Justin Lee Haruyama is the recipient of the 2022 David M. Schneider Award. The Schneider award recognizes graduate student essays that offer innovative and fresh approaches to kinship, cultural theory, and American culture.
Justin Lee Haruyama is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Beginning in September 2022 he will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Haruyama’s current project, Mining for Coal and Souls: Modes of Relationality in Emerging Chinese-Zambian Worlds, addresses the controversial presence of Chinese migrants and investors in Zambia today. Haruyama’s work brings together the study of racialized conflict and labor migration, neocolonialism and resource extraction, Christianity and new religious movements, and emerging transformations in global capitalism. Taking issue with simplistic narratives that have too frequently painted Chinese companies and individuals in Africa as either neocolonial exploiters or South-South “win-win” development partners, Haruyama demonstrates how concrete encounters between Chinese and Zambians are far more ambivalent and open-ended than is often portrayed by such rhetoric about “China in Africa.” His paper, “African Critiques of Liberalism: The Curse of Ham, Biblical Kinship, and Hierarchy in and Beyond Zambia,” will be sent to Cultural Anthropology, a journal that David M. Schneider helped to found, to be reviewed for publication.