[Linganth] Daniel White on Administering Affect

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Drew Kerr chats with Daniel White this week on the CaMP blog, asking him
questions about his book, Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the
Politics of Anxiety.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: How do the worlds that state administrators manage become the
feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses
this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls
"Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic
decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of
Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their
country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing
regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent
decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety
as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture
branding as a remedy.

Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible
government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating
connection between state administration and public sentiment. White
analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as
anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called
"Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between
practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among
Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate
how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended
consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book
presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional
lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come
to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis
of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture,
and national identity.
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