Duke University Press Log

It's Hello Kitty Month!

2014 is a big year for cultural icon Hello Kitty. She turns forty! Her creators, the Sanrio Corporation, are celebrating with a convention, HelloKittyCon, October 30-November 2; a Hello Kitty Reading Day on October 25; and with a special exibhit at Los Angeles's Japanese American Museum, "Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty," which opens tomorrow, October 11.

The exhibition is co-curated by Christine R. Yano, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa, and author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific. The exhibition examines the colorful history of Hello Kitty and her influence on popular culture. Hello! includes an extensive product survey, with rare and unique items from the Sanrio archives, alongside a selection of innovative contemporary artworks inspired by Hello Kitty and her world. On December 6, Yano will discuss her book at the museum. 

Yano recently made news when she revealed in a preview of the exhibition that Hello Kitty is not a cat. "Hello Kitty is not a cat," Yano told the Los Angeles Times. "She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty." 

Here's a short excerpt from the conclusion of Pink Globalization, in which Yano explains Hello Kitty's staying power and importance. Read the entire introduction here. Happy Anniversary, Hello Kitty!

Yet she is always Kitty, even as her guises and appropriations slip and slide the semantic terrain. Indeed, the hypermeanings of Hello Kitty — that is, Hello Kitty as the uber-cute, the uber-feminine, and, for some, the uber-Japan — are part of her fetishization. She exists in her very excess, playing it multiply, exoterically. Throughout this tumble, she still manages to shock through the strength of her iconicity. The only way in which consumers might be continually shocked by a Hello Kitty vibrator or gun or tattoo is when these items overturn the image of the mouthless cat: the items undermine our expectations set in a mode of overdetermined market meanings. Each shock reconditions us to a new equilibrium of expectations, a newly calibrated zone of meaning. This gives new meaning to the name of several Sanrio stores in the United States, "Sanrio Surprise." Such constant newness and shock cause one female punk admirer to declare, "Hello Kitty is rock ’n’ roll!" By that, she points to the edginess that rock occupied in its infancy, but her statement may have been more prescient than she realized.

Indeed, as Hello Kitty wears hats both corporate and individual with equal panache, Sanrio’s cat shares the stage with many pop culture expressions who have moved from the margins to the center. Hello Kitty and the pink globalization she leads may be rock and roll to some, but she is inevitably, unabashedly, irreverently, celebratory Japanese Pop. Pure product, her logo appears seemingly everywhere. Look through the Hello Kitty lens — literally and figuratively — and every point of light transforms into Kitty. This is the wow factor, achieved simply as a low-tech wink that is both artful and artless. Moreover, as pop, she provides the ultimate shifting commercial wink upon ourselves. That wink of Japan’s mouthless cat provides important lessons on the politics, pleasures, and aesthetics of foreign-as-familiar commodity play in this age of global desirings.

Excerpt Copyright Duke University Press, 2013.

The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu

On July 24th, 1911, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition team followed an eleven year old boy to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The expedition sensationalized the area and opened the floodgates of tourism in Peru. Today, tourists, adventurers, and academic enthusiasts from all over the world still flock to Machu Picchu. In honor of this wonder, sample several articles from two journals, Ethnohistory and Hispanic American History Review.

In “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science: Huaquero Vision and the Yale Peruvian Expedition to Machu Picchu, 1911, 1912, and 1914–15,” Amy Cox Hall delves deeper into the rediscovery of Machu Picchu. She examines the practices and collecting technologies of the expedition to suggest that the objects accumulated as well as the practices used in accumulating helped fashion Machu Picchu into a “lost city” that was “scientifically discovered” by Bingham. Read an excerpt:

Although popular myth associates Hiram Bingham and his global unveiling of Machu Picchu in 1911 with archaeology, Bingham was trained as a historian and “had little interest in stratigraphy” or other methodologies associated with modern archaeological research. Instead, what was practiced on the three forays of the Yale Peruvian Expedition (YPE) to Machu Picchu is better characterized as a late antiquarianism-inspired collecting spree—or, less generously, strategic “grave robbing."

In this article I suggest that the expedition’s practices and technologies helped mythologize Machu Picchu into a “lost city.” ̈ It was initially imagined by Bingham as the lost Inca city of Vilcapampa, and the expedition team’s collecting practices and the frame of science, as well as the types of artifacts collected, helped materialize Machu Picchu as both a vestige of the Inca race and a “scientific discovery.” The collecting practices combined prospecting with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on those objects that might contribute to the accumulation of its knowledge. Rather than representing a nation’s or empire’s sovereign claim over a territory and its history, the expedition relied on the universal virtue and sovereignty of science to make its objects collectible.

Read more of “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science” here.

In “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail,” Keely Maxwell explores how tourism has shaped Latin America by constructing touristic landscapes and impacting environmental problem solving. He utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Read an excerpt:

Thousands of kilometers of former Inca roads span the Andes. One 40-kilometer section has become a new type of Andean pathway, a tourist trail hiked by 54,000 foreign visitors in 2008 alone. Tourism has emerged as a potent political economic force in twentieth-century Latin America, with concomitant environmental impacts. Yet despite the importance of tourism in the region, there are few scholarly investigations of its history, particularly its environmental history. Research has centered on how tourism developed as a leisure activity linked to modernity and capitalist industrialization, on the social construction of tourism destinations, and on social relations of hosts to guests. In Latin America, tourism histories have focused geographically on the Caribbean and Mexico and thematically on “sun and sand” or on cultural heritage tourism. The Inca Trail is part of the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, created in 1981 and designated a World Heritage Site for natural and cultural heritage in 1983. It is a premiere tourist destination and the center of controversy over environmental impacts, and so it provides a critical case for examining the environmental history of Latin American tourism.

Read more of “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail” here.

The Little Veins of Central America by Deborah T. Levenson

Today's guest post is by Deborah T. Levenson, Professor of History at Boston College, author of Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader. She calls for us to listen to the stories of the undocumented Central American children appearing on the U.S. border.

That tens of thousands of children cross the border from Mexico to the United States without documents presents immediate challenges to all of us. They are coming primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries in which not only is unemployment high, and employment very poorly paid, but mere survival—much less a life beyond mere survival—is at stake.  In the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, 70% of the population under age 5 is so malnourished as to stunt growth, and in all these countries violence from gangs and adult mafias is lethal, everyday.

Many of us might agree that nations should take care of "their own"—let’s not hold our breath—and that US bears much of the responsibility for crisis. Its policies have undermined local peasant agriculture and national industry, contributed to the sharp decrease in social programs, and supported military regimes that have modeled the behavior prevalent in gangs. These are vital questions.

However, given the sharp polemics over what to do with these children right now, I want instead to give some face to who “they” are.  I have spent years of researching and writing about youth in Guatemala, and with reference to Central American youth in general, and I want to suggest how the young fit into this schema of high levels of poverty and violence that generates flight, a noun that fails to capture children’s motives and identities.  

For generations, poor people of Central America—as in other places—have depended on the pooling of incomes of family members to guarantee one pot large enough for all.  Central American children have long been part of this familial wage. They have worked in peasant agriculture and as seasonal harvesters. The worse the economic crisis gets, and the less subsistence that is available in their regions, and the farther they go: from the countryside to the city; from country to country; from Central America to Mexico to the USA. For the most part, the Central American youth I have met in Massachusetts are here to remain vital to that traditional family wage economy and to retain a place that gives them esteem and meaning.  A 14 year old from Honduras lives in a crowded apartment in Chelsea and shovels snow in the winter and cleans yards in the spring to send money home for his mother’s expensive heart medicine.  A teenager delivers newspapers in Salem to provide for her siblings in Guatemala.  Many youth—of course not all—leave home to protect home. This is one of the oldest immigrant stories, in US history, a heroic and true one. Befriend a Central American youth and you might hear one.

 You might hear another true story, one about gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha  (MS-13). Most reports indicate that the current increase in immigration of unaccompanied minors is a reaction to the growth of gang violence. Yes, youth are running from gang violence, and, it need be underscored that by leaving, they are also resisting forced conversion into being violent themselves. MS-13 operates in a simple and seemingly airtight manner in which extreme violence plays a pivot role. You join the gangs and get shoved into a life that relies on hurting other people to earn money and prestige; one acquires points for murdering and thus moves up in the ranks. If you are rebuff the gang, you face punishment by death or, if that not, an impossible dilemma.  At 13 years of age, a Guatemalan named Edgar Chocoy refused to join MS-13, which “transmuted” his death sentence into the payment of  “tax” so exorbitant that he would have had to resort to serious crime to pay. He refused to do that as well, and he left the country, fast.  He made it to Los Angeles where he was picked up and deported back to Guatemala after a judge denied his plea that MS-13 would kill him on his return. Edgar’s stance against the gangs was essentially a moral one and he paid a high price for it. Two weeks after he was deported, MS-13 murdered him.

Policy toward unaccompanied children, many of whom have challenged the fatal dynamics of gang control, as Edgar did, or who have “resolved” (personally and successfully responded to) their home nation’s health care crisis in their small way by buying medicines that otherwise would not be supplied, need be based on respecting these youth, who stand for life and against despondency. 

Fernando, the Peruvian Neymar by Orin Starn

Our final World Cup guest post is by Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods and co-editor of The Peru Reader, as well as series editor for The Latin America Readers and The World Readers. He is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

I’ve  watched the World Cup from a shantytown in desert Peru.  

I’m here doing intensive ethnographic research—well, actually just hanging out—with my two-year old, Lucien. We’re living with a family I’ve known for almost thirty years. Back when I arrived in their village as a young anthropologist, the Córdovas lived in a mud farmhouse up in the Andes. They later followed the great Peruvian migrant trail, a million Joads, down to the big coastal cites. Their hot sandy slum is just a circle removed from hell, at least by regulation American standards. It’s a place of burning garbage piles and swirling dust storms where turkey buzzards, rats and scabrous dogs everywhere patrol for scraps. Life is still much better for the Córdovas. Now they live in a tin-rooved shanty with real matresses, a gas stove, running water, electricity, and internet pirated from a relative next door. There’s also a television that grabs the World Cup with only some good old-fashioned squiggly static.  I’ve found caring for a two-year old here to be sport in itself without the changing table, diaper wipes, and the Babies-R-Us rest, and an extreme one at that. But Lucien is a celebrity with his little blonde curls in a universe of black straight hair. And he gets passed around between houses and relatives in this world where people do not shut themselves off from each other as we so often do in the United States. 

Few here care all that much about the World Cup, contrary to the stereotype of a soccer-crazed subcontinent. Peru hasn’t made it to the World Cups for two decades. You see high shantytown skills in the fulbito, or mini-football,  played in the concrete schoolyard and sandy streets.  But poverty, league corruption, and bad facilities have kept the country from developing any real top-flight players since Teofilo Cubillas, the graceful Afro-Peruvian star who scored eight World Cup goals. Nor is Peru really much of a sports culture. Its genius lies in music, the arts, history, and, now food, with three Peruvian chefs ranked among the world’s top twenty. And then there’s also the gift and curse of Peru’s spectacular outsized geography of tropical jungles, Saharan deserts, and Himalayan peaks.

That doesn’t mean that soccer doesn’t matter. Consider the Neymar haircut of Fernando, a Córdova nephew:

 

                                                 

Fernando wanted to dye the floppy top blonde for the full Neymar effect.  “But my parents wouldn’t let me.”   He’s still only ten. He’d had the straight line cut of Daddy Yankee, the reggaeton superstar, the year before:

 

Now, Fernando says, four or five other boys in his fifth grade class have also gone Neymar. A  little Peruvian boy with the doo of a Nuyorican music idol and now the fallen Brazilian soccer superstar?  Hair has gone global like everything else.  

I ask Fernando why he likes Neymar. “I saw him in some games. He’s fatal, great – he always makes his team win.”   It’s television and the Internet, of course, that led Fernando to Neymar, the great enablers of global celebrity and sports circuits. “I found his pictures on Google. My Dad showed the barber on his phone.”

Hair, as the old school anthropologists liked to remind us, can stand for many things. Status: the Manchu queue and Sun King’s curly wigs. Rebellion: Cromwell’s roundheads, the Rasta’s dreadlocks, and the punk’s mohawk. Religion: the monk’s tonsure and Sikh’s uncut turbanned hair. And even, by its absence, the darkest human suffering,  as in the chemotherapy patient’s baldness or the concentration camp prisoner’s shaved head. Hair may be the most flexible and polysemous sign in the cabinet of body politics.

But for Fernando, hair is as much as anything about idol worship, the little boy’s eternal copycat desire to be like the mythical Olympians.  He was rooting for Brazil, but mostly for Neymar, though he didn’t seem too distraught about his hero’s injury. The day after, he came to show me this meme on his cousin’s laptop.  It had gone viral in Latin America:

 

The rhyme that makes the meme funny, at least to non-Brazilian fans, only works in Spanish—between ardilla, squirrel, and rodilla, knee. 

Zuñiga asks, “Neymar, did you see the squirrel?” 

“What squirrel?,” Neymar replies.

“The squirrel,” Zuñiga says, “that’s kicking you in the back.”

Fernando didn’t seem too stricken by Brazil’s black day against Germany. He got bored halfway, going out to ride his skateboard on a cracked chunk of sidewalk.

There’s little pan-Latin American solidarity in football fandom. National allegiances trump continental ones; the global south remains a term more for postcolonial academics than a felt sentiment here.  Brazilians have something the reputation of the old ugly Americans here, the arrogant tourists.  Argentina seems very far away, and it has treated its Peruvian immigrants poorly—maids and construction workers. There was a sprinkling of Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and even Dutch supporters among the Córdova clan, though no one was going to lose any sleep over the results:

 

One cousin, Cristina, did say she felt sorry for the Brazilians, a touch of human kindness.

Fernando’s sister, Made, 11, is a Messi fan, rooting for Argentina.  She was the secret weapon for her the sixth grade team at the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes school. Her coach would bring her in to play right wing when the team had to have a goal.  The other coaches complained that having a girl violated school rules, however, and Made didn’t like some of the boys shouting insults at her either. In Peru’s brand of soccer sexism, boys play soccer, and girls, if they play sports at all, play volleyball (and, it should be noted, the Peruvian women’s volleyball team took home the silver medal in the 1988 Olympics in a great underdog story of modern sports).  Made doesn’t play anymore, though with her gold-studded flatbill hat and cool funky look she’s not heading for Barbieland either.

 

I ask Fernando how long he’ll keep his Neymar cut. He’s not sure. Until, smiles his father Yonny, something new comes along from the  “fábrica de los suenos—the dream factory,” the shining online world of myth and fantasy by the gigabyte.

It seems to me enough worth recording the moment to snap one last picture of Fernando outside the house.

He holds his ball in his own little World Cup fold in time.

 

 

NYU Scandal Casts Light on Treatment of Workers in United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates has a long tradition of bringing in workers from other countries, particularly for construction jobs. Many come from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, among other countries. Some stay only until their job is done and send most of their wages back to their families in their home countries. Others bring their families with them and remain for generations. None of these immigrants, regardless of the length of their stay, are able to attain citizenship in the UAE, even though they now make up 85% of the population.

 

Workers' dormitory in Dubai. Photo by Neha Vora.

Recently, the New York Times investigated the treatment of those workers in the construction of NYU’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, and found that they live and work in shockingly poor conditions. Despite the labor protections set forth by NYU to their contractors in Abu Dhabi, many of these workers work 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, and can live with up to 14 other men in a room.  

 

The UAE’s disregard for the rights of its non-citizens is not new. In Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai’s Indian-dominated downtown to explore the lives of these “temporary guest workers”, who have flooded into the UAE since the 1970s. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, these workers are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. Vora notes, “Certain expatriates are welcomed into the UAE and governed through technologies and rhetorics of a free and open market that purportedly allows anyone to succeed if they perform neoliberal self-enterprising subjectivities, while others are deemed insignificant and invisible to the fabric of the city-state. ...Those who constitute exceptions to citizenship, like Indians in Dubai, are, by virtue of their exclusion, necessary to defining the parameters of citizenship and the legitimacy of the state. That is to say, their everyday practices, performances, and rhetorics actually prop up the citizen-noncitizen divide and the authoritarian patrimonial governance system through which they are regulated as outsiders.”

Interested in learning more? Impossible Citizens provides great information about the history of guest workers in the UAE. Check out the introduction here.

Will Indian Elections Lead to Change in Culture of Corruption and Red Tape?

Although the votes are still being counted, India's long-ruling Congress party has conceded the national elections to the BJP. Many voters gave frustration with corruption as their reason for voting for the clean sweep. Young Indians in particular are looking to new leadership to develop their economy.

Akhil Gupta opens his recent book Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India with this question: "Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty? Why do regimes whose legitimacy depends upon bettering the lives of the poor continue to allow anywhere from 250 million to 427 million to live below the poverty line?" He argues that red tape and corruption are a form of violence against the poor, causing millions of deaths. 

Although the poor in India may not wield economic power, they have long been considered an important group for politicians to court. But this year's elections brought a larger turnout from urban voters than in the past. To many, the young urban Indian working in a tech company is the sign of the future, but Gupta counsels against forgetting about the importance of agriculture to the Indian economy: "Agriculture has recorded the slowest growth rates of teh secotrs in the Indian economy. Agriculture is the only place where the vast majority of the unemployed and underemployed population can find employment in the short and medium term, but that will not happen if there is slow growth in this sector." Gupta also cautions against rising inequality: "It is not just the widening economic distance created by the conjunction of class and sectoral differences that is of concern. Equally important is the fact that the lives and experiences of many people who are part of the new global economy are increasingly cut off from those the urban, and especially, rural poor. For most of the urban middle-class there is no possibility of understanding, let along sympathinzing, with the struggles faced by poor people."

The new government under Narendra Modi must adopt policies that aid all Indians, or they may find themselves out of office in a few years. Unlike in the U.S., Indians on average vote half their politicians out of office at each election. 

Read more of Red Tape for great background to today's election news. Check out the introduction here. 

Q&A with Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan is is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her new book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States, is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform. 

First of all, can you give a brief description of trafficking into forced labor? Why don’t trafficked persons simply leave—as many migrant laborers do—when working conditions get really bad? Why can’t they just walk away?

 I see trafficking into forced labor as one end of a continuum of everyday forms of migrant labor exploitation. Some trafficking cases are clearly at one end of the continuum. Guards with guns and locks on doors are obvious signs of violent coercion, but most of the workers I met were not physically restrained. I met many workers who did not walk out unlocked doors—for example, domestic workers who did not leave while their abusers were at work. What kept them there? A lot of things: promises of payment, language barriers, lies about corrupt police, and fears about unknown dangers in the United States. And to what would they be running? Abusive employers take their passports, withhold payment, and restrict their contact with the outside world. Without any identification, money, contacts—or even seasonally appropriate clothes—workers in situations of forced labor feel isolated and alone.

 What I learned speaking with men and women who were in forced labor in low-wage labor sectors is that everyone perceives exploitation differently. Simply put, what scares some does not scare others. That’s where individual perception of risk and harm comes in. Every individual experiences coercion subjectively. This subjectivity of coercion explains, in part, why the U.S. government has issued so few trafficking visas (T visas). Attorneys have to prove coercion—they have to explain why their clients did not walk out unlocked doors.

 In the book you mention that trafficked persons sometimes labor side-by-side with other migrant laborers. How do you tell the difference between a migrant worker who has been trafficked into forced labor and a migrant worker in a low-wage, exploitative job? In other words, what are the telltale signs of extreme labor exploitation v. run-of-the-mill exploitation?

Trafficking happens in work sites where exploitation of migrants is commonplace. Extreme abuse can blend into everyday forms of abuse. Wage theft—not paying overtime, or agreed-upon wages—for example is rampant in low-wage labor sectors. Migrant workers, especially those new to the United States with limited English and little knowledge of their rights, expect and accept a certain degree of exploitation. This book looks at the tipping point between everyday forms of exploitation, and abuse that goes too far. What is that tipping point? Neighbors and co-workers should question why, for example, domestic workers never seem to leave their employers’ house, or why farmworkers never go into town. Peer outreach workers describe meeting fellow workers who are fearful of attending any of their organizations’ events or meetings. This is a sure sign that these workers' employers are monitoring them—even in their downtime.

The book’s focus is on rebuilding a life in the United States after forced labor. Yet, as the reader might expect, you also have a lot to say about their experiences during their time in forced labor. How does their time in forced labor affect them?

Remarkably, the women and men I met are emphatic that their time in forced labor has changed them—but does not stop them. Often they are angry about the time and money that their abusers stole from them. Some have nightmares and flashbacks. But they are clear that they look ahead, not behind them.

You emphasize that formerly trafficked persons generally live in poverty. How is this different from other new migrants who live in low-income neighborhoods and work in low-wage jobs?

Life Interrupted’s main focus is on how trafficked persons rebuild their lives. They struggle. They not only have to deal with traumatic events of the past, but they also enter the ranks of the working poor. They do so alone, without family or friends to offer support. This is what differentiates them from other low-wage migrants: trafficked persons resettle on their own, not as part of a larger community. Those who were exploited by somebody from their home country often strategically avoid neighborhoods and jobs with co-ethnics. It can be dangerous to live in a community where your abuser, or his or her associates, may still be at-large. And, most trafficked persons do not even know a single other person who was trafficked, so they do not have the opportunity to learn from others who have been through similar experiences.

In what ways are men and women's experiences in forced labor different?

They aren’t. What has been different is the level of media and policy attention on women's exploitation in the sex sector. In fact in many instances “trafficking” has been used interchangeably with “sex trafficking.” The book introduces women who were brutally exploited in the sex sector. But we also meet many other women and men who also were brutally exploited in farm work, factory work, domestic work and restaurant work. It is just not possible to measure exploitation or to posit that exploitation in one labor sector is worse than in another.

This conflation of trafficking with sex trafficking helps explain why so few trafficking visas have been issued to date. Since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was passed in 2000, fewer than 4000 persons have been awarded trafficking visas. The legislation allows for 5000 visas to be issued every year. This means we could have issued 65,000 visas by now. Why have so few been issued? I argue that the number remains low because law enforcement has focused its efforts on finding exploited workers in only one sector: the sex sector. In the process, many women who are not trafficked are arrested and deported if they are undocumented. These policies have driven sex workers to work underground, rendering already vulnerable workers even more vulnerable. Clearly we could be doing more to find and protect exploited workers across low-wage labor sectors, without harming those who choose to work in the sex sector.

What can be done to reduce the incidence of forced labor in the United States? What is the best strategy?

Trafficking into forced labor is preventable. Holding international temporary labor recruiters and employers accountable is a first step. They must guarantee that their workers’ labor contracts are fair. These contracts should be free of excessive (and bogus) recruiting fees and provide decent wages and overtime pay. Also, a worker’s visa status should not be tied to one employer. If a migrant worker is being exploited (or witnesses coworkers or neighbors being exploited) he or she needs to feel safe to report abuse. I never met a trafficked person who knew about the T visa while they were in forced labor. Rather, they only find out about the TVPA and the protections it offers after they exit forced labor. Most undocumented migrants — and temporary workers (guest workers) — assume that if they come forward to report any kind of abuse they risk arrest and deportation.

At the end of Life Interrupted I outline some basic policy steps to prevent trafficking such as passing immigration reform, monitoring worker recruitment programs, closing the Fair Labor Standard Act (fsla) loophole that excludes some agricultural workers and care workers in private homes, supporting domestic workers’ bill of rights introduced in state legislatures, ending immunity for diplomats who abuse workers in their employ,and rescinding state- and local-level law enforcement policies.

 So immigration reform is intimately tied up with preventing trafficking?

 The U.S. government’s policies on trafficking are nothing short of schizophrenic. Without meaningful immigration reform that protects workers in all labor sectors from abuse, threat, and retaliation, trafficking into forced labor will continue. At the same time that abuse is rampant and unfettered in certain industries (such as in agriculture), migrants also face racial profiling in their communities. Policies and programs that deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law, along with Arizona-style, state-level anti-immigrant legislation, keep migrants from reporting all kinds of crimes and abuse in their neighborhoods and worksites.

 Trafficking into forced labor is an extreme version of what happens in sites where low-wage migrants work every day. The 4000 T visas issued thus far are clearly a drop in the bucket. These are the exceptions to an otherwise punitive immigration regime. It is a fiction to assert that we are truly fighting trafficking when 11 million individuals live and work in the shadows. If we are serious about fighting trafficking, we would end policies that silence migrants. Employers know they can exploit with impunity. I think the shockingly low number of T visas says it all. On one hand law enforcement tries to reach out to the most extremely exploited workers, while, on the other, they simultaneously look for undocumented migrants. One set of polices undoes the other. Finding more workers in situations of forced labor means offering protections—not handcuffs.

Celebrate Mardi Gras with our Journals

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival" by Richard Rambuss in boundary 2 (27:2)

Read an excerpt:

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.

 

"Mardi Gras Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City" by Kevin Markwell in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (8:1-2)

Read an excerpt:

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)

For more of "Mardi Gras Tourism," click here.

 

Don't forget to check out Matt Sakakeeny's new book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans while you're on your Mardi Gras kick!

 

*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.

The Tricycle Taxi Driver by Renato Rosaldo

Please accept my gift, I say.

In Lagawe I own the only
tricyle taxi, orange, yellow, red,
fresh paint, curving lines.

After noon the soldiers arrive breathless,
say an American woman fell
from the precipice near Mungayang.

At dusk they arrive, Ifugaos, a few men,
two women, one carries the baby
of the American woman in a yellow backpack.

I shall be the one.

In a rattan hammock tied to a pole
Ifugao men bring the woman’s body.
The American man shoulders

his five-year-old son,
his walk heavy, shirt soaked,
face streaked with dirt,

his tears behind red eyes,
then he mumbles,
Taxi, and steps toward me.

He places his two sons on the seats,
then sits between them, offers to pay.
I’ve come here to give him a ride.

Please accept my gift, I say.

 

From The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief by Renato Rosaldo.

Q&A with Anne Allison

Anne Allison is Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. Her new book, Precarious Japan, is an ethnography about Japanese experiences of insecurity in the contemporary era of nagging recession, irregular labor, nuclear contamination, and a shrinking overall population with more and more elderly.

What is “precarity” and why is contemporary Japan particularly susceptible to it?

Precarity is a term used by labor scholars and activists to reference precarious employment: working at jobs that are unstable, insecure, and low-paid. For most of history and in most countries around the world today, most workers are precariously employed (if they have jobs at all). But for some countries—like the United States, western Europe, and Japan—the postwar period brought relative stability in employment for a wide swath of both white and blue collar workers. This was true of Japan during its period of high economic growth between the 1960s and 1980s when, establishing itself as a global industrial power, Japan became known for its “miracle” economy. Correlated with high productivity was stability of employment, particularly for male workers who came to expect long term jobs. But, with the bursting of the Bubble economy in the early 1990s that triggered a nagging recession (that Japan has not totally emerged from even today), industry and the government started promoting a shift to more flexible employment: what is called non-regular employment (contract, dispatch, temporary, part-time). Such jobs save companies money and, along with the adoption of neoliberalist policies such as deregulation of industry, the risk of the market has been shifted from employers onto workers. Today, one-third of all workers and one-half of all young workers between the ages of 16 and 24 are irregularly employed. Such precariously employed workers are also called “precariat” (workers in precarious employment). 77% of the precariat are women.

You talk a good deal about the shift from regular to irregular employment, from the idea of “Japan, Inc.” to “liquefied Japan.”  How has this shift changed Japan’s social fabric?

When long term employment was more the norm, the commitment male workers would make to the workplace dovetailed with long term marital ties: getting married and having children. A gendered division of labor—breadwinner male, caregiver female—went hand-in-hand with men working long term jobs at one workplace. This socioeconomic model is sometimes called “Japan, Inc.” for the complicity between the nation-state and business (and between Japan Inc. and the corporate-family system). As jobs have become more irregular, fewer and fewer Japanese are able to afford the kind of lifestyle associated with Japan, Inc.: long term jobs, marriage and kids, high-end consumerism. As jobs become “liquefied,” so does social life more generally. Irregular workers are only half as likely to get married as regular workers, and young people are far less likely to marry and have children than their parents.

How are furītā (perpetual temporary workers) treated by society as a whole?  How do they fit into the overall social landscape?

Furītā is another name for precariat or irregular workers, though it generally is reserved for young people. When the word was first introduced (as part of an ad campaign by Recruit Company, a temporary work agency, in 1989), it had a positive spin: jobs that are “freer” in duty, responsibility, and durability than the long term jobs of the postwar generation. But after the Bubble burst in 1991 and irregular employment became more fact than choice for a lot of young workers, the term has taken on a different connotation. While furītā are not always blamed for the precarity of their jobs and lives, they still carry the social stigma of lacking permanent employment (and the status that regular employment brings with it). This is also gendered for while 77% of the precariat are women, men increasingly are at risk of never being able to secure permanent employment as well. Women will say they would never marry a furītā for the social marginality this would confer on them and irregular male workers are only half as likely to marry as regular workers.

How does the  precarity/poverty of Japan differ from that of the US?

Both the U.S. and Japan share high rates of poverty (16.2% in Japan which rises to 20% for the elderly and for children) as well as low rates of national expenditures for social welfare. In both countries as well, the rate of socioeconomic disparity is rising rapidly. But there are many differences in precarity/poverty between the two countries. Jobs have always been much more diverse in the US and switching jobs, even multiple times, is not that unusual for Americans. But in Japan, the postwar norm was a lifelong job (for men) which makes the shift towards more flexible/irregular employment today feel like a radical transformation. The same is true of the family model. In Japan, only 2% of children are born out of wedlock so birth and (heterosexual) marriage are closely linked. Family is the foundational social unit in Japan; it has also been the de facto welfare unit. So, whether one is married or not, or has children or not, is extremely important to how one is identified and how/if one has a safety net. There are segments of the population for whom this is true in the U.S. as well, of course, but there is also much more diversity and heterogeneity in living/birthing arrangements here. Also, while volunteerism is rising in Japan (and much occurred in response to the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 11th, 2011), there is more generally in the U.S., I would say. So, being without a family or job leaves one particularly susceptible to social precarity in Japan: a fact reflected in such phenomena as “lonely death” where the elderly, living alone, die alone.

How has the rise of precarity changed the role of politics and activism?

As the general public has become more aware—and concerned—about rising poverty, un(der)employment, and social disparity, the issue of precarity has been taken up by politicians and activists. In 2009, the DJP party ousted the long-standing LDP party on a campaign that actively addressed this issue. The LDP has now returned to office and is less aggressive in dealing with irregular employment, yet local governments across the country (such as in Niigata prefecture and Niigata city) expend considerable resources and energy to youth assistance/training/and job support. Activists have become very committed to working for the rights and benefit of the precariat. There are MayDay events organized around precarity and democracy, furītā unions, campaigns to activate for better working conditions and policies for dispatch workers, and a number of other initiatives/activities meant to raise consciousness and support for hikikomori (social withdraws), NEET (not-in-education, employment, or training), those susceptible to committing suicide (the suicide rate rose suddenly in 1998 to about 33,000/year—a rate that has stayed high ever since), the homeless, and the un(der)employed.

 

What has led to the existential loss of the “home” and how does that connect with the sense of hopelessness?

Family was once much more a matter of patrilineage with multigenerations living together. Since the end of the Second World War, the trend towards the nuclear family living on its own with a reduced number of children occurred quickly (particularly in the cities where urbanization was another immediate trend). The familial norm became a man who held a long term job and was the breadwinner, a woman who tended to children and was a housewife, and two children who were expected to work hard at school and grow up to reproduce the same type of family. Home meant a family home, inhabited by a nuclear family, with everyone working hard in their assigned social roles; the desire to own one's own home and fill it with the electronic appliances marking Japan's new rise of a consumer culture was called “my-homeism.” This type of family and home, connected to the corporate capitalism of postwar Japan (what I call in my book “the family corporate system”), has begun to unravel with the bursting of the Bubble in 1991 and the trend towards precaritization of work and life. Being unable to have a long term job, unable to own one's own home, unable to get married and have children—all of this gets associated with a loss, both real and figurative, of “home” in Japan today. This also provokes a sense of hopelessness.

What is the connection between loneliness and hopelessness? 

When hope is defined by stability of job, stability of marriage and home, and stability of income to pay for a middle class consumer lifestyle, then those who lack all this can easily feel hopeless. Being stranded from marriage and a job also deprive one of what has been a primary source of status, identity, and connection with others. Without these social ties, people often get isolated. Currently one-third of all Japanese live alone. This can be by choice, but there is also a phenomenon in Japan of “lonely death” —when the bodies of people who lived, then died, alone are discovered days, sometimes weeks after death. In a study done by NHK (the national broadcasting system) on lonely death, they discovered that even families won’t claim the bodies sometimes of those they feel have been stranded from them for too long or have changed their name and can’t be part of the family register. Loneliness, in general, seems to be a big social problem because the ways of connecting to others are so limited (family, workplace, school). This is one of the issues I explore in the book—as well as social practices that are emerging that are generating new ways for people to connect with others. The word I kept hearing while doing fieldwork was ibasho—which means feeling at home—but the way I more often heard it expressed was from people who told me that “ibasho ga nai” (I don’t feel at home anywhere; or I don’t feel I have a home). But one does see efforts made to generate new ibasho all over the place; new drop-in centers where everyone/anyone can find an ibasho; places for hikikomori (social withdrawees) to get out of their parent’s homes where they live isolated in a room; stop-suicide events where those who feel hopeless about life itself can find others who feel the same thereby possibly finding a way to avoid committing suicide themselves.

What was the most powerful story you heard regarding precarity while you were doing your field work?

My book is filled with stories about precarity that I acquired in the course of doing fieldwork. All, to me, are moving. One of the most powerful is about a man, now in his late 30’s, who was bullied, isolated, and psychologically abused growing up. He was a wrist-cutter and hikikomori at one point. But, through reading books, he came to the understanding that he was only a “loser” by a certain definition of worthiness—high academic accomplishment, success on the job market, upwardly mobile. But he realized that he had value and worthiness of a different kind. Becoming a social worker, he started working with precariat, particularly hikikomori. This is what he does today; he has just edited the book of a middle-aged man who has lived homeless and unemployed for years in what is now called a new phenomenon of SNEP (solitary non-employed person) and, with his own NPO, he set up a shop/cafe/work center in Niigata-city that services elderly and hikikomori. He also produced a film where he employed three hikikomori to do all the work—this was his agenda, to get hikikomori to do something productive. His name is Takayuki Suzuki and his story is one of the most powerful I encountered.

Has the earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima disaster of 2011 changed the nature of precarity in Japan?

Yes and no. The triple disaster produced new forms of precarity: nuclear contamination, death and destruction for those living in the area, evacuation and displacement for over 300,000 Japanese, incredible costs for clean-up and reconstruction. The national economy has also been affected, as has the livelihood of so many farmers and fishermen in Tohoku; and the issue of nuclear power also hovers over the country. Today only two of the original 54 nuclear reactors have been restarted. But Japan once relied on nuclear reactors for 30% of its power; whether or not it can remain an industrial power without rekindling the nuclear industry or whether or not it can find sufficient alternatives are pressing issues today. The public sentiment is overwhelmingly against the nuclear industry. There are also older forms of precarity that still exist. These have become more obvious in the wake of 3.11; the original fifty workers who went into the Daiichi nuclear plant and almost all those subsequently working to quell the effects of the meltdown are precariat. And precarity—as in being insecure in both employment and life—came to be seen as a category that stretched to include all Japanese in the immediate wake of 3.11 when everyone was susceptible to the after-shocks of the earthquake and the unknown dangers of nuclear contamination.

 This may seem to some like a relentlessly bleak book. Are there signs of hope for the Japanese precariat going forward?

 I don’t see, nor intended for the book to be seen as relentlessly bleak. That many people are facing precarity in their lives today is true—and as true of Japan as everywhere around the world as we can see from recent protests (for/by precariat) in Egypt, Brazil, Turkey, Spain. But that precarity—of multiple kinds—is an issue getting public recognition is hopeful. People are saying they are not satisfied with living a life that feels too insecure, too lonely, too deathlike, too demeaned. And they are coming up with new ways of being in the world beyond the old ways that aren’t really working that well anymore. I see this as very hopeful.