Etienne RP

Letter to a Young Muslim Fashionista

4 Mar 201710 Mar 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis, Duke University Press, 2015.

muslim-fashion So you’ve picked up this book because you think Muslim fashion is the next new thing. You’ve made a good choice: this book is totally made for you. It is a book that will teach you things, give you ideas, and make you think. Don’t expect tips on what to wear and how to wear it, though: this you will have to decide for yourself. If who you are is what you wear, then you cannot delegate this task to a third party. But reading Muslim Fashion will help you make your own choices and dress on your own terms. Maybe you won’t feel the same after reading it. Maybe your image will look different into the mirror. This is what they call a transformative book: it will make you see things differently. This is the good thing about reading books in general: you can turn them to your own use. So if this book helps you dress smarter, so be it. But it may also help you think about what you wear and why you wear it. If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

To be frank with you, you may find Muslim Fashion a bit hard to read. But relax: this book review is here to help you through the reading. It will give you tips that will make understand things a lot easier. So don’t freak out if you see long sentences and difficult words. This is how people working as university professors make a living. Sentences are like skirts: you can wear them long or short according to your likes and dislikes. Trust me: I will use short sentences to describe long hijabs and ample robes. Or at least I’ll try. As a full disclosure, I don’t work in the fashion industry, and I am not involved in any way with Muslim fashion. I just like to read difficult books and try to make them simpler to read by writing book reviews. I wrote this one especially for you. If you find it helpful, you may provide feedback by clicking on the ‘helpful’ button or by writing a comment. But please understand: I am not a specialist in Muslim or modest fashion, or in any women’s fashion for that respect. So take my writing with a pinch of salt: if you disagree with what you read, blame the author of the book, not me.

I am starting from the premise that you are already familiar with basic vocabulary. So you can tell a niqab from an abaya, a jilbab from a hijab, or a shayla from a turban. You may also be familiar with ethnic clothing: burqa cover from Afghanistan, kebaya dress from South-East Asia, chador cloak from Iran, tesettür veil from Turkey, salwar kameez outfit from South Asia. I am also assuming that you know what pious fashion, or modest fashion, is about. So you may be interested to learn where it came from, or how it varies in time and place. The important point to make is that modest fashion is not only about To Veil or Not To Veil. And even if you do, there are many different styles to veiling. Indeed, you may wish to design your own style, based on examples and references glimpsed in magazines or on the street. There are also a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. This is not pure exhibition: people choose what to show and what to hide. All people do.

You can be both pious and fashionable at the same time

Some islamic clothing are clearly outside the purview of fashion. This is clearly the case with burqa, niqab, or abaya—although you may be interested to learn that some embroidered abaya sell for thousands of dollars in Gulf states. Indeed, some people challenge the idea that you can be both pious and fashionable at the same time. For them, a modest outlook is the antithesis of fashion: modesty is to break free from the tyranny of appearance, to contest the idolatry of the body. And indeed, the fashion world has accustomed us with habits that are far from restrained or modest. Exposed nudity, promiscuity between models and their admirers, rumors of drug consumption and tales of anorexia make the catwalk sound like a freak show. No wonder some customers and clothes designers want to break free from this model. But that’s the thing about fashion: no fashion is still fashion, especially when it becomes fashionable. This is what is happening with Muslim fashion; and this is the story that the author Reina Lewis recollects in her book.

On a first look, no industry could be farther from fashion than the tesettür producers in Turkey, This is a country that brands itself secular and where the wearing of headscarves is frowned upon by the state, with an outright ban in schools and colleges or in the national parliament. Women wearing the local headscarf or tesettür have other concerns than fashion. Since Atatürk promoted western clothing and western mores, wearing the veil has always been coded as old-fashioned, rural or excessively religious in secular Turkey. But think again: tesettür companies have gained market share at home and abroad, and are now competing on brand image and seasonal collections. Today’s veiling-fashion producers market colorful and constantly changing styles, from bold and close-fitting to more conservative ones. Istanbul is now developing itself as a fashion city with a critical mass of consumers and fashion specialists, and Muslim fashion is definitely part of the show. For many young Islamic women, wearing a headscarf marks them off as different from their mothers who are going out bareheaded. This is precisely the point: who would like to look exactly like her mother? And as fashion catalogues and lifestyle magazines will show you, there are many ways to wear the tesettür.

People have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so.

Doing research for her book, Reina Lewis interviewed several shop workers wearing the hijab in fashion stores or malls located in several British cities. The interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2010, and I am sure many things have changed since then. But maybe some things haven’t. UK law promotes employment equality regardless of religion or belief, and so sales persons have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so. Shop rules may define how workers dress and present themselves, but only up to a point. Discrimination on grounds of religion can bring an employer to court. Of course, how sales assistants dress is important for their boss and for their clients. They are the brand’s ambassadors, and their style and advice will help match the product and the consumer. In this context, familiarity with modest or pious style can be an asset, especially in neighborhoods populated by Muslim families. Take the case of Y.S. for instance. She didn’t have to apply for a job: she was recruited while shopping in a branch of Dorothy Perkins because the store manager thought she looked cool. She wore her hijab with style and personality, and being modest and trendy was exactly the image the store wanted to project.

Here I may introduce a few concepts proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. For Bourdieu, style is a form of symbolic capital: it is something that you can cultivate and that can be converted into forms of economic capital, like finding a job in a lifestyle magazine or a fashion store. Style is also a component of habitus, a social property of individuals that orients human behavior without strictly determining it. In a book called La Distinction, Bourdieu described the rise of a new class of cultural intermediaries working in service activities: sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so on. Upwardly mobile, these middle class individuals used their symbolic capital and were driven by their habitus to give legitimacy to new forms of cultural activities: minor arts such as photography or jazz music, self-presentation through fashion and lifestyle, and mass consumption of goods and appliances designed to make life easier. The young fashionistas described in Muslim Fashion are the heirs of these trendsetters. They do not act in isolation, but in a field (another important concept from Bourdieu) composed of many players and sources of authority. Only this field is not much cultural as it is religious. As surprising as it may seem, women participating in Muslim fashion are also religious intermediaries.

Fashion is usually regarded outside of the mainstream of religious concerns. Except for Islam: in this case many people—Muslim and non-Muslim—have an opinion on what Islamic women should and shouldn’t wear. As Reina Lewis describes it in another chapter, Muslim lifestyle magazines and fashion catalogues are faced with a conundrum. How to represent women’s bodies? Some magazines such as Azizah have a policy of always putting a model with a headscarf on their cover. Others, such as the American quarterly Muslim Girl, do exactly the opposite: their idea is to represent as many different girls as possible and all their different approaches to faith. Still others avoid photographs of the human form, or take pictures of women viewed from behind so as not to show their face. Emel, another lifestyle magazine, takes straight-up photos of real people wearing street fashion but avoids professional models. The representation of female bodies raises even more controversies online, where readers and commentators are prompt to express their views in reaction to blog posts or social media pictures. Reina Lewis describes how the rise of online brands selling modest apparel was accompanied by the development of a lively blogosphere and social media devoted to modest style.

Modest fashion is coming to a store near you

A new category of “modest fashion” has therefore emerged and become legitimized on the Internet. Women can now find products designed with modesty in mind, consult style guides and join in fashion discussions about how to style modesty. These discussions are not necessarily faith-based and inspired by Islam: they can be inter-faith—as some Christian groups or Jewish believers have similar modesty needs—or based on no faith at all. They are increasingly cosmopolitan: see for example the new fashion line designed by Hana Tajima, an English woman based in Malaysia, which was launched in Singapore by Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel company. I have to confess I learned more from browsing the web using the “modest fashion” keyword than from reading long articles about secularity and attitudes considered as ostentatiously religious in my own country—which is France. Speaking of France, if I have a minor quibble with Reina Lewis’ book, it is when she alludes to a supposedly outright ban of Islamic dress in France, whereas the limitations introduced by French law are only limited to certain types of dress—the face-veil—or to certain locations, such as schools. And even these laws may evolve, along with the changing attitudes among the French public. Paris has long been the capital of fashion: my personal wish is that it will also become a magnet for the creation and expression of Muslim fashion.

Ghost in the Shell

25 Feb 201725 Feb 2017 Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story, Ian Condry, Duke University Press, 2013.

the-soul-of-anime In my opinion, The Soul of Anime should be read in business schools. It provides a wonderful case study of a particular industry, and it can teach management practitioners many things about globalization, creative industries, and flexible labor. Unlike what is stated in the book’s subtitle however, the story of Japanese anime is not a success story. As Ian Condry states in the introduction, “in terms of economic success, anime seems more of a cautionary tale than a model of entrepreneurial innovation.” Judged from a management perspective, the anime industry is in many ways a case of failure: a failure to globalize, a failure to create value on a sustained basis, and a failure on the side of market participants to reap profits and secure employment. But management can learn from failures as much than it can learn from success stories. What’s more, the anthropological perspective adopted by the author points towards a different theory of value creation: for cultural content industries, value is not synonymous with profits, and the relation between producers and consumers cannot be reduced to monetary transactions and economic self-interest. This is the intuition that the founders of anthropology developed when they analyzed trading relations among primitive tribes in terms of gift-giving and reciprocity; and this is the conclusion that this modern anthropology book reaches when it describes the popular success of this particular case of industrial failure.

A failed success story

Why didn’t anime transform itself into a profit-making machine for Japanese media groups? Why didn’t studio Ghibli—the producers of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away—develop into a franchise akin to Walt Disney’s? Why didn’t stories based on manga series—the main source of inspiration for Japanese anime—give birth to blockbuster movies the way that Marvel Comics did? For all its popular success and—in the case of Ghibli production—critical acclaim, Japanese anime production remains in many ways a cottage industry. The studios in which the author of The Soul of Anime did his fieldwork, with names such as Gonzo, Aniplex, and Madhouse, are small-scale operations that continuously stake the house on their next production. Even the biggest players such as Studio Ghibli, Production I.G. and Toei Animation are limited in size and do not generate extraordinary profits. As Ian Condry describes it, a studio can employ anywhere from fifteen to a few hundred people, and relies heavily on local freelance animators as well as offshore production houses located in South Korea, China, and the Philippines. Like other segments of the Japanese industry, the anime sector has been “hollowed out”: by some estimates, 90 percent of the frames used in Japanese animation are drawn overseas.

The work that remains in Japan is not very well-paid and is precariously flexible. Long hours are the norm, and many animators work freelance, moving from project to project, often without benefits. Visiting a studio is more like entering the den of a manga production house, with papers piling up everywhere and people working frantically on deadlines, than witnessing the cool working environment of a high-tech start-up. Indeed, manga stories provide most of the content later developed in anime movies, and the two worlds are closely interconnected. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy otherwise known as the “god of manga,” used to quip that manga was his wife, while animation was his mistress. Like manga, anime now attracts a cult followership across the globe, and fans are present on every continent. They often start to watch anime from a very young age: by some estimates, 60 percent of the world’s TV broadcasts of cartoons are Japanese in origin. Despite its global reach, the anime industry failed to give rise to corporate giants that could have become global actors. Even Studio Ghibli’s biggest overseas success, Spirited Away, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, scored much less on the international box office than U.S animated productions of much lower quality. Mamoru Oshii’s cult film Ghost in the Shell reached number one in DVD sales in the United States in 1996, but failed to generate profitable spin-offs and lucrative sequels. Toei Animation’s original ambition to become the “Disney of the East” has failed egregiously.

The Galapagos syndrome

In a way, the failure of anime to globalize is just another case of the Galapagos syndrome: many globally available products take a local form in Japan, a variant that is sometimes more advanced and attuned to the local ecosystem, but which diverges from global trends. This isolation from the global market acts as a form of protectionism, allowing species to develop in unique ways, but leaves Japanese companies ill-prepared for global competition. Although cultural content industries such as manga, anime, video games, music, and films are being promoted by Japanese authorities for their ability to attract foreign audiences, the fact is that creators, drawers and scenarists mostly have a domestic audience in mind when they design their stories. The scorecards that manga readers send to weekly magazines to rate their favorite episodes is a case in point: it makes manga scenarios highly receptive to the reactions of the public, as unpopular series are discontinued and only the most popular manga stories survive and evolve according to their readership’s taste. But the system also makes manga series dependent on the whim of a group of core fans or otaku that do not necessarily reflect the national public, let alone global audiences. Copyright and intellectual property rights may also be an issue: Japanese companies reap hefty profits on the domestic market where IPR protection is strong, but are pilfered in neighboring countries through copycats, illegal downloading, and video streaming. Yet another argument that explains anime’s parochialism is that the global slot of blockbusters and megahits is already occupied by American productions, leaving only the niche markets of national cinema and sub-culture.

There are many reasons anime didn’t go global the way Walt Disney did. But perhaps we are using the wrong yardstick. Perhaps the value that anime generates belongs to a different class that is more diffuse and evanescent. As Ian Condry notes, “so much of what makes media meaningful lies beyond the measures of retail sales, top-ten lists, and box-office figures.” Anime cannot be gauged solely by examining what happens onscreen or by how it is marketed by studios. Instead of analyzing the cultural content of particular series or the business strategies of anime producers, Condry looks at the role of fans, the circulation of anime series and the dynamics between niche and mass market. He shows how the unexpected turnaround from failure to success for the Gundam franchise was linked to the energy of amateur builders of giant “mecha” robots and fans forming “research groups” into “Minovsky Physics”, an invention from the sci-fi series. He follows hard-core fans in sci-fi conventions, cosplay contests, and other fairs where amateurs distribute home-made manga and otaku videos. He focuses on fansubbing, the translation and dissemination of anime online by fans, which is governed by complex rules that are not always hostile to copyright protection. He considers how people can express strong affection or “moe” for virtual 2D characters with and sees it as “pure love” with no hope for a reciprocal emotional payback. This is a multi-sited ethnography, based on participant observation or “learning by watching” (kengaku), in which the author attempts to assess how value arises through the social circulation of media objects.

Follow the soul

Economists follow the money; anthropologists follow the soul, the energy, the mana. In his classic study of the Kula trade among the Trobriand islanders, Bronislaw Malinowski described the complex rules by which shell necklaces and trinkets circulated around a vast ring of island communities to enhance the social status and prestige of leaders. Kula valuables never remain for long in the hands of the recipients; rather, they must be passed on to other partners within a certain amount of time, thus constantly circling around the ring. French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift, reconceptualized this analysis of the Kula trade to ask: ”What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” His answer was that Kula objects were invested with a certain property, a force binding the receiver and giver that he called the ‘hau’ or life-force. Another Polynesian notion that Marcel Mauss used was the ‘mana’: a form of a spiritual energy or charisma which can exist in places, objects and persons. Applying these notions to the Japanese context, we can say it is the ‘hau’ of anime that makes fans devote some of their time to give back to the community of anime lovers through writing subtitles or designing cosplay costumes. By summoning the ‘soul’ of anime, Ian Condry reconnects with some basic concepts of the discipline, and renews the inspiration of two of the great founders of anthropology. Both Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss tried to build theories of exchange and the economy that went beyond monetary transactions and the economic interest of rational individuals. We find that same attention on how energy flows, reputations accumulate, and people collaborate in the production and circulation of anime.

Management scholars can also learn a lot from reading this modern anthropology book. The concept of ‘co-creation’ used by management scholars and sociologists is close to the ‘collaborative creativity’ used by Ian Condry to describe emergent structures of creative action in which both anime studios and fans play an important role. Similarly, “platforms” are a hot topic in management studies. Business scholars see platform industries as embodied in technologies that allow open collaboration and value creation on an unprecedented scale. Economists see platforms as multi-sided markets having distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Rather than viewing technologies or markets as the platform, the anthropologist draws our attention on the circulation of emotions and meanings that define and organize our cultural space. Observing script meetings for a particular children TV series, Condry describes how a logic evolving around ‘characters’ and ‘worlds’ form the basis on which anime scripts are constructed and evaluated. Characters and worlds are trans-media concepts: they make a particular design or atmosphere move across media and circulate among people. They attract and connect, without being tied to any particular story or media. A well-known example is Hello Kitty, a character which exists independently from any storytelling and which has become an icon of a world of cuteness or ‘kawaii’. But characters are ubiquitous in Japan: they advertise anything from government agencies to city wards, and ‘character designer’ is a popular profession among the young generation.

From niche to mass market

Anime is often considered as the land of otaku, the realm of geeks, the kingdom of nerds. It is segmented into different categories or sub-genres, and a series’ appeal is generally limited to one single age group, as even the biggest successes very seldom straddles generations. It is, in essence, a niche market. Very seldom can it hope to reach a mass audience. But as Condry argues, the path from niche to mass may first involve jumps from niche to niche. Indeed, this might be the key to a more accurate definition of mass: to see it as network of niches acting in unison. The notion of “media success” often hinges on a movement from something small-scale that expands to become large-scale, yet niche has a chance in the context of global popular culture, free downloads, and viral videos. This is a new world after all, a world where the music video of an obscure rap singer from South Korea can be viewed over 2.5 billion times on YouTube, or where a gore movie such as The Machine Girl, whose schoolgirl heroin has a machine gun grafted to her amputated arm, can feature among the most often downloaded films on some media sharing platforms. Management should better pay heed to the otaku out there—or, in Steve Jobs’ words, “to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Ian Condry also redefines what we mean by social media. As he remarks, “today, media forms are more than something we simply watch, listen to, or consume; media is something we do.” Social network services like Facebook or Twitter have demonstrated that media could be a platform for participation as much as an object of consumption. What makes “social media” new is not the technology as much as the idea that media is not something to consume from a Network (like ABC) but something we participate in through our (small “n”) networks. Social network services or SNS make real what is virtual by making virtual what is real. In other words, Facebook-like platforms project onto the virtual world structures of relations between people and objects that form the basis of our day-to-day interactions; and by doing so, SNS show the materiality of the invisible bonds that connect components of the real world. Social media has helped put back the social into the media; but as the story of anime illustrates it, the social has been there all along. Anime’s success as a media form relies on the feedback loops between producers and audience. This brings us back to the energy around anime, which arises through its circulation and the combined efforts of large number of people. We might think of this collective energy as a kind of soul. The social in the media is what the anthropologist calls the soul. It is like a ghost in the shell: it animates real and virtual bodies, it moves across media platform and licensed goods, it makes energy flow from producers to consumers and back again. Anthropology is a very useful means of capturing these dimensions of our social reality that are ghost-like and often spirited away, because fieldworkers can gain access to that which is most meaningful to people through persistent engagement and critical questioning. This is why, in my opinion, anthropology should be taught in business schools.

When the Korean Wave Hits the Screens

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A review of Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema, Youngmin Choe, Duke University Press, 2016.

tourist-distractions Korean government officials nowadays distinguish three waves of hallyu. The first one occurred serendipitously with the unintended success of Korean TV dramas in Japan, China, and South-East Asia. The second wave was brought by the marketing strategies of entertainment companies that targeted growing markets and developed export products in the form of K-Pop bands, TV co-productions, computer games, advertising campaigns, and restaurant chains. According to these Korean officials, the third wave of hallyu will cover the whole spectrum of Korean culture, traditional and contemporary alike, and will be engineered by the state, which sees the export of cultural content as a linchpin of its creative economy strategy. Korean cinema sits rather awkwardly in this periodization. Korean movie directors didn’t wait for the first ripples of the Korean wave to gain recognition abroad: they featured early on in the Cannes film festival and other international venues where their talent and originality won critical acclaim. Cinema studies constituted Korean films as a topic for analysis before hallyu became a theme worthy of scholarly research and commentary. The first books that addressed Korean cinema as a genre, such as Kyung Hyun Kim’s seminal essay on The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, were written in the tradition of Asian cultural studies that sees each countries’ movie productions as a distinct whole, thereby overlooking the transnational dimension that is so prevalent in the reception of Korean hallyu.

Hallyu cinema as a subset of Korean film history

Youngmin Choe, who is the coeditor of a Korean Popular Culture Reader, bridges two strands of research: Korean cinema studies—that takes national boundaries as a given and addresses the aesthetic content of movies—and hallyu studies—which are by nature transnational and focus more on reception. She does so by limiting her study to the films produced between 1998 and 2006—the high mark of the Korean wave—and by addressing one particular theme: tourism, or the movement of people and emotions across national borders. The films examined in this book seem to anticipate the travels of their audience. They display traveling and tourism as a theme in their narrative, and present locales and sceneries in a way that is bound to induce travel plans and touristic yearnings. They are, in this way, self-referential: travel or boundary-crossing features both on-screen in the stories that are narrated and in the off-screen transnational movements that these films generate. This allows the author to construct hallyu as a category worthy of academic research and to propose the notion of hallyu cinema as subset of Korean film history. As she states at the outset, “the largest ambition of my study is to transform hallyu, which has become first and foremost a marketing strategy, into a bona fide critical term.”

It all started with Winter Sonata. The TV drama featuring Bae Yong-joon achieved a huge success in Japan and set the standard for the crossover and tourist potential of the Korean wave. Locales shown in the drama became the destination of fan tours and touristic pilgrimages. Middle-aged Japanese ladies craved after the sight of “Yon-sama” and developed a cult-like followership. This in turn set the stage for the ongoing Korean wave, which reached publics well beyond Japan and sparked an interest for all things Korean. Although she doesn’t address this particular drama—she only considers films—Youngmin Choe discusses several movies that were produced in Winter Sonata’s wake. April Snow, a film released in 2005 and featuring the same actor Bae Yong-joon, was produced with the Japanese public in mind. Filmed in locations on the eastern coast of Korea, the film contains a self-referential invitation to what the author calls affective tourism: affective images are projected onto affective sites so that the experience of the traveller reproduces the emotions felt by the viewer. Inspired to visit these locations because of the movie story, the tourist travels as if he or she were in the film. Unlike visitors to Universal Studio Hollywood theme park in the United States, tourists at the April Snow sites are invited not only to the places where the movie was shot, but as if into the diegetic and affective space of the movie itself. For instance, in the small city of Samchok, tourists interested in April Snow can sleep in the same room as the characters in the film, eat the same food, sip coffee at the same table, and walk the same streets, with signs and posters depicting images from the corresponding scenes in the movie.

Tourism, drama, and the emergence of an Asian identity

Tourism and drama are associated with modernity in Asia. Indeed, television series and touristic travel shape the imagined communities of East Asia. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper printing press and the political exile, two agents that Benedict Anderson saw as central in the emergence of national communities in nineteenth century Europe. In Asia, the leisure class takes the form of the travel group. Mass tourism is the foremost expression of the newly gained access to leisure and mass consumption. The Asian tourist has often been identified with the group-centered, photo-taking, cliché-seeking participant of organized package tours. But there’s more to it than just group-think: Asian tourism creates a new form of commodified experience, which is less centered on exotism or escapism and more on emotions and affects. In this respect, the Asianization of Asian tourism is accompanied by a displacement or tourists’ interest. Less focus is placed on history and cultural heritage, more attention is devoted to bodily experiences such as eating, shopping, and scenery-viewing. The Asian tourist looks for the experience that will yield photo opportunities and conventional memories to be shared with others. Asianization, before being analyzed in economic or political terms, can be conceived as a shared affective experience shaped by regional tourism and media consumption. These networks of travel contacts and emotional yearnings among Asian populations are what made hallyu’s rise possible in the first place.

Lest we forget, the tourist imagination in East Asia began with pornography. Japanese tourism to Korea from the mid-1960 until the late 1970 was predominantly male and centered around sex tourism, often combined with business meetings. Known also as kisaeng tourism, this kind of sexual encounter harkened back to colonial practices in yojong establishments and epitomized the imperial consumption of the colony itself as an object of desire. Youngmin Choe opens her book by a close examination of Park Chul-soo’s Kazoku Cinema, the first film collaboration between Japan and South Korea following the lifting of the ban on the import of Japanese cultural products in 1998. Kazoku Cinema is a self-reflexing film about the making of a film, with strong sexual undertones. As the author writes it, “pornography becomes an allegorical mode of historical reconciliation that foregrounds everyday banality.” The desire for sexual intimacy and physical touch also shapes the story of Asako in Ruby Shoes, which cuts back and forth between Tokyo and Seoul as the two heroes engage in Internet porn, and of April Snow, which narrates an adulterous liaison. The whole production of the Korean wave can in a way be interpreted as soft porn, as the cravings of middle-aged Japanese ladies for “Yon-sama” or the provocative attire of K-pop idols suggest. In turn, these sexual desires and erotic feelings contribute to the transformation of once rival nations unto cooperative friends open to transborder flows. Sex, in Asia, is political.

The political is never far in Korea, a land divided between two states separated by the 38th parallel. Any visitor to the DMZ has experienced the strange feeling of being at the same time in a movie scene and in a tourist attraction. On the face of it, the reality of the place contradicts both impressions: the tension between the two Koreas is very real, and the DMZ is first and foremost a military zone. But visits to the DMZ are shaped as a tourist experience, not least because of the many films that used the zone as their locale. Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (J.S.A.) begins with an aerial shot of the DMZ, as a group of foreigners on a guided tour of the southern side are surveying the Military Demarcation Line that runs through the middle of the demilitarized zone. It ends with picture shots taken by the tourists in this initial scene, which reveal the whole story that has been unfolding. The commodification and marketization of military zones is not limited to the DMZ. The Korean War film Taegukgi illustrates a process labelled as “post-memory”: the memory of a trauma that was never personally experienced, but whose lingering effect is felt by following generations. This Korean blockbuster, produced shortly after the liberalization of the movie industry imposed by the US as part of the FTA, thematizes the struggle against Hollywood hegemony, the nation’s simmering anti-American sentiments, the rise of an Asianization discourse, the realities of national division, and the hopes for reunification. As the film Silmido, set on an island off the coast of Incheon, it has given rise to a theme park and also was the focus of a temporary exhibition, thereby fueling the rise of film-induced tourism. The author opposes the Korean War Memorial, which illustrates how the Korean War should be remembered—as heroic, masculine, and patriotic—, and the “false memorials” created in the wake of war movies, giving way to alternative modes or remembrance that are more feminine, leisurely, and affective.

How do all the movies analyzed in Tourist Distractions relate to hallyu? As Youngmin Choe makes it clear, most of the films she addresses are not part of the Korean wave as defined by state authorities and media reports: only movies geared towards a Japanese audience like April Snow, or the blockbusters produced after the opening of the market to Hollywood competition, qualify as such. The hallyu discourse does not emerge in Korea until 2001. It has roots in twentieth-century visions of Asian integration and serves to support the corporate strategies and geopolitical ambitions of newly-developed Korea. The author links hallyu to neoliberalism, cultural nationalism, and postcolonialism, and she uses the words “neo-imperialist” and “sub-imperialist” to qualify Korea’s projection of cultural power. But her book does not discuss political integration and economic processes in detail. As she states, “I am more interested in the formation of a shared affective experience that transnational cooperation requires in order to build its networks for the exchange of products and capital.” In a reversal of Marxist thought, culture is not the reflect of underlying economic forces, but forms the infrastructure basis or enabling factor which makes economic and political developments possible. Her category of “hallyu cinema”, strictly delineated in time and in scope, is defined by the aesthetic criteria of self-reflexivity and affective content, not by the movies’ marketing strategies or their impact at the box office. Self-referentiality in hallyu movies refers both to the content of the movies—as the films examined in the book seem to anticipate the travel of their audiences—and to their production and circulation that foster transnational exchanges. Tourist films and film tourism are closely interconnected.

The affective turn in cultural studies

Beyond contributing to cinema studies and hallyu studies, Tourist Distractions points towards what has been described as an “affective turn” in cultural studies. The notion of affect—pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others—has become a central tenet of cultural studies. Affect is a concept that places emphasis on bodily experience and that goes beyond the traditional focus on representations and discourse. The turn towards affects is therefore a turn, or a return, to the body. It is also a turn towards new kinds of imagined communities. Affects and emotions help us connect with some people while distancing us from others and in material form can be used for economic and political purposes, making it a form of capital. Emotions help form the boundaries and relationships between individuals and society; they determine the rhetoric of the nation. The hallyu nation, or global Korea, is built on networks of affective exchanges. Korean movies and dramas are valued for their emotional content, for their ability to move people in many ways, including geographically. Call it, if you will, the Greater East Asia Co-Sentimentality Sphere. The emergence of this new affective space that stems from the diffusion of tourism and of films, lies at the core of this groundbreaking study of hallyu cinema.

Thinking Deep about Hello Kitty

25 Feb 20179 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific, by Christine R. Yano, Duke University Press, 2013

J hello-kitty apanese pop culture is not just a consumer fad or a passing attraction. It has become a research topic worthy of academic lectures and scholarly publications. This interest for new things Japanese was demand-driven and linked to transformations in North American and European universities in the past twenty years. Students enrolling in Japanese language classes or Japanese studies departments grew up alongside anime figures and manga characters coming from Japan. Their early exposure to Japanese popular culture and commercial products led them to request teachings that would reflect their childhood experience and teenage interest. Anthropologists and cultural studies scholars were better equipped to address this new demand than the literature scholars and historians or political scientists that have traditionally dominated area studies departments. Rather than working on texts and archives, they use ethnographic fieldwork as the preferred means of data collection. They are interested in the production and circulation of cultural objects as bearers of meaning and values. They do not draw a sharp distinction between high and low culture, between marketized commodities and authentic creations. For these new scholars, observers of the contemporary should not reject the mundane, the commercial and the transient. Rather, they should pay attention to everyday objects and popular productions as “goods to think with.” By doing so, they are able to notice emerging trends and societal changes that have broader implications for the understanding of contemporary societies.

Can Christine Yano prove she’s a real anthropologist?

Even so, choosing Hello Kitty as a research topic may have raised some eyebrows in Asian studies departments. Sanrio’s merchandising icon is the archetype of what scholars usually brush off as irrelevant for their studies. The commercially-driven, superficial and childish phenomenon of this kitten figure adorning various consumer products surely cannot be taken as the topic of a serious academic study. It can at best provide a case study for a business class on brand marketing, or an illustration in an introductory course on Japanese culture’s global reach. But certainly no book can be published on such a mundane topic. Or can it? Christine Yano is aware she took risks in choosing Hello Kitty’s reception in the US—what she calls “pink globalization”—as the focus of her study. As a nasty comment gleaned over Twitter puts it, “some years ago anthropologist Christine Yano proved #hellokitty wasn’t a real cat, which made many readers doubt she was a real anthropologist.” Such remarks may have been inspired by the jealousy of colleagues who saw Yano reach popular success, not really in terms of book sales, but through invitations to give lectures, attend fan conventions, and curate exhibitions—all activities that usually lie beyond the ambit of most anthropology professors. Critics may also point to some flaws in the methodology—this is a research-lite, easy-fieldwork book that is overly reliant on Internet sources—, lack of fact-checking—Yano takes at face value the anti-Hello Kitty rant found on a satirical parody website based around a fake fundamentalist Baptist church—and writing style that mixes professional jargon and journalistic catchwords.

How can the author prove she is a real anthropologist while at the same time remaining true to her chosen topic? Her first impulse is to take Hello Kitty very seriously. Her book won acceptance in a prestigious university press series by showing all the trappings of serious scholarship—the footnotes, the bibliography, the references to theory and drafting of new concepts. At the beginning of every chapter, Christine Yano raises theoretical issues by way of rhetorical questions, and then purports to answer them based on accumulated data and complex reasoning. She pays tribute to past scholarship and quotes from all anthropologists who have studied Japanese popular culture—Anne Allison, Laura Miller, Thomas LaMarre, Brian McVeigh, Jennifer Robertson, Marc Steinberg—as well as from many cultural critics and feminist scholars. She discusses key concepts in detail, presenting the genealogy of popular notions such as pink, cute, cool, and kitsch, as well as exotic words such as kawaii, asobi, fanshii guzzu, kogyaru, shôjo, and kyarakutâ. She offers her own theoretical constructs: “pink globalization”, “Japanese Cute-Cool”, “the wink”. She knows that in doing so, she loses some readers along the way—some Internet comments lambast her book as “a boatload of jargon”, and particularly resent her savant references to Adorno and to Marx. But this is the price to pay to gain admission in the exclusive circle of cultural critics and anthropology scholars.

A multi-sited ethnography

More specifically, Christine Yano, who is identified on the book’s back cover as Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, anchors her research in the discipline of cultural anthropology. Her book is what scholars describe as a “multi-sited ethnography”: she didn’t do fieldwork in a single community or location, but collected data and observations in various places, mostly in Hawai’i and in San Francisco, but also in other cities where her professional assignments took her. As she describes it, “Hello Kitty became a research hobby: whenever I traveled to another city, I searched Sanrio stores and fans… Every year when I taught the course on Japanese popular culture, I surveyed students about their knowledge of Hello Kitty.” She also scanned the Internet for testimonies and contacts on her research topic. She conducted structured interviews (thirty-one in total) with various informants: Sanrio managers in Japan and in the US, shop salespersons, Kitty adult fans, goods collectors, and artists. She includes long excerpts of these interviews in her book. Again, this is standard practice in anthropology, where the notes and recordings of the ethnographer are often reproduced in extenso. But this may rebuff some readers, for various reasons that the author herself acknowledges in the following: “some readers may feel that the fan interviews I quote here represent an overload of sentiment, a barrage of capitalist frenzy, a besotted attachment to a commodity. Without apology, I agree, and suggest that these readers skip over the interviews themselves and head to the conclusions I draw from them at the end of the chapter.”

This curious self-denial points to another discursive strategy by which the author affirms her credentials as a serious scholar. At many junctures, she tries to distance herself from corporate lore, marketing ploys, and naive adherence to what Hello Kitty represents in order to offer her own critical interpretation. She responds to critics by incorporating their viewpoint and giving them a voice within her own analysis. For instance, she concludes her chapter on Sanrio’s corporate strategy with the following: “a company ethos of happiness tinged with pink sounds like a hugely naive, manipulative enterprise, and that, in fact, may be exactly what it is.” She devotes a whole chapter on “Kitty Backlash”, reflecting the views of Hello Kitty’s detractors which she mainly found on the Internet. This leads her to her enormous blunder when she takes at face value the discourse of a parody Baptist church that reads the word “Hell” in “Hello Kitty”. Although Sanrio’s cat is primarily a child’s character, Yano focuses exclusively on adult consumers of Kitty products—and even on adult products, such as the infamous Hello Kitty massage wand. She also devotes much place to cultural productions and artistic expressions that play with Hello Kitty in creative and imaginative ways. Art, like anthropology, has a complex and troublesome relationship with commerce and capitalism. In her way, her whole book structure reproduces her ambivalence with Hello Kitty as a scholarly pursuit—from finding Kitty at home in Japan, to following her through global marketing strategies across the Pacific, describing her ubiquity, giving voice to Kitty detractors, and then showing that subversion and, ultimately, art, essentially “get it.”

We find this mix of adherence and critical distance in the juxtaposition of fan testimonies and anti-Kitty hate speech, in the contrast between interviews and commentary, and even in the author’s own writing style, which mixes scholarly jargon and popular expressions. Christine Yano claims for herself the right to write at times like the editor of a girlie magazine, while in the next paragraph using difficult words and complex reasoning like a tenured professor. Like her character, she can be both cute and cool at the same time, and she writes with tongue-in-cheek humor. Her sentences often mix the serious and the playful, the elaborate and the obvious, the obtuse theorizing and the plain reasoning. Even her main theoretical concepts (cute, cool, kitsch, pink, kawaii, etc.) are borrowed from plain language and everyday expressions. This makes Pink Globalization an easier and more pleasant read than most anthropology books published in the same publisher’s series. This also makes it risky business: her theoretical apparatus and critical commentary may lose plain readers along the way, while scholars of a more classical bent may be put off by her choice of topic in the first place. But again, there is a market for critical analysis of Asian pop culture, as evidenced in the many publications that now address the topic, and cultural anthropologists are better placed to claim this market segment for their discipline.

The philosophy of “the wink”

Beyond Hello Kitty, is there anything that non-Kitty fans can take from this book? I mentioned the creative use of simple notions such as cute and cool, the way they relate to ordinary people’s lives, and the value added that theory brings. More than pink globalization, the key concept Christine Yano wants to offer as her personal contribution to social theory is the “wink”. This is, of course, a Kitty gesture: Hello Kitty, in some of her modern renderings, winks at her viewers, thereby complicating the blank stare and expressionless face she is so much remembered for. The wink defines the very fetishism of Hello Kitty. It is a symbol of friendship, playfulness, and intimacy. It creates the possibility of two-way interactions, of double meaning, and second degree. The wink resolves logical inconsistencies—between cute and cool, child and adult, kitsch and art, pink and black. It allows for subversive uses of Hello Kitty. The wink also includes the viewers into the circle of those who “get it” and assume what Kitty stands for. More importantly, “wink as play” holds the power to silence or incorporate Kitty’s critics. In turn, adult consumers wink back at her and use Kitty in minimalist acts of subversion, performing feminity or sexiness. For Christine Yano, the wink is also a theoretical gesture. It is her personal answer to those in faculty committees and scholarly associations who raise eyebrows at her research topic and question her credentials as an anthropologist.

Lost and Found in Translation

22 Feb 20179 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies, by Shiho Satsuka, Duke University Press, 2015.

nature-in-translation How do you translate nature in Japanese? The obvious answer—the word “shizen” is the dictionary translation of “nature”—is not so obvious, at least for historians of Japanese thought. Shizen is a Japanese pronunciation of the Taoist concept of ziran, drawn from Laozi. It describes the condition of artlessness or a situation happening without human intention. Its opposite is the notion of “sakui”, or “invention”, the forces of human agency that intervene to create social order. The opposition between shizen and sakui, between the natural way of heaven and earth and the power of human creation, was revived after the Second World War by public intellectual Maruyama Masao when he tried to identify the responsibility for Japan’s wartime aggression. In order to exonerate the Emperor who remained in place as a symbol of the Japanese nation, the war was narrated as if it happened “naturally”, and ordinary Japanese people were framed as the victims of the war. For Maruyama, who chose to emphasize the forces of sakui as first conceptualized by Confucian scholar Ogyû Sorai, the ambiguity in the notion of shizen, and the difficulty to find a proper translation for human subjectivity, was precisely at stake. In order to reenter the international community as rational agents, the Japanese needed to establish a new spirit of individual autonomy, or shutaisei, and to overcome nature as shizen. Only so could they find a proper sense of freedom—another concept that was difficult to translate, as the word jiyû retains the meaning of its origin in the Buddhist expression of jiyû jizai, which designates liberation as self-detachment.

For Shiho Satsuka, translating nature takes a different meaning. Trained as an anthropologist in the intellectual hotbed of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she did her graduate fieldwork training as a travel guide in the Canadian National Park of Banff, a destination favored by Japanese tourists. Her book, drawn from her PhD thesis and published in 2015, analyzes the way Japanese tour guides translate ecological knowledge into lived experience. Translation of nature involves much more than finding proper Japanese equivalents of English notions. As Shiho Satsuka states, it “concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included in the society as a legitimate subject.” The focus of the book is on the tour guides, not on the tourists they accompany. In classic anthropological fashion, the author elaborates from her field notes to describe how the guides left Japan and came to Canada to live in “magnificent nature”; what image they held from Canada and how it contrasted with the reality they found there; how they went through training and transformed themselves into service workers; and how they negotiated issues of gender, cultural difference, knowledge politics, and personal identity. The book mobilizes a vast array of authors and theories, Western and Japanese, while staying close to the lived experience and worldviews of the tour guides that the author befriended during her anthropological fieldwork.

Narratives of freedom

Japanese guides offer “narratives of freedom” to account for their departure from Japan and their adoption of a new lifestyle in the Canadian Rockies. Their decision to leave Japan coincided with a period of national angst and crisis. In a newly established neoliberal environment, the meaning of “freedom”—remember the ambiguity of the Japanese term—became a contentious issue. The furitâ—the free individual living on small jobs or arubaito—captured the imagination of a generation aspiring to detach itself from the secure but constrained environment of the corporation. Becoming a furitâ was often a choice born out of necessity, or necessity made virtue, in the context of widespread liberalization of corporate regulations and labor laws that resulted in growing youth unemployment and precariousness. In the midst of economic change, as the Japanese economy moved from bubble years to prolonged depression, a growing number of young adventurers “escaped” from Japan to go overseas for self-searching travel. In their pursuit for freedom, they chose to drop out of, or not participate in the Japanese corporate system. A number of them found in Canada and its national parks a convenient site to reinvent themselves and establish their new subjectivities. Some thought guiding was their dream job, while others only considered it as transitional work until they found what they really wanted to do with their lives.

Their aspirations were projected onto “magnificent nature”: Canadian natural environment offered the canvas on which they could reinvent themselves, unfettered by national boundaries, cultural norms, and social rules. Moving to Canada offered them what they couldn’t find in their home society: the opportunity to pursue freedom and the choice to live one’s own life as a self-standing individual. Japan was perceived as oppressing the true, authentic self with layers upon layers of social rules and obligations. Escaping to the West was a way to take back control of one’s life and to embrace the centrality of the individual. At the same time, Canada provided a version of Western subjectivity distinct from the American model, an alternative space in which nature played a significant part in the guides’ construction of subjectivities. Japanese candidates to Canadian immigration were often attracted by mere pictures, anecdotes, or TV shows depicting life in the wilderness. They embraced the image of the natural park’s guide as a figure of independence and freedom—a person who had a solid sense of her own subjectivity and the ability to move beyond national, social, and cultural boundaries. Shiho Satsuka tracks the construction of this imaginary space in the work of a value entrepreneur, former politician and popular television entertainer, Ohashi Kyôsen, who provided his readers with the dream vision of “living one’s own life” free from the company and nation, the two most important social contexts in shaping a sarariman’s life. Although Ohashi’s main target was more the young male retirees whose corporate alienation had left them bereft of any social ties, his vision was also influential among young office ladies and freeters who found that the corporate ladder was closed to them and chose to escape to a world of unbound possibilities.

Co-modification of the self

What they discovered in Canada was that work was still work, and that becoming a tour guide entailed what the author labels a “co-modification of the self”. As service workers, they were enjoined by their training manager to become a commodity, in the sense that their public expected to consume a commodified performance similar to the one offered by an artist or an entertainer. Co-modification also designates the modification and production of self through interactions with nature and with the public who came to see the guides as a reflect of their environment. Becoming a commodity therefore had a quite different meaning from that of the commodification of labor that Marx saw as a centerpiece of capitalist exploitation. If anything, the commodity or shôhin implicit in this process of self transformation retains the qualities of premodern craftsman’s production. There was a tension between the unique skills and personalities of each guide, their obligation to act with “sincerity” and “authenticity”, and the demands of mass tourism which asked for a standardized level of comfort and quality of service. Each trainee was therefore encouraged to build his or her unique narrative, while assimilating the rules and procedures listed in a hefty manual. There was a Zen-like quality in their apprenticeship, as the trainees had to guess what the managers and senior guides had in mind even though they did not spell out their intentions. They were invited to blend with nature and transform themselves into locals, while retaining some traits of “old-style” Japanese behavior. For their instructor, the perfect match between a person and his or her surrounding was the foundation for attaining “freedom”, in the sense that the Buddhist tradition gives to the term jiyû jizai. To achieve this notion of freedom, it is important to train one’s own body and mind, and let oneself detach from one’s self-interest in order to become one with nature.

The guides’s performance as “Japanese cosmopolitans” were the result of this co-modification of self and environment. For the Japanese tourists, the guides embodied the cosmopolitan dream of escaping the standard course of stable yet constraining lives of salaried workers in order to live a frugal yet fulfilling life in nature. Despite—or because of—the stereotypical association of outdoor activity and masculine culture, female outdoor guides played a particularly significant role. They performatively constructed their subjectivities as people who could transcend the dominant gendered norms. By doing so, they produced a charismatic aura and presented themselves as mediators with the special ability to go back and forth between the everyday world and an elsewhere, imaginarily staged on Canada’s vast natural landscape. Shiho Satsuka draws the portrait of three of these charisma guides, referring them to familiar gender figures in Japanese pop culture: the male-impersonating female found in girls’ high schools or Takarazuka plays; the tomboy who refuses to grow up and fall into assigned gender roles; and the girl medium fighting to save the world as in video games or anime movies. The ambiguous characteristics of female tour guides who straddled various sets of two worlds—male and female, adult and child, and human and nature—exemplifies the limits of standard binary frameworks used for categorizing human beings. It shows that being female is not a “natural fact” but a cultural performance: choosing a gender category for oneself or others is not necessarily based on a biological body, but on a person’s social role and position in everyday interactions. Here the author makes reference to the work of Judith Butler, but her “gender trouble in nature” is devoid of any militant charge, and gender ambiguity is presented as an everyday fact of life. If anything, the gender roles performed by female outdoor guides are more “natural” than the artificial roles assigned to young women in Japanese society.

A matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape

Japanese outdoor guides offer “nature in translation”: they are expected to tell the stories of nature as if they were national park interpreters. In the park managers’ view, ecological science is the basis of understanding nature’s language. Guides play a role of environmental stewardship as a result of a neoliberal privatization process that has outsourced nature’s protection to the commercial sector. But nature and science take on different meanings in English and in Japanese. The Japanese guides’ participation in an accreditation program revealed discrepancies of worldview that locate humans in relation to nature. Japanese participants asked more questions about plant and rocks as opposed to animals, they did not laugh when their instructor ironically hugged a tree, and they had trouble translating notions like “nature interpretation” or “stewardship” into Japanese. In their view, the guide was not a decoder of nature’s true message but more like a matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape. They let nature do the talk. This doesn’t mean that Japanese guides were not interested in environmental science and technical knowledge as dispensed in the training program: on the contrary, they were keen to update themselves with the latest research by the park scientists, and embraced the principles of environmental conservation. But they insisted that nature was much larger than any person’s ability to grasp it, and their questioning suggested that the dividing line between nature and society varies across cultures. The notion of stewardship, which implies that man is accountable for this world and has to answer to a higher authority about its management, is not easily translated into other religious and knowledge traditions.

Nature as a constant process of translation

Multiculturalism and environmental protection are two key areas in which Canada has assumed a self-assigned leading role in the world. They have become pillars of Canadian national identity, a source of pride and attractiveness in a world where these two values are put under stress. But nature conservation is seldom seen with the prism of multiculturalism. Instead, ecology has adopted the language of science, with the underlying assumption that scientific knowledge is culturally neutral and universally applicable to people with diverse backgrounds. By following the trail of Japanese tour guides in Banff, Shiho Satsuka shows that nature needs to be understood as a constant process of translation. Ecology as a language is inseparable from the politics of knowledge translation: notions such as nature, freedom, work, or identity are constantly renegotiated in distinct social contexts. The Japanese guides portrayed by the author occupy a liminal space away from mainstream Japanese and Canadian societies. But these service workers have much to tell us about what it means to inhabit nature as cosmopolitan agents seeking freedom and independence in a globalizing world. This book, the first one published by the author, also demonstrates the proper value of a graduate education in anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline that adresses big issues—the relation between mankind and nature, the political economy of neoliberalism and flexible work, the definition of freedom and subjectivity—in a located and situated manner. Theory—and this is a theoretically rich book—always come as a tool to understand our present in concrete situations. Her graduate education has provided Shiho Satsuka with a rich toolbox of concepts and references, but more important to her was the patient learning and questioning accumulated during ethnographic fieldwork. This book marks the birth of a great anthropologist.