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​6 Gringa in Japan During three months of touring, we performed primarily in public schools and moved daily throughout the islands, going from the northernmost, Hokkaido, all the way to the southernmost, Okinawa. A small bus became our principal off-stage place of interaction—a moving capsule in which we were all rather captive and in each others’ presence for three to six hours a day. Our instruments, costumes, and sound equipment fit in the large storage area of the back, while we fit into exactly nine passenger seats of the front—five Bolivian musicians, Hishimoto, a US musician (myself), a Japanese manager, and a Japanese sound engineer. At the beginning of the tour, conversations were boisterous and jovial, but as the daily monotony of repetitive performance work set in, we all sought our own escapes. Mine included a regimen of studying Japanese-language books and tapes for two hours, followed by a measured reading of a Murakami novel that I would try to make last until our next visit to Tokyo where I would shop again in the English-language section of the Shinjuku Kinokuniya Bookstore. The Bolivians did more music listening than reading . The Spanish-language section of Kinokuniya was very limited, and Bolivians had to pace their reading of the one or two books they brought with them from home. Japanese-to-Spanish language guides were difficult to find, making it less likely that Bolivians would attempt their own Japanese-language study on the bus. For a time, I was asked to create informal English-language study sessions, a plan that lasted the first few weeks, but then dwindled, in part due to my own limited abilities to improvise on-the-spot classes for language teaching. My captive students quickly lost interest. As one of them bluntly told me, “The problem is you don’t have a method.” As we settled into our routines, or lack of them, this moving vehicle became a site of my fieldwork and the context of a particularly eyeopening conversation that made me reflect on the nature of doing fieldwork across areas—between Bolivia and Japan, between Latin America and East Asia. The phrase “gringa in Japan” is used to emphasize the methodological angle here, one that shook up my own ethnographic position with which I had become too comfortable. A gringa identity, like all 150 Chapter Six identities, is relational; and as Diane Nelson has argued, it is constructed through movement; a US white woman must travel to Latin America before she becomes a “gringa.”1 The term may be inflicted as an insult as easily as it is rendered a term of endearment. Context is everything. I was sometimes called “the gringa who plays with Música de Maestros,” although now some three different women might fit that description in relation to this ensemble. But at other moments, I have quaked in fear when identified through this term. On one of my trips in the Bolivian countryside, the bus on which I traveled had multiple flat tires. When the driver began to change the third tire, other passengers began to whisper to each other that the gringa had brought them this bad luck. When I am in the Bolivian context, “gringa” is an identity placed upon me by others. By taking that identity to Japan, I want to emphasize the ethnographic relations I brought to Japan—ones that were more about a knowledge of Bolivia, Latin America, and the Spanish language than about any equivalent knowledge of Japan. While this unevenness of preparation can be seen as disadvantageous for my ethnographic interpretations, I instead propose that such variability is a prevalent yet untheorized aspect of multi-sited global ethnography , something that might be shoved under the rug because it reveals shortcomings next to time honored ethnographic traditions like learning the language of one’s research context. Alternatively, such disparities of preparation might be dismissed as irrelevant because to pay it any attention at all would be to give too much credit to area studies formations that have come under attack. In brief summary, “area studies” became central to the US academic context during the Cold War.2 In 1958, the federal government began funding university area studies programs through the National Defense Education Act and Title VI grants. On one hand, area studies were championed as a metageography that avoided the dual East-West or Europe-Asia frameworks .3 On the other hand, area studies were critiqued on several points...

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