Book Review: Making a moral society: Ethics and the state in Meiji Japan (original) (raw)

Asian Studies Review, 2011

Abstract

In a contemporary version of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit or ‘‘deferred action’’, Michiel Baas has written an anthropological study of Indian students in Australia that has acquired new significance due to subsequent events. Baas could not have known in 2005–06, when he was conducting fieldwork in Melbourne, that the topic of his study would explode as a matter of wide public and media concern in both Australia and India. While the final chapter of Imagined Mobilities deals with the international fallout that followed the 2009 reportage of violent attacks against Indian students in Australia, Baas’s focus on the lives and experiences of these students suggests that he was ‘‘on to something bigger’’ from the beginning. Indeed it is Baas’s juggling between the big and the small, between the global transformations of higher education and the specific aspirations and life trajectories of his informants, that gives the book its texture and complexity. By offering simple explanation...

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