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The State Bearing Gifts

Deception and Disaffection in Japanese Higher Education

The State Bearing Gifts cover

The State Bearing Gifts

Deception and Disaffection in Japanese Higher Education

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Description

Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value,' 'exchange,' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the 'gift,' McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of 'social contract' for understanding state-society relations. Written to be read as both a political and philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, this work has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitimacy.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Paradox and Price of the Gift
Chapter 2 The Burden of the Beneficiary: Schooling, Legitimacy, and Alienation
Chapter 3 Exchange Dramatics: Evaluating the Realness of Value
Chapter 4 Dramatizations, Deceptions, and Fronts
Chapter 5 Bureaucratic Fetishism and Mutating Institutions
Chapter 6 The State as Gift-Giving Machine and Stage Manager
Chapter 7 Japan's Strategic Schooling: Education as a Gift from the State
Chapter 8 Faces and Fronts: The Licit and Illicit Facets of Japan's Higher Education
Chapter 9 Exchanging Untruths at Amadera Women's Academy
Chapter 10 Learning National Identity at Amadera Women's Academy
Chapter 11 "Examocracy": Examinations as Dramatizations of Self-Worth
Chapter 12 Guiding Students through the Official Exchange Circuitry
Chapter 13 Education Reform-Mongering: Real and Rhetorical Change
Chapter 14 Self-Deception as Alienation: Rethinking Estrangement in Modern Society
Chapter 15 Appendix: Varieties of Exchange
Chapter 16 A Précis of Alienation

Product details

Published Jun 16 2010
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 308
ISBN 9780739113455
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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