The State Bearing Gifts Deception and Disaffection in Japanese Higher Education

Using Japanese higher education as a case study, Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of "exchange dramatics" among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty members, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on common practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and the key concepts of "value," "exchange," and "role performance" by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the "gift," McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of the "social contract" for understanding state-society relations. Written as both political and philosophical commentary and as anthropological investigation, The State Bearing Gifts has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly with regard to the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitimacy. Book jacket.

Brian J. McVeigh is visiting assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona.