Articles by Amy Borovoy

Amy Borovoy is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on mental health and public health in Japan, biomedicine, gender, and Japan’s reliance on the family and wife and mother as welfare surrogates. Her first book, The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 2005) explored how women contain the social damage of heavy drinking in Japan and postwar ideas of welfare and nurturance bump up against American 12-step ideologies. She is currently completing a book manuscript exploring canonical texts in Japan social science in the latter part of the twentieth century and their impact on American ideas about modernity and the self.