Profiles

A Little Failure and a Healthy Dose of Serendipity: Ethan Michelson
Challenging Identities: Marvin Sterling

A Little Failure and a Healthy Dose of Serendipity

Professor Ethan Michelson Assistant Professor of Sociology and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Ethan Michelson, claims that he is where he is today all because of a little failure and a healthy dose of serendipity. Michelson began to study Chinese as an undergraduate at McGill University but quit after one year and a disheartening grade of B-. After a year off, however, he felt something was missing and took a class on the anthropology of contemporary China taught by Professor Laurel Bossen which renewed his interest in China and encouraged him to resume his study of Chinese. After studying Chinese for three years at McGill (including a summer at Xiamen University), he was selected for the China-Canada Scholar Exchange Program, an honor usually reserved for graduate students and faculty, and spent a year studying in Nanjing while applying to American graduate school programs in anthropology and sociology.

Michelson's guiding research interest at this point was the plight of collective farming in China. His undergraduate thesis, "In Defense of Collective Farms," lamented the abolishment of collective farms in the post-Mao reform era. "I thought that collective farms in the Mao era had gotten a bum rap, and I was out to show why," he explains. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, he continued to be interested in the countryside, theories of development and the plight of the Chinese peasant.

In his third year of graduate school, Michelson received funding from the coveted Social Science Research Council International Predissertation Fellowship Program (SSRC IPFP), which would allow him to travel to China and begin to lay the groundwork for future research by gaining institutional support, developing connections and locating resources. He went to Beijing where he was affiliated with the Sociology Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Determined to do a village study, he spent months asking to be taken to a village. He eventually wound up going on an official visit to a nearby village in Hebei Province, accompanied by bureaucrats from three levels of government. "The villagers were overwhelmed to see this white guy surrounded by a convoy of high-ranking officials. Needless to say, I got the official party line to all of my questions, and left after three days completely disheartened." He returned to Beijing less one topic of research. "My research prospects in the countryside were looking grim. The SSRC IPFP saved my life because it allowed me to explore the feasibility of my original topic and gave me the freedom to start checking out other, more viable research topics."

But here is where the serendipity comes in. Earlier that year, CASS had hosted a large conference for Asian sociologists. Michelson became the impromptu translator and tour guide for the Israeli delegation (yes, Israel is included in China's definition of Asia ), as none of its members could speak Chinese. Leon Sheleff, a professor of law and sociology at Tel Aviv University, grilled him with questions about Chinese criminal justice and other areas of the legal system. Michelson could answer none of his questions. "Professor Sheleff told me point-blank that I should do my dissertation on the Chinese legal system because there was no scholarly literature in English on Chinese law written for a social science audience, and there was a great need for a descriptive overview and analysis of the Chinese legal system. He even gave me a dissertation topic—'Beijing Lawyers.'"

At the time, Michelson "shelved" these suggestions and continued to hold out hope that he could pursue his research on the Chinese village. After the spectacular failure of his village field trip, however, the conversations with Dr. Sheleff echoed in the back of his mind. He started to pay attention to books about law in China, and in a second round of serendipity, he found a collection of "Dear Lawyer Bao" legal advice columns in a bookstore next to the law firm that was responsible for publishing the columns in a local newspaper. Michelson immediately began translating the book and collecting columns that had been omitted. (These translations are the basis of his forthcoming book with the University of California Press.) He also started spending time in the law firm that wrote this newspaper column observing the work of its lawyers. Soon afterwards he found a second influential book, Toward an Age of Rights, which he was surprised to discover was co-written by a scholar at CASS's Institute of Law, one of the places to which he had accompanied Professor Sheleff as his interpreter. He dug out the business cards he had received on his visit with Sheleff and renewed these contacts. Soon he was collaborating and publishing with Gao Hongjun and Xia Yong. Owing to this good fortune, CASS's Institute of Law became Michelson's home base and a major source of logistical support as he carried out his dissertation field research on Chinese lawyers in 1999-2001.

"If my village study had not failed, I would have never seen the unrealized potential of the study of law in China." Sometimes failure is good.

In the summer of 2003, after he defended his dissertation entitled Unhooking from the State: Chinese Lawyers in Transition, Michelson was deeply saddened to learn that Professor Sheleff had passed away that very year. After once dismissing Professor Sheleff's suggestions as "good ideas, but not for me," in the end Michelson followed these suggestions to the letter, proving that good ideas and a measure of luck, both good and bad luck, can be a recipe for success. Written by Susan W. Furukawa

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Challenging Identities

Identity and culture have been abiding themes in Visiting Assistant Anthropology Professor Marvin Sterling’s personal and professional life. After growing up in Jamaica, Sterling came to the U.S. at the age of 13. He went to high school in Queens and attended New York University as a Communication Studies major, with a specialization in print journalism. After graduation, Sterling worked for over a year at a non-profit organization in New York, and then decided to attend graduate school in Los Angeles. He had planned to study the growth of the mass media in Jamaican society, and its effects on Jamaican cultural practices, but his plans, as plans often do, soon changed.

Before beginning UCLA’s anthropology program, Sterling moved to Los Angeles and worked for a year at Para Los Niños, an organization that provides social services for kids living in the Skid Row neighborhood. Every day, on his way from the bus station, he had to walk through the city’s Little Tokyo, which borders Skid Row. One day, in the window of a tourist gift shop, he saw a collectible Mammy doll.

“It surprised me,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to see in 1990s Los Angeles. It made me think about why it was there, and the nature of the Japanese interest in blackness that this doll seemed to represent.”

While at UCLA, Sterling heard about a series of negative remarks made by several Japanese politicians about people of African descent. The most infamous was made by then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who blamed the U.S.’s decline on the Latinos and African Americans. Nakasone claimed that these groups were responsible for bringing down the nation’s “intelligence levels.” “So with this, of course,” Sterling said, “my interest continued to grow.”

Rather than a study on media in Jamaica, Sterling decided on an M.A. thesis entitled, Double Consciousness and the Black Male Self: An Ethnography of African-American Sailors at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. He was interested in how these African American sailors thought Japanese people saw them, as well as the sailors’ feelings about life in Japan. He discovered that these perceptions depended on such factors as age, extent of military travel, and the on- or off-base residence of the men he studied.

While conducting this research, Sterling discovered that there were vibrant hip-hop and reggae scenes in Japan. In this way his dissertation research came to center on the popularity of roots reggae, dancehall reggae, and Rastafari (an anti-colonialist religious movement emerging from among the urban Jamaican underclass in the 1930s) in the country. By the time he returned to Tokyo to conduct this research, however, he found that roots reggae in Japan had become an exclusively rural phenomenon, and that dancehall-style reggae was growing in urban areas, particularly in Yokohama. This shift enabled him to consider how the Japanese engagement with Jamaican culture evolved across scenes as well as over time.

“In Japan there’s such a fascination with ethnic difference, but also such a fear of it, especially when it’s seen in some way as not being manageable,” Sterling says. “When it’s a product, like a Mammy doll, it’s manageable. But in the form of a thinking, feeling human being, one standing right in front of you, it’s not. That presence is dangerous, unmanageably dangerous. The strength of this pleasure and this fear of course depends on the idea of Japan as a homogenous society. There are groups of people, like Koreans, living in Japan whose presence should call this idea into question and yet it’s still so pervasive. So how is that myth perpetuated? Who does it serve? To me these are really interesting questions.”

Currently, Professor Sterling is reworking his dissertation: In the Shadow of “the Universal Other:” Performative Identifications with Jamaican Culture in Japan, to be published by Duke University Press. In his current research for that book he looks at early Japanese anthropology as one means of exploring how Japan has understood race. Sterling is interested in how that idea was introduced from the West and developed through the 20th century, and ultimately its relevance to Japanese interest today in black popular culture. In addition to this project, he is also exploring the Japanese imagination of New York City, and particularly black youth subculture there. “On Sundays in Harlem, you often see Japanese people riding buses to church as part of these gospel tours. Many of them are actively studying gospel music. They also view New York as a sort of mecca for hip-hop and dancehall culture, and so they are coming to the city to experience it first-hand.”

During his year at Indiana University, courses taught by Professor Sterling include: “Body Power and Performance,” “The Anthropology of Contemporary Japan,” “The Anthropology of Race,” and “Black Music and Identity.” Written by Susan W. Furukawa

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