Article

Anthropological Theory
2019, Vol.19(1) 170–190
Living together: ! The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:

Sympathy and the sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1463499618782791

practice of politics journals.sagepub.com/home/ant

Joseph Hankins
Department of Anthropology, University of California,
San Diego, USA

Abstract
What place is there for sympathy in politics or politics in sympathy? This essay takes
inspiration from the Japanese formulation of multiculturalism (tabunka-kyōsei or ‘‘the
living together of multiple cultures’’) to explore the sympathetic politics of living
together. Following a group of Japanese activists on a solidarity trip to Chennai, India,
the essay builds a definition of politics—the creation of venues, scenes, and opportu-
nities in which we might practice ourselves as we want to become—that relies on the
cultivation of fellow feeling. Rooted in the history and contemporary practice of
Japanese activist trips to India, this essay specifies a definition of politics and sympathetic
engagement that complicates recent discussions of humanitarianism and politics that
tend to place these two efforts in opposition against each other.

Keywords
humanitarianism, Japan, politics, solidarity, sympathy

Introduction
In the fall of 2005, I was hired by a group of activists in Tokyo to teach them
English. These activists all identified as Burakumin1—people with connections with
types of labor that are considered unclean, such as leather and meat production.
This group in particular might once have had ancestors who worked in those
canonically Buraku industries, but they themselves were all either sanitation work-
ers or full-time activists. They wanted to learn English in preparation for a trip they
would take the following year to Chennai, India. The second of such trips, and
potentially one of many to come, it would offer them opportunities to meet with
greater numbers of their Dalit comrades face to face, to see their comrades’ living

Corresponding author:
Joseph Hankins, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr. MC 0532
La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Email: jdhankins@ucsd.edu
Hankins 171

situations as the Dalit activist they worked most closely with had seen their own in
her trips to Japan during prior years, and to share experiences and strategies with
the aim of strengthening their relative movements. They would tour homes and
work places, and exchange stories of discrimination and pain as well as success and
strategy.
For the decade prior to their first trip, the Buraku group had met monthly to
research and discuss the kinds of things that the Buraku and Dalit faced in
common. They had regular study sessions about their forms of social stigma and
how that related to the particular formations of religious practice, nation-state and
colonial history, and capitalist development in each country. These groups regu-
larly hosted Dalit activists from India and Nepal, and were part of a large network
of such activities throughout the Buraku political movement in Japan. This Tokyo-
based group had, in the previous five years, started to talk about solidarity trips to
India that would build on their long-standing connection with a particular Dalit
activist. The Japanese group worked closely with this activist and the political
organization of which she was a part. Communicating regularly through e-mail
and by phone, the two groups refined what they hoped to achieve in these solidarity
trips, and how they hoped to advance their understanding of the similarities and
differences in their respective situations. Because of visa concerns, more than eco-
nomic ones, the initial volley of trips was to be from Japan to India, but there were
hopes that groups of Dalit activists, likely to be funded by their Japanese comrades,
would eventually be able to travel to Japan as well. Both sets of activists wanted to
understand how the contemporary global political and economic moment might
place these two groups, otherwise separated by thousands of miles, in similar pos-
itions: marked by a stigma passed through kinship relations that was deeply tied to
the forms of labor they historically had or currently could perform. The solidarity
trips were to personalize this research, to build and deepen friendships as a way of
grounding the more theoretical readings they were doing, and to enrich and
strengthen, alongside each other, the respective political movements and social
standing of each group.
The first time the Japanese activists had gone to India they had done so without
any language preparation, and they regretted this fact while they were there. They
had exchanged pictures and experiences with their Dalit comrades through an
interpreter; but, leaving India, they lamented not being able to communicate
more directly. Eight months prior to their second trip, then, they organized an
English language class, and, having heard of a native English speaker working with
the head offices of the Buraku Liberation League, hired me to teach them.
The 12 students in this English class, all between 40 and 80 years old, were
complete beginners in the language. At the first meeting we discussed their goals
and what types of English they might want to learn for their upcoming trip. We
drilled English reproductions of several Japanese sentences they had identified as
key in describing their situation in Japan: ‘‘Buraku discrimination is a form of
caste-based discrimination,’’ and ‘‘Buraku people face discrimination in marriage,
employment, and education.’’ Beyond these statements and a smattering of travel
172 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

phrases, we devoted most of our time to developing what we came to call

‘‘my story’’—succinct statements that could be used to explain to Dalit comrades
how the Buraku activists came to know they were marked as Buraku, how they
became involved in the Buraku liberation movement, and what type of work they
currently did.
They were also keen, in these English classes, to learn phrases that would help
them explain their presence in Chennai to people not familiar with the political
project. While both groups are relatively stigmatized and impoverished in their
home countries, the group from Japan enjoyed much greater access to economic
means than did their counterparts in India; they also had significantly easier access
to the travel documents necessary to make the trip. The economic disparity had
been clear on their first trip. They had been confronted with profound poverty and
had been asked—by some of their Dalit counterparts who noticed, when they saw
Japanese tourists’ tremendous wealth—for money or for food. The group from
Japan was extremely moved by the entrenched poverty they encountered and by the
stories of discrimination and abuse that the Dalit people suffered. They wanted to
help, but they also wanted to avoid a relationship of patronage and were instead
invested in casting the trip as one of solidarity. Very early in our English class we
discussed what to do if people in India asked the Japanese group for money. After
some conversation among the students, they decided to reply with: ‘‘We came to
learn how we can help each other best. We will go back to Japan and share what we
learn. That is all we can do for now.’’ The Buraku and Dalit leaders both explained
that they wanted to prioritize building a relationship that relied on mutual educa-
tion, growth, and empowerment rather than one of charity.
This relationship between solidarity and charity was complicated, however.
Whatever efforts they made to distance themselves from a relation of charity, the
Buraku activists were persistently haunted by an act of generosity by a man who
had gone on the first trip. This person, not Buraku himself, had committed most of
his adult life to working with corporate responsibility programs to end anti-Buraku
hiring practices. He had joined in the first trip to see what he could do to support
those efforts. Shortly before that first trip, his doctors informed him that the cancer
he had been struggling with for years had resurged and that he likely did not have
much longer to live. He participated in the study tour, and when he saw that one of
the Dalit groups they visited had plans, but no money, to build a community and
youth center in a rural area, he provided the funds. He died a few months after the
first solidarity trip, and on the second trip we would visit the construction site
where the building he funded was starting to take shape.
This act of generosity was an acknowledgement of the extreme differences in
political and economic conditions that the Buraku and Dalit faced, and the build-
ing that resulted from it a constant reminder of those differences, as well as of the
possibilities of philanthropy from the Japanese group to their Indian counterpart.
This dissonance would haunt the entire solidarity trip as requests, expectations,
and hopes for economic aid would tacitly stand behind most interactions between
the groups, occasionally bursting forth in an explicit plea—‘‘help us’’—to be met
Hankins 173

with their prepared sentences: ‘‘We came to learn how we can help each other best.
We will go back to Japan and share what we learn. That is all we can do for now.’’
The group from Japan debated, in the English class and on the trip with Dalit
leaders, where and how to specify the care for the pain of another within a politics
of solidarity. What place can care take in politics of solidarity; what form might
such a sympathetic relation take?—and, conversely, what politics might be built
from such care?
These solidarity trips, which have continued over the past decade, have tee-
tered persistently on whatever edge there might be between a politics of
humanitarian aid and a politics of grassroots empowerment (see Leebaw,
2014). In the face of tremendous economic and social differences, these
Buraku and Dalit activists are attempting to forge a sense of connection that
intertwines the possibilities of care and that of economic and social justice.2 The
Buraku solidarity project invests in cultivating a fellow-feeling and sympathetic
connection between the groups as a means of spurring greater critical analysis
of social, economic, and political forces that are global in scope. Theirs is a
politics inextricably premised upon the intercalation of both of these modes of
attachment. It is a politics that begs for a more robust analysis of sympathetic
connection and for a greater specificity to what might be called politics in the
first place.

A human anti-politics
In the past decade since that English class, Buraku activists have continued their
trips from Tokyo to Chennai, and they have endeavored to specify the politics of
their sympathy, and the sympathy of their politics. Across the same decade, a very
similar constellation of concerns has unfolded among social scientists. In the past
ten years, several social theorists have put great thought into the relationship
between humanitarianism and politics. While one strand of this conversation con-
tends that humanitarianism is not political per se, another strand argues that such
claims to apolitical status actually obscure the anti-politics of this mode of gov-
ernance that effaces its own political effects and tends to cut human pain off from
socio-historical context.
Fundamental to this conversation, Didier Fassin, in his recent book
Humanitarian Reason (2011), charts the rise of moral sentiments to the status of
an essential force in contemporary politics. In this new arrangement, he argues, the
horror and sympathy felt for the misfortunes of a fellow human have become the
foundational fuel for a certain type of political transformation. Sufficiently stoked,
indignation at the suffering and vulnerable status of another might prompt political
action aimed at ameliorating that pain. The rise of this mode of politics, Fassin
contends, has enacted a set of transformations in how social problems are under-
stood and addressed: ‘‘inequality is replaced by exclusion, domination is trans-
formed into misfortune, injustice is articulated as suffering, [and] violence is
expressed in terms of trauma’’ (Fassin, 2011: 6).
174 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

In Fassin’s argument this shift, which began with the end of the Cold War and
has reached its ascendancy in the past decade, presumes a fundamental paradox in
how people relate with one another. On the one hand, the politics of compassion
depends on an inequality—some populations are more vulnerable than others; on
the other hand, all subjects are presumed to be equal in their shared humanity.
Fassin critiques this new humanitarian governance precisely because compassion
always presupposes, and thus replicates, a relation of inequality even as it claims
itself to be a force of solidarity among equal humans. It is that presupposition that
comprises its political force, even if it casts itself as simply, apolitically, helping
those in need.
Miriam Ticktin follows a similar vein of argument in her book Casualties of
Care (2011). There, she examines the roles an ethic of humanitarian aid plays in
French immigration policy. In her analysis, Ticktin follows the unintended conse-
quences of a putatively apolitical effort to expand French immigration to vulner-
able populations. The expansion of emergency immigration rights to women who
have suffered gender-based violence and to victims of human trafficking, she
argues, presumes a universality of suffering that can be uncovered by particular
medical techniques of bodily examination. However, at the same time, it also
delimits that universality with tacit standards of moral legitimacy: only certain
pains can rally the care of the state; others, like the pain of entrenched poverty,
do not summon care or concern. Ticktin tracks the way in which healthcare pro-
fessionals entrenched in the immigration process encourage potential entrants to
the French state to present and understand themselves as wounded in particular
ways, ways that then qualify their citizenship for the rest of their lives in France. In
the end, this politics of care, as enacted through immigration policy, ends up,
Ticktin contends, ‘‘reproducing inequalities and racial, gendered, and geopolitical
hierarchies’’ and as such functions as an ‘‘antipolitics’’ (Ticktin, 2011: 5).
The legal and medical humanitarianism that arises in this line of analysis is one
that reduces people to their wounds, psychological and physical. It evacuates them
from their socio-historical settings and focuses on the ways in which they experi-
ence pain. This is a pain thought to be im-mediate, obvious, and universally avail-
able for sympathetic engagement to any onlooker. At the same time, in these
analyses, it is a politics that effaces its own political effects; it stands opposed
here to ‘‘interest’’ or ‘‘justice’’; it enacts an adjudication based on unspoken stand-
ards of moral legitimacy, enacting inequality even as it casts itself as predicated
upon human universality. According to these analyses, which I find to be quite
compelling, such humanitarianism never explicitly deals with how it constitutes and
polices the boundaries of the universal human or ‘‘universal’’ human pain. These
are its anti-politics, the unintentional consequences to something frequently
avowed, by those who enact it, as simply apolitical.
Fassin and Ticktin are not the only social theorists to elaborate a rendition of
this argument. From Nancy Fraser’s tracking of a shift from redistribution to
recognition (Fraser, 2000) or Wendy Brown’s analysis of the demands for wounded
others within liberal states (Brown, 1995) to Elizabeth Povinelli’s contrast of a
Hankins 175

politics of liberal sympathy and a politics of connection (Povinelli, 2002), we see a

historical periodization, a shift that happened sometime around the end of the Cold
War, in which the justificatory base of political action moved from framings of
economic justice to those of a politics of sympathy, even if the substantive claims of
each moment remain very similar (Gal, 2003).
The conversation on politics and sympathy that has emerged in the past several
decades at times veers close to painting a bald dichotomy between the two political
orientations, wherein ‘‘true politics’’ might be indicted for ‘‘not caring,’’ or
‘‘caring’’ for being ‘‘anti-political.’’ In its most straw-figure form, this set of argu-
ments runs the risk of reifying a normative understanding of politics, making
‘‘politics’’ not an ethnographic question to be investigated but, rather, a title to
be conferred by the social analyst who is the arbiter of what is political, and when
(see Candea, 2011). This normative politics arrives in a nostalgic mood, setting up a
yearning for some prior moment when real politics happened. What, then, are we
to do with this pervasive tension that thrives in the contemporary moment? We can
pit the two sides of the proffered dichotomy against the other: justice versus love.
Each would then have its own places and times of relevance. This dichotomy is
reminiscent of Richard Rorty’s offering, in his argument against Clifford Geertz on
essentialism, for a healthy liberal society where we would need both ‘‘Agents of
Justice’’ capable of expanding justice across disparate situations and ‘‘Agents of
Love’’ (he recommends anthropologists for the job) who throw open the windows
to the details of specific cases and thus potentially transform the substance of
justice (Rorty, 1990).
Or we can discern in this constellation of arguments a tacit imperative for
developing the grey area within the binary: to think of these modes of engagement
not as oppositional but as dialectically connected; to not flinch away from an anti-
politics of care in favor of some prior mode of true politics, but rather to specify the
modes of politics and of sympathetic engagement that might already challenge a
stark dichotomy between love and justice.3 The collected set of essays, of which this
one is a part, seeks to specify what we social theorists might mean by politics and
how we might ethnographically investigate it without predetermining our field of
engagement. I add to this endeavor by exploring the dissonance, overlap, and
provocation at the intersections of politics and care. The endeavors of the
Buraku activists traveling to Chennai offer a perfect crucible in which to generate
such a path and to hone our conceptualization of politics, of how to approach it
ethnographically, and to suss out what modes of sympathetic engagement might
open avenues to politics, and for whom.

Living together

The word in Japanese for multiculturalism is tabunka-kyosei; or, literally, the living
together of multiple cultures. Garnering more and more attention in Japan in the

past ten years, tabunka-kyosei has come to refer primarily to a constellation of
social issues surrounding the immigration of non-Japanese people into Japan in
176 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

search of jobs. Its country plagued by an aging population and dwindling birth
rate, the government of Japan has in recent years enacted a number of policies
aimed at easing the immigration path for those who would move to Japan to work,
particularly in industries that involve dangerous, dirty, or difficult labor (Kondo,
2011). Some of these potential laborers—say, for example, people of Japanese
descent living in Brazil or Peru (Tsuda, 2003)—have been able to secure claims
to Japanese nationality through parents or grandparents. Others, who do not have
that luxury, rely instead on Japan’s notoriously difficult-to-navigate immigration
process; and still others gain access to Japan with a short-term work visa and then,
failing to meet the requirements of the immigration process, stay beyond their visas
to work while living covertly (Kondo, 2011).
With the increasing influx of these workers, anxieties have proliferated about
how these foreigners might live together with Japanese nationals raised in Japan.
Government agencies in Japan are then caught between two sets of imperatives: the
pressure of a waning native work force collides with anxieties about accepting the
foreign. Out of these colliding pressures, multicultural policies, which aim at fos-
tering the possibilities of cultures living together, have come into a heyday.4
Decades before this term gained the popular purchase it now enjoys, the type of
production and organization of social difference that it heralds became prominent
in Japanese politics. As I have argued elsewhere (Hankins, 2014), from the 1980s
onward (what Neary [1997] calls the ‘‘third phase’’ of Buraku politics) Buraku
difference has come to be seen more and more as a form of social difference that
might sit alongside that of resident Koreans, indigenous Ainu, Okinawans, or now
the increasing number of foreign workers, who are all held up as indicators of
Japan’s status as a socially heterogeneous nation-state.5 This mode of reckoning
social difference has particular characteristics, among them an interest in the cul-
tural specificity of these groups, an equation of the different groups all as Japanese
minorities, a constant vigilance for more groups not yet recognized, an elision of
the ‘‘majority’’ from consideration, and an understanding of these minority groups
as fundamentally wounded by their social and economic marginalization.6 These
characteristics arrive as demands: in order to gain access to whatever government
funds or programs might be available for the betterment of their situation, these
groups must show their cultural coherence, their equivalence to each other, and the
wounds they have suffered in their marginalization (Hankins, 2012). As a regime of
governing difference, multiculturalism has, since the late 1980s, been a regnant part
of leftist Japanese politics, and a dominant mode of marshaling and representing
Buraku difference.
Japanese multiculturalism foists such demands on social difference, to the det-
riment and benefit of those forced to answer its summons (Hankins, 2012, 2014).
Rather than focus on this critique here, I draw inspiration instead from what Zigon
(2018) terms an ‘‘anthropology of potentiality.’’ This is not an anthropology that
relies on thick description as an analysis of what is actual, nor is it a critique that
attempts to reveal what might ‘‘really’’ be happening in a situation in spite of what
those involved in the situation might state is happening. Rather, as Zigon proposes
Hankins 177

it, an ‘‘anthropology of potentiality’’ is an attempt to read contours of something

incipient within a situation as a means of engaging in conversation with those
involved in that situation as much as in conversation with theorists of anthropo-
logical practice (Zigon, 2018, 16). In this vein, the Japanese term for multicultur-
alism uncovers something very useful for a contemporary contemplation of
 prompts and centers the question of how different collect-
politics. Tabunka-kyosei
ives might forge a life together. The term kyosei  is used to describe situations of
mutualistic symbiosis; it can also be read as tomo ni ikiru—to live together. This is
less a living alongside than it is a living with and through others. The togetherness is
not a supplement to life, something added on that might feed back; rather, one’s
ability to live or to thrive is deeply imbricated in the life of others. The use of the
term places any one entity, collective or otherwise, within ecological relations that
both exceed and constitute them simultaneously.
Until the 1980s, the Buraku political movement focused primarily on Buraku
issues as a stand-alone problem within the Japanese nation-state, and they came
under severe critique from other groups for doing so. Through the leveraging of
political influence, they had succeeded in 1969 in having a set of laws passed that
directed government funds to Buraku neighborhoods and industries that registered
themselves with the government. While this program had its internal critics, i.e.,
those who argued that registration would render Buraku areas more visible and
thus more susceptible to discrimination, it came to shape the contemporary terrain
of Buraku politics. Registered Buraku neighborhoods were able to use government
funds to sustain their political movements, to improve housing conditions, street
sanitation and safety, to provide scholarships to families for education, and to
consolidate a collective Buraku identity that might continue such work.
Historically, Buraku areas are frequently located very close to neighborhoods
housing descendants of Korean nationals who had been brought to Japan during
the wars as forced labor. Lacking nationality themselves, and never completely
absorbed into the Japanese body politic, this group of people has consistently
struggled for economic and social opportunities that Japanese nationals more
easily enjoy. The set of laws passed in 1969 opened a path for Buraku people,
unmarked by ethnic or national difference, to make demands on the state and to
improve the conditions of their neighborhoods and families. It also opened a path
for a widened economic gap between them and their closest neighbors, resident
Koreans.
The Buraku movement came under severe critique from those neighbors for a
single-minded focus on their own issues (Neary, 1997). Indeed, a common argu-
ment by the political movement against Buraku discrimination at the time was
simply: we are Japanese; why would you discriminate against us? This argument
situated national rights and responsibilities as an unexamined quality belonging to
the ‘‘Japanese’’; it left unexamined how such belonging was constituted and what
exclusions it might entail. Faced with such criticism, in the 1980s the Buraku pol-
itical movement reconceptualized its political strategies, and instead moved, as
outlined above, to a stance based on a broader analysis of the creation and
178 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

management of social difference in Japan that included an analysis of the situation

of groups such as the resident Koreans, who might now be understood as allies and
comrades rather than adversaries sitting across a gulf of ethnic difference (Neary,
1997). This reconceptualization was not without its detractors or critics, however.
After decades of antagonism, for example, resident Koreans were wary of sitting on
panels with Buraku activists to showcase the minority groups of Japan for a visit
from the UN special rapporteur on racism (Hankins, 2014). Similarly, there were
murmurs of resistance (and acclaim) from both groups when confronted with the
possibility of engaging in solidarity politics with sexual minorities (Hankins, 2014).
The shift in Buraku politics, which coincided with the end of the Cold War,
involved greater attention to, and demand for, the wounds of the marginalized; it
also invited deeper consideration of, and new frameworks for thinking about, how
different groups such as the Buraku and resident Koreans might be connected to
each other, both constituted as collective subjects: minority groups within the
Japanese nation-state. This shift in political formation explicitly foregrounded
the question of living together: how might groups constituted as minorities live
together; how might the life of those groups live together with the Japanese
nation-state; how might more circumstances be cultivated so that techniques and
modes of living together might be fostered, rendered explicit, and strategically
practiced.
In her book The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks (2011) underscores a distinc-
tion between ethics and politics that is of use here. Across the book, she builds an
argument for the elimination of labor as it is organized under capitalism, and ends
with an insistence for a post-work politics rather than a post-work ethics. For her,
thinking alongside Aristotle and Arendt, the distinction between politics and ethics
is one of vantage point more than it is a total cleavage. Politics trains the attention
on ‘‘collective action and fields of institutional change,’’ whereas ethics places the
focus on ‘‘practices of the self and encounters with the other’’ (Weeks, 2011: 228).
Each set of practices implicates the other: engaging in collective action toward
institutional change relies upon and impacts the possibilities of practices of the
self and encounters with the other. However, they are distinct entry points to
approaching life alongside others: one focused on the collective and the institu-
tional, the other on a self in its relation to an other as possible within such insti-
tutional forms. Tracing the ties between these two modes of action, Weeks pushes
for attention to the task of changing the institutions and discourses that frame
individual lives and action. Politics then is the collective engagement with such
arrangements so that we might ethically practice the selves we want to become.
Politics, as collective engagement with institutional form, serves as ground for the
ethical interaction of self and other; it is future-oriented on an ever-advancing
potentiality, and it is fundamentally processual.
It is this political potentiality that I want to unfold from Japanese multicultur-
alism. Fundamental here is the question of kyosei  or tomo ni ikiru—how do we live
together; that is, how do we collectively create the venues in which we might live
together? How do we capacitate our formative entanglements with each other so as
Hankins 179

to create reliable opportunities in which we might rehearse ourselves as we want to

become? I term this a politics rather than an ethics, following Weeks’s distinction,
because the focus in on the collective creation of institutional venues of interaction,
rather than on the interactions between self and other. Japanese multiculturalism,
even in the midst of all of its failings (Hankins, 2012; Yoneyama, 2003), can be seen
as an incitement to creating the conditions under which we might all live together.
What place then might sympathy have in the construction of the institutional forms
that allow us to live together?

Pain in someone else’s body

When I was in junior high school, I first learned that I was Burakumin when kids
made fun of me. When I was in high school, some of my classmates refused to play
with me or refused to date me. Now I work with the Tokyo Liberation League.

For decades Buraku and Dalit activists have worked concertedly to institution-
alize venues in which they might practice being that which they want to become,
together. The study groups, invitation of Dalit guests, and coordination of efforts
at the United Nations, are all examples of such venues and such strategy. The more
recent development of solidarity trips is another face of such politics of living
together, one tied to the rise in humanitarian governance that Fassin and Ticktin
critique in which moral sentiments sit entangled with a politics of justice. The
politics of the Buraku solidarity trips consist in the strategic formulation of oppor-
tunities for Buraku and Dalit people to practice being the selves they aspire to
become. Both the trips themselves, and the various workshops, study sessions, and
report-back meetings held before and after each trip, serve as a place for these
activists to rehearse their commitments to exploring how Buraku stigma might be
related to that of the Dalit, and to social justice more broadly.
In our English class leading up to the second trip, we spent the majority of the
time drafting and practicing concise statements that explained who the participants
were, where they were from, how they had come to know themselves as Buraku,
and what they currently did. The participants in the course referred to their
accounts as ‘‘My Story,’’ which was simultaneously an intimate account of self,
and an opportunity for practicing and cultivating that self in relation to their Dalit
comrades. The quotation that opens this section is one such ‘‘My Story.’’
Several months into our classes, I had asked each participant in the course to
come with a draft, in English, of their story. During the class period we refined each
statement, with me offering grammatical and vocabulary suggestions, and then we
went around the class, with each person standing and presenting their story in front
of everyone else. Most of the students stumbled diligently over their sentences, each
person practicing multiple times in hopes of getting the statement down to a fluid
flow of English words. Once we had gone halfway or so around the room, one
student presented a particularly well-prepared piece. In a somewhat quiet voice, she
180 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

explained to us in English that she had not learned that she and her family were
Burakumin until she was in junior high school. Several of her friends had started to
make fun of her and refuse to hang out with her; boys refused to date her. These
other kids had been told by their parents not to spend time with her, that she was
dirty. She suffered regular harassment and bullying at school for years. Over time,
though, she learned that she was not alone, that there were other Buraku students
in her school and throughout Japan, and she became galvanized to do something to
transform the Buraku situation.
The grammar and vocabulary of this presentation came relatively easily to her.
However, as she started to recount her experiences of discrimination, she started to
stammer and fumble over her words—not from lack of language ability, but from
an emotional rush at remembering and recounting her experiences in junior high
and high school. She turned red, emotion welling up in her voice and tears in her
eyes. Here, forty years after the end of high school, those memories, said in front of
a group of friends and comrades, evoked an intense emotional response. I imme-
diately felt guilty for asking her to present her story in front of everyone. Later that
evening, at the restaurant we went to following class, I apologized, but she told me
not to worry about it. This was something she had never shared with anyone
before, and she appreciated the opportunity to speak these memories, to practice
them here in front of her peers before sharing them with Dalit women in India.
The crafting and practicing of these stories offered the students in the class the
opportunity to rehearse their memories as well as their stances toward those mem-
ories, in front of each other and with an imagined Dalit audience. If there is an
ethics to be found in that relation between self and other, there is a politics to be
found in creating the venues for its practice. The stories were composed to give the
Dalit an idea of the personal and private, painful and sometimes triumphant cir-
cumstances Buraku people faced in Japan. The Buraku contingent would share
their stories, and they would listen to the comparable stories from the Dalit, with
the hope of transforming each other from distant strangers to intimate comrades
more attuned to how they already lived together and how they hoped to lived
together differently. In this process of crafting these stories, the Buraku activists
internalized this rich topography of others, and in so doing transformed themselves
individually and collectively, even as they transformed their connection to the
Dalit. Building on decades of interaction with Dalit activists, they had created a
venue in which they might be able to rehearse the selves they wanted to become.
Projecting yourself into the perceptions of an audience requires that you think,
feel, and be yourself differently. This is the work of sympathy. David Hume (2000)
and Adam Smith (2010) argue that sympathy can be productively understood as a
‘‘fellow-feeling,’’ more of a conduit for the transference of emotional orientation
than an emotion unto itself.7 It might foster compassion or care, but it might as
easily foster enmity or disgust. In all cases, the fellow-feeling of sympathy takes
coordination to achieve. It takes active work to attune oneself to the circumstances
of another, to habituate that attunement into part of one’s being, and then be able
to share an emotional orientation together.8 For the Buraku activists, this
Hankins 181

attunement presupposed a longstanding mutual political commitment and it antici-

pated venues for rehearsing themselves together. The Buraku activists created
themselves looped through a projected Dalit interlocutor.
This definition of sympathy—a feeling with rather than a feeling for—highlights
the fact that coordination of sentiment requires contextual knowledge, requires
mediation, requires work to effect. It is not something that simply arises unbidden
into the heart upon encounter with another’s pain, for example. It takes attune-
ment and rehearsal to enliven sympathetic engagement. This is where I diverge with
some of the recent anthropological literature on empathy (e.g., Throop, 2010) that
I think obscures too much of the labor required to recognize another’s pain as
eligible for sympathetic engagement. This body of work focuses on the intersub-
jective condition of being human and the work that goes into attuning to intersub-
jective relations; I, in a slightly different move, examine instead the institutional
forms upon which intersubjectivity relies. I do not presume a human condition but,
rather, examine the labor that goes into creating the institutional scaffolding that
allows one to be human. In my formulation, the capacity for extending sympathy
relies on cultivating a sense of proximity—of developing and applying those
tacit standards of, for example, moral legitimacy that Ticktin traces in her work.
It requires a particular, embodied mode of attention cultivated over time and
attunement to circumstances (cf. Csordas, 1993). It is a reflexive attunement to
and invocation of living together.
The sympathetic engagement that the Buraku activists rehearsed in our English
class was built upon decades of cultivating such attunement and sense of proximity,
even as it fostered and transformed that sensibility. Since the 1950s the Buraku
liberation movement has conducted trips to India to investigate possible similarities
with the Dalit and assess the possibilities for collaborative political work. Before
multiculturalism was a commonly used word, they worked to analyze how they
might already live together with these Dalit, despite a distance of thousands of miles
separating the groups. The leader of the immediate post-war liberation movement,
Matsumoto Jiichiro, himself visited India multiple times to forge connections and
build a base for collaboration (Tomonaga, 2005).
During the 1960s and early 1970s, even as the Buraku Liberation League was
prioritizing domestic issues, their research sibling organization took as one of its
primary goals the investigation of something it called ‘‘caste-based discrimination’’
throughout Asia, with an eye on identifying the various global factors—formations
of religion, the nation-state, and capitalism—that might help organize social stigma
in similar ways across the continent. With the movement’s increased interest in
international human rights in the 1980s, the research institute intensified its work,
encouraging Japanese scholars to visit countries in South Asia and sponsoring
visits to Japan by Dalit activists and organizers. Their published work was distrib-
uted to all branches of the liberation league throughout the country and was
synopsized in partner organization newsletters.
The study tour that I participated in was intimately entwined with this decades-
long endeavor by Buraku organizations to forge connections on the basis of shared
182 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

experience and to strategize around the political task of how to create venues in
which they might practice living together.9 The tour was an outcropping of a
friendship between a member of the Japanese group, Mizuno, and the leader of
the partner Dalit organization, Caroline. During college in Kyoto, Mizuno had
been urged by a mentor, a man named Imai at the local Buraku liberation office, to
visit India. Shortly before Mizuno had started interning at the office, Imai had
visited India, been inspired by what he saw, and had established enduring friend-
ships with several of the Dalit organizers he met, among them Caroline’s father.
Imai passed away shortly thereafter, but until his death kept insisting to Mizuno
that he should visit India. A few years later Mizuno helped organize a visit to Japan
by Dalit leaders, and in that exchange met Caroline’s father. He then redoubled his
efforts to travel to India. He started volunteering at places that used English, to
improve his language skills, and he took on more jobs, working as a security guard
and an attendant at a corporate cafeteria, and saving money by living in the com-
pany’s janitor’s closet.
Eight years later, he had finally amassed enough money to participate in an
exchange program at a Dalit Christian Theology school. There he reconnected with
Caroline’s father, who introduced him to a number of Dalit leaders as well as his
daughter. Twenty years later, Mizuno and Caroline remained close friends.
Caroline had become a lawyer and the leader of the Chennai-based Dalit group,
and Mizuno had become one of the core members of the Tokyo branch of the
liberation league. They had visited each other’s homes multiple times and were
actively engaged in each other’s political movements. In 2004 the two decided to
organize a study tour of Dalit communities in Chennai that would connect
Caroline’s political work more directly to Mizuno’s, potentially channel funds
from relatively wealthier Japanese organizations, and allow for the inspiration of
cross-pollination.
The solidarity trips from Japan to India are not a project based on feeling bad
for another’s misfortune. They are rooted, instead, in a long-standing attempt to
identify and forge connections between different groups across a continent. They
start from a presumption that Buraku and Dalit experiences are tied to each
other, not that they are the same, but that Buraku and Dalit people already, in
some fashion, live together; that their livelihoods, their capacities to live, are
interconnected. Within this project, sympathy plays a key role. The work of
understanding each other as connected enables the Buraku and Dalit groups
to better feel with each other, even if that feeling is at times unbalanced or
uneven. It allows the students in my class to anticipate a Dalit audience that
might in turn be key in how they practice being the selves they want to become. It
is this project against which stand the moments in which the Buraku contingent
does feel bad for the circumstances of their comrades. The possibilities of
humanitarian aid here sit always within a larger context that establishes and
reaffirms connection through the cultivation of fellow-feeling. The pain that
the Buraku might encounter in their comrades’ bodies arrives, through this con-
nection, as a pain in their own.
Hankins 183

The sympathy of politics and the politics of sympathy

In many ways, the solidarity work between the Buraku and the Dalit resembles,
and complicates, what Arjun Appadurai describes as ‘‘deep democracy’’
(Appadurai, 1996). These Buraku and Dalit organizations are working to articulate
their local interests across national boundaries in solidarity with each other, much
as are the land rights organizations Appadurai discusses. Appadurai argues that
such grassroots networking is novel, born in a time of waning promises of a
Marxist vision of class-based internationalism and those of modernization and
development, and that it is not merely an insidious ‘‘self-governmentality’’ but
rather governmentality turned against itself, a ‘‘governmentality from below’’
(Appadurai, 1996: 36).10 As much as this mode of relation reflects the procedures
of governmentality—statistical action on populations, discipline wedded to bio-
power—it also reflects and reiterates the rise of moral sentiments within such
governmentality. These grassroots networks use the work of sympathetic engage-
ment, of care, of a performance and recognition of vulnerability.
Appadurai does not dwell on these wounds or their performance; instead, he
moves quickly to think about the political conditions and salience of these efforts,
in which he sees much promise. These forms of transnational alliance, he contends,
allow communities a comparative perspective and external legitimation; they rally
the authority of cosmopolitan interest to the side of their local politics; they pro-
vide venues for exchanging strategy; and they foment and deepen internal critical
debate (Appadurai, 1996: 41–43). In so doing these organizations engage in politics
as I have defined it. They create institutional forms—study groups, missions to the
UN, solidarity trips, English language classes—in which they might rehearse them-
selves as they want to become: they strengthen themselves and each other, and they
potentially reform what democracy and politics can be. While much of his tone
borders on the panegyric, Appadurai reminds the reader this ‘‘form of deep dem-
ocracy, the vertical fulcrum of a democracy without borders, cannot be assumed to
be automatic, easy, or immune to setbacks’’ (Appadurai, 1996: 46).
The solidarity efforts of the Buraku and the Dalit hold true to Appadurai’s
analysis, though their interaction highlights, much more than does Appadurai,
the kinds of inequalities possible even in these moments of ‘‘deep democracy.’’
Theirs is an attempt to assess and use the connections that place the Buraku and
Dalit in relation to each other, however unevenly, to enliven that web of entangle-
ment in new ways, fostering a transformation in themselves and the forces that
connect them. As the students in the English class were discussing how to handle
requests for money, they expressed a desire to go beyond thin transactions; rather,
they said, they hoped to establish a longer term relationship that might have affects
on themselves as much as the Dalit. This was not mere instrumentalism; members
of the Buraku group gained little cultural capital in their trips to India. They gained
no money, were not using this experience to apply for grants or secure further
funding, and they were not doing it for local or municipal electoral political
gain. Likewise, they were not doing it for mere self-enrichment or self-care.
184 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

These were not trips of tourism, they were not attempts to enrich oneself alone, and
they were not motivated by pity for a suffering other. The students were clear in the
class and in their strategy sessions with Dalit leaders that they hoped that these
trips would allow them to exchange views and experiences with the Dalit, recogniz-
ing ever more their connection and opening themselves to potential transformation
and future strategy through regularly being together. When I asked if they were
motivated by a desire to help their Dalit comrades, or out of a sense of obligation
toward them, they quickly corrected me. They were not interested in charity, they
stressed. They saw themselves instead as obligated to a cause of social justice that
they held in common with the Dalit they were visiting. Their sense of being similar
to the Dalit was not grounded in a universal humanity but in a particular under-
standing of social and economic projects through which their situations were con-
nected. They built this political project through their sympathetic engagements,
through understanding and living their lives as interconnected with those of the
tanners and street cleaners they met in Chennai. To combine and complicate Fassin
and Appadurai both, they are pursuing something that might be called a ‘‘humani-
tarian governance from below’’—an attempt, through sympathetic engagement
and being with each other, to institutionalize new modes of living together.
The critiques of humanitarian aid that have emerged from social scientists over
the past several years have focused on how such aid presumes that the suffering of a
body is something immediately recognizable, understandable, and relatable: that
we know pain when we see it, that it marshals a reaction in any human onlooker,
and that pain itself must be stopped. But, in assuming pain to be universally rec-
ognizable and im-mediate, this humanitarian mode of engagement sets aside con-
sideration of the conditions that produce pain, as we saw in Ticktin’s argument,
without critical reflection about the standards tacitly brought to bear for judging
pain worthy, or not, for aid. Furthermore, in isolating pain as the object of con-
cern, this humanitarianism occludes from consideration the kinds of connections
binding the care provider and the sufferer together in the first instance. This
approach to suffering evacuates the suffering of a body from the socio-historical
conditions and connections out of which such experience might arise.
Understood as such, compassion is cast as contrasting with other forms of
relating more properly political. Recall here the contrasts of care vs. politics,
moral sentiments vs. social and economic justice. This tension, in all of its
guises—between similarity and difference, between justice and love, between mim-
esis and alterity—is a tension that falls all too easily under what Povinelli (2006)
has identified as the constitutive tension of liberalism.11 Trapped within such a
tension, options would appear to be on the order of an ‘‘either or’’—either pay
more attention to the differences and allow them to proliferate, i.e., to pour more
anthropological ‘‘love’’ on the situation, or be more attentive to ‘‘justice,’’ extend a
self-altering sympathetic engagement further, commensurating across differences
(again, see Rorty, 1990). Remaining within such a tension trades on the production
of good feelings for the nation—either in justice or love—and need not probe the
ways in which such groups might already be connected.
Hankins 185

The solidarity work of the Buraku and the Dalit, however, offers an alterna-
tive to this stark binary. In their politics, i.e., in their practices of creating
venues in which they might rehearse themselves as they want to become, the
focus, carefully analyzed over decades, is on connection—connection through
similar placements within configurations of capital and secular national belong-
ing, not a connection through universal humanity. This is a connection that
allows for the disposition of the sympathetic imagination, and that connection
then, in turn, is enlivened and transformed by sympathetic engagement. The
activists practice and share stories of pain, both physiological and psycho-
logical, and those stories sit as part of a political project to create new venues
beyond and in addition to the state or the United Nations to practice being
themselves, together, in a new way. This is not, note, a connection premised on
the condition of being human as the anthropological literature on empathy too
quickly presumes; it is, rather, a connection that is socio-historically specific,
that locates the human condition itself as a particular historical form. This
alternative, I argue, requires sympathetic engagement as much as it might
speak to desires for economic justice and socio-historical context—the offerings
of connection. The recognition of connection, of one’s self always already being
co-substantial with that of another, requires the work of priming the imagin-
ation, of pulling on the circumstance of another to imagine them in relation to,
even part of, oneself (Povinelli, 2006). This work is the work Hume (2000)
describes in his analysis of sympathy, and it need not be purely liberal in the
sense of presuming fundamentally atomized individuals. Instead, it can be sim-
ultaneously attentive to the pains of another and necessarily understand those
wounds as integral to the health of one’s own distant, yet connected, body. Here
sympathetic engagement requires and stimulates the politics of practicing one-
self living together with another.

Conclusion
In 2015, the group of Buraku activists decided to discontinue their solidarity trips
to India. Over the course of 11 years, they had been to India nine times. The
participants in the group changed, some from year to year, although a core
group had participated in every venture to India, going annually, listening to the
stories of Dalit comrades, sharing their own, exploring the overlaps and disson-
ances in their struggles for liberation, and strategizing efforts that might illuminate
and transform their shared conditions of oppression. They continued their study
groups, discussing the ways in which the Dalit and Buraku find themselves in
similar circumstances, conditioned by contemporary economic, political, and
social conditions. They also reported back their experiences, thoughts, and findings
to a wider group of activists—Buraku and non-Buraku, sanitation workers, union
organizers, and other concerned groups. For over a decade, these Buraku and Dalit
activists very intentionally worked to create venues in which they might imagine
and live themselves in connection.
186 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

In this essay, I have posed politics as a fundamental, collective concern with how
to orchestrate one’s formative engagements with others in order to create venues,
scenes, or opportunities in which one might rehearse oneself as one wants to be.
Far though they may be from elections or legislative changes, and non-co-terminus
with familiar containers of politics such as, for example, the state, the market, the
public, or the middle class, the solidarity trips that Buraku activists have made to
India are political endeavors. They allow the participants, and their comrades in
Chennai, to practice being self-connected to other selves, even if thousands of miles
might separate them. At times this practice comes as a relief, a feeling of connection
never before experienced; at other times it comes as a deep rewriting of the self, as
one’s self is looped through those others together with whom one lives. These
practices of collectively instituting new forms of interaction, create new political
possibilities and open up new ethical obligations between self and other. While
these trips, at least in this iteration, are now at an end, they have shaped the sense
of future possibility for the participants, comrades, and those who attended the
report-back sessions; they have reframed each person’s relationship to their own
memories of discrimination and recontextualized what might be the pain of mar-
ginalization; and they have required and allowed an openness to the lives of others
in a way that opens them to their own.
In the summer of 2015, I attended a dinner and strategy meeting in Tokyo with
Caroline and Mizuno, and other Buraku activists who had orchestrated these soli-
darity trips. Of the ten or so people there, several vocally lamented that the tours
were over, but the consensus of the table was that the relationships they had built—
both with the Dalit and with each other—would continue for years to come and
would serve as a resource for future collaborative projects joining Buraku and
Dalit interests together. One person laughingly noted that she would always be
surrogate mother and friend to the Dalit youth who had been named after her on
their first study tour.
In the language of this special issue, these endeavors are practices of forging a
commons, of turning towards the world in which one is embedded to make it
different together, and in the process making oneself different. Antagonism, dis-
agreement, and agonism are foundational to the definition of politics set forth in
the introduction. Here, there is a host of crucial distinctions—Buraku vs. Dalit,
Buraku and Dalit vs. global forces that effect their marginalization, Buraku actor
vs. themself—across which the labor of living together plays. This labor of
making the self alongside others requires a contact with others and with the self
that has the capacity to be as disruptive as it may be formative; and, indeed, as
I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere (Hankins, 2012, 2014), there has been
a host of moments when the entire project threatened to break down in the face
of profound differences between the groups. In narrating themselves for an
imagined Dalit audience, the Buraku activists internalize that topography of
others and work to remake themselves. The cultivation of fellow feeling, based
on such practices, is then always a process of wrangling with antagonisms,
across and within selves.12
Hankins 187

The endeavors of these Buraku activists show how this collective process of
creating venues for living together, incorporating disagreements and agreements,
and of working through similarity and difference, can and potentially must take
place on a terrain of fellow feeling. Through these practices of sympathetic engage-
ment, the Buraku enact a politics that is global, individual, and collective in scope.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Eli Elinoff, Nicole
Fabricant, and Nancy Postero, and the editors, reviewers, and friends who helped
steer this piece into a better version of itself.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. The word ‘‘Burakumin’’ literally means ‘‘people of the hamlet.’’ It is a discriminatory
euphemism for people in Japan associated with stigmatized labor, taken up by a political
movement led by those people to describe themselves. ‘‘Buraku’’ or ‘‘hamlet’’ contrasts
with the governmental administrative term ‘‘Dowa,’’ which refers only to those Buraku
areas that have registered themselves with the government. ‘‘Burakumin’’ is more expan-
sive than the government term, and indexes an oppositional political stance. Some
people whom the political movement describes as Burakumin do not use the term to
describe themselves.
2. See Thelen (2015) for an analysis that works across multiple disciplinary strands—
including through Marxist, feminist, disability, and kinship studies within anthropol-
ogy—to offer a conceptualization of care as a process fundamental to social organiza-
tion that cuts across spheres of life such as economics and politics that are otherwise
thought of as distinct.
3. Kabir Tambar (2016) makes a similar argument about blurring such lines in his analysis
of nonviolence and friendship as Kurdish political strategy in Turkey. Discussing
Ticktin (2011), Moyn (2011), and Schmitt (2007), Tambar argues that, ‘‘I am persuaded
by the notion that there is a politics to this allegedly non-political human rights, but let
us note that there is a strategic reduction in this line of argument: we are being told that
whenever a moralistic human rights claims to be irreducible to politics, whenever it
claims to be autonomous of politics, we must refuse that claim and instead interrogate
precisely those points where morality is, in fact, reducible to politics. But can we not also
reverse this relation and ask if politics itself is an autonomous realm, irreducible to
morality. Can we not identify ethnographic sites where the concept of the political,
with its determination of friends and enemies, is subjected to moral re-evaluation?.’’
188 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

4. In 2006, the Ministry of Internal Affairs proposed the ‘‘Plan for Tabunka Kyosei 
Promotion in Local Communities’’ and, as of April 2010, it reported that 96% of pre-
fectural governments, 100% of the governments of specifically targeted cities, and 41%
of all cities had implemented such a plan for fostering inclusion of ‘‘foreigners’’ in daily
life (Kondo, 2011: 10–11).
5. We can see such a shift in the representation of Buraku issues—from a single, stand-
alone issue to something always within a broader context of Japanese minorities—in the
academic literature as well. The canonical English-language texts by de Vos and
Wagatsuma (1966) or Yoshino and Murakoshi (1977) both treat Buraku issues on
their own. By the mid-1980s (and beyond) it had become more possible, if not impera-
tive, to consider Buraku issues always alongside other minority groups in Japan: for
example, see Befu (2001), de Vos and Wetherall (1983), Lie (2001), and Weiner (1997).
6. See Yoneyama (2003) for a trenchant analysis of the failings and dangerous nature of
multiculturalism as a mode of managing social difference.
7. See Fennell (2012) and Rutherford (2009) for discussions of sympathy, understood in
the tradition of Scottish Moral Philosophy and governance.
8. See Zigon (2014) for more on attunement.
9. Zigon has proposed the concept of the ‘‘situation’’ as a means of tracking and under-
standing how wide-spread, distributed conditions hold together locally and non-locally
(Zigon, 2015: 502ff). We might think of the Buraku and the Dalit as connected as in the
same situation despite geographical distance. Such a socio-historically maintained
assemblage would also explain how the Dalit, rather than, say, the Paekchung from
the nearby Korean peninsula separated from Japan by decades of enmity since the war
of the mid-20th century, appear as potential partners in this political endeavor. In that
sense, my ethnographic attempt to traverse those shared conditions here might qualify
as what Zigon calls ‘‘assemblic’’ (2015: 515ff).
10. Appadurai is not alone in this type of conceptual move. Hardt, for example, argues for
the expanding necessities of affective labor as opening opportunities for ‘‘biopower from
below’’ (Hardt, 1999: 99).
11. cf. Povinelli’s distinction between what she calls the ‘‘autological’’ subject (i.e., a subject
cast as internal to itself and free and unique in that internality) and the genealogical
society (conceived as restrictive in its projection across entities) in Empire of Love (2006);
see also Taylor’s description of the collapse of social hierarchies in Multiculturalism
(Taylor, 1994).
12. For more on sympathy and the antagonisms of governance, see Rutherford (2009).

References
Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Befu H (2001) Hegemony of Homogeneity. Melbourne, AU: Trans Pacific Press.
Brown W (1995) States of Injury. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Candea M (2011) ‘Our division of the universe’: Making space for the non-political in the
anthropology of politics. Current Anthropology 52(3): 309–334.
Csordas T (1993) Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–156.
De Vos G and Wagatsuma H (eds) (1966) Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and
Personality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hankins 189

de Vos G and Wetherall W (1983) Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Koreans, Ainu, and
Okinawans. London, UK: Minority Rights Group.
Fassin D (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Fennell C (2012) The museum of resilience: Raising a sympathetic public in post-welfare
Chicago. Cultural Anthropology 27(4): 641–666.
Fraser N (2000) Rethinking recognition. New Left Review 3(3): 107–120.
Gal S (2003) Movements of feminism: The circulation of discourses about women.
In: Hobson B (ed.) Recognition Struggles and Social Movements. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–118.
Hankins J (2012) Maneuvers of multiculturalism: International representations of minority
politics in Japan. Japanese Studies 32(1): 1–19.
Hankins J (2014) Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Hardt M (1999) Affective labor. boundary 2 26(2): 89–100.
Hume D ([1739] 2000) A Treatise of Human Nature (Norton DF and Norton MJ, eds).
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kondo A (2011) Migrant immigration policy in Japan. In: Grassroots
Perspectives on Multiculturalism and Cohesion in Japan and the UK: Miejo Law Review
61(1): 3–30.
Leebaw B (2014) Justice, charity, or alibi? Human rights, humanitarianism, and humanity’s
law. Humanity 5(2): 261–276.
Lie J (2001) Multiethnic Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moyn S (2011) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Neary I (1997) Burakumin in contemporary Japan. In: Weiner M (ed.) Japan’s Minorities:
The Illusion of Homogeneity. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 59–83.
Povinelli E (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Povinelli E (2006) The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and
Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rorty R (1990) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Rutherford D (2009) Sympathy, statebuilding, and the experience of empire. Cultural
Anthropology 24(1): 1–32.
Schmitt C (2007) The Concept of the Political. Schwab G (trans). Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Smith A ([1759] 2010) The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York, NY: Penguin.
Tambar K (2016) Declarations of friendship: Nonviolence and the concept of the political in
the Middle East. Paper presented at a meeting sponsored by the Institute for Religion,
Culture and Public Life, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African
Studies, the Department of Anthropology and the Middle East Institute at Columbia
University, New York, 6 October 2016. See also: http://www.mei.columbia.edu/mei-
events-fall-2016/2016/8/31/kabir-tambar-declarations-of-friendship-nonviolence-and-
the-concept-of-the-political-in-the-middle-east .
Taylor C (1994) The politics of recognition. In: Gutmann A and Taylor C (eds)
Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73.
190 Anthropological Theory 19(1)

Thelen T (2015) Care as social organization: Creating, maintaining and dissolving significant
relations. Anthropological Theory 15(4): 497–515.
Throop CJ (2010) Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain
in Yap. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ticktin M (2011) Casualties of Care. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Tomonaga K (2005) Nihon kara Sekai he no Hasshin: Shokugyo to Seikei ni Motoduku
Sabetsu [A Missive from Japan to the World: Discrimination Based on Work and
Descent]. Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (ed.). Osaka, JP:
Kaihou Shuppansha.
Tsuda T (2003) Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in
Transnational Perspective. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Weeks K (2011) The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and
Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weiner M (1997) Introduction. In: Weiner M (ed.) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of
Homogeneity. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. xiv–xxii.

Yoneyama L (2003) Boryoku,  Ridoresu: Tabunkashugi no Poritikusu [Violence, War,
Senso,
Redress: The Politics of Multiculturalism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Yoshino R and Murakoshi S (1977) The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin.
Osaka, JP: Buraku Kaiho Kenkyujo Press.
Zigon J (2014) Attunement and fidelity: Two ontological conditions for morally being-in-
the-world. Ethos 42(1): 16–30.
Zigon J (2015) What is a situation? An assemblic ethnography of the drug war. Cultural
Anthropology 30(3): 501–524.
Zigon J (2018) A War on People: Rethinking Ethics through Anti-Drug War Politics.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Joseph Hankins is Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliate with Critical

Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research and teach-
ing focus on the production and management of social hierarchies and
antagonisms.