Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

Abstract

In this textually experimental book, Dorinne Kondo advances the theoretical literature on the self and challenges prevailing Western notions of Japanese work life. Kondo's vivid account of everyday life on the shop floor of the small, family-owned factory where she worked in Tokyo traces the ironies and contradictions in people's construction of self. What emerges from her nuanced analysis is a self distinctly different from the unitary "I" presupposed in Western discourse. Rather, Kondo's approach views selves as multiple, gendered, and crafted in contexts of power. Kondo's portrayal of life in the factory provides a critical new perspective on the Japanese economic miracle. Prevailing Western images of Japanese work life are drawn from male, middle-class managers in large corporations. By concentrating on small, family-owned factories, on artisans, and on women part-time employees, and by showing the conflicts in the company-as-family idiom, Kondo subverts stereotypes of a homogeneous Japanese society and docile Japanese workers. The innovations on levels of theory and content are paralleled in the book's sophisticated writing strategies. Moving easily between vignette, self-reflection, theory, and history, Kondo advances the growing literature in critical anthropology and the anthropology of the self by demonstrating the inseparability of the personal from power, culture, and history. . . . It will appeal to anthropologists, to scholars in feminist theory and in postmodernism, and to anyone curious about life in contemporary Japan. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)