Put Asia on the Map of Race; Put Race on the Map of Asia

Culturally bound and socially contested, race has been debated by humanities and social science scholars over the last century in terms of its arbitrary definition, ambiguous categorization, and implications that disseminate into various social arenas.

This debate has increased in the past two decades. On the one hand, evolving networks of commerce, information, and labor complicate our understanding of the political world, in which traditional national boundaries become blurred and are no longer dominant. On the other hand, the proliferation of sequenced genomes—first a white male done by the Human Genome Project and then several others from different populations—created an emerging map of race and science, in which, as Donna Haraway (1997: 218) predicted, genome is both its language and the key object. The two trends not only bring race to a global scale where new approaches and perspectives are much needed, but also make race and its presentations in science and society a challenging yet apt working site for STS researchers.

The three books under review—Is Race a Universal Idea?, Racial Representation and Social Reality, and Racial Representations in Asia—reflect the changing faces of race. With a particular focus on Asia, they observe how these emerging arenas and new perspectives integrate into the scholarship concerning race and its social influences. The cases presented in these books attempt, as their editor, Yasuko Takezawa, boldly claims, to “transcend the Western paradigm” of race in terms of methodology and the region it applies to. More important, they aim to display the particular aspects of race as it is woven into Asian societies, as well as to follow how Asian populations are counted in the expanding map of race as it goes global.

A brief background of these books is useful. Although published in different languages (two in Japanese and one in English), the three books have the same origin: a series of interdisciplinary, long-lasting research projects on the social studies of race, in which Takezawa serves as the principal investigator, beginning in 2001.¹ Based at Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities, the core research members include not only humanities scholars but also physical anthropologists and geneticists.² In the past ten years, they have met regularly for group discussions and workshops. In addition, as part of these projects’ requirements, some members, along with scholars from abroad (mainly the United States and the United Kingdom), present their works in symposia and conferences, most of which are organized for the projects.³ At the time this review was completed (August 2012), Takezawa is planning to add another book to this series.⁴

A good way to see the common themes in the three books is to examine the approach of Takezawa, the central figure in these projects, and her idea of race as a research topic. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Takezawa’s early work focuses on the generations of Japanese Americans (nikkei), who share experiences and memories of their relocation and internment during World War II. Her consideration of race as a socially constructed, dynamic concept in the process of social movement is well explained in her book Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (1995).⁵ This standpoint continued when Takezawa moved into the realm of the social study of race.

As ambitious as the full title of Is Race a Universal Idea? implies, Takezawa writes a long introduction to elaborate her idea of race.⁶ Titled “Jinshu gainen no hokatuteki rikai ni mukete” 総論-人種概念の包括的理解に向けて (“Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of the Idea of Race”), this 109-page chapter expresses her discontent with current interpreting frames of race, which not only fail...