Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology
Online ISSN : 2424-0516
Print ISSN : 1349-0648
ISSN-L : 1349-0648
Volume 70, Issue 4
Displaying 1-30 of 30 articles from this issue
  • Article type: Cover
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages Cover1-
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Article type: Cover
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages Cover2-
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages App1-
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Jun YONAHA
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 451-472
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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    This paper deals with the political process of and contemporary discourses about the Ryukyu Annexation, the integration (or colonization) of the Ryukyu kingdom into Japan in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture (Okinawa-ken). It aims to rethink the "myth" that the annexation was an ethnic reunion of the Japanese nation, or that Meiji government justified its invasion by that kind of logic. Those narratives have been disseminated widely through the works of postwar historians. In contrast, this paper shows an alternative, almost totally different, vision of the annexation. First, the people of neither Meiji Japan nor Qing China adopted ethnological theories to back up their political moves for or against the annexation. Secondly, although contemporary American and English media discussed the biological origin and purity of the Ryukyu people, both governments still ignored those discourses. Put differently, the failure of nationalism to emerge during the annexation shows that the existence of Western discourses about ethnicity is not enough to bring about the self-organizing dynamics of nationalism. In the early modern, so-called "Chinese" world order of East Asia, the concept of nationality had far less importance than it does in the modern world. Unlike a nation-state whose legitimacy originates from its people's will, the authorities of pre-modern Asian states were represented by their emperors or kings only. In addition to that historical condition, the modern world system of the 19th century was still not based on the norm of nationalism. Henry WHEATON, in his popular book, Elements of International Law (6th edition), declared that the concept of a nation had nothing to do with that of a state. Therefore, it was no wonder that Meiji government, attempting the jurisdiction of the Ryukyu Annexation, did not take the logic of ethnic identity into consideration. The Japanese foreign minister at the time, TERASHIMA Munenori, told the Chinese minister Ho Ju-chang that the islands should belong to the state they were paying taxes to. Throughout the diplomatic conversation between the Japan and China, neither the concept of Ryukyu ethnicity nor the ideology of a nation-state played any role at all. What is more interesting, however, is the fact that English-speaking people at the time conducted a discussion about the racial and ethnic characteristics of the Ryukyu people. Chars F. FAHS, an assistant surgeon in the fleet of Matthew C. PERRY, had already reported that the inhabitants of Ryukyu were descended from the ancient Japanese; the Japanese scholar OTSUKI Fumihiko published a translation of his paper in 1873. In the summer of 1879, ex-U.S. president Ulysses S. GRANT, serving as the mediator to the Ryukyu problem, mistook the Japanese point of view as a justification based on "the ethnological affinities" between the Japanese and Ryukyu people. Because that misunderstood vision was widely reported through the U.S. media The New York Herald and the Meiji government's puppet newspaper, The Tokio Times, the anti-Japanese English paper in Yokohama, The Japan Gazette, even tried to demonstrate how raising the issue of ethnology would actually hurt the Japanese case, since the inhabitants of the Ryukyu islands seemed to be more racially pure and homogeneous than those of Japan. In the end, ethnological discussions were limited strictly to the American and English contexts: the Japanese and Chinese governments never appropriated such logic to support their political claims over the islands. That means that the lack of ethnographical knowledge cannot explain why neither state used the discourse of nationality. There was knowledge, of course, but several structural reasons prevented it from becoming politicized. A look at the Chinese newspaper Shenbao, published in Shanghai since 1872, shows us that the reasons given by both sides stemmed from the

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  • Yoko HAYAMI
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 473-483
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Sachiko KUBOTA
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 484-504
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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    This paper will examine a plan to build a local museum in the context of social changes surrounding the Aborigines in Australia. It will also look into how researchers have been involved in the whole process. In an Aboriginal township located in the northeastern comer of Arnhem Land, where I conducted my research, the plan to construct a local museum and/or a 'keeping place' had come up for repeated discussion since the 1970s, without any success. However, since the same period, the attitude toward Aboriginal art has changed dramatically in mainstream Australian society as well as internationally. For a long time, the products of Aboriginal people were seen just as crafts or souvenirs, and never as 'art'. In the 1980s, however, Aboriginal art began to be regarded as 'art', and all the mainstream museums and art galleries started to collect it. With the recognition by mainstream society of Aboriginal art as a valuable cultural and artistic symbol, the idea has emerged to build a museum to exhibit the art in its own production area. The idea is that Aboriginal art should be valued and shared in a way to strengthen Aboriginal identity in the local production area. Around the same time, mainstream institutions started the policy of repatriation. Since colonial times, numerous Aboriginal human remains and artifacts have been collected and stored in museums and galleries. With the upsurge of the repatriation of colonized people's heritage worldwide, repatriation also began in Australia. However, as the collection included secret/sacred objects that cannot be simply be repatriated to the competent communities, a special building, such as a 'keeping place', had to be built that can be locked properly. Within that Australian social context, the plan was repeatedly submitted to the local communities to build a local museum and/or 'keeping place'. In my field area too, the possibility was discussed many times, but was never realized. I was involved in the discussion, and was asked several times to give advice, as well as to make an application for funding. Although I advised them that their statements in the application for funds had to be simple and straightforward, there were diverse opinions within the community, and it was impossible to make them reasonable. In 2003, the matter took a new turn. One clan leader mobilized the local government and managed to get reserve funding to open a 'knowledge center' in 2004. Many Australian researchers and journalists showed an interest in that project, and it attracted wide public attention. Many anthropologists also enrolled in the project. The leader and one of his juniors in charge of the center were actively involved in the research of those scholars. But in the local context again, the plan caused a lot of tension among the clan leaders. As a result, by 2005, the scale of the planned center was reduced, and it is now operated in a quite limited way. There are several reasons why a local museum had not been realized in my area of study for such a long time. First, there is a difference in the concept of 'art' between the locals and the outside world. In the local context, the paintings and carvings made by Aborigines are very important cultural items, to be sure. But they are not regarded as personal products, but are instead owned and shared by the members of patrilineal clans. Their art is based on the paintings and designs used in the rituals and creation stories of the clan, and even the secular paintings that can be sold are still in similar circumstances. Second -and perhaps the most important reason- is the difference in the attitude toward the exposure/concealment of the culturally important items. Although the government expected the local museums to function as the core of local identity by exhibiting the artworks, the most important objects cannot be

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  • Nobuhiro KISHIGAMI
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 505-527
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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    This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of anthropological practices through a discussion of my own anthropological research among the urban Inuit of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As outlined in this paper, I have carried out anthropological research among the urban Inuit of Montreal since 1996. My 1997 research results stimulated several Inuit in Montreal to establish an association of Montreal Inuit as well as a monthly community feast in Montreal. Also, my ethnographic reports were among the first to study the urban Inuit, who had previously been ignored by their fellow Inuit still living in the Arctic, as well as by federal and territorial governments, not to mention anthropologists. As an anthropologist, I have attempted to write an ethnography of the urban Inuit. At the same time, as a volunteer with the Association of Montreal Inuit, I have served as a mediator among the urban Inuit, as well as between them and government officials on issues relating to the Association. Furthermore, several representatives of the Association, as well as federal government officials, have been using my research for their own purposes: the Association representatives have used my research data to obtain greater financial support and services from the federal government, while the federal officials use the data to better understand the current conditions of urban Inuit in making policy decisions in Ottawa. My own experiences have forced me to reconsider anthropological practices and the role of the anthropologist in the contemporary world. In particular, I realize that because much of our research affects many peoples' lives, we must be very concerned with ethical issues when undertaking anthropological research. From my view, one of the primary goals of anthropology is to understand practices, discourses, and other socio-cultural phenomena of a given people/society in relation to other peoples/societies, from both the 'native' and 'outsider' perspectives. As this paper illustrates, anthropologists have the opportunity to focus on the lives and cultures of various minority peoples who have consistently been ignored by the dominant society. Such research is of academic importance to anthropology as a discipline. Also, because such anthropological research can be applied to social movements and policy-making to improve the lives of minority or other disadvantaged peoples, anthropology can contribute significantly to solving human problems in practical ways. On the whole, contemporary anthropology tends to be classified into two separate subgroups according to its goals: ethnography and applied anthropology. In fact, their respective practices are interconnected: any anthropological research based on long-term fieldwork can be applied to the solution of a large variety of problems in the contemporary world. Recently, 'action anthropology,' or 'public anthropology,' has attracted broad attention in the discipline of anthropology. Even so, its practices raise serious ethical problems. Those include the justification of anthropological practices affecting people's lives and the encouragement of intra-group factions, as I have shown with my Montreal case study in this paper. Although those problems are unavoidable in anthropological research, I argue that we can improve such practices by reflecting on our own research methodologies and critically assessing those of others. Finally, I address the problem of "writing culture" shock in ethnographic representation. I argue that one drawback of describing culture "as is" is its association with modern anthropological practice. That drawback cannot be overcome merely by developing new ethnographic methods for writing others, since the problem is partially grounded in the inequality of political and economic power relationships between researchers and informants,

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  • Yuji ANKEI
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 528-542
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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    In this paper, I narrate my experience of ethical difficulties during my three decades of field surveys on Iriomote Island. one of the southernmost islands of Japan, in the prefecture of Okinawa. Although the island is famous for its well-preserved nature such as the Iriomote wild cat and coral reefs, its islanders have suffered from various adversities: severe capital tax systems (1636-1902), tropical fever malaria (until the 1960s) and underpopulation after WWII. When I first visited the island at the age of 23, some islanders told me that they were tired of so-called "researchers," who came to the islands by dozens. Since then, they have continued to tell me, "Researchers, go home! Only those who agree to be our friends are welcome." Then, the question was how a researcher could be a friend of the islanders, while continuing to conduct field surveys among them. Episode 1 in my paper describes a perilous encounter with a drunken islander. He criticized me about my research on ethnoarcheology. He suspected that I stole artifacts buried in the tombs of abandoned villages. I failed to explain him what my research was, but angrily demanded some apologies from him. In reply, he seized a bottle and aimed it at my head so as to strike me down... However, thanks to that quite frank encounter, we became very good friends afterwards, and he helped me in my research of placenames in abandoned villages. Episode 2 deals with my trials to publish ethnographies in the name of local speakers rather than researchers. Former inhabitants of abandoned villages had prepared manuscripts, and my wife and I helped to compile them for publication in three volumes. Then we planned to help an inhabitant of an existing village to do a similar thing with us, and he tried to put some oral traditions of his own family in a manuscript. That caused misunderstanding and frustration among the other villagers, however, because they felt that his manuscript contained non-authentic versions of songs sung during their solemn festivals. They convened a general assembly of the villagers, and I was summoned to explain to them which tradition was more authentic and right. Episode 3 is a record of the endeavors to establish an agricultural cooperative of organic rice farmers in Iriomote. Since the 1980s, the local government forced the rice cultivators of Okinawa to initiate insecticide use in their rice fields. In the 70's, I had studied traditional rice cultivation in Iriomote, and found that its traditional rice varieties and their cultivation systems came from southern islands and Taiwan, and seldom from northern islands, including mainland Japan. I was also afraid of the side-effects of insecticide in Iriomote paddy fields, not just for human beings, but also for endangered species such as the wildcats that feed on the smaller animals living around the paddy fields. In collaboration with a local leader, Kinsei Ishigaki, I held a symposium in Iriomote, inviting some 200 local people, and told them of the dangers of insecticide and the possibilities of commercializing organic rice. The following year, when they organized a cooperative and tried to sell their organic rice directly to consumers, I could not help but become an advisor to them and a voluntary salesman for their rice. Many obstacles surrounded us: hostile public servants, debt collectors, rice dealers, and fraudsters. Business was far more difficult than doing field surveys, and I even made sales pitches for the rice at the annual meeting of the Ethnological Society of Japan when invited to give a speech on research ethics. It took about 15 years until the cooperative finally managed to pay back the rest of their debts. Now some of the islanders regard my family as their relatives. We can learn from these exercises that it is, as a rule, better to refrain from doing business with the persons we study, but also that if we do

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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 543-549
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 550-555
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 555-558
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 558-560
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 561-564
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 565-566
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 566-567
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 568-569
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 569-570
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 571-574
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 574-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 575-
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 576-578
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 578-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 579-580
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages App2-
    Published: March 31, 2006
    Released on J-STAGE: September 25, 2017
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  • Article type: Index
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages i-iv
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages App3-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages App4-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Appendix
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages App5-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Cover
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages Cover3-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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  • Article type: Cover
    2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages Cover4-
    Published: March 31, 2006
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