AANA18112U East Asian Cities: Urbanization and Big-City Life in Japan, China, and Korea

The East Asian region (China, Japan, the two Koreas, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) is home to about 1/5 of the world’s population and three of the world’s 11 largest economies. The region has undergone massive economic, social, and political changes in recent decades, most conspicuously expressed in mass-scale urbanization. Today, East Asia hosts about half of the world’s 50 largest cities, and the rural-to-urban development continues at a staggering pace. But how do people live in East Asia’s sprawling cities? What types of social environments and meaning making, everyday realities, and new problems emerge in these vibrant and ever-changing localities? How can the region’s vast cityscapes be approached ethnographically, as a complex field of anthropological enquiry?

In this course, we will engage these questions by focusing on the region’s three most populous countries and four overall themes: living, working, relating, and consuming. Studying and discussing recent ethnographic accounts and region-specific theorizations grounded in the four themes will give us both panoramic and critical insight into urbanization processes, social realities, and new phenomena in East Asia’s cities. What type of atmosphere defines “home” in Japanese middle-class suburbia? How do China’s migrant workers deal with social and spatial  marginalization? How do young South Koreans juggle a precarious job situation, family obligations, and soaring housing prices? And what does the “old” countryside mean to contemporary city-dwellers? Engaging these and related questions involves a range of central anthropological concerns, including development, gender, kinship, insecurity, mobility, and nostalgia. Engaging with the literature, we will train our critical and analytical skills, develop systematic reading skills and train our ability to read “beyond the facts” to identify textual layers and critically reflect on research questions, methods, arguments, and the position of the ethnographer in the course readings. The course ends with an exam essay aiming to combine such skills and concerns with newly acquired regional knowledge.