Anne Allison facts for kids
Anne Allison is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University in the United States, specializing in contemporary Japanese society.
She received her BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1986.
Work
Allison's book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (California, 2006), analyzes the interplay of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of "J-cool" (Japan's brand of "cool" youth goods) on the global marketplace. A Japanese edition of this book was published in 2010 by Shinchosha Press under the title Kiku to Pokémon: Guro-barusuru nihon no bunkaryōuku.
Her other book focuses on how the Japanese experience insecurity in their daily and social lives is the subject of Precarious Japan. Tacking between the structural conditions of socioeconomic life and the ways people are making do, or not, Anne Allison chronicles the loss of home affecting many Japanese, not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense of not belonging. Until the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, lifelong employment and a secure income were within reach of most Japanese men, enabling them to maintain their families in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Now, as fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work, hope turns to hopelessness and security gives way to a pervasive unease. Yet some Japanese are getting by, partly by reconceiving notions of home, family, and togetherness.
Books
- Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1995)
- Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006)
- Precarious Japan (2013)
