Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. x, 311 pp. US$80.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-7617-2.
Once embraced with optimistic prospects, post-miracle economies in East Asia are currently facing uncertain futures. This book, edited by Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai and Hai Ren, deals with one of the fundamental questions in the world of the neo-liberal global market: Is globalization an opportunity or challenge? A well-elaborated set of ethnographic chapters of this volume renders much-needed nuanced accounts on how contemporary youth in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan deal with the realities of post-economic miracles in East Asia.
There are three main objectives in this volume. First, the book is “an exploration of how ‘places are made through their connections with each other, not their isolation’” (2). East Asia as a region is captured in terms of “a series of intertwined histories in which ideas—civilization, modernity, development, globalization—have traveled from one place to another and have taken local form while looking at other places as a basis for comparison” (2-3). What the volume tries to reveal is “the resonance across time and space within East Asia” (3).
Second, the volume endeavours to “demonstrate the power of anthropology to trace out the connections between people’s lived experience with larger processes working at the global scale” (3). This is important as “[e]thnography provides us with detailed descriptions of how people in different locations in East Asia experience their everyday realities in the midst of the new possibilities and constraints that the global economy is producing for their lives” (3). What is emphasized here is the methodological as well as empirical foci on people’s everyday life-making challenges.
Third, the book tries to “illuminate the changing calculus of human worth in the production of subjects as both workers and consumers” (3). While globalization often accompanies the “idea of freedom and the promise of self-fulfillment,” also observable in this process is “the cost of greater vulnerability and uncertainty” (3-4). How do the people in East Asia deal with this neo-liberal burden of self-responsibility?
The book has eleven chapters (excluding the introduction). The first three chapters deal with the issue of human engineering. How have “new kinds of spaces, institutional structures, pedagogies, discourses and practices” in this new world generated “new kinds of people” (15)? The volume discusses this by referring to three cases, including China’s newly emerging middle class and its entrepreneurial norms (chapter 1); the Taiwanese obsession with the internationalization of society and its implications for a society in the stage of postindustrial development (chapter 2); and rural migrant workers in Beijing and their everyday struggles without access to adequate health care (chapter 3).
In this conjunction, the next four chapters discuss the issue of affect in contemporary globalized economies. By referring to what Hardt and Negri call affective labour, the importance of social skills to navigate the world of neo-liberal globalization is stressed. This segment of the volume includes the cases on South Korean college students’ new discourses on individual self-development (chapter 4); the attempt of one local university in Taiwan to emphasize happiness and smiles in everyday life on campus (chapter 5); a professional training school in Beijing that provides rural women with necessary skills as domestic workers (chapter 6); and a newly emerging patriotic education program in public schools in Japan (chapter 7).
The final three chapters explore the issue of freedom. This is one of the central neo-liberal dilemmas since “a liberation from structures of the past … are now perceived to constrain individual freedom” (21). More concretely, this freedom problematique is explored by referring to the issue of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace (chapter 8); a newly emerging social realism observable in Japanese TV dramas that questions the very concept of work in Japan (chapter 9); and the issue of economic and political freedom in post-IMF crisis South Korea (chapter 10).
Overall, each case study provides important ethnographic implications of neo-liberal challenges at the level of every day. Capturing neo-liberalism as an underlying framework (or ethos) that drives global market economies, the contributors of the volume skillfully picture life-making processes in contemporary East Asia. The depth and width of their coverage are certainly the book’s strength.
Questions still remain, however. First, while each case is intriguing, are the stories in the volume uniquely regional? Of course, East Asia as a regional economy is dynamic and important. The authors do a good job of addressing the ways in which each economy has been subject to neo-liberal challenges. Also, a neo-liberal ethos has certainly spread to the region, as the book claims. However, it is questionable if the volume successfully documents the ways each economy, society or people interact with each other (or, in their word, resonate) in a unique (or East Asian) fashion as it implies at the onset. Also, the levels of economic and political development in the region are still very diverse, which makes a comparative study challenging, if not impracticable. In this conjunction, another concern lies in the volume’s lack of a concluding chapter. Does the book answer the questions posed at the beginning? Are there any unanswered questions? What would the editors suggest for further study? It would be helpful if the volume concluded with critical self-appraisals of the overall project.
That being the case, Global Futures in East Asia is a notable achievement. The book is methodologically solid and empirically rich. This is a volume to be read by students of international political economy in general as well as those who study East Asia.
Kazuya Fukuoka
Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, USA
pp. 295-297