State Bearing Gifts

Brian J. McVeigh is visiting assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona.

• Chapter 1 The Paradox and Price of the GiftChapter 2 The Burden of the Beneficiary: Schooling, Legitimacy, and AlienationChapter 3 Exchange Dramatics: Evaluating the Realness of ValueChapter 4 Dramatizations, Deceptions, and FrontsChapter 5 Bureaucratic Fetishism and Mutating InstitutionsChapter 6 The State as Gift-Giving Machine and Stage ManagerChapter 7 Japan's Strategic Schooling: Education as a Gift from the StateChapter 8 Faces and Fronts: The Licit and Illicit Facets of Japan's Higher EducationChapter 9 Exchanging Untruths at Amadera Women's AcademyChapter 10 Learning National Identity at Amadera Women's AcademyChapter 11 "Examocracy": Examinations as Dramatizations of Self-WorthChapter 12 Guiding Students through the Official Exchange CircuitryChapter 13 Education Reform-Mongering: Real and Rhetorical ChangeChapter 14 Self-Deception as Alienation: Rethinking Estrangement in Modern SocietyChapter 15 Appendix: Varieties of ExchangeChapter 16 A Précis of Alienation

This book is an ethnographic, participant-observer study based on the author's extensive experience with ten post-secondary institutions in Japan, in a variety of roles including graduate student, researcher, professor and department chair....It is an intriguing approach that helps us see the data in a different light, to see connections that we might otherwise not see. . . . Presents a fascinating, but disturbing, case study of undergraduate education in Japan.