The authors first describe individual differences in the structure of the self. In the independent self-construal, representations of others are separate from the self. In the interdependent self-construal, others are considered part of the self (H. Markus & S. Kitayama, 1991). In general, men in the United States are thought to construct and maintain an independent self-construal, whereas women are thought to construct and maintain an interdependent self-construal. The authors review the psychological literature to demonstrate that many gender differences in cognition, motivation, emotion, and social behavior may be explained in terms of men's and women's different self-construals. Recognition of the interdependent self-construal as a possible alternative conception of the self may stimulate new investigations into the ways the self influences a person's thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Models of the Self: Self-Construals and Gender

Geert Hofstede’s legendary national culture research is critiqued. Crucial assumptions which underlie his claim to have uncovered the secrets of entire national cultures are described and challenged. The plausibility of systematically causal national cultures is questioned.

Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith - a Failure of Analysis

https://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Journal%20of%20Management-2008-Ashforth-325-74.pdf

Identification in Organizations: An Examination of Four Fundamental Questions

It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.

Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?

Reflexivity is commonly used in qualitative research and has been posited and accepted as a method qualitative researchers can and should use to legitimize, validate, and question research practices and representations. This paper closely examines the role of reflexivity as a methodological tool as it intersects with debates and questions surrounding representation and legitimization in qualitative research, within modernist and postmodernist ideologies, and pays close attention to how reflexivity is being defined and used in present-day research. Specifically, the author identifies and discusses the problematics of four common trends in present-day uses of reflexivity: reflexivity as recognition of self, reflexivity as recognition of other, reflexivity as truth, and reflexivity as transcendence. The author argues for a move away from comfortable uses of reflexivity to what she terms uncomfortable reflexive practices and provides an overview of the work of three authors who practice reflexivities of disco...

Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research

"The ethnography of Japan is currently being reshaped by a new generation of Japanologists, and the present work certainly deserves a place in this body of literature. . . . The combination of utility with beauty makes Kondo's book required reading, for those with an interest not only in Japan but also in reflexive anthropology, women's studies, field methods, the anthropology of work, social psychology, Asian Americans, and even modern literature."--Paul H. Noguchi, "American Anthropologist" "Kondo's work is significant because she goes beyond disharmony, insisting on complexity. Kondo shows that inequalities are not simply oppressive-they are meaningful ways to establish identities."--Nancy Rosenberger, "Journal of Asian Studies"

Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

From the runways of Paris to the casting controversies over BMiss Saigon, from a local demonstration at the Claremont Colleges in California to the gender-blending of BM. Butterfly, BAbout Face examines representations of Asia and their reverberations in both Asia and Asian American lives. Japanese high fashion and Asian American theater become points of entry into the politics of pleasure, the performance of racial identities, and the possibility of political intervention in commodity capitalism. Based on Kondo's fieldwork, this interdisciplinary work brings together essays, interviews with designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and playwright David Henry Hwang, and "personal" vignettes in its exploration of counter-Orientalisms.

About face : performing race in fashion and theater

"mother" and "sister" were at the doctor's, so I was busy helping the grandfather tend his young granddaughter. He quickly tired of his duties, leaving me to entertain her and to see that she not toddle too far afield. Promptly at 4 PM, the hour when most Japanese housewives shop for the evening meal, I lifted the baby into her stroller and pushed her along ahead of me as I inspected the fish, selected the freshest looking vegetables, and mentally planned the meal for the evening. As I glanced up into the shiny metal surface of the butcher's display case, I noticed someone who looked terribly familiar: a typical young housewife, in slip-on sandals and the kind of cotton shift the Japanese label "home wear," a woman walking with a characteristically Japanese bend in the knees and sliding of the feet. Suddenly I clutched the handle of the stroller to steady myself as a wave of dizziness washed over me-for I realized I had caught a glimpse of nothing less than my own reflection. Fear that perhaps I would never emerge from this world into which I was immersed, inserted itself into my mind and stubbornly refused to leave, until I resolved to move into a new apartment, to distance myself from my Japanese home and my Japanese existence. That an anthropologist's experience in the field is conditioned by his/her culturally and biographically mediated way of seeing-one's distance from one's informants and the inevitable prejudices forming one's baggage of cultural assumptions-is by now an idea of no particular novelty in anthropological circles. Recent experiments in ethnography and anthropological epistemology sensitively examine these issues, based around an awareness of the position of the ethnographer vis-a-vis his/her informants and how this might affect the fieldwork experience and its representation in the ethnographic text (cf. Crapanzano 1977; Rosaldo 1984). Yet most ethnographies, even of the reflexive kind, are products of contexts in which the observer/ethnographer is a visible outsider. Perhaps as a consequence (and perhaps as a gender difference; see Kirschner 1983), these ethnographies depict the Other as ineffably alien, as separate, distinct beings. The best we can

Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology

Contents: Investments and interventions (Un)Disciplined subjects: (de)colonizing the academy? Dorinne Kondo University of Southern California (Re)Viewing an asian American diaspora: multiculturalism, interculturalism, and the northwest Asian American theatre Karen Shimakawa University of California, Davis Creating performative communities: Through text, time, and space Russell Leong Cross-discipline trafficking: what's justice got to do with it? Sharon K. Hom City University of New York School of Law at Queens Translating knowledge Notes toward a conversation between area studies and diasporic studies Dipesh Chakrabarty University of Chicago Hualing Nieh's mulberry and peach in sinocentric, Asian American, and feminist critical practices Sau-ling C. WongUniversity of California, Berkeley Biyuti in everyday life: performance, citizenship, and survival among Filipinos in the United States Martin F. ManalansanUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Missile internationalism Kuan-hsing Chen National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan Para-sites, or, constituting borders Leading questions Rey Chow Brown University Modelling the nation: the Asian/American split David Palumbo-liu Stanford University In-betweens in a hybrid nation: construction of Japanese American identity in postwar Japan Yoshikuni Igarashi Vanderbilt University Conjunctural identities, academic adjacencies R. RadhakrishnanUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Asian/American epistemologies Epistemological shifts: national ontology and the new Asian immigrant Lisa Lowe University of California, San Diego Imaginary borders Kandice Chuh University of Marylend, College Park To tell the truth and not get trapped: Why interethnic antiracism matters now George LipsitzUniversity of California, San Diego

Dorinne K. Kondo

Papers

Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

About face : performing race in fashion and theater

Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology

Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora