Global Futures in East Asia (Anagnost and Arai), page 2

Global Futures in East Asia

Ann Anagnost and Andrea G. Arai

The object of this essay is to discuss ethnographic explorations of life-making in a time of great economic uncertainty and upheaval. The opportunities and terrors of this new time, profoundly shaped by global forces, frame the future life prospects of the young. Defined by calculations of risk and recalibrations of human capital, these conditions of existence have resulted in new forms of embodied labor power and entrepreneurial subjects.

Our principal focus in this essay is to explore more specifically how these new kinds of subjects are formed in East Asia. The reasons for this regional focus are two-fold. First, we are now said to be entering the Asian Century in which the dynamism of the global economy is said to be shifting away from Europe and North America to a region of emergent economies. The rise of China, in particular, figures centrally in visions of a future world order in ways that are eerily reminiscent of Japan’s economic preeminence in the 1980s. Moreover, China’s overtaking of this position cannot be understood without a deeper understanding of a longer history of colonial modernities and neocolonial modernization projects that underlie the more recent period of neoliberal restructurings and global markets. Therefore, our focus on East Asia as a region also signals our intent to explore the value of area studies for global studies as well as the reverse, that is the importance of incorporating global perspectives in our understandings of regional and national contexts. All too often, especially in East Asian area studies, the fields of study identified with specific nation states (China, Japan, Korea) are too insular and fail to address the ways in which constructions of place are bound up with their relationships to other places. Likewise, a newly constituted “global studies” tends to gloss over the deeply stratified histories that continue to shape the present and future. We aim to explore emerging ethnographic literatures that contribute to the bringing of regional and global perspectives to the study of East Asian places.

Intricately involved in the booms and busts of the Asian national contexts has been the restless movement of capital in the post-Cold War period and up to the present. The ethnographies we review help to map this logic of capital movement and with it the making and breaking of economies and the social orders they supported. The recent economic meltdown in the United States and elsewhere has been a forceful reminder of how complexly places are related to each other. The economic bubble was fueled in good part by speculative trading in futures and derivatives markets in which transactions of value increasingly took on more and more ephemeral forms that were traded globally. The collapse of this delicate house of cards, buoyed by free-market fundamentalism, has left devastation in its wake the magnitude of which is still not clear. The Japanese recession of the early 1990s, triggered by a collapse in the real estate market, appears in retrospect almost as a dress rehearsal for the current economic troubles. A crisis of over-accumulation in Japan led to the migration of Japanese capital to China, which had been newly opened for foreign investment in the 1980s. China’s rapid economic rise must, therefore, be connected to Japan’s need for a “spatio-temporal” fix (Harvey 2003) in seeking out cheaper sources of labor on the Chinese mainland. The effects of these economic shifts have led to the hollowing out of the Japanese economy and a much less secure trajectory for Japanese youth for whom the goal of life-long job security no longer has the same allure, even as the possibility of attaining it becomes ever less likely (Arai 2003, 2005; Driscoll 2007). In this essay, we wish to build frameworks for understanding the ways in which youth envision their futures in this brave new world. Our thinking for this project was informed by the dramatic shift of fortunes in East Asia at the end of the 1990s as economic crisis and neoliberal reform swept the region beginning in Japan, presaging the new harsh realities of the present crisis. In our focus on emergent labor subjectivities, we can bring ethnography to bear on what it does best by exploring the complex relationships between macro-level processes working globally with the everyday practices of building a life in an economic landscape that has been dramatically changed.

The Future as Critical Concept

Yet a third objective of this essay is to explore the future as a critical category. Anna Tsing has reminded us that the allure of globalization is in no small part due to its power to envision a future (2000:332). This future orientation of globalization talk is undoubtedly connected with the promissory nature of finance capital, which had become by the recent turn of century a major engine of accumulation in late capitalism, at least until this most recent bursting of a financial bubble. Global opportunity mapped out new frontiers in the movement of capital, in which social actors, whether these are individuals managing their retirement portfolios (Miyazaki 2006) or investment banks engineering their strategies for growth (Ho 2005). The verb that Tsing (2000, 2005) uses to convey the performative power of these representations of futurity is “to conjure.” To speak of the “global situation” is to invest it with a reality that it might not yet have but that can be enacted upon through these discursive framings to produce material effects. Her critique challenges us to imagine the future differently so that other possibilities might emerge. She suggests that we think of “the global” in terms of projects, rather than thinking of it as descriptive of something that already exists or that will, in time, be inevitable (see also Gibson-Graham 1996).

Tsing suggests that we treat globalization as a project rather than as an inexorable process, much as contemporary critiques of development are now rethinking in retrospect the modernization projects of the postwar era. This exhortation encourages us to view globalization and the neoliberal reform projects that often accompany it also as projects of human engineering that bear some resemblance not only to the modernization projects of the postwar period but also the modernity projects of national becoming that preceded them at the turn of the last century. All three of these moments—modernity projects of national becoming, postwar modernization, neoliberal restructurings in the context of globalization—entail the production of new kinds of subjectivities—national subjects, recipients of aid and first-world tutelage, and self-governing citizen-subjects, respectively.

Overview of Themes

The central themes of this review of the ethnographic study of East Asia within the context of globalization are therefore three-fold. The first is an exploration of how “places are made through their connections with each other, not their isolation” (Tsing 2000:330). What might it mean to talk about region as a series of intertwined histories in which ideas—civilization, modernity, development, globalization—travel from one place to another and take shape with a view to other places as a basis of comparison? An adequate understanding of the present must necessarily be grounded on an awareness of the histories of these complex crossings (Ong 2006). Such a project, combining deep area knowledge with regional and global perspectives, is necessarily a collaborative project, concerned to uncover the resonances across time and space within East Asia. We envision this essay as a way to encourage a dialogue among scholars working in their different locations, but who wish to work collaboratively on more border-crossing projects.

The second theme is the power of anthropology to trace out the connections between people’s lived experience with larger processes working at the scale of the global. Ethnographic portraits within the context of globalization provide us with detailed descriptions of how people in different locations in East Asia experience their everyday realities in the midst of the new possibilities and constraints that these movements in the global economy are producing for their lives (Ren 2005). Engagement with these transformations at the level of the everyday beyond our national borders also makes us attentive to the changing profiles and experiences of our students at U.S.-based academic settings. Embodying the realities of globalization’s flows of information and capital, they also bear the burden of neoliberalism’s “freedoms” and self-responsibility. An unexpected consequence of anthropology’s tracing out of connections (past and present) in this new era is the fostering in our students a sense of identification (rather than competition) with youth located elsewhere in their shared experience of the promise, hope, uncertainty, and terror they confront as they enter the global economy as embodied human capital (Abelmann 2003; Hoffman 2006; Inoue 2007; Nelson 2000).

A third theme is the changing calculus of human worth in the production of subjects as both workers and consumers. A number of the studies we review look at the contingent production of emergent forms of being in relation to national projects of human engineering. In phrasing it this way, we hope to draw attention both to the intentional activities of agents of change (including agents working on themselves) and the imaginaries of development that they inhabit along with the indeterminacy of outcomes (Anagnost 2004, 2006; Arai 2003, 2005; Pazderic 2004; Pun 2005; Song 2006; Yan 2008; Zhang forthcoming; Zhang and Ong 2008). As noted above, amidst the promises of globalization to equalize and “flatten” the world, anthropologists confront the way in which the utopic visions of this era, often invested with ideas of freedom and the promise of self-fulfillment, are also laden with the costs of greater vulnerability and uncertainty.

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