Product Description: How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question in A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries by exploring “meta-framing:” our ever-increasing capability to “step back” from the environment, search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar, and generate “as if” forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision...read more

Product Description: Whether neoliberal, social democratic, state-guided, socialist, or postsocialist, feverish consumerism now characterizes political economies on the global scale. What is the common denominator of these systems that are supposedly so different? How has mass affluence shaped political freedoms, understandings of self, and identity politics? Are political ideologies grounded in human nature?Many rely on capitalism, the industrial revolution, or democratization to answer these questions...read more

Product Description: Written by an experienced teacher and scholar, this book offers university students a handy "how to" guide for interpreting Japanese society and conducting their own research. Stressing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, Brian McVeigh lays out practical and understandable research approaches in a systematic fashion to demonstrate how, with the right conceptual tools and enough bibliographical sources, Japanese society can be productively analyzed from a distance...read more

Product Description: One third of the Japanese female workforce are 'office ladies' and their training takes place in the many women's junior colleges. Office ladies are low-wage, low-status secretaries who have little or no job security.Brian J. McVeigh draws on his experience as a teacher at one such institution to explore the cultural and social processes used to promote 'femininity' in Japanese women...read more

Product Description: Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value,' 'exchange,' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level...read more

In this fresh and original analysis, Brian J. McVeigh confronts both the demonizers and apologists of Japan. He argues persuasively that far from being unique, Japanese nationalism becomes demystified once 'management' and 'mysticism'--the same processes and practices that operate in other national states--are taken into account. Stripping away Orientalist-inspired misconceptions, the author stresses the variety and relative intensity of nationalisms, ranging from economic, ethnic, and educational to cultural, gendered, and religious. He moves beyond state-centered ideologies to explore the linkages between official and popular nationalisms and the complex interplay of ethnocultural, ethnopolitical, and ethnoracial forms of identity. The ambiguity and everydayness of nationalism, McVeigh contends, explain its enduring power. He concludes that modern Japan is imbued with a deeply rooted legacy of 'renovationism' or 'reform nationalism' that accounts for its streamlined state structures, guarded economic nationalism, and highly scrutinized relationship with the rest of the world. Highlighting the pluralism of identity among Japanese, this book will be an invaluable corrective to recent works that glibly proclaim the emergence of 'globalization,' 'internationalization,' and 'convergence.' (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this dismantling of the myth of Japanese "quality education", McVeigh investigates the consequences of what happens when statistical and corporatist forces monopolize the purpose of schooling and the boundary between education and employment is blurred. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Uniforms are not unique to Japan, but their popularity there suggests important linkages: material culture, politico-economic projects, bodily management, and the construction of subjectivity are all connected to the wearing of uniforms...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Brian J. McVeigh uses a unique anthropological approach to step outside flawed stereotypes of Japanese society and really engage in the current debate over the role of bureaucracy in Japanese politics.To many in the West, Japan appears as a paradox: a rational, high-tech economic superpower and yet at the same time a deeply ritualistic and ceremonial society...read more

Product Description: This volume is an examination of the beliefs and practices of Sukyo Mahikari; and investigation of how this movement, as a product of Japanese culture, shares normative discourse with Japanese society; and an examination of how culture constructs mind and belief. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)