Professor of Anthropology Nobuko Adachi
Nobuko Adachi, professor of anthropology at Illinois State, will lead the next International Seminar Series at noon Wednesday, October 17, in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center. Adachi will present “Not Just Ethnicity, But Global Pressure: Cultural Maintenance of Japanese Transnational Migrants and their Descendants in Brazil.” The event is free and open to the public.
In her talk, Adachi will explore how and why Japanese in Brazil have succeeded in retaining their ancestral Japanese language. She will discuss how in most other nations, Japanese descendants tend to lose their language fluency and traditional cultural practices to assimilate into host cultures. Currently, there are over 1.5 million Japanese descendants living in Brazil. Most of them reside in farm areas of southern Brazil, and still practice their ancestral Japanese culture and language. Adachi’s lecture explores the fundamental reason for this maintenance.
The author of Ethnic Capital in a Japanese Brazilian Commune: Children of Nature, Adachi received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include Asian American studies; diaspora theory; transnational migrations in cultural, political, and economic contexts (especially Japanese immigration to the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Peru), Japanese and Koreans in the former USSR; race and racism; ethnic identity; minorities, justice, and injustice; sociolinguistics (language and power, language change, language death and language maintenance, language shift, pidgins, code-switching, foreigner talk, and bilingualism).
The International Seminar Series offers the Illinois State campus and Bloomington-Normal communities weekly opportunities to learn about a wide range of international topics. Guest speakers are usually experts in their fields across a range of disciplines who cover a wide array of cultural, historical, political, and social topics.
International Seminar Series events are free and open to the public and occur every Wednesday from noon to 1 p.m. in the Bone Student Center. The fall 2018 series will focus on immigration. For a full schedule, see the Office of International Studies website.
