This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American
kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship
system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American
kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically
situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and
thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship
change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a
general process I take as having been central to the development of
contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a
unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled
social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone
since the turn of the century has been shared by many other
Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are
structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as
well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change
involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to
the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions
have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we
can comprehend the system of symbols and meanings structuring
people's kinship relations in the present only if we know their
kinship relations in the past. If symbolic systems help people
answer the questions and cope with the problems of meaning they
confront in their everyday lives, symbolic analysis can only be
enriched by a knowledge of the social history that has given rise
to these questions and problems. Conversely, we can comprehend that
social history only if we comprehend the system of symbols and
meanings through which people interpret and thereby transform the
past. In this study I treat the oral kinship autobiographies I
elicited from first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in
Seattle, Washington, both as cultural tales and as accounts with a
good degree of historical veracity. Because people's recollections
of the past are reasonably accurate and do not obliterate facts so
much as reinterpret them, they can be mined to reconstruct a social
history of events and actions. At the same time they can be used,
along with what people say about the present, as material for a
symbolic analysis. Unlike most Japanese Americans, and most of
those who have studied them, I do not uncritically assume a
timeless past of "Japanese tradition" in which stem-family
households were endlessly reproduced by people who obeyed the
"rules of the Japanese family system." Instead, on the one hand, I
reconstruct kinship relations in Japan from immigrants' accounts of
their kinship biographies and, on the other, regard the Japanese
past and the American present that figure so centrally in these
accounts as complex symbols whose meanings must be explicated. The
analytic strategy I have formulated for this study is one I think
can be usefully applied to groups besides Japanese Americans and
other ethnic groups whose conceptions of their particular cultural
traditions and experiences as immigrants are similarly prominent in
their discourse on kinship relations. It can help us better
understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even
among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made
invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural
system as a generalized American one. For whether they view
themselves as having an ethnic past that is Polish, Italian,
African, English, or, in the case of "just plain American," one
supposedly unmarked by ethnicity, all these folk commonly speak of
a "traditional" past in opposition to the "modern" present. Like
Japanese Americans, they too construct tradition by
reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their
actions in the present, thereby transforming past and present in a
dialectic of interpretation.
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