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"A fascinating mediation that weaves between the making of leather and the making of a multicultural Japan. Masculinized forms of industrialized tanning intersect with the feminized work of website design and solidarity tourism in efforts to turn 'Discrimination Based on Work and Descent' into imaginations of a world free from racism and built on global solidarity and 'complete liberation.'"
Charles L. Briggs, author of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare
"A product of ingenuity, scrupulous considerations, and ethical commitment, Working Skin suggests, through the analytics of critical multiculturalism and labor, new possibilities of transnational Japanese ethnography as part of the ongoing project of politicizing anthropology for the modern world."
Lisa Yoneyama, author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory
"Working Skin is an extraordinary ethnography on the contemporary politics of the Buraku people in Japan. Hankins narrates the lives and experiences of the Buraku people inescapably entangled with and transformed by global circulations of capital and of the liberal discourse of recognition. This is a must-read for students and scholars interested in global multiculturalism and transnational cultural politics of the disenfranchised."—Miyako Inoue, author of Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: Hailing from Texas
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Labor of Multiculturalism
Part One
Recognizing Buraku Difference
1 • Of Skins and Workers: Producing the Buraku
2 • “Ushimatsu Left for Texas”: Passing the Buraku
Part Two
Choice and Obligation in Contemporary Buraku Politics
3 • Locating the Buraku: A Political Ecology of Pollution
4 • A Sleeping Public: Buraku Politics and the Cultivation of Human Rights
Part Three
International Standards and the Possibilities of Solidarity
5 • Demanding a Standard: Buraku Politics on a Global Stage
6 • Wounded Futures: Prospects of Transnational Solidarity
Conclusion: The Disciplines of Multiculturalism
Epilogue: Texas to Japan, and Back
Notes
References
Index
About the author
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.
Summary
Since the 1980s, arguments for a multicultural Japan have gained considerable currency against an entrenched myth of national homogeneity. This book enters this conversation with an ethnography of Japan's Buraku" people.
Additional text
"An important contribution to the field."
