Case Report 1－“People of Fuku (Happiness)” : from Fuku-Haku (Fukuoka,Hakata)

Abstract

  While editing History of the City of Fukuoka, we conducted research on the current life of people in Fukuoka. In this work, it was important to combine a bird’s-eye view of the local community with a worm’s-eye view of people living in communities. Such a study reminds us of the importance for anthropologists to appropriate things that are not their own. But how can they do it? The field of daily life has a power to let local people as well as outside researchers vivify formalized social scientific words such as ‘society,’ ‘community,’ and ‘kinship.’ This kind of reinterpretation denies redefinition of words, but highlights descriptions. That is what anthropological research seeks.