SEAA
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Elected Officers
*PRESIDENT
LAUREL KENDALL, (PhD, Columbia University, 1979) Positions held: Curator (1993-Pres.) American Museum of Natural History, Associate Curator (1988-1993) AMNH, Assistant Curator 1983-1988) AMNH; Adjunct Professor (1995-present) Columbia University, Adjunct Associate Professor (1990-1995) Columbia University; Visiting Assistant Professor (1981-1982) University of Kansas; Post-doctoral Research Fellow (1979-1981) University of Hawaii. Interests and/or activities: popular religion, shamans, gender, modernity, material culture, museums, Korea, Vietnam. Significant Publications: The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East (with Alexia Bloch) University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit, (ed. With Nguyen Van Huy) University of California Press, 2003; Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (ed.), University of Hawaii Press, 2001; Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity, University of California Press, 1996; Initiating Performance: The Story of Chini, a Korean Shaman in Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, eds. The Performance of Healing, Routledge, 1996; Korean "Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism", American Anthropologist 98/3, 1996; The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, University of Hawaii Press, 1988; Shamans Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits:ÊWomen in Korean Ritual Life, University of California Press, 1985.
*PRESIDENT-ELECT
JENNIFER ROBERTSON, (Ph.D., Cornell University, 1985) Positions Held: Professor (1997-present), Associate Professor (1991-97) Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UCSD (1988-91); Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Williams College (1986-1988) Interests and/or Activities: Socio-Cultural and Historical Anthropology and Ethnography (Art and Visual Culture, Museums, Biotechnology and Bioethics, Colonialism and Imperialism, Feminist Theory, History of Eugenics and Bioethics, Human-Robot Interface, Mass/Popular Culture, Race and Ethnicity, Sex/Gender Systems, Urban Studies); Japan and Israel Significant Publications: Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (University of California Press, 1991, 1994); Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (UCP, 1998, 3rd ed. 2001, Japanese trans. Gendai Shokan, 2000); Editor, A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell, 2005).
*PAST PRESIDENT
YUNXIANG YAN, (PhD, Harvard University, 1993) Positions held: Professor (2003-present), Associate Professor (1998-2003) University of California, Los Angeles; Assistant Professor (1996-98), University of California, Los Angeles; Assistant Professor (1994-96), Johns Hopkins University; Lecturer (1993-94), Chinese University of Hong Kong; Lecturer (1984-86), Peking University, China; Interests and/or Activities: rural development, family, kinship, and social exchange, and transnationalism and global change; Significant Publications: Private Life under Socialism: Individuality and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999, Stanford University Press, in press; The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village, Stanford University Press, 1996; McDonald’s in Beijing: The localization of Americana, in James Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, Stanford University Press, 1997, Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford Univ. Press, 2003).
*SECRETARY
SABINE FRUHSTUCK (Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1996) Positions Held: Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies (2006-Pres) Associate Professor (2003-2006) Assistant Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara (1999-2003); Visiting Research Professor, Kyoto University (2003) Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Vienna (1994-1999); Interests and/or Activities: Socio-Cultural and Historical Analyses of Japan in the World, Including Power/Knowledge, Gender/Sexuality, Military/Society; Significant Publications: Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (University of California Press, 2007), Japanese trans. Fuan no Heishitachi: Nihon no Jieitai Kaibu (Hara Shobo (2008), Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2003).
Platform Statement: I am interested in bottom-up approaches to researching problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military societal relations in modern and contemporary Japan and East Asia. I find an interdisciplinary methodology that overcomes some of the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, historiography and sociology most useful and theoretically most fruitful. Thus I hope to see SEAA reach out more to other sections of the AAA as well as to other disciplines with similar intellectual concerns regarding East Asia.
*TREASURER
SANDRA TERESA HYDE (PhD, UC Berkeley & San Francisco, December, 1999) Positions Held: Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine (2002-Present), McGill University, Canada; NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow (1999-2001), Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Interests and/or Activities: cultural politics of infectious diseases, post-socialism and governmentality, gender and sexuality. Significant Publications: Eating Spring Rice: The Cultural Politics of AIDS in Southwest China, University of California Press, January 2007. Postcolonial Disorders, MJ Good, ST Hyde, S Pinto and B Good (eds.), University of California Press, Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Series, forthcoming 2007. "Sex Tourism and the Lure of the Ethnic Erotic in Southwest China," in China’s Transformation: The Stories Beyond the Headlines, Lionel Jensen and Tim Weston (eds.), Boulder, Colorado: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
*COUNCILORS
ANRU LEE (PhD, CUNY Graduate Center, 1999) Positions Held: Assistant Professor (2003-present) John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Assistant Professor (1999-2003) California State University, Sacramento; Secretary (2005-2008) Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW); SAW Anthropology News Contributing Editor (2002-2005); Interests and/or Activities: gender and sexuality, urban anthropology, anthropology of transportation, city and citizenship, political economy, Taiwan; Significant Publications: In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (SUNY Press, 2004); Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (ME Sharpe, 2004; co-edited with Catherine Farris and Murray A. Rubinstein).
SARA FREIDMAN
GUVEN WITTEVEEN (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997) Positions Held:Education Outreach Coordinator (2003 to present), University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, Outreach Coordinator (2001, 2002) Michigan State University Asian Studies Center, Research Fellow (1999 to 2001) National Museum of Ethnology in Japan; Interests and/or Activities: (member of the AAA Anthropology Education Committee; interest in audio and videography uses in teaching and research; seeking better linkages between foreign language learning and ethnographic description); Significant Publications: "Can You See Yourself in Digital Video?" (Anthropology News, Mar 2005), The Renaissance of Takefu : How people and the local past changed the civic life of a regional Japanese town (Routledge, 2004), Civil Society in Japan and Takefu City’s Efforts to Involve Citizens in Community Building." (Senri Ethnological Series, 2002).
BONNIE ADRIAN, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver. She earned her Ph. D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Yale University in 1999. She is author of Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (University of California Press, 2003), winner of the 2004 L.K. Hsu Book Prize. Her current project is tentatively entitled "Intimate Buddhism: Applying Dharma to the Problems of Modern Family Life in Taiwan" and was awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant for research in 2008.
TOMOMI YAMAGUCHI (PhD, University of Michigan, 2004) Positions Held: Assistant Professor (2007-Pres) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Montana State University, Bozeman; Post-doctoral Fellow (2004-2007) Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago; Interests and/or Activities: sociocultural anthropology, Japan, feminism and social movements, Significant Publications: "Impartial Observation and Partial Participation: Feminist Ethnography in Politically Charged Japan" Critical Asian Studies, 39 (4), December 2007; (with Norma Field) "Gendered Labor Justice and the Law of Peace: Nakajima Michiko and the 15-Woman Lawsuit Opposing Dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq" Japan Focus, October 20, 2007; "Feminism, Timelines and History-Making" in Jennifer Robertson ed., Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, Blackwell, 2005.
Platform Statement:There are a variety of goals I have been in the process of pursing, and it is my hope that being a councilor would allow me to achieve these goals for myself and for other East Asian anthropologists. For example, I would like to: enlarge the profile of East Asian Anthropology within the AAA, and improve such features as panel scheduling at the annual meetings, facilitate scholarly communication and collaborations internationally, among anthropologists in East Asia and researchers in related fields in the U.S. As a Japan specialist, I maintain strong ties with Japanese scholars and activists already, but being a councilor would give me a more official position from which to act, encourage more active usage of on-line communications among SEAA members, develop more interactive features of the SEAA website to promote public knowledge about East Asia, encourage active participation of minority scholars, and promote diversity within SEAA. I am currently at an institution where East Asian anthropology is still at its beginning stages in the curriculum, and as such I believe that collaboration and information exchange are of vital importance, especially in colleges and universities with smaller programs. SEAA could become a vital organization in helping these smaller programs with information resources and opportunities for collaboration.
CHARLENE E. MAKLEY (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1999) Positions Held: Associate Professor (2005-present) of Anthropology, Luce Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (2000-2005), Department of Anthropology, Reed College, Portland, OR; Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, (1999-2000). Interests and/or Activities: Chinese and Tibetan history and culture, linguistic anthropology; anthropology of religion and ritual; gender studies; Co-organized double panel on the cultural politics of development in Post-Mao China, AAA 2007. Significant Publications: The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press (2007). "Speaking Bitterness: Autobiography, History and Mnemonic Politics on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 47(1): 40-78, January (2005). "Gendered Boundaries in Motion: Space and Identity on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier," American Ethnologist 30(4) (November ) (2003).
Platform Statement:As an SEAA Councilor, I would like to help support and expand upon SEAA's mandate to promote the anthropological study of East Asian societies. In the face of intensifying capitalist and statist pressures in the region, this to my mind is a crucial counter-imperative. My interdisciplinary and cross-border training in Chinese and Tibetan studies also predisposes me to promote inter-area and interdisciplinary links in research and theory-building in a way that would nonetheless enhance the status of anthropology as a singular discipline and make clear the particularities of East Asian societies today.
*STUDENT COUNCILORS
JUNE MEE KIM (A.M., Harvard University, 2003) Positions Held: Assistant Resident Dean (2006-Pres) Harvard College Lowell House; Resident Tutor (2004-Pres) Harvard College Lowell House; Teaching Fellow (2006) Harvard College; Adjunct Lecturer (2003-2004) Hunter College; Program Associate (2003) The Korea Society; Proctor (2001-2003) Harvard College Freshman Dean’s Office; Conference Coordinator (2002-2003) Harvard University Korea Institute; Interests and/or Activities: diasporas, aspirational ideology and iconography, transnational socialization, popular and material culture; Significant Publications: "The Case of Chosnjok Labor Migrants in Seoul: Challenging Traditional Conceptions of Citizenship, Cultural Homogeneity, Ethnic Solidarity and Locality ", Select Papers of The Korean Studies Graduate Student Conference, Harvard University Korea Institute, Volume 3, 2003.
JUNKO TERUYAMA (MA, University of Chicago, 2004; Ph.D student, University of Michigan) Positions Held: Graduate Student Instructor (2006-Pres) University of Michigan; Intern/researcher (2006) NPO EDGE (Tokyo, Japan); Research Assistant (2005-2006) University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies; Researcher (2003-2004) Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan); Interests and/or Activities: Illness/disability, marginality, social movement; Presented "Disabling Narratives: Media Representation of LD and Other Developmental Disabilities in Japan, 1994-2004" at the 2007 Society for Disability Studies Annual Conference in Seattle
Platform Statement: The Society for East Asian Anthropology embraces a cross-disciplinary forum for academic exchange, committing itself to discovering and developing a global network of East Asian scholarship that is not necessarily limited to anthropological research based in U.S institutions. If elected, I will support this function and push for an even greater focus on encouraging international and cross-disciplinary dialog among scholars and students working with diverse topics, theoretical orientations and disciplinary traditions. My motivation is based on my involvement with disability studies where the dearth of anthropological inquiry (especially of Asian societies) is a pressing issue, and my personal awareness and concern that there are relatively limited channels that foster international academic exchange, especially between American and East Asian anthropologists. I strongly feel that SEAA should assume the role to promote an increasingly diverse and inclusive space where anthropologists and other scholars alike can contribute their perspectives and facilitate critical discussions that are of importance to the studies of East Asian cultures and societies.
*OTHER POSITIONS
AAA PROGRAM EDITOR: GORDON MATHEWS
AN COLUMN EDITORS: CAROLYN STEVENS, CHRISTINE YANO
EASIANTH EDITORS: THEODORE BESTOR, DENISE O’BRIEN
WEBEDITOR: DAVID WIGGINS
top ↑PAST SEAA PRESIDENTS
TED BESTOR, 2001-02
LAURA MILLER, 2003-04
YUNXIANG YAN, 2005-06
top ↑