6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent ethnography of work, July 6, 2000
This review is from: Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Paperback)
This is a complex and intelligent cultural ethnography of the many-layered, multi-tensioned ideas of self and identity among female Japanese factory workers. It is a "thick description," heavy on pondering the minutiae, and with little in the way of broad cross-cultural comparisons; this is neither good nor bad, just Kondo's style. The detailed nuances she brings out are wonderful; it is rare to see such careful attention to detail in a study of the workplace. However, readers rooted in traditional "rational management" traditions may want to look elsewhere, as this volume takes its inspiration from anthropology and lit-crit, not business and economics.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Successful Postmodern Ethnography, April 29, 2001
This review is from: Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Paperback)
Kondo's work is a much needed example of "how" to do postmodern ethnography. There have been many theorizations about alternative ethnographies, but few good deliveries. Kondo's narrative ethnography about power and its cultural effectivity at the level of everyday life delivers. In fact, her informative and creative work was never far from my on writing table during my ethnographic research which resulted in the recent release of my ethnographic monograph, Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography. Kondo's work is essential reading for anyone attempting to do ethnography about the complexities of cultural and personal identity formation and their hegemonic articulation in everyday practices. In short, Kondo takes the complicated and, oft-times, abstract theoretical renderings of poststructuralism/postmodernism and points to a way in which they can be enlivened through thick descriptions of everyday lives and situations. One of the finer and insightful aspects of her work is found in her tact of avoiding simplistic theoretical categorizing through the ethnographic utilization of irony and the notion of unintended consequences. A must have for those interested in feminist studies, Japanese culture and society, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism/Poststructuralism, and critical and alternative forms of ethnography.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
A Poorly Written Piece, Lax in Style and Weak in Intellectual Rigor, April 30, 2006
This review is from: Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Paperback)
Dorinne Kondo applies loose academic standards to her writing. She is unabashed about it: hers is "a strategy that expands notions of what can count as theory", and her "emphasis on complexity, power, contradiction, discursive production, and ambiguity is invoked in part to demonstrate complexity and irony in the lives of the people I knew, in order to complicate and dismantle the ready stereotypes that erase complexity in favor of simple, unitary images."
I will not tire the reader with more quotations; suffice to mention the apprentice anthropologist's record of people's "bewilderment at having to deal with this odd person who looked Japanese and therefore human, but who must be retarded, deranged, or--equally undesirable in Japanese eyes--Chinese or Korean." This may be her conception of irony and subtlety; to me, this sentence only reinforces stereotypes about the Japanese, who certainly do not all hold these views, as well as it is offensive to persons living with mental disabilities or to Korean and Chinese residents in Japan.
As she herself confesses, D. Kondo was one of those graduate students who constantly change their dissertation topic according to the last passing fad or research opportunity that happen to cross their way. She first attempted to study the relationship between kinship and economics in family-owned enterprises, in order to counter the view of the diligent and anonymous Organization Man associated with Japan, Inc. The focus of her research then shifted to the broader social and cultural context, and she attempted to write an ethnographic monograph of Arakawa, the popular ward of downtown Tokyo where she had settled to live and work. Working part time in various settings also tempted her to study labor relationships on the shop floor.
She then had her epiphany during a corporate ethics retreat organized by the confectionery factory in which she was working part time: plunging into icy baths, walking barefoot on jagged rocks and screaming expressions of filial piety in front of Mt. Fuji somehow made her realize that selves are artifacts "crafted within shifting fields of power and meaning." Exit her old research project, enter her new topic: "the Japanese concept of self." As her research advisor may have suggested to focus and problematize a bit more, she came out with a first-person narrative that adds layer upon layer of description with some theoretical developments.
While her references to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida give a postmodernist cachet to her ethnographic account, a firm theoretical backing didn't inform the design of her fieldwork or generate research hypotheses that she would have put to the test in a rigorous way. Her poststructuralist/feminist agenda seems to be placated as an afterthought, the result of a vernis de culture that she acquired while rubbing shoulders with Judith Butler, Joan Scott and other luminaries during the postdoc fellowship she spent at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, almost ten years after her fieldwork.
Her use of colloquial Japanese expressions, words uttered by "real people" as she says, will only add obscurity to the text for those who do not know the language, while it will prove only redundant and somewhat conceited to the readers who are conversant in Japanese. On the other hand, the paucity of Japanese sources in her bibliography shows that she wasn't able to progress much beyond that colloquial level. This bars her from confronting her hypotheses to results attained by Japanese social scientists, with the exception of well-known sources available in English, such as Chie Nakane and Takeo Doi, that the author reproduces uncritically. Although I cannot pinpoint any act of plagiarism, her indiscriminate use of these and other well-known sources left me with a sense of deja lu all over again.
Crafting Selves is advertised on its back cover as a "textually experimental book." To me, it is only a poorly written piece, lax in style and weak in intellectual rigor.
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