediating institutions,
political ideology and social control.
Power can be exercised and consciously manipulated
through institutions that acquire specialized
knowledge and have the ability to influence the
existing discourses, according to Foucault; it can be
seen as a constantly changing project of a self that
is aware and self-reflexive, as Giddens understand it;
or it can be a product of society that is beyond the
control and awareness of the individual, according to
Judith Butler. In other words, the discourses of power
can be accepted, resisted, challenged and even changed
by the subjects position and the relationships.
The 2007 AJJ conference invites papers, poster
presentations and panel proposals that offer critical
discussions of the intersections of power in the
ongoing construction of identities and negotiation of
relationships in contemporary Japanese culture and
society. The conference is open to papers on issues in
related fields of studies, and encourages debate on
different practices and performances that may be
complexly located in the spaces of the past, present
and future, and of the intimate, the local, and the
(trans)national. Papers and discussion can be in
English or in Japanese.
AJJ’s guest speaker, Roger Goodman, Nissan professor
of Modern Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford,
will give a special presentation about The Changing
Nature of Power, Self-Identities and Relationships in
Japanese Higher Education: “The comparative
educationalist, William Cummings, has described higher
education as having experienced three revolutions. In
the first, which began in the middle ages in
Continental Europe, universities became teaching
institutions which were granted the special privilege,
for which they could charge fees, of granting licenses
to practice in various professions. In the second
revolution, the start of which Cummings dates to the
early 19th century, basic research became an important
activity of the universities. Government and other
donors (for example, Rockefeller, Carnegie in the US)
began to invest in universities so that scholars could
produce work which would be of benefit to society and
civilization in general, if not to them in particular.
In the case of both of these revolutions, higher
education establishments allowed their own community
of scholars to dictate what they taught and researched.
In contrast, Cummings describes the basis of the third
revolution as involving ‘an outward shift of increased
responsiveness to social demand’. Higher education
institutions are increasingly seen as part of the
for-profit commercial sector rather than non-profit,
‘charitable’ organizations and the reforms associated
with the third revolution have had a major impact on
the way that they operate worldwide. Ehara Takekazu,
drawing on the work of Ian McNay, has characterized
these reforms as a shift from collegial-bureaucratic
to corporate-privatized management.
Japan’s higher education sector has been one of the
more resistant to these worldwide trends but a
combination of political, economic, and demographic
pressures are making such resistance increasingly
untenable. This paper outlines the reforms that are
part of the third revolution and how they have been
introduced into Japan. It then, based on fieldwork in
a number of Japanese higher education institutions,
sets out to explore both the resistance to and
ramifications of these reforms, focusing in particular
on issues of power and control as well as the
self-identities of, and relationships between, those
who work in such institutions. Underlying the paper is
the question of whether Japan’s reluctance to embrace
the reforms is due to institutional, historical or
cultural reasons.”
Proposals should be submitted to Mary Reisel:
reisel@tuj.ac.jp.
The deadline for submission of papers was extended
until September 10th, 2007.
For further details:
AJJ: http://www.ajj-online/net/
The Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies:
http://www.tuj.ac.jp/icjs.
Contact: icjs@tuj.ac.jp, reisel@tuj.ac.jp
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Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
http://forum.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
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