Japan Fieldwork Workshop invites you to another interesting presentation.

Dr. Dalit Bloch

Department of East Asian Studies, Tel-Aviv University

COMMUNICATING INTIMACY: LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS IN JAPAN

June 9th, 2011, 6pm.

Sophia University, Yotsuya Campus

Bldg. 10, room 301
http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location

Open to all at no charge

Abstract:
Language is omnipresent in modern social life. Spoken or written language is used in private communication as well as in the mass media, in email messages together with emoticons and signs, in songs accompanied by music or in advertising posters together with visual images.
Couplehood, like other relationships, consists of various interactions in which language is a key, although not the only, element. Needs, perceptions or desires are communicated by means of language in its broader sense, including the verbal and the non-verbal levels.

As a system of social meanings language is, in itself, stable, self-evident and commonly shared, and at the same time, dynamic, constantly changing and a vital agent of change. In my talk I would like to discuss two aspects of linguistic shift that correspond with transformations in couplehood in
Japan: the first refers to the growing importance of communication and its centrality as a key element in couple relations, and the second concerns changing patterns and vocabulary in the discourse about couplehood, as used by the partners themselves.

Dalit Bloch is an Anthropologist and a recent Ph. D.
She was a Japan Foundation Fellow, a Foreign Research Student (*Ryū-Gakusei*) at Musashi Kogyo University, Yokohama, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Comparative Culture, Sophia University Tokyo. Her dissertation "*Intimate
Matters: An Ethnographic Perspective on Couplehood in Japan*" is based on three years fieldwork in Japan (2001-2004).
She is currently teaching at the Department of East Asian Studies, and the Unit for Culture Research in Tel-Aviv University, Israel

--
David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Sophia University, Tokyo