Theodore C. Bestor

Theodore C. Bestor is a Professor of Anthropology and Japanese Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is currently the Chair of the Department of Anthropology.

Previously, Bestor taught at Cornell University and Columbia University, and was program director for Japanese and Korean studies at the Social Science Research Council.

Bestor was born in Urbana Illinois in 1951. His parents were Arthur Bestor and Dorothy Koch Bestor. He lived in Champaign-Urbana until he was 11, when his parents moved to Seattle. He attended secondary school in Seattle and graduated from Fairhaven College of Western Washington University in 1973, after which he studied at Stanford University, where he received Masters degrees in East Asian Studies (1976) and Anthropology (1977), and then received a PhD in Anthropology in 1983.

Bestor has written widely on the culture and society of Japan. Much of his research has focused on contemporary Tokyo, including an ethnography of daily life in an ordinary neighborhood, Miyamoto-cho. Since the early 1990s his primary research has concerned Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market where he has studied the economic anthropology of institutions, and has focused also on food culture, globalization, and Japan's fishing industry.

He is a past president of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Urban Anthropology and the Society for East Asian Anthropology (the latter of which he was founder and first president).

Bestor was born August 7, 1951, in Urbana, Illinois. His father, Arthur Bestor, was a historian of American constitutionalism and his mother, Dorothy Alden Koch Bestor, was a professor of English literature. The family moved to Seattle in 1962. Bestor first visited Japan in 1967, when his father received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the University of Tokyo, Rikkyo University, and Doshisha University.

He grew up in Seattle and graduated from Fairhaven College in Bellingham, Washington in 1973. Bestor received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1983, after spending four years studying and doing research in Tokyo along the way. His wife, Victoria Lyon Bestor, is Executive Director of the North America Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources.

Publications

• Doing Fieldwork in Japan, Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Victoria Lyon Bestor (co-editors), University of Hawai'i Press, 2003 (ISBN 0-8248-2734-1)
• Neighborhood Tokyo, Theodore C. Bestor, Stanford University Press 1989 and Kodansha International 1990 (ISBN 0-8047-1797-4)
• Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, Theodore C. Bestor, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004 (ISBN 0-520-22024-2)

Awards

• Winner of the 1990 Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award.
• Winner of the 1990 Hiromi Arisawa Memorial Award, sponsored by the AAUP and the Japan Foundation.
• Winner of the 1990 Robert Park Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association.

External links

• Theodore C. Bestor Homepage at Harvard

• Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities. Bestor lectures at Boston University's Center for the Study of Asia.