State Bearing Gifts

Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value,' 'exchange,' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the 'gift,' McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of 'social contract' for understanding state-society relations. Written to be read as both a political and philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, this work has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitimacy.