Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences

215 Pages·1999·4.696 MB·English

by  Kosaku Yoshino

CONSUMING ETHNICITY
AND NATIONALISM
ConsumAsiaN Book Series
edited by
Brian Moeran and Lise Skov
The Curzon Press and The University of Hawai ‘i Press
Women, Media and Consumption in Japan
Edited by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran
Published 1995
A Japanese Advertising Agency
An Anthropology of Media and Markets
Brian Moeran
Published 1996
Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture
Edited by John Whittier Treat
Published 1996
Packaged Japaneseness
Weddings, Business and Brides
Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni
Published 1997
Australia and Asia
Cultural Transactions
Edited by Maryanne Dever
Published 1997
Asian Department Stores
Edited by Kerrie L. MacPherson
Published 1998
Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism
Edited by Kosaku Yoshino
Published 1999
CONSUMING ETHNICITY
AND NATIONALISM
Asian Experiences
Edited by
Kosaku Yoshino
First published in the United Kingdom by Curzon Press
Published in 1999 Kosaku Yoshino
Published 2019 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY I 0017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
Editorial matter© 1999 Kosaku Yoshino
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
The responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of the
statements in this book rests with the individual contributors.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Consuming ethnicity and nationalism : Asian experiences / edited by
Kosaku Yoshino.
p. cm. - (ConsumAsiaN book series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8248-2247-1 (cloth : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8248-2248-X
(paper : alk. paper)
I. Nationalism. 2. Nationalism-Asia. 3. Ethnicity.
4. Ethnicity-Asia. I. Yoshino, Kosaku, 1951- II. Series.
JC3 I l.C6455 1999
320.54'095-dc21 99-22772
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-7007-1189-5 (hbk)
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors vii
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Kosaku Yoshino
1 Rethinking theories of nationalism: Japan’s nationalism in a
marketplace perspective 8
Kosaku Yoshino
2 The nation consumed: buying and believing in Sri Lanka 29
Steven Kemper
3 Representing nationality in China: refiguring majority/
minority identities 48
Dru C. Gladney
4 Representing aborigines: modelling Taiwan’s ‘mountain
culture’ 89
Shih-chung Hsieh
5 Peoples under glass: a tale of two museums 111
Laurel Kendall
6 Consuming anthropology: the social sciences and nation-
formation in Malaysia 133
Shamsul A.B.
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CONSUMING ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM
7 Distant Homelands: nation as place in Japanese popular song 158
Christine R. Yano
8 Return to Asia?: Japan in Asian audiovisual markets 177
Koichi Iwabuchi
Index 200
vi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dru C. Gladney is Dean of Academics at the Asia-Pacific Center in
Honolulu, and Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the
University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His books include Muslim Chinese:
Ethnic Nationalism in the People s Republic (Harvard University Press, 2nd
edition, 1996); Ethnic Identity: The Making of a Muslim Minority
Nationality (Harcourt-Brace, 1998); Making Majorities: Constituting the
Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey and the US. (editor,
Stanford University Press, 1998).
Shih-chung Hsieh received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington,
Seattle in 1989. He is a Professor of Anthropology at the National Taiwan
University. His interests include ethnicity, ethnohistory, interpretive
anthropology, ethnography of northern Southeast Asia, Taiwan’s abor-
igines and the Tai-Lue, a Thai-speaking ground in Yunnan, China. He has
published nearly sixty academic pieces in Chinese and English on these
themes.
Koichi Iwabuchi is a doctorate candidate in the Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences, the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His thesis
concerns transnational popular culture in Asia and Japanese cultural
presence in the region. His main publications include ‘Complicit exoticism:
Japan and its other’ (Continuum, 1994), ‘Purposeless globalisation or
idealess Japanisation?: Japanese cultural industries in Asia’ (Culture and
Policy, 1996), and ‘Pure impurity: Japan’s genius for hybridism’ (Communal
and Plural, forthcoming). He previously worked for the Nippon Television
Network (NTV) in Tokyo as a journalist and producer.
Steven Kemper is Professor of Anthropology at Bates College. He took a
Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in anthropology, carrying out fieldwork
on the Buddhist monkhood. Since then he has worked on issues focused on
historical anthropology, in the case of astrology, marriage practices, the
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CONSUMING ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM
updating of the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition, and the advertising
business. His publications include: The Presence of the Past: Chronicles,
Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Cornell University Press, 1991). His
ethnographic interests have spread from South to Southeast Asia.
Laurel Kendall is Curator in Charge of Asian Ethnographic Collections
at the American Museum of Natural History and teaches in the
Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author
of Shamans, Housewives and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean
Ritual Life (University of Hawaii Press, 1985), The Life and Hard Times
of a Korean Shaman: of Tales and the Telling of Tales (University of
Hawaii Press, 1988), and Getting Married in Korea: of Gender, Morality,
and Modernity (University of California Press, 1996) as well as numerous
articles on gender, shamanism, and healing. She is co-editor of several
books including Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern
States of East and Southeast Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 1995). Her
recent work examines ritual as both a lens on social transformation and a
locus of argument about modernity. She is currently writing a book about
changes in the Korean shaman world over the last twenty years. Kendall
received a Ph.D. in anthropology, with distinction, from Columbia
University in 1979.
Shamsul A.B. is Professor of Social Anthropology at Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Bangi. He writes extensively in Malay
and English on politics and culture, with an empirical focus on Southeast
Asia, in particular Malaysia. His best-known book is From British to
Bumiputera Rule (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986)
nominated for the coveted Harry Benda Prize, Association of Asian
Studies USA. Currently, he is working on a book based on his decade
long research on ‘Competing Nations-of-Intent: Identity and Nation
Formation in Malaysia’. At present, he is the Dean of the Faculty of
Social Science and Humanities at UKM.
Christine R. Yano is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is currently at work on a book,
Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, as
well as a project on Japanese songs of World War II.
Kosaku Yoshino is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University
of Tokyo. He took a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. He is the author of Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan:
A Sociological Enquiry (Routledge, 1992) and A Sociology of Cultural
Nationalism (in Japanese, Nagoya University Press, 1997).
viii
PREFACE
There have been two formative moments in the conception of this book.
The first was a meeting with a Malaysian anthropologist, Shamsul A.B.,
at a conference dinner table in Oxford in July 1993. At the Association
of Social Anthropologists’ Decennial Conference, I gave a paper on
discourses on the distinctiveness of Japanese culture and behaviour - a
subject that had long been regarded as considerably important by
students of Japan. Such discourses were so prevalent in Japan that there
was even a specific name for the phenomenon, namely, nihonjinron.
Previously, studies of nihonjinron had centred on ideological ‘produc-
tion’ by elites. My argument was that the relationship of discourses on
Japanese uniqueness to nationalism can better be understood by paying
attention to how such discourses are ‘reproduced’ and ‘consumed’ in
the marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was little scholarly work in
countries other than Japan on phenomena comparable to nihonjinron.
In addition, studies of discourses on national distinctiveness were on
the whole still limited to ‘high culture’ and tended to overlook aspects
of everyday behavioural culture. At the dinner, Shamsul told me the
amazing story that in Malaysia anthropology was so popular that his
department had an average annual enrollment of nearly one thousand
students. He explained to me that anthropological ideas of cultural
differences (as well as similarities) of ethnic groups were popular
because of everyday applications among various sections of the multi-
ethnic society. I am not suggesting simplistically that anthropology in
Malaysia is all about discourses on cultural differences, but his remark
suggested that this was at least one way in which anthropology was
‘consumed’ in the multi-ethnic society of Malaysia.
I began to consider the possibility of a comparative study of how
discourses on cultural differences are ‘consumed’ by members of
society. Studies of discourses on national distinctiveness and, for that
matter, of nationalism were confined to the production of such
IX