ASIAN STUDIES CENTER FACULTY

 

 

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Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

Kinship in Action: Self and Group

Kinship has made a comeback in teaching. In addition, kinship studies have moved away from the minutiae of kin terminological systems and the "kinship algebra" often associated with these, to the broader analysis of processes, historical changes, and fundamental cultural meanings in which kin relationships are implicated. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart bring together a number of interests and concerns in order to provide pointers for students, as well as scholars, in this field of study. Prentice Hall, 2011. See Pearson Higher Ed to purchase.

Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New Guinea Perspectives

In this compelling new book, Andrew Strathern and Pamela J Stewart argue that in communities where violence must be paid for through compensation, violet conflict can be contained. With primary references to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and comparisons to cases from Africa, Pakistan, and other arenas of tribal social formations, the Authors explor how rituals such as wealth disbursement, oath taking, sacrifice, and formal apologies are often used as a means of averting or transcending acts of revenge after violence. University of Queensland Press, 2011. See www.uqp.com.au to order.

Ann Jannetta, Professor Emerita of History wins the 2009 John Whitney Hall Book Prize

Congratulations to Professor Emerita of History Ann Jannetta upon winning the 2009 John Whitney Hall Book Prize of the Northeast Asian Council, Association of Asian Studies, for her recent publication The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2007).

 

 

 

Updated October 4, 2012