Towards Mono Studies

Directions and Possibilities for Material, Things, and Mono's Anthropological Studies

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review the development of anthropology as the studies of things, and to examine the influence of western anthropology on Japanese Anthropology. At first, material culture was primarily researched from the viewpoint of cultural diffusions; then their focus shifted to material granted to be subjected to human being. However, in the 1980s, more specifically, after Arjun Appadurai's work in 1986, the approach was more social because materials were also 'things,' embedded in human beings' social life. The studies related to 'things' have been focused upon and developed in anthropology through works, such as Alfred Gell's agency theory and William Pietz and David Graeber's fetishism studies. In this article, I demonstrate how things-studies influenced Japanese anthropology by referring to the works of Japanese anthropologists, such as Kaori Kawai and Ikuya Tokoro. I review things-studies, briefly, and state the possibility of this field of anthropology's development, by employing the unique concept of the Japanese word mono.