Global Futures

In this lecture, William Mazzarella will consider recent controversies over film censorship in India from the perspective of the category of "obscenity." The talk will address two goals: to move beyond the standard understanding of censorship battles as an opposition between "progressives" and "reactionaries" and to mine the Indian legal understanding of obscenity for how it might help us think about the politics of mainstream publicity, beyond what is conventionally categorized as "obscene."

William Mazzarella has taught in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago since 2001. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Mazzarella is the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003). For the last several years, he has been researching and writing on cultural regulation, censorship, affect, and what he calls "the politics of immediation."

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Join Brad Weiss for a brownbag workshop and lecture on ethnography and popular culture in Africa. Weiss will discuss his forthcoming book, Street Dreams and Hip-Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania. The book explores the contemporary fluorescence of popular culture as an array of practices through which Tanzanians establish their place in an explicitly global and spectacular flow of images, objects, and persons. In the modes of fantasy that constitute their popular culture -- exemplified by such micro-institutions as kinyozi (small barbershops that serve as hubs for the circulation of a wide variety of media, consumer goods, and neighborhood gossip) -- urban Tanzanians imaginatively articulate and act upon a world remade.

Brad Weiss is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include the ethnography of Africa, the anthropology of the body, and community forms. He has conducted fieldwork in Tanzania for 20 years and is the author of two books and numerous articles on social and cultural transformation in East Africa. Weiss also serves as executive editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa.

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This course will focus on the interlinked modernity projects in China, Japan, and Korea and the historical, political, and economic forces that link the education of youth with projects of national development and international economic competition. Education as broadly conceived is not limited to activities that take place in the institutional context of schooling but it also includes pedagogies of citizenship and programs of human engineering in the reform of populations as a project of national development. This course will focus on how the time of childhood and youth has been synchronized into universalizing conceptions of development and modernity at different moments in the history of East Asia: under the banner of "civilization and enlightenment" in the early part of the 20th century, in the modernization projects of mid-century,and more recently in debates about "globalization." Although the emphasis of the course will be on contemporary debates about youth and globalization, these national histories will be introduced as a necessary background for understanding the present.

Drawing on ethnographic field research in the Indian Himalayas, Dyson explores forest-related work as a site for young people to build friendships, create individual and collective reputations of competence, and develop a sense of selfrespect. Through attention to the 'micro-geography of work,' Dyson considers the importance of forest-based work in local ideas of dignity and explores how far girls' leaf collection practices reproduce caste and gender norms.

Jane Dyson is a Visiting Scholar in the South Asia Center at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the everyday work practices of children and young people in the Indian Himalayas. Dyson focuses in particular on young people's creative struggles for respect, and examines how children themselves imagine and value their work practices. She has a forthcoming book, Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Political Geography that she co-edited with Craig Jeffrey (Geography).


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In January of this year, the Japanese ruling party passed a bill altering the meaning and intent of a key education law. Over its 60-year history, the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) served as a final guarantor of educational rights and a bulwark against pressures for Japan to remilitarize. The new law requires schools to "foster patriotic attitudes" and parents to accept more responsibility for their children's successful development. Although many critics view these changes as a return to the heavy-handed interventionist state of prewar times, Arai argues that they represent the shifting of responsibility from the government to the individual. Arai suggests that this new disciplinary structure is suited to the pressures of economic globalization. In this talk, Arai tracks the inception of these changes from the recessionary 1900s to the present demand for mobility, liquidity, and internalized sacrifice in an era when national futures no longer guarantee personal ones.

The notion of "quality," or suzhi, has become a cultural determination of the value form of labor in China's economic reforms, marking the divide between manual and mental labor. As a specifically Chinese articulation of the concept of human capital, suzhi must be understood within the frame of the global economy. However, its workings in the context of China offers a critical perspective on new conceptions of value circulating more globally as the "immaterial labor" of the "knowledge economy."

Corruption is central to the everyday economies and identities of young people in urban north India. Jeffrey uses an analysis of corruption as a lens through which to understand emerging youth cultures in India and changing patterns of caste and class reproduction. Jeffrey builds on a critical engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and five years of ethnographic field research conducted between 1995 and 2007 in western Uttar Pradesh.

Craig Jeffrey is Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the cultural politics of inequality in India, with particular reference to agrarian change, educational regimes, youth politics, and rural poverty. Jeffrey has published nearly forty articles and has two forthcoming books: Reproducing Difference? Education, Unemployment, and Youth Cultures in India (with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery) and Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Political Geography (coedited with Jane Dyson).

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In this presentation, Corbridge will reflect on the status and integrity of development studies as a discipline. Is it an impossible enterprise, and if not, why not? How meaningful are discourses of "development" at a time of war in Iraq and when the median age of death in sub-Saharan Africa is slightly less than 5 years?

Winter 2007 • Jane Dyson • SISSA 490A

This interdisciplinary course explores childhood and youth in South Asia. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part — ‘Orientations’ — we discuss theoretical approaches to studying childhood and youth in South Asia. The second part of the course is built around a set of themes relevant to an understanding of children’s and young people’s lives in the South Asian region, namely: work, education, violence, and health. The final part of the course — ‘Representing Youth’ — is concerned with issues of how young people are represented and represent themselves, and the political implications of these representations.