This paper focuses on cormorant fishermen at Lake Poyang in Jaingxi Province in China. It provides an ethnographic description of the historical changes of cormorant fishing amidst social changes in China, and analyzes the subsistence strategy of the fishermen. In China, there are comparatively many studies on the historical change of peasants' lives and rural communities. From those studies, we know that social changes in China, such as the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the implementation of land reforms, the enforcement of the collectivization policy, the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and implementation of the family contract responsibility system, have all greatly influenced the lives and subsistence of peasants. However, there have been only a very few studies made on the historical changes in fishermen's lives and fishing communities in China. Especially, there has yet to be conducted any anthropological research on the fishermen at the inland lake. Therefore, it is still unclear how the life and subsistence of the fishermen has changed in China. Geographically, the research in this paper focuses on R town in Yugan County of Jiangxi Province, located to the south of Lake Poyang. The fishermen in R town live on the lakeside. In R town, 39 households are mainly engaged in cormorant fishing. All of the fishermen (68 male and 25 female) are Han Chinese. Their average age is 36.4 years, and their average fishing experience is 26.6 years. All the cormorants that the fishermen keep in Lake Poyang are so-called Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis Linnaeus). In R town, the fishermen keep 925 cormorant (611 males and 264 females), the average age of which is 3.3 years. Cormorant fishing on Lake Poyang was influenced by national policy and environmental changes in China. Before the founding of the PRC, dispute about fishing spots had frequently occurred between fishing villages on the lake. At that time, the fishermen established their own governments to decide upon a set of rules, which aimed to regulate the fishing activities and solve the disputes. After the founding of the PRC, land reform was instituted, and all the "self-governments" that the fishermen had organized were abolished. However, the fishermen managed to cope with the various problems that emerged on account of their fishing activities through the traditional fishing rules. The enforcement of a collectivization policy completely abolished the conventional organization and fishing rules. It also forbade family fishing activities, and forced fisermen to fish in large groups. However, the fishermen quickly adapted their conventional fishing methods to the collectivization policy, newly defining the fishing rules. After the collectivization policy was stopped, the fishermen abolished the conventional rules, and shifted the group fishing back to family-based fishing activities. Thereafter, the geographical area of cormorant fishing vastly declined during and after the 1990s. In 1989, the fishing area covered 581.3km^2, but that shrank to just 114.16km^2 by 2000. In other words, the area of cormorant fishing was reduced by 80.4% over that period. Two causes can be identified for the decrease. First, there was an increase in exclusive water areas, in which the right to fish was purchased by other fishermen after the execution of the family contract responsibility system. For that reason, cormorant fishermen cannot fish in those areas. Secondly, large water areas had turned to land through reclamation works. Under such circumstances, fishermen resumed fishing in large groups, newly defining the group fishing rules, and making contact with the merchants who buy their fish. Using this case study, this paper shows that fishermen have changed or arranged their fishing methods and rules according to the environmental changes that occurred in China. In other words,

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This paper examines the expansion of "biomedicine" through an analysis of pharmaceutical distribution and policy in southern Ghana. In particular, it focuses on the "chemical seller" as a unique pharmaceutical distributor. In this paper I illuminate three things: the main characteristics of pharmaceutical distribution in southern Ghana, the features and premises of Ghana's pharmaceutical policy, and the difficulty of expanding "biomedicine" as a concept for explaining the contemporary medical situation in that country. In the anthropology of pharmaceuticals, two features are noted for pharmaceutical distribution in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, there are many types of illegal pharmaceutical distributors. Second, hospitals and health centers lack pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical distribution differs however, in southern Ghana. There, illegal pharmaceutical distribution is rare, and both hospitals and health centers have adequate supplies of pharmaceuticals thanks to a distribution system centralized through various types of public stores and the principle of "cash and carry." Yet, it is the existence of chemical sellers that is the most distinct feature of pharmaceutical distribution in Ghana. They are unique pharmaceutical distributors, in that they are licensed by the government, yet have no formal education in the field of biomedicine. Indeed, they are the main actors in the distribution of pharmaceuticals in southern Ghana. While there are 1,126 hospitals and health centers and 1,088 pharmacies, there are more than 8,000 chemical sellers in Ghana. My study focuses on a town 'A' in the western part of the Eastern Region of Ghana, where I stayed for 12 months. Approximately 2,700 people over the age of 18 live in 'A', where cacao, oranges, palm, timber, diamonds and bauxite are the main products. Town 'A' has four chemical sellers and one health center. There are no hospitals or pharmacies. A chemical seller has approximately 160 clients per day, while the health center sees an average of 19.4 patients per day. One trend that has been the so-called "brain drain" of trained people - doctors, nurses, pharmacists - from the field of "biomedicine". There is such a shortage of people educated in "biomedicine" that constructing a pharmaceutical distribution system within their ranks is virtually impossible. As pharmaceutical distributors, chemical sellers have a complementary relationship with health centers. In health centers, the average cost of treatment is about USD5.00, and the duration of the waiting time is more than two hours. Meanwhile, the chemical sellers provide pharmaceuticals quickly and cheaply. Additionally, due to the fact that the number of customers purchasing anti-malaria drugs from chemical sellers is minimal, while the patients attending the health centers do receive anti-maralia drugs, we can speculate that patients and their families may choose between the chemical seller and the health center based on the severity of their illnesses. There is a close relationship between the state of pharmaceutical distribution in Ghana, as outlined above, and pharmaceutical policy. The Pharmaceutical Act presumes that chemical sellers are merchants - not healers - and therefore it is not necessary for them to be educated in "biomedicine" in order to be granted a government license. But, the administrative agency requires consultation and reference. And, chemical sellers do prescribe some pharmaceuticals for their clients in the same manners as nurses. I insist that we cannot understand such a situation as an expansion of "biomedicine." In medical anthropology, we objectify "biomedicine" as a system, which is composed of seven main factors: (1) medical treatment and care as action, (2) persons educated in or practicing biomedicine, (3)

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In this paper, I analyze the construction of "Tibetan culture" by refugees and expatriate writers as well as its byproducts. More concretely, this paper describes the process of constructing Tibetan culture by focusing on a particular genre of the performing arts that is often referred to as the most important facet of Tibetan culture by members of the refugee society in Dharamsala, as well as in descriptions about it by many foreign writers and intellectuals. Through a critical examination of that cultural production, this paper also considers its negative dimensions, which result from situating performing art as the most important part of Tibetan culture. The Tibetan refugees referred to here are those who have left Tibet since the 1950's and have taken exile in Dharamsala (India). They have spent almost 50 years reconstructing their lives and recreating what we call culture. However, many of the contexts of this cultural recreation changed-some in dramatic fashion. I will show that Lhamo, or what is called the Tibetan opera, and Zhoston, the space of performing Lhamo, have radically changed during the 50 years of exile. This paper explores the construction as the most important part of Tibetan culture by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. He has often preached of the importance of Lhamo to audiences and to people at the Zhoston and at various other sites. Echoing the Dalai Lama's opinion, students are taught that Lhamo is extremely important. Many Tibetans have also recognized Lhamo as the most important part of Tibetan culture, and we can find many people, including foreign tourists and researches, who come to observe Lhamo. However, before the exile, Lhamo was just one performance held around Lhasa, a city to which numerous Tibetans went on pilgrimages. Many people who did not live near Lhasa were thus unfamiliar with it. However, from today's perspective, it is considered the most important feature of Tibetan culture. That means that Lhamo's meaning has changed as a cultural performance since the exile began. That observation also applies to Zhoston. Based on information gathered directly from refugees, we now think of Zhoston as the Lhasa performance space for Lhamo at Drepung and Norbulingka. However, one could find other styles of Zhoston in Tibet before exile. Before then, it was a "comforting festival" for monks, and the performance of Lhamo was one expression of those festivals. Zhoston was also held in regions throughout Tibet, not only in special performance spaces in Lhasa (Drepung and Norbulingka). Like the changes in Lhamo, we can say that Zhoston has also since changed its meaning as a performance space in the wake of the exile. After the establishment of the exile community in Dharamsala, the meaning of Lhamo changed from a local performance centered in Lhasa to the most important expression of Tibetan culture. Zhoston also changed its meaning, from a festival space seen in various regions throughout Tibet, to the performance space of Lhamo as a Lhasa-based festival. In that context, Lhamo and Zhoston have been described as important dimensions of Tibetan identity. For the exile community, their performances have also become a sort of cultural protest against China. Those changes have been caused by a number of factors. This paper analyzes the process of the changes and demonstrates how the conjunction of the Tibetan exile community and descriptions of Lhamo and Zhoston by Tibetan and foreign intellectuals have imbued these events with special meaning, constructing them as the most important dimensions of Tibetan culture and its most important performance space. I thus situate this paper within a theory of cultural objectification, which focuses on the practices both local people and outsiders undertake in the creative process of constructing culture. However, that process has also produced what can be called a

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Diabetes is a major health problem in Japan, affecting more than 5 million people directly. Its public health implications grow along with the potential market of newer and simpler medications, making it one of the most dynamic fields of collaboration between the state, scientific research and private pharmaceutical companies. In this article, my concern is to describe how hypoglycemic agents (i.e. diabetes drugs) perform those links, which, in turn, articulate biological and cultural differences by measuring, negotiating and imaging them in medical practice. The increasing presence of pharmaceutical innovations in Japan calls for a shift of focus to the local settings of learning and appropriating such medications in daily life - that is, how people come to understand pills and injections that are designed to treat their disease. After delivering the prescription, the physician has to align the drugs with offers of the salesmen, skills of the pharmacists and patients' complaints etc. Norms of blood sugar, clinical trials and that of social life all become interrelated, through the calculation of which medications constitute sameness to such norms, and those that constitute a difference. By pointing at the metabolism, the drug orients toward an embodied understanding of seemingly unimportant events in daily life: what and when to eat, how much to sleep, where to spend the weekend, etc. It opens new ways for formulating questions and interpretations that differentiate the patient from others, while at the same time displaying the metabolism as part and parcel of the patient's life. But how does one account for such overlapping biological and cultural variations simultaneously? Drawing on the plurality of perspectives surrounding health and disease is an established method of medical anthropologists. Differences play a crucial role in contemporary medicine, and anthropologists are, by profession, attentive to the plurality of illness and its social consequences. However, as recent dialogues between science studies and anthropology have shown, such plurality is present on both sides of the divide, and anthropologists should address them symmetrically if they want to overcome both cultural and technological reductionism. One way to do so follows the practicalities of medicine, where such differences are performed and embodied locally in the relations of scientific knowledge and personal suffering. As shown by anthropologists, putting skills to practice does not necessarily follow their acquisition. Rather, learning is often a part of the very routines it brings about. Similarly, the self-management of chronic conditions is more than simply the internalization of a scientifically given knowledge. The techniques of putting pharmaceuticals to use are embedded in an open-ended mediation of disease: an attunement of bodies and their affects. Through a fieldwork study of the practice of pharmacological therapy at a diabetes clinic in the northern part of Japan, the dominant pluralist model of medical anthropology will be criticized here. I will show, instead, how differences are mobilized in the embodied relationship of science and culture through the technological mediation and daily routine of pills, insulin pens and medication diaries. First, I explore the shifting endocrinological categories that frame the practice of the self-management of diabetes in Japan (ch. 3). Then, I focus in on the specific case study of Suzuran Diabetes Center (pseudonym), to illustrate the interaction between scientific facts and cultural values in the clinical organization of the use of medications (ch. 4). Those interactions take place through the embodied practices of dosing drugs and learning to live with the scientific knowledge they distribute. Such finding is, however, not merely a hypothetical concern of the anthropologist, as I will point out in the fifth section, but a long

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The movement for the protection of World Heritage Sites, promoted by UNESCO, has been spreading throughout the world. The ideal of the World Heritage Convention is to protect natural and cultural heritage sites with "outstanding universal value" against damage and destruction, regarding them as humankind's common heritage. That means that a nation, once having signed the Convention, must accept UNESCO's intervention in the protection of its heritage. Lao PDR, which ratified the Convention in 1987, has two World Heritage Sites: the Town of Luang Prabang and the Vat Phou Temple Complex in the Champasak Cultural Landscape. This paper examines the case of Laos in order to demonstrate some of the problems underlying the international movement of heritage conservation, widely considered to be one of the great ideals of humanity. The Town of Luang Prabang, inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1995, was the capital of the Lan Xang Kingdom from the 14^<th> to the 16^<th> century. The present city is a fusion of different architectural styles: it has many Buddhist temples of a distinctive Lao style, while its secular buildings represent a hybrid of Chinese, Vietnamese and French styles. The World Heritage committee noticed the high degree of authenticity of its overall townscape and urban fabric. The heritage site of Vat Phou Champasak, inscribed on the list in 2001, contains a Khmer temple (Vat Phou), the remains of an ancient city, and the landscape that surrounds them. Vat Phou was constructed as a Hindu temple by the Khmer, but after the fall of their empire it became a place of Buddhist worship for locals. Analyzing publications on these two heritage sites, we find "authenticity" to be one of the major criteria for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Globalization and homogenization are considered the major threats to the sites, so UNESCO refuses any alterations to them. The locals, who repair temples and secular buildings with modern, imported materials and non-traditional techniques, are accused of lacking knowledge, of being unaware of the value and uniqueness of their heritage. UNESCO promotes the development of tourism, regarding it the best means of both boosting the local economy and preserving the cultural treasures, but on the condition that tourism is carefully managed to avoid critical stress on both the environment and the historical cultural resources. UNESCO World Heritage projects may be effective in preserving cultural heritage sites that would be lost if no measures were taken. On that point, they apparently contribute to the preservation of the cultural diversity of humanity. However, UNESCO's notion of culture is an essentialist one, a notion that has been criticized by James Clifford and Edward W. Said. Prohibiting locals from improving production at will, so as to carry out conservation works consistent with values and criteria brought from the outside, would hinder their cultural creativity. The evaluation and preservation of heritage sites based on criteria that are applied to all the heritage sites in the would spoil the cultural vitality fostered by each community, and would consequently be counterproductive for the protection of cultural diversity.

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