Cultural Autonomy And Suicide Summary

“For things to have value in man's world, they are given the role of commodities. Among man's oldest and most constant commodity is woman” (Castillo, 1995, p. 80). A woman’s worth within male dominant cultures is based on the usefulness she exhibits to the advancement of her male counterparts. The inequality of women in Japan based on gender is one of multiple reasons Anne Allison chose to study the nightlife of Japan in relationship to the topic of masculinity. Through anthropological methods, Anne Allison’s Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club exposes the concept of male dominance and gender inequality by specifically discussing the gender roles of Japanese men and women not only in the workforce
One anthropological method alluded to be utilized in the research was archaeology, specifically reviewing the literature of the past. As discussed in Cultural Anthropology, archaeology is the study of past cultures, both historic cultures with written records and prehistoric cultures that predate the invention of writing (Bonvillain, Cultural Anthropology, p. 11). By examining the already written history of the Japanese culture, the anthropologist discovered “holes” or missing pieces that are vital in defining a specific culture, including such topics as sexuality, women, and cities (Allison, 1994, p. 11). She then established the purpose of the research by addressing these three main concepts. This mindset of looking at a culture’s many parts encompasses how anthropologists view everything in a culture as an integrated whole. On page thirteen of Nightwork the author stated that in order to carry out her research, she worked in a hostess club for four months (Allison, 1994). This type of immersion to observe the Japanese culture of hostess clubs demonstrated the use of ethnography. Ethnography is formally defined on page six of Cultural Anthropology as the aspect of cultural anthropology involved with observing and documenting peoples’ ways of life (Bonvillain, Cultural Anthropology). At the very end of the introduction, the author addressed the fact that certain effects of her characteristic differences could slightly have altered the ethnographic research conducted in her fieldwork. Noted in the introduction of Nightwork are the deviances from the expected cultural norms such as her being an educated, American studying the people (Allison, 1994, p. 30). These methods of research allowed