Writing Selves in Diaspora is a work born out of long-term fieldwork by the author, Sonia Ryang, in Japan and the United States, spanning more than one and a half decades. It offers an unprecedented insight into Korean women's lives and their formation of self in diaspora in Japan and the United States.

This compelling and controversial book places the concept of love in both a social and historical context. Taking an approach in which state formation and vicissitude of power are explicitly taken into account in the discussion of intimacy and love, the author demonstrates that love as idealization and love as sexuality must be kept analytically separate. Chapters include discussions on sexualized rituals and fertility festivals, the murder case of Abe Sada, pure love in Miko and Mako’s tragedy and the 1990s phenomenon of ‘enjokosai’ or aid-date. Combining ethnographic, theoretical and archival research, this text will appeal to scholars of Japanese anthropology, feminist anthropology and gender studies alike.

Product Description: Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular...read more

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