Board Member

An anthropologist of contemporary life in Japan, Anne Allison teaches at Duke University. Her research has covered pop culture, corporate capitalism, domestic labor, the nightlife, Pokémon, digital companionship, precarity, and death. Her books include Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006), and Precarious Japan (2013). She is currently finishing a book on new trends in Japan involving death, solo sociality, and self-management of mortuary and post-mortem arrangements.

Posts by This Author

Time and Life in Fukushima

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Time and Life in Fukushima

Summer 2015, four years after the disaster, I headed to Fukushima with a friend to see what we could of the region. Having contracted with someone offering to g... More

3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Ten Years Later

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3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Ten Years Later

In July 2011, three months after the Tohoku tsunami and subsequent nuclear reactor destabilization, we published the first Hot Spot series on the Society for Cu... More

Syllabus Archive: Critical Ethnographies

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Syllabus Archive: Critical Ethnographies

What is ethnography, and how do we teach about ethnography/ethnographies so that students understand the complexity of analysis? There have been many scholars w... More

Academic Precarity in American Anthropology

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Academic Precarity in American Anthropology

This essay addresses the precariousness of the job market for U.S.-based PhDs in sociocultural anthropology. While a tenure-track job remains the career goal of... More

Disaster: Deviation

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Disaster: Deviation

Four months after what was called Japan’s compound disaster (of earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown at the Daiichi and Dainichi nuclear reactors in Fukushima), I ... More

Relief Work-On the Ground

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Relief Work-On the Ground

I arrived in Japan on June 7th—shortly before the “100 day” anniversary of the disaster which, in Buddhist tradition, is a significant marker for honoring the s... More