第一部
Knowledge and Narration: Material Mnemonics and Embodied Memory in Japanese Child Welfare
Kathryn E. Goldfarb (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology,University of Colorado at Boulder)
Research on early childhood memory highlights how children create a sense of themselves over time through discussion with parents and other family members, and reference to physical spaces, photographs, and documents, which “scaffold” the child’s understanding of event and time. What happens to people’s understanding of their own past and current selves when these scaffolds are absent or inconsistent, and when basic facts about the past are either unavailable or the context for them is unclear? How should we understand dormant traumatic memories that reappear suddenly, or cases where information about one’s past is documented but not tied to actual interpersonal relationships? These situations are all too common for children in state care. In this paper, I bring together two very different types of accounts from people who have grown up in the Japanese child welfare system, with discussion of a child welfare practice that is intended to ameliorate gaps in self-knowledge. This initiative, “Life Story Work,” presupposes a different basis for selfhood than other studies of narrative formulation and memory, highlighting how documentation practices impact the ways we experience temporality and personal identity. These accounts urge us to consider how knowledge of the past shapes one’s sense of self in time: how particular epistemological projects of knowledge gathering and creation point to certain kinds of ontologies, ways of being, selves. This presentation considers how memory is created and experienced through dispersed engagements with objects, bodies, and other people, a perspective that exemplifies how social connection and disconnection are materially experienced.
第二部
Aging and the Medicalization of Late Life: The Case of Kidney Transplant in Japan
Amy Borovoy (Professor, East Asian Studies Department, Associated faculty, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University)
Japan’s rapidly and dramatically aging society is coming at an enormous cost. Aging (long life expectancies and smaller total fertility rates) is a problem common to industrialized nations, but Japan is a leader. Effects of aging on the body include diabetes, dementia, high blood pressure, kidney and liver failure, and cardio-vascular disease. The Japanese Ministry of Health is actively thinking about how to curb the costs of this society, but this raises ethical questions. The aging generation is precisely that generation which rebuilt Japan from a nearly-destroyed society to a world economic super-power and middle-class society. What does it means for a nation to care for its people in these circumstances? What does society owe to this generation? What are the ethical implications for medicine and clinical decision-making? And how are medical procedures themselves re-shaping human relationships?
My focus is on End Stage Renal Disease and its treatments: kidney dialysis and kidney transplant. Japan has the highest per capita rate of kidney dialysis of any OECD country. My concerns include: the meaning of organ transplant in Japan (which largely refers to living donation); the transfer of organs within the family; donor-recipient relations and the meaning of informed consent; and the conditions that enable the prevalence of dialysis. The problem of End Stage Renal Disease in Japan raises questions about the nature of social welfare in Japan today, and it also reveals a window into the “biologization of peoples’ moral commitments” (Kaufman 1991) as biomedical interventions increasingly offer life-extending technologies that re-define the nature and extent of kinship obligations.
第二部コメンテイター 漆原尚巳 （慶應義塾大学薬学部教授）
