ABSTRACT

This chapter considers family, with the author tracing and locating the dynamism of civil society scholarship within her own ethnographic work about parental abduction and activism in contemporary Japan. Most common definitions of “civil society” posit it as fundamentally exterior to family life, an intimate sphere. In the scholarly literature, family is frequently used to define the outer edge of civil society, suggesting that family lives and civil society are non-overlapping, separate spheres. In this chapter, Alexy argues that, despite such common definitional exclusions, in practice, civil society and family membership intertwine to a substantial degree.