I explore and interrogate the development and application in Japan–with cross-cultural comparisons–of robotic prosthetic devices that effectively transform disabled persons into cyborgs, a condition of “cyborg-ableism.” Included here is a critical reassessment of the so-called theory of the uncanny valley. In Japan, wearable robotic devices proceed from and depend on a corporeal aesthetics of the gotai (the intact body). I examine the type of human body that is privileged in the discourse of machine-enhanced mobility, and also analyze the modes of sociality that robotic devices and prosthetics are imagined to recuperate. Apropos 2020, Japanese participation in the Paralympics is briefly reviewed.
Jennifer Robertson is Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a former director of the Center for Japanese Studies, where she served for the past four years as Director of Graduate Studies. Robertson is on the faculty of the Robotics Institute, and a faculty associate in the Science, Society and Technology Program. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1985, where she also earned a B.A. in the History of Art in 1975. The author of several books and over seventy articles, her new book, Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation, will be published this fall (2017) by the University of California Press. http://www.jenniferrobertson.info/
This EAC event is co-sponsored by the Reinventing Japan Research Focus Group, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies.
