joseph doyle hankins

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ph.d. candidate in socio-cultural anthropology

university of chicago

163 Bergen Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

773 266 7432
doylej@uchicago.edu

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I am finishing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. At its broadest, my research investigates the intersection between contemporary forms of capitalism and political mobilization. I examine quotidian and material practices in order to analyze the reciprocal relationship between the circulation of global capital and transnational social movements.

In my dissertation, I use a study of cowhide to get at these issues. By a stroke of good luck, my hometown happens to produce an enormous amount of cow rawhide, which is shipped to Japan and tanned into leather by people who are stigmatized in the process. These people are caught in a dilemma -- to ignore discrimination and their stigma in hopes that it might fade alongside the disappearance of these industries from Japan, or to join the activist call to be recognized as Burakumin in the multicultural struggle against a 'homogenous' japan.

My second research project expands my interests beyond the Japanese case to investigate the changing international status of labor as a political category. My dissertation ethnographic work suggests that a transformation in labor evident in the Buraku case -- namely, from a set of economic practices to a category amenable to identarian arguments -- is a phenomenon transnational in scope. My next major research project will investigate how this emerging transnational politics engages with forms of political representation across Japan, South Asia, and eastern Africa.