Locals, new-locals, non-locals : (re)mapping people and food in post-disaster Ishinomaki, Japan

This thesis is an ethnographically informed analysis of the transformations undergone by the practices of consumption, distribution, and discourse production of local seafood after the Great East Japan Disaster of 2011 in the municipality of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Drawing from data collected during a 12 month fieldwork in Miyagi and Tōkyō, I individuate three classes of actors (locals, new-locals, non-locals) whose activities contribute to the changes in the imagery about seafood and its producers; and two movements: one centrifugal, along which food leaves Ishinomaki to reach Tōkyō, the capital, and one centripetal, followed by visitors and tourists who come to Ishinomaki to experience its food, among the other attractions. In this thesis the study of disasters and their consequences on human society, and the study of food as a fundamental instrument of signification and negotiation of locality, converge to produce a novel interpretative frame through which I look at the transformations of Ishinomaki as a dialogic process that embeds the 2011 disaster in the wider historical perspective of the Japanese Northeast (Tōhoku) as a politically subaltern region. Locals, new-locals and non-locals inscribe in this stratified horizon their values, projects and hopes, creatively re-negotiating the meanings of locality, sociality, and civic subjectivity through seafood such as oysters (kaki), scallops (hotate) and sea-squirts (hoya). This intensive work of inscription, in turn, causes the lives and experiences of individuals to ‘stick’ to the seafood as it circulates, generating a network from which emerges images of young, enterprising fishermen and domestic immigrants, striving against a conservative past in order to build new social spaces out of the tsunami debris.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Gasparri, Duccio

Contributors dc:contributor

• Matsunaga, Louella
• MacClancy, Jeremy
• Boret, Sébastien
• Shibiyama, Akihiro

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/xtrx-0n25

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:d9d1884e-f17a-41ea-a42d-024876fbded7:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1