Nancy Rosenberger

Japanese sense of self

List figures List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction Nancy Rosenberger 2. Japanese preschools and the pedagogy of selfhood Joseph Tobin 3. Multiple selves: the aesthetics and politics of artisanal identities Dorinne Kondo 4. The tree in summer, the tree in winter: movement of self in Japan Nancy Rosenberger 5. Identification of the self in relation to the environment Augustin Berque 6. Self in Japanese culture Takie Lebra 7. The reference of other orientation Tamkami Kuwayama 8. Kehjime: how indexing self and social life defines its organisation Jane Bachnik Index.

The Double Binds of Getting Food among the Poor in Rural Oregon

Abstract An in-depth ethnographic study of low-income rural residents in Oregon shows that they are caught in double binds as their ways of life and their incomes increasingly do not fit with the neoliberal economic order, creating tensions in the ways in which they can fulfill their food needs. The study uses Bourdieus definition of a double bind as a set of inculcated habits that do not match the changing field in social, economic and political ways, and thus people are not able to live effectively. In this study, we found that interviewees, many of whom have experienced economic and social decline in their lives, exhibit attempts to keep up and strategies particular to their situation that do not fit easily into the neoliberal economy. Analysis of the data shows several important double binds: eating habits that do not fit their nutritional knowledge or their food income; strategizing for material cultural capital on incomes that can ill afford it; use of social networks to survive; and contradictory perceptions of independence set against need for government assistance.

Patriotic Appetites and Gnawing Hungers: Food and the Paradox of Nation-building in Uzbekistan

Abstract Nations reverberate with the conundrums of unity and difference. Studies of food provide an effective way to understand this paradox as food indexes both rituals of the nation as national cuisine yet links with myriad and variable performances as it is grown, cooked and eaten. National foods enhance ethnic nationality in newly independent, increasingly authoritarian Uzbekistan where the focus is on national cuisine in part because of deprivation, rather than abundance. National cuisine is vulnerable to differences within a nation, because in the shared and embodied practices surrounding food, people make emotion-based evaluations of the nation-state. Uzbek governmental policies result in poverty, limited food production, little global food, and repression of pure Islamic practices, regions, and minority ethnic groups.

Menopause as a symbol of anomaly: The case of Japanese women

Doctors tell Japanese women that the reason for the intensity of their menopausal symptoms is isolation and leisure. Still identified with the home, but urged to do hobbies or part‐time jobs that do not give her full membership in society, the middle‐aged woman is in an anomalous position in the social structure. She uses menopause as a catchall symbol for psychological and physical complaints. Cosmopolitan doctors encourage the idea of psychological causation of menopause by identifying menopausal symptoms with the autonomic nervous system. Chinese medicine offers a traditional physical‐psychological approach.

Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood

ABSTRACT This analysis of Japanese organic farmers in their 30s and 40s gains insight from Lyng’s framework of ‘edgework’—a transgression of life/death boundaries by sports practitioners. Young farmers emerged in qualitative fieldwork as ‘occupational edge-workers,’ crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, and economic/moral. They manage risks and navigate uncertainties of natural forces, traditional village practices, neoliberal pressures to be entrepreneurial in the market, and judgment of older, purer organic farmers. With goals of living in harmony with nature, intimate others, and community, they create lifestyles in marginal rural localities by which they can make selves that are alternative to the neoliberal narrative, yet act as entrepreneurial subjects that risk bringing their version of morality to the market, via delicious, organic food sold to self-creating consumers. Claiming normality and spurning ideas of organic as a movement, their alterity is partial and practical as they exploit the potentials of this risky border zone. Conducted in 2012 and 2014, this research contributes to investigating alternative lifestyles in Japan, exploring the changing nature of alternative food movements in the neoliberal era, and understanding active agency for self and the environment in the neoliberal situation of entrepreneurial subjectivities, edgy self-making, and historical traditions.