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Informationen zum Autor Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination; Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan; and Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club and a coeditor of the journal Cultural Anthropology. Klappentext In an era of irregular labor, nagging recession, nuclear contamination, and a shrinking population, Japan is facing precarious times. How the Japanese experience insecurity in their daily and social lives is the subject of Precarious Japan. Tacking between the structural conditions of socioeconomic life and the ways people are making do, or not, Anne Allison chronicles the loss of home affecting many Japanese, not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense of not belonging. Until the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, lifelong employment and a secure income were within reach of most Japanese men, enabling them to maintain their families in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Now, as fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work, hope turns to hopelessness and security gives way to a pervasive unease. Yet some Japanese are getting by, partly by reconceiving notions of home, family, and togetherness. ""Precarious Japan" is a model of new modes of conceptualizing sociocultural theory. Here the theory is sober, mature, aspirational, hopeful, gracious. It pushes up against the limits of thinking categorically, of thinking that lived phenomena simply, magically, derive their force from the categorical--from identities, borders, inclusions and exclusions, ideals writ large. It will be important to scholars trying to get a better handle on what is going on in the historical present."--Kathleen Stewart, author of "Ordinary Affects" Zusammenfassung Precarious Japany reflects on how the Japanese are experiencing insecurity in the contemporary era of nagging recession! irregular labor! nuclear contamination! and a shrinking overall population with more and more elderly. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments ix 1. Pain of Life 1 2. From Lifelong to Liquid Japan 21 3. Ordinary Refugeeism: Poverty, Precarity, Youth 43 4. Home and Hope 77 5. The Social Body-In Life and Death 122 6. Cultivating Fields From the Edges 166 7. In the Mud 180 Notes 207 References 219 Index 231...
