Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how is the construction of Okinawan kinship and the constitution of such families in the city of Campo Grande. The research will focus on people / families that make up the associations in the Okinawan city.

Paper long abstract:

Japan has always been permeated by the myth of ethnic homogeneity. The idea that homogeneity is present even in countries receiving "nikkeys" immigrants, as is the case in Brazil. However, for the last decades it has been possible to note that the multiplicity and diversity are also part of the japanese reality. This diversity makes the group think of themselves and others to think as opposites. Thus, Campo Grande becomes field investigation of this heterogeneity, since it possesses two distinct groups - the Okinawans and the "japoneses" - in an opposition movement and aggregation throughout history. When thinking of a "Japanese unit" we are not paying attention to details that make up the relations between the groups involved (Okinawans, non-Okinawans and non-western). The purpose of this research is therefore to understand how notions of family and belonging can build the oppositions and differences between Japanese immigrants and their descendants.

Paper short abstract:

This project analyses the meaning and processes of Japanese Ki in Japanese martial arts, or how to make kinship - or relatedness - between Japanese and non-Japanese by ways of martial arts.

Paper long abstract:

In my master's research, I evaluated Japanese fencing as a device of Japaneseness, i.e., a device that sought to "make Japanese" - being descendants or not. In this 'manufacturing' process, the Kendo focused three plans intimately connected: "spirit" [Ki], sword and body. While development of the previous research, my doctoral project seeks to collect data through reports of life of Kendo practitioners and analysis of documents that deal with the concept of Ki - energy - and with ethnographic fieldwork and through interviews in Japan and Brazil. The concept of Ki is presented as an important way of understanding the Japanese Culture in practice, in closest relationship with a culturally Japanese idiosyncratic notion of love. The notion of Ki shows great potentialities - theoretical and analytical - for studies of kinship-relationality and japanese family including cultural recognition processes, still not duly evaluated by an anthropological point of view.

Paper Download (187 KB)

Paper short abstract:

Kinship is one of the most significant dimensions of the relationships involving migration: it establishes complex networks and complex networks are also created as kinship. We see a complex intertwining of movement and kinship. We intend to explore some of these overlapping processes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes a reflection on the connections between kinship and movements. Studying a considerable variety of movements, we realized that we always see kinship as one of the most significant dimensions of the relationships involving migration: kinship establishes complex networks and complex networks are also created as kinship. In one dimension (the "given" that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out) or another (the "constructed" assigned to constructivists), kinship affects and is affected by the people's movement. We see a complex intertwining of movement and kinship. We intend to explore some of these overlapping and offer contributions to think anthropology of migration, as well as anthropology in general, since we believe that these cases allow us to think beyond the usual categories of anthropological thought.

We will see a number of examples that allows us a more systematic reflection on the place of kinship in migration systems, or the opposite: the place of migration / movement in kinship systems. We came to a relevant question that we intend to address: kinship, understood by the relatedness bias is itself movement with which we deal (and therefore the opposite would also be possible)? To help answer this question, we will go through two stages in this paper: first return to the discussion of "diferencialities" and its implications, and then connect the examples and their specific kinship with a reflection on the "diferencialities" and their connections with kinship and subsequently with movement.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the concept of descent appears in the national society overlapping with the concepts of nationality and ethnicity, by considering the problems in Japanese law concerning the citizenship of the people of Japanese descent born abroad in the history of Japanese migration.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1960s it is well recognized and referred that the concepts of nationality, ethnicity and descent have the same aspect as a membership rule based on the reiteration of parent-child relation. But there have been few discussion on this topic itself, especially within the empirical studies about migration or ethnic groups in national societies. In this presentation I analyze the legal problems over the nationality of the Japanese descendants outside of Japan, so as to examine how these concepts of collective identity are overlapping and branching off in the social reality.

When the second-generation Japanese appeared in such countries as the US or Brazil, their status of double citizenship was thought to cause diplomatic problems, and the Japanese government had to mediate between the two opposed principles: jus sanguinis and jus soli. This paper deals with the literature on the amendment of the Nationality law (1924) and the new immigration law (1990) in Japan, to consider how the law manages the continuity and distinction between the Japanese nationals and their descendants born abroad, and what meaning their shared descent has in legal system of the nation state. Through this inquiry I will approach the subject of interpenetration of nationality and kinship in the historical process, following Brackette Williams's works on this issue. This will be an attempt to connect kinship studies in civil societies and migration studies in Anthropology from the case of the Japanese descent.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates some testimonies of Okinawan Brazilian women and their marriages as a way to understand Okinawan Brazilian community.

Paper long abstract:

kinship and family are important categories in the constitution of okinawan community in Brazil. In their discourses about identity and in their day by day life women are supposed to nurture the okinawan family and maintain their traditions and family name. Based in the testimonies of some women this investigation is about how they found their partner, fell in love and constituted their own families. In some cases they must choose between a successful career or their marriage when there is no chance to keep both. This paper explores gender relations and sociability in and outside the okinawan community to understand their choices in a larger context post okinawan immigration to Brazil and over a background of discourses about identity. Also I understand the social marks of differences such as class, gender and race implicated in those discourses as important categories to visualize the maintenance of okinawan families and the immigration memories in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The ideas of family and ancestor worship are implied in the okinawan brazilian way to describe their culture and are essential to understand their sociability.

Paper short abstract:

Through the work with the memories of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, this study characterized the importance of land in the constitution of the nikkey rural way of life. The results of this research point to the need for a combination of kinship, land and immigration experience to understanding the complexity of this way of life.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to present elements for understanding what we call nikkey rural way of life. Why Japanese immigrants have become small landowners in São Paulo State's countryside and what is the role of land to these men and women, are some questions to be answered in this presentation. Historically constituted, this way of relating to the land and to the nature is what, in general, explains the persistence of many small nikkey landowners bound to their sites. Mostly, the lands of the interlocutors in this study were situated in regions through which the sugar cane industry advances, making it increasingly difficult to play this way of life, since politically, socially and economically are incompatible ways of organizing the production. Necessarily anchored in a very specific and rigid family background, with strict rules that are collectively shared, the individual strategies point to the collective undertaking: the improvement of living conditions and the end of overwork. Thus, this paper presents the key elements to understand the values of a significant portion of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, in this case, those who are articulated till the present day on the nikkey rural way of life.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this research is to analyze the practices of the Yuta - mediums who acts in Okinawa, Japan and Brazil - among the families of Okinawan descendants in São Paulo, Brazil, focusing to comprehend the ways in which Okinawan tradition and kinship are conceived and resignified within this complex relationship between Japanese immigration, kinship and religiousness.

Paper long abstract:

Ellen Schattschneider has made a relevant discussion regarding Japanese kinship and religiousness in Social Anthropology, presenting an intricate relationship between kinship, religiousness, transmigration and cosmology, in which kinship is responsible for the contact between the world of the living and the world of the dead in Tohoku, Japan. Similarly, we can see that the Okinawan shamanism performed by the yuta - mediums who acts in Okinawa, Japan and Brazil- operates within a similar logic by uniting two distinct dimensions, with the dead having an essential and active role in the life of the living. In their practice, the yuta introduce, signify and resignify the perceptions of Okinawan kinship which connects the living to their ancestors, with the possibility of the dead influencing on their kin: disrespectful practice or failure to worship the ancestors results in structural issues in the family, including families of Okinawan descendants in the city of Sao Paulo that have detached from Okinawa, Okinawan "culture" and "tradition” a long time ago. The aim of this research is to analyze the Yuta practice among the families of Okinawan descendants in São Paulo, Brazil, focusing to comprehend the ways in which kinship is conceived and resignified within this complex relationship between Japanese immigration, kinship and religiousness.