>A new series of cartoons from Japan are captivating both
Japanese and >Hong Kong youngsters... in these cartoon stories,
the hierarchical
>relationships of the adults are parodied, reversed, joked upon
by a 5 >year old kindergarten boy...
Perhaps this can fit with Judy's previous point to help us
imagine what kinds of 'resistance' the production and uses of
these cartoons can and cannot generate, and the relations they
may have to other forms of resistance that complement them
'ecologically' in the sense of my last posting.
Could we possibly be so (ethnocentrically?) optimistic as to
imagine that hierarchical social relations do indeed have some
connections to quasi-feudal relations of production, and that
hierarchical traditions, and the values that support them in
cultures like Japan and Hong Kong may change as economic
relations begin to become less rigidly stratified? I assume there
is a lot of new wealth in these communities, and that it is not
all monopolized by the traditional 'top' of the society, so that
rising social trajectories are becoming more common, and the
present wealth of many people may seem equivalent in status to
what would have been a higher position at a past time within
their own memories. In these conditions (which existed in the US
in the late 40s and 50s at least), the _naturalization_ of
hierarchy becomes difficult because it is no longer also the de
facto lived experience of many people, who find themselves
'higher' by one marker or another than they would ordinarily have
had a right to be or any expectation of being. In the US, and
European societies generally, this may well have contributed to
the 60s phenomenon of direct challenge to traditional values and
power relations.
Could something similar happen in Asia today? and how might the
activities of resistance combine more purely discursive and more
direct material action in linked ways? JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU