Description

Book Synopsis

The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo''s old day-laborer district, San''ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San''ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering''s book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values

Perilous Wagers

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    A Paperback by Klaus K. Y. Hammering

    4 in stock

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      Publisher: Cornell University Press
      Publication Date: 8/15/2024
      ISBN13: 9781501776427, 978-1501776427
      ISBN10: 1501776428
      Also in:
      Social and cultural anthropology

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo''s old day-laborer district, San''ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San''ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering''s book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values

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