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Chapter 2

Missing Persons

The Problem of Missing Persons

History and anthropology continue to edge closer to each other. Culture, the anthropologist’s stock in trade, has become an indispensable component of historians’ accounts. For their part, anthropologists increasingly emphasize cultural change. Attuned to cultural relativism, they have readily made the further leap into historical relativism. One might say that both disciplines are trying to free themselves from ethno-and tempocentrism.

I endorse this effort, but I have reservations about the widespread tendency to elide considerations of biography, consciousness, and personal agency from analyses of meaning. This erasure—the Problem of Missing Persons—afflicts both history and, less forgivably, my own discipline of anthropology. It is associated, I have argued, with the near-dominance achieved by interpretive and post-interpretive (discursive) approaches to the study of meaning. Those approaches explicitly or, more often, implicitly equate public representations with subjectivities.

The interpretation of public representations has become a privileged method of cultural analysis. The appeal of the method, which treats such representations as texts, is evident. For anthropologists, it permits the inference of subjective patterns from concrete, readily observable, highly public material such as cockfights, naming practices, and shadow plays (Geertz 1973c). Moreover, interpretation provides a single method applicable to both past and present. Its utility is, if anything, stronger for historians than for anthropologists. That is, the interpretation of cultures (Geertz 1973c) dovetails nicely with the archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1976). An archaeology of knowledge promises that from symbolic detritus—surviving documents and artifacts—a historian can read cultural (or discursive) formations, the changing universes of meaning through which the dead have paraded.

But the dead were once alive. My own fieldwork over the past twenty years has convinced me that public representations are hazardous guides to subjectivities, which I think of as, roughly speaking, cognitive and experiential flows. Another way to say this is: An account of meaning that fails to engage living people cannot reliably infer thoughts, feelings, or motivations. At best an interpretive ethnography or history can sketch a representational environment—but people do radically different things with representations, and their meaning-making is partially hidden from view. To glimpse it we need to employ, where possible, techniques other than textual interpretation.

The ethnographic practice known as person-centered ethnography (LeVine 1982; Hollan 1997; Linger 2001b) permits a fieldworker to explore how people go about making sense of the world into which they were cast. Usually conducted through face-to-face interviews, such research reveals that people affirm, transform, negate, manipulate, and go beyond the public representations that are the objects of conventional symbolic analyses. By highlighting the gap between representational environment and meaning-making, person-centered studies point to the significant indeterminacies inherent in any interpretive ethnography or archaeology of knowledge.

This chapter sounds a note of caution about Missing Persons approaches and suggests a partial (though sometimes unavailable) remedy for their limitations. First I outline some recent critiques of standard interpretive methods and describe the person-centered alternative. I next draw on my 1994–96 research in Aichi prefecture, in central Japan, to examine how Oscar Ueda, a Japanese Brazilian migrant to the city of Nagoya, refashions his national and ethnic identities in an unfamiliar social milieu.¹ I end the chapter by discussing the implications of Oscar’s self-making for anthropological and historical investigations of meaning.

Spiders, not Flies

Recall Geertz’s depiction of culture as a web of symbols. The metaphor has, as I noted in Chapter 1, suggested to many that people are flies rather than spiders—that they are caught “in culture” (or “in discourse”). The ethnographer’s main task is, accordingly, to trace the sticky web of representations in which the flies are trapped. The unfortunate flies themselves are incidental to the cultural account. The method required is “thick description,” an analysis of symbolic forms based on detailed, intricate interpretation.

Criticism of representational approaches within anthropology has grown to a drumbeat in the past decade or so, though it has antecedents stretching back almost to the beginning of the century (Sapir 1917). From various angles, the critics make a similar point—that public symbols, rituals, narratives, discourses, and performances are, in Roy D’Andrade’s words, “too elliptical” (1984: 105) to serve as reliable guides to meanings.² In other words, people are active spiders, not passive flies. Their subjectivities cannot be treated as mere imprints of public representations on minds (Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997).

Person-centered ethnography aims to catch the spiders at work—or, shedding the bug metaphors, to treat human beings as active meaning-makers in their own right. Because meaning is always somebody’s, the immediate object of person-centered ethnography is what Theodore Schwartz has called idioverses (1978)—ever-changing individual worlds of meaning. Person-centered approaches thereby recover the missing persons, moving human beings to the center of cultural accounts.

In exploring idioverses, I favor flexible interviews over predesigned question-and-answer sessions. Informal, open-ended conversations encourage people to explore their personal networks of thought and feeling. Of course, conversation is no substitute for ESP. Drawing inferences about thoughts and feelings from what people say is a hazardous enterprise, for even “private,” face-to-face talk is, in a restricted sense, public. Narrative conventions and interpersonal considerations certainly shape such talk (Bruner 1988; Hollan 1997). Yet the substance of a particular conversation is not reducible to rules, any more than the substance of an utterance is reducible to syntax. Moreover, because person-centered conversations take place in what is for most informants a novel interpersonal context, they offer rare opportunities for people to speak their minds.

Most everyday conversations are occasions for sociability, verbal sparring, exchanges of opinions, displays of distinction, joking, and so on. So are, at times, person-centered interviews, but the main objective—the co-exploration of an idioverse by anthropologist and informant—is extraordinary. I try to foster an atmosphere in which my conversational partner can be heard by me, hear herself, and respond to her own words. This is unusual conversational practice, and, when successful, yields unusually rich material.

Because rapport is essential, I prefer interviewing those with whom I have already established a comfortable relationship. I seek to put the person at ease, to assure her that her point of view is valued. I encourage her to think things through and to speak with candor. I try to ask questions that are pertinent, responsive to issues she herself raises. My efforts to elicit frankness, to avoid imposing my own perspective, and to listen carefully sometimes fail, but often I gain some insight into another’s concerns and ways of thinking. People also appreciate the chance to reflect out loud and to be taken seriously. I used to be surprised when informants thanked me for talking with them, but no more.

In underscoring the advantages of person-centered ethnography, I do not mean to discard Missing Persons approaches, which are always valuable and sometimes irreplaceable. The representational environment, past or present, here or there, deserves close attention. And where persons are in fact missing one must employ Missing-Persons methods: without a time machine one can hardly interview residents of ancient Athens.

My aim here is simply to put Missing-Persons approaches in their place. They invite us to situate ourselves, with our own particular biographical, emotional, and conceptual baggage, among unfamiliar representations, and to make sense of them. The interpretive technique resembles, at worst, a projective test. At best, practiced by a sensitive, informed observer adept at leaps of imagination, it can undoubtedly yield insightful and provocative speculations about the propositions with which others are bombarded.

But nothing can substitute for verbal give-and-take with those who inhabit an alien representational environment.³ Oral explorations of life histories, thoughts, and sentiments provide checks on interpretive conjecture and shed light on the personal meaning-making and subjective diversity missed by analyses of public symbols. A successful person-centered interview creates a space where the interviewee can verbalize and hammer out her understandings of the world and herself, bringing to life the generative dialectic between public representations and personal experience.

From Japan to Brazil to Japan

Before moving to Oscar Ueda’s reflections, let me sketch the historical context of his journey from Brazil to Japan.⁴ Beginning in 1908, Japanese migrants, recruited and assisted by a Japanese government eager to export its surplus population, traveled to Brazil in large numbers to work on the coffee and cotton plantations of São Paulo and other southern states.⁵ Most of the migrants (isseis) intended to return to Japan after a short stay, but they rarely did.⁶ Instead they scraped together some money and bought farms or started small businesses. Their children (nisseis) and grandchildren (sanseis) spoke Portuguese and, for the most part, adopted Brazilian lifeways, even as they often identified as, and were labeled, japoneses. Members of the later generations also began to marry “Brazilians” at increasingly high rates, raising mestiço (mixed-blood) children.⁷ Brazil’s current nikkei (Japanese-descent) population has grown to one and a half million, the largest in the world.

But for well over a decade now Brazilian nikkeis have been flooding back into Japan. This so-called return migration was triggered initially by a labor shortage in Japan that coincided with hard times in Brazil.⁸ Through the boom years of the 1980s, small and middle-sized Japanese factories found it difficult to recruit unskilled labor. Younger Japanese increasingly shunned menial, relatively low-paying jobs. Accordingly, some firms began to hire illegal workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other less affluent regions of Asia. This practice partially alleviated the labor shortage, but produced (in the view of many Japanese citizens and, especially, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a new, acute social problem: the entry of foreigners considered to be alien and unassimilable.⁹

In 1990 the Japanese government responded with a law permitting foreign nationals of Japanese descent, supposedly preadapted to Japanese language and customs, to live and work in Japan. The result was a huge influx of Latin Americans, most of them from Brazil, which had a large nikkei population and was at the time suffering a severe economic crisis. Although generally well-educated and prosperous by Brazilian standards, Japanese Brazilians could earn many times their Brazilian incomes by taking jobs in Japanese factories.¹⁰ At first most of the migrants were men, but increasingly women and families, including minor children, also settled in Japan.

By the mid-1990s, Brazilian migrants, scattered throughout Japan, numbered about 200,000.¹¹ More resided in Aichi prefecture, my field-site, than anywhere else in the country. In Aichi, Brazilians work in a range of occupations, but mostly as unskilled laborers in the auto parts plants that supply the great manufacturers. As we shall see, by and large the Brazilians’ sojourn in Japan has met neither their expectations nor those of their Japanese hosts. Most Brazilians speak little Japanese (and read less), do not in the main adhere to Japanese customs, and find the country somewhat inhospitable. In a nutshell, Japan ended up with people who look Japanese but are not, and Japanese Brazilians experienced not a homecoming but a kind of exile. Some Japanese local governments have responded by hiring a few college-educated, bilingual Brazilians, such as Oscar Ueda, as counselors and teachers serving the growing Brazilian population.

During my stay in Japan I lived in Toyota City, in a public housing complex that was home to about 1,600 Brazilians. Toyota City, seat of Toyota Motors and many of its suppliers, lies close to the eastern city limit of Nagoya, the capital of Aichi prefecture and one of Japan’s largest cities. I visited those places where Brazilians had a marked presence: ethnic restaurants and bars, company-run apartment buildings, public offices, factories, and schools. I read Portuguese language newspapers published in Japan and collected posters and leaflets aimed at and produced by migrants. I surveyed Japanese and Brazilian national representations: laws, narratives, treatises, popular formulations. But my most productive technique was person-centered interviewing, for I was interested primarily in how the migrants reconceived themselves while living in Japan. My interview with Oscar Ueda therefore focused on questions of ethnicity and nationality, eliciting from him wide-ranging reflections on Brazil, Japan, and a host of moral and philosophical issues entangled with his sense of self.

Oscar Ueda

At the time of my conversation with Oscar Ueda, I had known him and his partner, Márcia Komatsu, for over a year. Unlike most nikkeis in Japan, Oscar and Márcia held white-collar jobs. Graduates of the University of São Paulo, Brazil’s most prestigious university, both worked for the Aichi prefectural government as bilingual advisers to foreign workers. I often visited them at their respective offices to tap their expertise and exchange observations, and I developed a cordial relationship with each of them.