Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978321
S. Lim
Abstract:This article examines false registration as a method of domestic adoption in South Korea. The article argues that the practice of falsely registering adoptees as natural births in the family registry emerged in response to the highly restrictive adoption laws in South Korea. As adopting agnatic kin for the purpose of family succession was deemed the only legitimate form of adoption, significant hurdles existed for other kinds of adoption in Korea. This article examines the history of domestic adoption in Korea and highlights the legal hurdles to domestic adoption. These restrictive adoption customs first originated during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) as a prescription for yangban elite; they were then codified as customary law for all Koreans under Japanese colonial rule (1910–45). The ban on non-agnatic adoption continued in the postcolonial period when it was codified in the new Civil Code of 1960. Multiple legal reforms were attempted since the 1970s to promote domestic adoptions, but change was slow. This article argues that the highly restrictive nature of adoption laws in South Korea produced an adoption regime that existed largely outside of the legal realm.
{"title":"Adopting in the Shadows: False Registration as a Method of Adoption in Postcolonial South Korea","authors":"S. Lim","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978321","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines false registration as a method of domestic adoption in South Korea. The article argues that the practice of falsely registering adoptees as natural births in the family registry emerged in response to the highly restrictive adoption laws in South Korea. As adopting agnatic kin for the purpose of family succession was deemed the only legitimate form of adoption, significant hurdles existed for other kinds of adoption in Korea. This article examines the history of domestic adoption in Korea and highlights the legal hurdles to domestic adoption. These restrictive adoption customs first originated during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) as a prescription for yangban elite; they were then codified as customary law for all Koreans under Japanese colonial rule (1910–45). The ban on non-agnatic adoption continued in the postcolonial period when it was codified in the new Civil Code of 1960. Multiple legal reforms were attempted since the 1970s to promote domestic adoptions, but change was slow. This article argues that the highly restrictive nature of adoption laws in South Korea produced an adoption regime that existed largely outside of the legal realm.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"495 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90317253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978386
Amy Brainer
Abstract:This article analyzes ways that legal and social understandings of kinship intersect for Taiwanese queer parents and prospective parents. Parents in this research experience varying degrees of legal and cultural intelligibility within the existing household registration system and the familial contexts in which they reside and carry out their daily lives. Many are rearing children in multigenerational, extended family households and are juggling a variety of gendered family roles and responsibilities that shape their parenting practices. Their experiences highlight the limits of rights discourses that treat marriage and parenthood as largely class-and gender-neutral institutions and presuppose a nuclear family model. Such uncritical approaches to marriage and parenthood leave the normative power of these systems intact even as they provisionally open to greater numbers of people. The article foregrounds pathways to parenthood and struggles for legal recognition among queers in a variety of family arrangements, including those that do not fit within the conventional representation of a cohabiting and marriage-desiring same-sex couple with children.
{"title":"Lesbian and Gay Parents, Heterosexual Kinship, and Queer Dreams: Making Families in Twenty-First Century Taiwan","authors":"Amy Brainer","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978386","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes ways that legal and social understandings of kinship intersect for Taiwanese queer parents and prospective parents. Parents in this research experience varying degrees of legal and cultural intelligibility within the existing household registration system and the familial contexts in which they reside and carry out their daily lives. Many are rearing children in multigenerational, extended family households and are juggling a variety of gendered family roles and responsibilities that shape their parenting practices. Their experiences highlight the limits of rights discourses that treat marriage and parenthood as largely class-and gender-neutral institutions and presuppose a nuclear family model. Such uncritical approaches to marriage and parenthood leave the normative power of these systems intact even as they provisionally open to greater numbers of people. The article foregrounds pathways to parenthood and struggles for legal recognition among queers in a variety of family arrangements, including those that do not fit within the conventional representation of a cohabiting and marriage-desiring same-sex couple with children.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"39 1","pages":"633 - 656"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81117090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978295
Seungik kim, Seung-kyung Sara L. Friedman
Recent decades have brought tremendous change to families, and the laws governing families, across East Asia. From new household forms — including divorcees, single parents, adults living alone or with chosen kin, samesex couples, and transnational marriages — to shifting ideologies of how families should be organized and kinship ties recognized, families have been at the center of substantial social and political change across the region. This special issue examines the intersections and tensions between how families are lived on the ground and the family laws and institutional mechanisms that create the scaffolding for recognizable kinship relationships. The articles use the rubric of “productive encounters” to understand these ongoing engagements of law and family as they unfold over a period of colonial and postcolonial reforms and transitions from authoritarian to democratic governance. The authors ask how laws and administrative regulations take shape through
{"title":"Productive Encounters: Kinship, Gender, and Family Laws in East Asia","authors":"Seungik kim, Seung-kyung Sara L. Friedman","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978295","url":null,"abstract":"Recent decades have brought tremendous change to families, and the laws governing families, across East Asia. From new household forms — including divorcees, single parents, adults living alone or with chosen kin, samesex couples, and transnational marriages — to shifting ideologies of how families should be organized and kinship ties recognized, families have been at the center of substantial social and political change across the region. This special issue examines the intersections and tensions between how families are lived on the ground and the family laws and institutional mechanisms that create the scaffolding for recognizable kinship relationships. The articles use the rubric of “productive encounters” to understand these ongoing engagements of law and family as they unfold over a period of colonial and postcolonial reforms and transitions from authoritarian to democratic governance. The authors ask how laws and administrative regulations take shape through","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"26 1","pages":"453 - 468"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81549977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978334
A. Alexy
Abstract:In contemporary Japan, police and law enforcement are often reluctant to assist in family conflicts. In practice, law enforcement and the family law system offer little assistance for people struggling with family conflicts in particular, following the logic that “law does not belong in families.” This article examines the informal, familial, financial, and social means people use to solve what might be called “family problems” when formal legal assistance is foreclosed. Operating as alternatives to the legal system, these strategies nevertheless are structured directly in response to the formal legal system, what it supports and allows. The article uses theorizations of legal consciousness, law’s “shadows,” and “order without law” to compare strategies and reactions of Japanese citizens and foreigners engaging the legal system in Japan. It argues that the written and unwritten rules surrounding Japanese family law reward those who seek solutions outside of formal channels, thereby co-constructing the legal system as unable to solve family conflicts. Linking individual strategies with outcomes, it concludes that family members who expect less assistance from the formal legal system often end up winning more.
{"title":"Children and Law in the Shadows: Legal Ideologies and Personal Strategies in Response to Parental Abductions in Japan","authors":"A. Alexy","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978334","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In contemporary Japan, police and law enforcement are often reluctant to assist in family conflicts. In practice, law enforcement and the family law system offer little assistance for people struggling with family conflicts in particular, following the logic that “law does not belong in families.” This article examines the informal, familial, financial, and social means people use to solve what might be called “family problems” when formal legal assistance is foreclosed. Operating as alternatives to the legal system, these strategies nevertheless are structured directly in response to the formal legal system, what it supports and allows. The article uses theorizations of legal consciousness, law’s “shadows,” and “order without law” to compare strategies and reactions of Japanese citizens and foreigners engaging the legal system in Japan. It argues that the written and unwritten rules surrounding Japanese family law reward those who seek solutions outside of formal channels, thereby co-constructing the legal system as unable to solve family conflicts. Linking individual strategies with outcomes, it concludes that family members who expect less assistance from the formal legal system often end up winning more.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"35 1","pages":"523 - 549"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73507717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978373
Timothy Gitzen
Abstract:This article explores the limits of family in contemporary South Korea by simultaneously examining the discourses and practices of anti-LGBT protesters and the state alongside an ethnography of queer and HIV/AIDS activism. The author argues that the limits of family in Korea ought to be conceived as a problem with sex incorporating both “substance” and the practice of having sex. He explores these limits of family through a broadening understanding of family law in Korea, focusing on the anti-sodomy clause in the Military Penal Code and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing. The author contends that to broaden the concept of family law to laws such as the anti-sodomy clause and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing demonstrates the intricate and unexplored ways the Korean family is produced through military laws and regulations. This is a recursive process, for the heteronormative expectations of family members are inscribed within military law, rhetorically casting the family as a threatened body that needs protection. However, the normative experience of the family in crisis produces violence against gender and sexual minorities. The author concludes by discussing the dangerous implications of these family laws.
{"title":"The Limits of Family: Military Law and Sex Panics in Contemporary South Korea","authors":"Timothy Gitzen","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978373","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the limits of family in contemporary South Korea by simultaneously examining the discourses and practices of anti-LGBT protesters and the state alongside an ethnography of queer and HIV/AIDS activism. The author argues that the limits of family in Korea ought to be conceived as a problem with sex incorporating both “substance” and the practice of having sex. He explores these limits of family through a broadening understanding of family law in Korea, focusing on the anti-sodomy clause in the Military Penal Code and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing. The author contends that to broaden the concept of family law to laws such as the anti-sodomy clause and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing demonstrates the intricate and unexplored ways the Korean family is produced through military laws and regulations. This is a recursive process, for the heteronormative expectations of family members are inscribed within military law, rhetorically casting the family as a threatened body that needs protection. However, the normative experience of the family in crisis produces violence against gender and sexual minorities. The author concludes by discussing the dangerous implications of these family laws.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"2012 1","pages":"607 - 632"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86393064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978360
Linda White
Abstract:The koseki 戸籍 (family or household registry) has long served as a material representation of the conceptual structure of Japanese family relations. Membership in a family has been stipulated and proved through registration in a koseki document defined through a shared surname and address. Evidence of family membership for purposes of legal transactions and social interactions has rested in the koseki document. However, during the past several decades some women have questioned the social pressure and legal requirement to change their names in marriage, choosing instead to maintain their surname by refusing to register their marriages to their “husbands.” Claiming themselves “married” but not legally registering their marriages, this growing group of name-change resisters defines their nonregistered marriages as jijitsukon 事実婚 (common-law or real marriage). Drawing on ethnographic research with women in jijitsukon marriages in Tokyo who refuse to share a koseki with their “husbands,” this article explores the implications of marital registration resistance in a marriage-centric society and the concurrent critique of the koseki system (the Koseki Law, koseki document, and the broader system of registration) and the legal marriage structure at the core of women’s claims to be married when they do not meet Japan’s legal criteria for marriage.
{"title":"Not Entirely Married: Resisting the Hegemonic Patrilineal Family in Japan’s Household Registry","authors":"Linda White","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978360","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The koseki 戸籍 (family or household registry) has long served as a material representation of the conceptual structure of Japanese family relations. Membership in a family has been stipulated and proved through registration in a koseki document defined through a shared surname and address. Evidence of family membership for purposes of legal transactions and social interactions has rested in the koseki document. However, during the past several decades some women have questioned the social pressure and legal requirement to change their names in marriage, choosing instead to maintain their surname by refusing to register their marriages to their “husbands.” Claiming themselves “married” but not legally registering their marriages, this growing group of name-change resisters defines their nonregistered marriages as jijitsukon 事実婚 (common-law or real marriage). Drawing on ethnographic research with women in jijitsukon marriages in Tokyo who refuse to share a koseki with their “husbands,” this article explores the implications of marital registration resistance in a marriage-centric society and the concurrent critique of the koseki system (the Koseki Law, koseki document, and the broader system of registration) and the legal marriage structure at the core of women’s claims to be married when they do not meet Japan’s legal criteria for marriage.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"17 1","pages":"581 - 606"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82532883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978308
Kathryn E. Goldfarb
Abstract:This article explores the legal norms and regulatory mechanisms in Japan that structure child welfare placement decisions, focusing specifically on the legal category of “parental rights.” It is suggested that the ways child welfare officers and caregivers understand the concept of “rights” — both those of the biological parent(s) and the child — construe kinship relationships as problems to be managed, but with a particular orientation toward what is called in the article the temporality of attachment. Child welfare caseworkers’ understandings of legal categories, processes, and forms of documentation (such as the Japanese family registry) produce particular forms of kinship that prioritize a child’s possible future relationship with an absent parent, above and beyond the day-to- day relationships children might develop with alternative caregivers such as foster parents. Despite the fact that the author’s Japanese interlocutors often described kinship as an immutable relationship of blood ties, the author shows how kinship is in fact produced through specific encounters between (mostly absent) parents and their children, child welfare caseworkers, and foster and institutional caregivers, scaffolded by their engagement with legal and bureaucratic regimes. The article explores what parenthood means within Japanese child welfare, both as a temporalized form of relationality and as a set of legally structured claims to the right to care.
{"title":"Parental Rights and the Temporality of Attachment: Law, Kinship, and Child Welfare in Japan","authors":"Kathryn E. Goldfarb","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978308","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the legal norms and regulatory mechanisms in Japan that structure child welfare placement decisions, focusing specifically on the legal category of “parental rights.” It is suggested that the ways child welfare officers and caregivers understand the concept of “rights” — both those of the biological parent(s) and the child — construe kinship relationships as problems to be managed, but with a particular orientation toward what is called in the article the temporality of attachment. Child welfare caseworkers’ understandings of legal categories, processes, and forms of documentation (such as the Japanese family registry) produce particular forms of kinship that prioritize a child’s possible future relationship with an absent parent, above and beyond the day-to- day relationships children might develop with alternative caregivers such as foster parents. Despite the fact that the author’s Japanese interlocutors often described kinship as an immutable relationship of blood ties, the author shows how kinship is in fact produced through specific encounters between (mostly absent) parents and their children, child welfare caseworkers, and foster and institutional caregivers, scaffolded by their engagement with legal and bureaucratic regimes. The article explores what parenthood means within Japanese child welfare, both as a temporalized form of relationality and as a set of legally structured claims to the right to care.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"51 4 1","pages":"469 - 493"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76589353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8978347
S. Friedman, Yi-Chien Chen
Abstract:This article analyzes the tension between marriage and family rights in the context of Taiwan’s marriage equality movement and the then-pending legalization of same-sex marriage following a 2017 Constitutional Court ruling. It focuses on the efforts of lesbian co-mothers to secure vital legal guarantees for the families they create through intentional childbearing. As pioneers who have formed families in a legal vacuum, these parents harbor deep hopes for what law will offer but simultaneously doubt that legal reforms will guarantee the rights and recognition they desire. For lesbian co-mothers, law and family are mutually constitutive practices oriented toward both the present and the future. Co-mothers make decisions about childbearing and family formation that take into account existing legal frameworks for family recognition, but their strategies for recognition also orient them toward future potentialities, posing the challenge of how to make decisions in the present without knowing for certain what might be legally possible in the future. The article concludes that lesbian co-mothers’ family strategies are productive as much as they are reactive; they not only diversify the norm but also potentially shift the very ground on which normativity is created.
{"title":"Will Marriage Rights Bring Family Equality? Law, Lesbian Co-Mothers, and Strategies of Recognition in Taiwan","authors":"S. Friedman, Yi-Chien Chen","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8978347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8978347","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes the tension between marriage and family rights in the context of Taiwan’s marriage equality movement and the then-pending legalization of same-sex marriage following a 2017 Constitutional Court ruling. It focuses on the efforts of lesbian co-mothers to secure vital legal guarantees for the families they create through intentional childbearing. As pioneers who have formed families in a legal vacuum, these parents harbor deep hopes for what law will offer but simultaneously doubt that legal reforms will guarantee the rights and recognition they desire. For lesbian co-mothers, law and family are mutually constitutive practices oriented toward both the present and the future. Co-mothers make decisions about childbearing and family formation that take into account existing legal frameworks for family recognition, but their strategies for recognition also orient them toward future potentialities, posing the challenge of how to make decisions in the present without knowing for certain what might be legally possible in the future. The article concludes that lesbian co-mothers’ family strategies are productive as much as they are reactive; they not only diversify the norm but also potentially shift the very ground on which normativity is created.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"26 1","pages":"551 - 579"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81952240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852176
Y. Zheng
Abstract:This article examines the role of whistling as an elusive voice in the literary world from around the third century onward. It argues that as an alternative to normalized forms of vocal, musical, and poetic expression, whistling destabilized, blurred, and reconfigured notions of voice, language, writing, and music within the larger context of Six Dynasties thought and aesthetics. Despite the wide range of vocalizations (e.g., wailing, the tiger's roar) associated with whistling in premodern China, the whistling examined in this article refers to a particular vocal art commonly practiced by the literati. It reached its height around the third century, signaled by a rise in literary texts that illustrate its musical features, elaborate its mechanism, and tell stories about whistlers. An analysis of two main texts on whistling, Rhapsody on Whistling (third century) and Principles of Whistling (circa eighth century), uncovers the act of whistling as a gap: it is not yet a voice, not quite a kind of music, and it is beyond the realm of language. The whistler does not produce the whistling; it is his breath—passing through a bodily gap—that activates his body as a musical instrument, making the whistled sound an echo even before it sounds.
{"title":"Sounding the Ineffable: Third-Century Chinese Whistling as an Alternative Voice","authors":"Y. Zheng","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852176","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the role of whistling as an elusive voice in the literary world from around the third century onward. It argues that as an alternative to normalized forms of vocal, musical, and poetic expression, whistling destabilized, blurred, and reconfigured notions of voice, language, writing, and music within the larger context of Six Dynasties thought and aesthetics. Despite the wide range of vocalizations (e.g., wailing, the tiger's roar) associated with whistling in premodern China, the whistling examined in this article refers to a particular vocal art commonly practiced by the literati. It reached its height around the third century, signaled by a rise in literary texts that illustrate its musical features, elaborate its mechanism, and tell stories about whistlers. An analysis of two main texts on whistling, Rhapsody on Whistling (third century) and Principles of Whistling (circa eighth century), uncovers the act of whistling as a gap: it is not yet a voice, not quite a kind of music, and it is beyond the realm of language. The whistler does not produce the whistling; it is his breath—passing through a bodily gap—that activates his body as a musical instrument, making the whistled sound an echo even before it sounds.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"19 1","pages":"267 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83016041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852098
Rajbir Singh Judge, J. Brar
Abstract:In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic "reaching and ungrasping" in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.
{"title":"Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation","authors":"Rajbir Singh Judge, J. Brar","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852098","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic \"reaching and ungrasping\" in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"7 1","pages":"319 - 346"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79606813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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