2 0 0 0 OA Scaling Precarity

著者
Mariko Yoshida
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.21, no.1, pp.457-491, 2020 (Released:2021-05-27)
参考文献数
56

In the context of the climate crisis, seawater scaling reveals the precarity of the ocean. Yet scaling as a process of knowledge production in ocean science unavoidably allows us to overlook the representation of complicated local biophysical relationships by using universalized measurements. Based on observations I made with a team of marine physiologists who investigate the effects of ocean acidification on mollusks, this paper shows practices of knowledge production about ocean precarity in Japan. By describing human-nonhuman entanglements that emerge in ecological disturbances, I demonstrate relational contestation over the measurement of unevenly distributed biosocial vulnerabilities. The sometimes unexpected interactions of sessile organisms, measurement devices, and marine physiologists with mollusks show complex processes of encounter rather than stylized biophysical representations. Recognizing the material semiotics of ocean acidification, in which chemical compounds, biological organisms, hydrological and geomorphological parameters, and other "things" become entangled, allows us to go beyond scalable metrics to understand the Ocean as a precarious place.
著者
De Antoni Andrea
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.18, no.1, pp.143-157, 2017 (Released:2018-04-19)
参考文献数
26

Spirit possession has witnessed a renewed scholarly interest, driven by new approaches. Research in cognitive science focused on the cross-cultural features of these phenomena, while anthropological studies provided accounts of experiences with spirits as emerging through interactions between the lived body moving in the world and the environment. Yet, a focus on how spirits gradually emerge through bodily perceptions, affects and interactions, is missing. In this article I focus on experiences during a Roman Catholic exorcism in contemporary Italy. I argue that: 1) Possession is not a self-standing phenomenon, but a “meshwork”(Ingold 2011) of lines of movements and attunements of humans and non-humans, which include specific affects, emerging through practice. 2) Spirits—in this case the devil—and their reality emerge “in-between,” among actors, as captures of a complex series of correspondences. 3) In this process, “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas 1993), bodily perceptions and “affective correspondences,” play a major role.
著者
YAMASHITA Shinji
出版者
日本文化人類学会
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.12, pp.3-25, 2011

What will Japan look like in 2050? By 2050, Japan's current population of 127 million will decline to 91 million, due to its low birth rate. The number of people aged 65 or older will increase to 40.5 percent of the total population by 2055. This is an ultra-aged society never experienced before in human history. Within such a demographic framework, Japan may be forced to "import" foreign labor for the survival of its economy. Thus, some foresee that Japan will have 10 million foreign residents by 2050, accounting for 11 percent of the total population, as compared with 2.2 million, or 1.7 percent, as of 2008. That necessarily leads to the scenario of Japan becoming multicultural. Against the background of such a future socio-demographic change in Japanese society, this paper examines transnational migration into Japan and the Japanese way of living together in a multicultural environment. Particularly focusing on the dreams of Filipina migrants, the paper discusses the cultural politics of migration, including the issues of citizenship and human rights, and seeks the possibility of establishing a public anthropology directed toward the future Japanese society.
著者
Gordon MATHEWS
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.9, pp.53-69, 2008 (Released:2017-03-31)
被引用文献数
1

This article begins by discussing a theoretically groundbreaking conference held in Japan in English, and asks why its organizers had no interest in publishing the results of this conference outside Japan. In seeking to understand this situation, the article first considers anthropologies throughout the world. It analyzes the massive American core, the semi-periphery of the large anthropological communities of Brazil, India, China, and Japan, and the periphery: the much smaller anthropological communities in Norway, Sweden, Israel, and Hong Kong. It then examines the particular situation of anthropology in Japan, in terms of its history, institutional structures, language, and underlying cultural factors, arguing that if American anthropology fundamentally views other societies' anthropologies as inferior, Japan views those anthropologies as foreign, and thus irrelevant. It concludes by discussing whether a world anthropology is possible, and considers whether Japan might lead such a world anthropology in overcoming the domination of the American anthropological center.
著者
Rafael Munia
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.21, no.1, pp.387-420, 2020 (Released:2021-05-27)
参考文献数
35

Perceptions of young women in Japan are examined in relation to female self-defense. Several women in Japan were surveyed, with some chosen for interviews. It seemed that self-defense was often connected not to learning assault-prevention techniques but to purchasing self-defense tools. This finding opens two avenues for discussion. First, the marketization of personal safety is explored, as is the genderization of these tools and the subsumption of women's safety into a logic of consumption. Second, the shift from viewing the body as a weapon to viewing the object as one, which projects various forms of subjectification onto women, is discussed. These include the outsourcing of women's agency to an external object. It is concluded that this outsourcing often results in the reinforcement of tropes of fragility and the neutralization of resignifications of the female body that emerges from practitioners who focus on the body as the instrument of self-defense.
著者
Jia Yulong
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.20, no.1, pp.043-087, 2019 (Released:2020-05-28)
参考文献数
29

Chinese interest in basketball has increased significantly since the 1990s. At the same time, sneaker culture centred on basketball shoes spread into China and has since played a crucial role in the development of Chinese youth culture. From 2000 onwards, counterfeit sneakers (referred to as 'changhuo') have appeared in China and have had a significant impact on the sneaker market. This has, in turn, raised questions about 'authenticity'. The definition of 'authenticity' under intellectual property rights law derives from the concepts of 'individual', 'authorship', and 'ownership'. This definition is not universal and can deviate from local understandings of 'authenticity'. This paper discusses how the 'authenticity' of sneakers is understood in China by focusing on the consumption of changhuo. Chinese sneaker consumers seem more driven by commitments to upholding an order based on the scarcity of goods and participating (or not participating) in conspicuous consumption than by legal definitions of authenticity and originality.
著者
Makoto Oguma
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.16, pp.237-250, 2016 (Released:2017-01-27)
参考文献数
25

Research findings of Japanese folklore studies have rarely been introduced in English in the past. One distinguishing feature of Japanese folklore studies is that it covers not only folklore, but also all aspects of Japanese people’s lives. Nihon-Minzokugaku, the official journal of the Folklore Society of Japan (FSJ), alone has published over 1,500 articles since 1958. With the cooperation of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, the FSJ will publish a series of articles in the Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (JRCA) to introduce the society’s research efforts in the following areas: (1) family, kinship, and local communities; (2) environment and livelihoods; (3) religion and rituals; (4) festivals and performing arts; (5) oral tradition; (6) material culture; and (7) museums and public folklore. This introductory piece discusses the development of Kunio Yanagita’s folklore studies, particularly the influence of Western ethnology and anthropology in this process, in an attempt to characterize Japanese folklore studies.
著者
Anderson James R.
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.18, no.1, pp.173-189, 2017 (Released:2018-04-19)
参考文献数
62

The impact of the dead on the living is considered from an evolutionary comparative perspective. After a brief review of young children’s developing understanding of the concept of death, the interest of looking at how other species respond to dying and dead individuals is introduced. Solutions to managing dead individuals in social insect communities are described, highlighting evolutionarily ancient, effective behavioral mechanisms that most likely function with no emotional component. I then review examples of responses to dying and dead individuals in nonhuman primates, with particular reference to continued transport and caretaking of dead infants, responses to traumatic deaths in wild populations of monkeys and apes, and a detailed case report of the peaceful death of an old female chimpanzee surrounded by members of her group. The emotional correlates of primates’ reactions to bereavement are discussed, and some suggested evolutionarily shared responses to the dead are proposed.
著者
Asli Kemiksiz
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.19, no.1, pp.051-082, 2018 (Released:2019-06-10)
参考文献数
28

Recently, the notion of "embodiment" has become a crucial concept in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Embodiment emphasizes that a physical body is a requirement for intelligent interaction with the physical world. Based mainly on my fieldwork in a cognitive robotics laboratory in the Kantō region, this paper examines the fluid thought styles of roboticists, who draw on a range of disciplines in order to operationalize embodied intelligence in robots. These thought styles shape computational assemblages and the making of widely different robots intended to mirror particular aspects of life. The paper shows "life" to be infused into a research area that primarily deals with machines, data, and complicated algorithms, despite the fact that the robots are not themselves seen to be alive.
著者
Ito Kozue
出版者
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
雑誌
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology (ISSN:24325112)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.18, no.1, pp.69-89, 2017 (Released:2018-04-19)
参考文献数
24

Studies on the tea ceremony have tried to answer the question, “What is tea?” for decades from historical and philosophical points of view. This paper deliberately converts the viewpoint from such an essential one to a processual one, in order to elucidate the generative moments in the enactment of the tea ceremony. Employing a perspective on the anthropology of art put forth by Alfred Gell, this paper analyzes a tea connoisseur’s enactment of the tea ceremony. Contrary to the former anthropological, symbolic analyses of the tea ceremony, an enactment of a tea ceremony is not perfectly prescribed, but temporarily engendered by communication between host and guests through conversation via things (i.e., utensils) as a medium of their agency. Yet, because every single tea ceremony is nonrecurring temporary event, these utensils—indexes in the enactment of a tea ceremony—do not exist forever. Instead, the repetition of the generative moment weaves out the social, relational world of tea.