In the wake of Ermo

Comments on Ermo, and a digression on selling blood

When I drafted the original syllabus, I thought that the logical step after Ermo might be to food and other ingestibles (the original topic was listed as 'food, tea and opium'), but I've changed my mind upon careful reading of the Lu and Ciecko article, which situates the film as an expression of (a) China's place in "global entertainment", (b) emergent capitalist motives and opportunities in present-day China, and (c) "televisuality" as a widespread phenomenon.

It seems to me that the next place to go is to a sort of meta-anthropology, asking how we might inquire into the questions

These are pretty big questions, and certainly invade territories that anthropology isn't necessarily 'responsible' for, because of (a) the scale of the socio-cultural units in question, and (b) anthropology's traditional methods.
Anthropology's disciplinary paradigm has fieldwork at its epicenter, and generally its methods focus at the face-to-face (f2f) level, working with informants whose testimony is woven into an ethnography of the community (sometimes communities) to which the informants belong. This is not the only, but surely the most familiar of the discipline's ways of knowing.

How can such a fine-grain approach be applied to societies of the scale we see in China, Japan, and Korea? Hordes of f2f interviewers fanning out to question and record? [not without precedent --see the case of Mass Observation in England] Some sort of aggregation mechanism to gather the harvest and process it? And can we expect that the sum of f2f reports could explain the higher-order organization on non-f2f societies? What other means of information/data-gathering do we need besides the (essentially traditional) toolkit of fieldwork? A few candidates:

A tried-and-true method uses historical settings and events as a starting place, and we've done a good bit of that in the last 8 weeks. Perhaps the greatest 'problem' is that we're limited (by time, certainly) to the anecdotal, to tales that are necessarily incomplete and incompletely joined up with their fuller context. (My notion is that each such 'tale' is a potential starting place, and generally I've offered them as possible on-ramps if the subject seems intriguing, but not followed them up in the interest of providing a broader spectrum).

Historically we can observe episodes of contact and struggle of many sorts, and trace consequences of particular events and processes, and we've already alluded to those in both Taiping and Boxer rebellions in China, and in the "opening" of Japan and Korea... and there's of course MUCH more to explore in those areas. It's perfectly possible to trace these globalization processes and entanglements via specific commodities, noting (for example) that it's at least arguable that modern "world trade" began with 16th century Spanish/Portuguese commerce with East Asia. The succeeding 200 years was very exciting, and certainly a time of great change in every corner of the globe, thanks to episodes of contact that can be seen through the lens of trade. The upshot of the 17th and 18th centuries can be read many ways, but one of them is certainly through the lens of commodity trade: we can observe that China held a very sizeable proportion of the world's silver [vast quantities from Mexican and Peruvian mines] in 1800, and that exports of tea and imports of opium were 19th century exemplars of globalization. Moving to the late 20th century, we might take the same commodity perspective by looking at manufacturing and export of electronics and such other facets of industrialization as the evolution of global textile production and trade.

(see, for example, google search including China's Electronics Industry, and an annual with the same title (see foreword and preface)

...and this book in Leyburn might be useful:

The role of foreign direct investment in East Asian economic development
edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger
Chicago IL. : University of Chicago Press, 2000
HG5770.5.A3 R65 2000
...and Korea, Taiwan, Japan ditto... and specifically Shenzhen ...and what's Shenzhen all about? Can you say sweatshops?)

Looking at the present moment, and emphasizing technology as a facet of cultural development, we might ask: how are Internet capabilities [and other information technologies] actually being used in the nations of East Asia? What should we have on our radar in this area? One way to begin exploring the Internet and other bits of cyberlore in East Asia is via Howard Rhinegold's Smart Mobs, but there are many other sources we might entertain:

last Thursday, Belcher-san quoted a WSJ story to the effect that Korea had more bandwidth per capita [?] than any other nation... google search suggests maybe I misremember (see Packet Geography 2002 and Global Internet Geography Database and Report 2004...) ...but consider some factoids for Korea and Internet Connectivity Map from Korea Network Information Center, and Internet users data... and animation of [past and projected] Internet growth

...and a factoid harvested from slashdot.org, from ITU story:

a report by the International Telecommunications Union shows the US lagging in broadband adoption. S Korea and Japan lead with between 60 and 70% of S Korean households wired for speed, with Japan catching up quickly. The U.S. ranks 11th...

In South Korea, it's the mouse that roars: New breed of politician taps the country's love affair with high tech, GEOFFREY YORK from Globe and Mail

Internet at Center Stage in Roh Presidency (Jan 2003) and Roh Re-Embracing His Online Supporters (28/x 2003)

wired.com search for 'korea' (300+ hits)

China Internet Use Grows and The cost of China's web censors (BBC)

We could ask the interesting question: what are cell phones/mobile phones doing to human relationships, to social activity, to 'popular culture'.

google: korea teenagers "mobile phones" (2100 hits...)

google: china teenagers "mobile phones"

japan teenagers "mobile phones"

ooooh ooooh look what I found: Proceedings of the Experts' Meeting at the Mitsubishi Research Institute, Tokyo, March 2003 (a 60-page pdf --see Programme with pictures and links to some presentations/PowerPoint slides)