FACT 02: Anthropology Talks

Beyond Vigilance: “Recursive Modernity” and the End of Disaster

• Speaker: Ryan Sayre (Cultural Anthropology, Yale U/ Waseda U)

• Date: July 19 (Fri.) 14：00～17：00
• Venue: University of Tsukuba Institutes of Humanities and Social Sciences （人文社会学系棟）　B113
• Commentator: Yasushi Uchiyamada (Social Anthropology, U of Tsukuba)
• Discussion: in English and Japanese 質疑応答は日本語及び英語で行います

This talk teases out the outlines of an emergent security milieu forming in Japan between two conceptions of preparedness; on the one hand, preparedness understood as a problem demanding increased consciousness, knowledge, and visibility, and on the other, preparedness taken as a broader milieu in which consciousness, knowledge, and visibility become precisely the problem. Drawing on two years of participant observation in Japanese expert, administrative, and lay disaster preparedness organizations before 3.11, I take up the Latin origin of 'security' (secura) meaning “without concern” to demonstrate how security strategies which aim to eliminate ‘concern’ by means of an ever-more vigilant ‘concern’ also reproduce it. After laying out this self-defeating 'concern for concern' as the basis of security discourses more generally, I draw on Japanese disaster preparedness practices to introduce an alternative security logic grounded not in vigilance and threat, but anchored firmly in poise. This talk, which details security as it soaks into the cultural ensembles of everyday life in urban Japan, offers an analysis of a first-world security paradigm in which a self-annihilating “reflexive modernity” (à la modernity theorists such as Ulrich Beck) is overcome by self-actualizing community production, or what I call “recursive modernity.”


◆Report:  (by Paul Simon Hansen)

On July 19th, 2013 Tsukuba University hosted its inaugural FACT seminar meeting organised by Shuhei Kimura.  Dr. Ryan Sayre (Yale/Waseda) presented a paper entitled “Beyond Vigilance: ‘Recursive Modernity’ and the End of Disaster” and Professor Uchiyamada Yasushi offered his ever incisive and eclectic comments as discussant to a full house of academics from both inside and outside Tsukuba University.

The paper was an attempt to get at the heart of contemporary Japan’s state of disaster preparedness by way of excavating the concept of preparedness from organisations whose primary role it is to promote it.  Dr. Sayre described a double enfolding whereby the state of preparedness is best viewed as a community that is, via its associative preparedness, unconcerned with it.  In other words, a situation whereby preparedness itself becomes part of community formation and so ought not to be viewed primarily as a response to threat or risk.  Dr. Sayre’s witty and insightful paper, based on long term fieldwork and social theory, was a direct, indeed provocative, challenge to the supremacy of 2nd Modernity or Reflexive Modernity popularised first by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens and now common in social scientific studies of risk, community, and agency.  Rather than the notion of a “modernising modernity” eating away at its own foundations, Dr. Sayre proposed a “recursive modernity” that traces a trajectory from Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, and Michael Walzer amongst others.  This is a concept of modernity not rooted in erosive critique but one that is “amplificatory and productive” of contemporary community formation.