ABSTRACTS
Amy Borovoy
Japan Studies and the Critique of Utilitarianism in Modern Social Life
I would like to locate Margaret Lock’s work in the history of American Japan studies in the social sciences, which has used Japan as a laboratory for exploring the importance of the social community in mediating modern life. Immediately after World War II (and even before its culmination), anthropologists began to consider how Japanese institutions such as the household system, ancestor worship, and tightly-woven village communities could be compatible with liberal democracy. In the context of early postwar village studies, anthropologists and sociologists linked traditional forms of community and Japanese kinship with the structure of modern urban enterprise and postwar social welfare. The idea that capitalism is contained by traditional social forms is in some ways foundational to Lock’s work on the body, which insists on seeing the body as socially immersed, and attends to the ways in which the value of the aging or “brain dead” body is defined by social ties. Through the work of Lock and others, I’d like to explore the relationship between Japan studies and the interrogation of certain forms of secularism, utilitarianism, and contractuality that have been seen as inevitable in modern societies.
Tsipy Ivry
Notes on the Changing Configurations of Reproductive Technologies
I propose two trajectories of exploration to extend Margaret Lock's insights into the local configurations of biotechnologies. First, exploring the new guidelines for genomic prenatal tests in Japan issued two years after the Fukushima disaster I suggest a reconsideration of "local natures" with which population groups are entangled in a process of co-production of local political ecologies of nurturance. Second, based on explorations of rabbinically mediated fertility treatments in Israel, I highlight the importance of understanding how biomedicine may become a technology of religion and religionalization.
Junko Kitanaka
Containing Depression: Treating the Epidemic in the Age of Preemptive Psychiatry
Recent progress in biology, particularly in the fields of neurobiology and genetics, has created a kind of optimism in psychiatry that biology will finally bring us decisively true knowledge about ourselves. While it is still short on promising cures for mental disorders, biological psychiatry is increasingly revealing how we all have a body and a brain where future risks are already deeply inscribed. As a result, there has arisen a new concern with controlling genetic uncertainty through the use of personalized medicine and mass screening. This obsession for controlling health is particularly striking in Japan, where workers have long accepted annual physical checkups through the workplace as a routine matter, and where they are now debating who has the right to intervene into workers' mental health. This paper traces how this debate has emerged during the current "epidemic" of depression and explores how the psychiatric rendering of workers' subjectivities is creating a new object of biopsychological self-governance.

Julie Livingston
Figuring the Tumor
This paper considers a series of photographs and other visual images present in the oncology ward of the central referral hospital in Botswana where a cancer epidemic rages. The images depict the bodies of patients with very egregious and disturbing tumors. They are difficult to look at, and I do not intend to display them. Instead, based on extensive ethnographic research in the ward, the paper considers the productive work that these photographs perform, not for the viewer, but for the photographic subject. The discussion explores how such images might assist patients phenomenologically and ethically in separating tumor from self, and in validating and socializing the obscenity of advanced cancer.
Susan Orpett Long
Imposing Order on Old Age in Japan
In a great deal of her work, Margaret Lock has drawn our attention to the ways in which scientific experts and government bureaucrats have constructed social categories that are culturally naturalized and through which people experience and interpret their [locally] embodied lives. In a parallel manner, the 14 year old Japanese system for long term care of the large frail elderly population has created new categories and terms through which old age is increasingly understood and lived. This paper discusses the impact of such factors as the universalization of expectations, the professionalization of caregiving, the uses of new technologies, and the numerical understanding of disabilities.
Melissa K. Melby
Varieties of Menopausal Experience: Lessons from Japan
Building on Margaret Lock’s ground-breaking work, this project undertook a broad reproductive ecology approach to the study of the menopausal transition in Japan, utilizing the ‘natural experiment’ provided by regional variation in soy intake, and combined cultural and biological anthropology methods. Hot flush prevalence rates spanned a 7-fold range depending on the linguistic term used, highlighting the importance of language in the interpretation of epidemiological data. The old adage “you are what you eat” is only partly true: depending on the composition of gut microflora, metabolites differ considerably. Results suggest that menopausal
Japanese women experience chilliness, a symptom occurring at the opposite end of the thermoregulatory system from those experienced by North Americans. A better understanding of who is affected by which symptoms may improve public health programs and individual medical treatment, as well as our understanding of the nature of biocultural variation in health.
Mitsuho Ikeda
Making Medical Anthropology in Japan: A Memoir of Ten years in Osaka in the 1980s
As we have plenty of Japanese medical anthropologists today, it is laborious to summarize general overview of the present future of “our” academic paradigm in Japan. Nevertheless if we back to 1980s, we can point to a few “big names” in Japan, the United States and Canada (also
England) which help explain the configuration and “birth” of Japanese Medical Anthropology.
While I do not intend indulge in nostalgia, I’d like to contextualize my political and academic positionality in that time. I was a member of, the Medical Anthropologists in Osaka, acronym
MAO, the parodist self-appointed MAOists of Osaka University, whose mentor or guru was
Professor Yonezō NAKAGAWA, medical historian, educator, and a pioneer of bioethics in

Japan. Under the liberal and anarchistic atmosphere created in his seminars, we could discuss broadly social medicine and “critical medicine” ( hihan-teki iryō) in our lab. This was a part of our program in the study of “history of social hygiene” (Gesellschaft für hygiene) from the prewar era of Osaka Imperial University. At that time we encountered Professor Lock’s critical essay on “Cultural Resistance by Japanese Good Wives and Wise Mothers,” ( Ryōsai kenbo no
Teikō), in 1983. The paper inspired us to rebuild MAOist thinking on critical medicine, also inspired by George L. Engel, Ivan Illich, Michael Foucault, Thomas McKeown, and so on (a series of foreign medical anthropology big names). I revisit our old theme and your new one: how can critical medicine serve to potentially innovate “our” life beyond the Japanese cultural context.
Karen Nakamura
Ethical Dimensions in Ethnographic Mental Health Research: Who is Protecting Whom?
Ethnographic field research with communities of people with mental illness are constrained by various Federal and institutional rules and regulations regarding privacy, consent, and access.
Most of these regulations were developed in the wake of various ethical scandals in social science and medical research in the mid to late 20th century. Newer legislation such as HIPAA has further restricted access for social science research, forcing anthropologists to run a veritable gauntlet before being allowed to enter their field sites. Based on my experience doing mental health research and participation on my university IRB, I would like to discuss the impact that the current regulatory regime has had on the future of ethnographic research.
Vinh-kim Nguyen
A Brief History of the End of AIDS
Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in eradicating AIDS through novel public health strategies. These include mass screening and treatment of those with the virus, use of preventive drugs in those at risk, and mapping of hotspots using molecular epidemiological methods. These approaches mark a significant « remedicalization » of the approach to the epidemic. Many activists have embraced the move to a more biomedical approach, breaking it seems with a long history of suspicion of public health strategies which had been eschewed in favour of more community-based « empowerment » approaches. Critical discussion of this « biomedical » turn has so far crystallized around the politics of medicalization/desocialization. I will argue that such discussions are perhaps misguided to the extent that they assume a stable division between the « biological », the « social » and the « laboratory » where such interventions are tested.
Adriana Petryna
Local Biologies and Therapeutic Potentials: The Shadows of Global Health
In many global health settings, responsibilities for medical care have shifted from doctor-patient relations to precarious social institutions and legal and experimental settings that afford proxy health care delivery often on the basis of emergency or strict criteria of eligibility, urgency, or need. In this talk I trace out a conceptual shift in global health from a focus on a right to health
(often equated with the right to medicines) to the institutional dynamics that facilitate—or, more usually, obstruct—a right to recovery. I draw on Margaret Lock’s powerful idea of local biologies to address this latter right as an unmet therapeutic potential and explore its practical and conceptual challenges. What social and political arrangements optimize paths of recovery?
And what arrangements make them so perilous, even fatal?

Glenda Roberts
Work and Life in Challenging Times: A Kansai Family Across the Generations
In this paper I present a portrait of how one nuclear, working-class family lived the past three decades, experiencing upward mobility in the early years, as well as instability in the later years due to the death of the husband/father, the early retirement from regular employment of the wife/mother, and the economic instability of the children as they try to establish their own families in a downward facing and uncertain economy. I will point out themes that tie back to what we knew of Japan’s legacies, and discuss where there are changes, and how these changes are being lived and interpreted by this family, the Fujiis (pseudonym). I carried out the research for this paper in 2011 and 2012, performing qualitative semi-structured interviews with this family whom I have known since 1983, when I began my doctoral dissertation research. This was the same year that I met Margaret, who befriended me and always lent me a sympathetic ear.
While through this research we can certainly see how the precarious economic environment of the past two decades has affected this family, at the same time there is evidence of a good deal of resilience and optimism, dare I say 'hope,' not the least due to very strong family bonds and the solid economic base the parents were able to establish in better economic times.
Azumi Tsuge
Exploring Norms and Rational Choices Concerning Reproductive Technologies: Local Meanings of Having Children in Contemporary Japan
While assisted reproductive technologies and prenatal tests flourish globally, the regulations of these technologies differ substantially in different countries. Japan is regarded as a “conservative country” concerning assisted reproductive technologies (ART), involving third parties despite existence of a large number of IVF clinics. Japan is also a country where many people criticize prenatal tests as a eugenic idea or as evidence of discrimination against disabled people, despite existence of many clinics and hospitals which perform abortion procedures, and the roughly two billion abortion procedures which are conducted each year.
The situations in Japan for having children are formed by Japanese family and kinship norms.
Although the disability movement in late 1960’s to 1970’s and 2 nd
wave feminist movement in early 1970’s affected the current situation, under neo-liberalist initiatives and the new emphasis placed on individual choice in reproductive medicine, Japanese women today face intricate issues about their reproductions. I would like to describe here their “rational choice” and
“strategies” in relation to ART and prenatal tests in Japan.
Everett Zhang
Between Shenti and the Body: The Continuous Inspiration of “Local Biologies”
Margaret Lock’s ethnography about aging in Japan illuminated the importance of “local biologies” in understanding the differences regarding human bodies—illnesses in particular and human experience in general. Since then, one of the most important developments in anthropology is the deepened engagement with transnationalism and globalization. In what way will the perspective of “local biologies” continue to inform our exploration of human existence?
This paper explores this question through examining the phenomenon that “shenti” in ancient
Chinese language is not the same as the body in biological sense today, and how this difference has tended to be erased yet continued to figure in everyday life today. Based on ethnographic experience, I explore how specific social conditions redefine bodily experience in such a way that shenti has been open to the influence of the body, but retains its bodiliness shaped by specific local conditions, a lesson we learn from the long lasting inspiration of “local biologies.