Crafting Selves by Dorinne Kondo

Dorinne Kondo, a Japanese American, Harvard-trained anthropologist, spent nearly two years in Japan working as a part-timer in a small confectionery factory in the shitamachi area at Tokyo. Her anthropological works suggest that identity is multiple and relational. She claimed throughout the book that selves are crafted in the processes of work and sometimes the process is complex and ambiguous since it involves all personal. Political, social contexts. Kondo unpacks the maintenance, negotiation, and creation of identities in an artisan confectionery factory among its part time workers and in order to do so she looked at historical and other contextual forces that may shape their discourse.

This book is divided into three parts. In first part Kondo discussed the settings.In Part One Kondo relates, in sometimes interminable detail, various factoids about the flexible usage of pronouns in Japanese as well as about the Yamanote/Shitamachi divide in central Tokyo and how that affects the construction of identity. There was a very open class difference between Shitamachi (of craftsmen and manual workers) and Yamanote ( elites) areas; the same concept of elite and subaltern classes distinguished on the basis of more/less money,high/low-paid salary, better/poor housing, etc and how they were tied to the firm size. People working in bigger firms were considered elite and with etiquettes where as people working in small firms were considered to be less elite. She also mentioned her own identity dilemma as Japanese American. She examines her own position in the field and how that may have changed people’s perception about her. This is an account where she w...

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...d of maintaining their tradition and at the same time accepting the capitalism environment ( they don’t eat meals together, young artisans get their housing free, different westernized events like potato digging, radish digging, hiking is being introduced). Kondo did not spend much time examining how capitalistic economy may have changed social structure in Japan and how that may have affected sense of identity at work place.

Kondo's finding addresses power relations in general. She argues for a complex view of power and human agency. This requires seeing individuals as decentered, multiple selves, whose lives are shot through with contradictions and creative tensions. People may rearrange power relations with the appropriate time frame but they can never escape the place beyond power. She argues that matrices of power and meaning are always open-ended.