1. Year's Activities
a. Membership

The Society for East Asian Anthropology had a wonderfully successful year. As a new section founded in 2001, establishing a solid membership base was a primary goal for us. Our membership grew from 380 in September 2003 to 454 in September 2004.

b. Annual Meeting

In the past, the AAA annual meeting has been the sole occasion at which SEAA has met. A poll of membership elicited on our EASIANTH Listserv made it clear that the majority of our members could not go to AAA meeting in Atlanta. It was apparent that members in Asia, who make up an important component of our section, found the abrupt change of dates and site an insurmountable logistical problem. Our solution was to hold a Mini-Conference on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley from November 18 to November 20, 2004, a decision unanimously endorsed by the SEAA Executive Board. We held our 2004 Executive Board Meeting and Business Meeting in Berkeley. Our Mini-Conference was not held in place of or in opposition to the AAA meeting. Rather, we weighed the various options and came up with the best solution for our section. The Mini-Conference in Berkeley was a great success, thanks to the incredible support we received from our membership. SEAA Berkeley featured 10 panels, 52 papers and 3 film screenings. The full program is available at http://www.aaanet.org/seaa/download/SEAA_booklet2004.pdf

c. Section Prizes

2004 was the first year we awarded sections prizes. The Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, recognizing outstanding work published in the previous calendar year, was presented to Bonnie Adrian for Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan's Bridal Industry (University of California Press, 2003). Judges said that this is an ".... engaging study that weds visual anthropology to issues of consumption and gender and along the way, has a lot to say about young adults in contemporary Taiwan. While in the best tradition of ethnography, the book provides nuanced information about a particular time and place, it is the sort of study that will be widely read, widely cited, and used in a variety of course formats." An Honorable Mention was also awarded to Yunxiang Yan for Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press, 2003), a "beautifully written, and troubling book that draws its considerable power from the author's long and intimate knowledge of the community."

The David Plath Media Award was awarded to John W. Bennett for his website "Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1948-1951: A Personal and Professional Memoir, 2002." This valuable annotated photo archive adds to the historical and ethnographic record, and can be used for further analysis.

The Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper was given to Ayumi Miyazaki (Ph.D. 2004, Harvard) for "Balancing individual and group identities: Japanese girls' linguistic and social negotiations with peer groups." An abstract of her paper will be published in a future SEAA column in Anthropology News. An Honorable Mention was given to Paul Festa (Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell) for "Mahjong agnostics in Taiwan: Fate, mimesis, and the martial imaginary."

d. Communications

Communication channels for SEAA include the section column in Anthropology News, the EASIANTH listserve, and the AAA Website. Bonnie Adrian and Ann Frechette were our co-editors for the section column in Anthropology News during 2004. AAA Website: Our Webmaster David Wiggins routinely updates and enhances our website. The EASIANTH Listserve is an unmoderated list with more than 370 members. It has been in existence for several years and continues to be an active vehicle for membership news and announcements, brainstorming for session ideas, and lively debate. EASIANTH Listserve

e.
Executive Board Members in 2004 were

Laura Miller (President) lmille2@luc.edu

Fuji Lozada (Secretary) erlozada@davidson.edu

Yunxiang Yan (President-Elect) yan@anthro.ucla.edu

Ted Bestor (Past President) bestor@wjh.harvard.edu

Joseph Bosco (Treasurer) josephbosco@cuhk.edu.hk

Gordon Matthews (Councillor) cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk

Millie Creighton (Councillor) milliecr@interchange.ubc.ca

Sonia Ryang (Councillor) sonia.ryang@jhu.edu

Avron Boretz (Councillor) aboretz@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Dawn Grimes-MacLellan (Student Councillor) maclelln@gol.com

f. Nominations

During 2004 the Nominations Committee (Fuji Lozada, Joe Bosco, Millie Creighton and Dawn Grimes-MacLellan) proposed a vibrant slate of candidates for open positions. We held elections in Spring 2004 and elected new Executive Board members for 2005: Susan Long as Secretary, Li Zhang as Councillor, and Tami Blumenfield as Student Councillor.

G. Changes in the bylaws
We proposed one Bylaws change:
ARTICLE 1. Name
Section 1. The Section shall be known as the East Asian Studies in Anthropology, E-ASIA(S),
a section of the American Anthropological Association, hereinafter referred to as the Section.
Proposal to change this to:
ARTICLE 1. Name
Section 1. The Section shall be known as the Society for East Asian Anthropology, SEAA,
a section of the American Anthropological Association, hereinafter referred to as the Section.
The proposal to change the name was approved by ballot in 2004. The Bylaws were changed to reflect our new section name.

2. Future Activities

The high energy at the Berkeley Mini-Conference enabled us to think of creative ways to continue to support our members in the future. One plan we initiated is to hold another SEAA Conference in Hong Kong in July, 2006. This meeting will be in addition the AAA annual meeting. Gordon Mathews at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has generously offered to begin the spadework.

We also decided to hold a one-day informal, non-registration workshop at a local university campus on April 3, 2005 (in tandem with the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting). We are inviting graduate students to present their recent fieldwork findings or dissertation proposals.