The dichotomy between the Western and the non-Western has been a basic presupposition for anthropological discussions of the idea of "personhood." Anthropologists tend to find another kind of personhood within so-called "savage" societies. Those kinds of personhood have been grasped as relativizing and criticizing the modern Western notion of personhood, "the modern individual." However, the concept of "the modern individual" itself has been accepted rather uncritically. Anthropological works, especially those in the fields of the anthropology of welfare or the medical anthropology, have shared that vision. They try to criticize "the modern individual" in two ways. The first looks for a social or relational personhood instead of the modern one, while the second pursues a more universal and "unsocial" self. However, those ways of criticizing are not successful at all, because the dichotomy between the Western and the non-Western is only strengthened by that logic. The cause of that failure derives from confusion about the idea of independence. Independence, which is the background idea to the "modern individual," has drastically changed throughout Western history in accordance with the contrary concept, dependence. Nowadays, it contains the physical, economic, and self-determining kinds of independence, which are interwoven with each other. Therefore, it is meaningful to show how different kinds of independence shape the total personhood. In this paper, I discuss the independence of elderly people in Finland who live alone and are supported by home help services. The data shown in this paper were obtained from fieldwork I did in a small municipality called "Archipelago Town." In the Nordic welfare states, de-institutionalization has been the mainstream policy since the 1980s. Elderly and handicapped people are to get assistance at home, and that assistance is to be provided by local authorities. In that way, municipalities have become obliged to provide welfare services. Nowadays, they have established local welfare systems with a central focus on the services to assist elderly people living alone at home, especially the home help services. In Archipelago Town, the lives of elderly people living alone are supported by a broad range of services extended by the home helpers. Not only do home helpers carry out domestic work and primary care, but also try to entertain and communicate with the elderly people. However, they do not interfere in some of the choices made by the elderly people. For example, some of the elderly can leave their rooms in a dirty condition. But too much drinking or smoking must be controlled by the home helpers. That choice-intervention in some cases, and non-intervention in others-depends on the dangerousness of the act. The physical risks to the elderly thus legitimize the intervention by home helpers. Those risks are noticed by the home helpers in the course of their daily proceedings. Especially, they pay attention to wandering outside and falling. Though those two risks are regarded very serious and are to be carefully avoided, elderly people frequently wander out of their home, and the "Anshin Denwa (hot line)" for use when elderly people fall down is frequently used. Why such risks often end up becoming a reality stems from the logic of self-determination. Until an elderly person reaches the stage where he/she loses his/her judgment and causes injuries to himself/herself, home helpers are not to interfere in his/her self-determination. Such interference sometimes leads to the decision that the elderly person can no longer stay at home alone. After incidents of wandering out or falling, the municipality in charge might decide to move the elderly person in question into an institution such as a nursing home. Therefore, it is possible to regard that such risks

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Alfred Gell claimed that an aesthetic approach to art objects was an anthropological dead end. What did he mean by an anthropological dead end? What is the way to go beyond this impasse? This article is driven by such questions. Robert Layton, in his critique of Art & Agency, criticized Gell for not acknowledging the importance of cultural conventions that people employ as they deal with art objects. He implicitly asserts that had Gell had the time for revision, he would have revised AA in favour of the visual communication model that Layton advocates. This, I think, is off the mark. Layton arrived at that conclusion without situating AA in the oeuvre of Gell. In this paper, I shall make an attempt to place AA in the oeuvre of Gell in order to understand the epistemology of Gell's anthropology of art, of which AA is a part. After surveying the epistemological premises of Gell's anthropology of art, I shall look at the model of circuitous/recursive pathways, which is central to Gel's anti-aesthetic anthropological theory of art. In the first section, I make an overview of the central theme of Gell' s anthropology of art, which concerns the work of artworks and its efficacy. In that connection, I discuss the epistemological significance of the Asmat shield that was selected as the frontispiece of AA. The shield is a conceptual model of an artwork, placed there to help us imagine how onlookers and artworks engage each other and constitute a series. In the second section, I move on to the methodological centrality of index and abduction. I make a brief overview of Pierce's icon, index and symbol, and then examine the ways in which Gell employed Shirley Campbell's "Trobriand canoe prow-board" as an exemplary case of how an artwork as an index works. In the third section, I discuss Gell' s uncompromising anti-aesthetic stance. In the first half of this section, I overview Gell's philistine (methodological philistinism) and its opposite, viz., William Fag's connoisseur and Kant's genius. In the second half, I make an overview of Jeremy Coote's aesthetic approach to Nilotic beauty and Gell's criticism of it. Coote's approach presupposes the Kantian notion of disinterested beauty. Yet, as is clear from the Nuer ethnography of Evans-Pritchard, Nilotic beauty is not disinterested beauty, but is interested beauty. Moreover, it is relational. In the fourth section, I discuss "volt" sorcery, Gell's conceptual model of enchanting artworks: a circuitous causal pathway in which the victim appears twice. That model is methodologically important because it does not presuppose a transcendental or supernatural being as the cause or origin of agency. In the fifth section, I discuss Gell's more dynamic working model of artworks: traps. In comparison with the conceptual model of volt sorcery, traps involve bodies, perceptions, narratives, time and kinesis more forcefully. It is also a model of how a person knows one's relationships with the world, not in terms of culture, but in terms of relations. Towards the end of this section, I introduce a passage from The Critique of Judgment §28 in which we learn that Kant perceives mighty nature from without. This involves a crucial distance that enables the post-enlightenment self to contemplate the world. This in turn enables us to understand the implications of the opposite move suggested by Merleau-Ponty: objectivity and subjectivity are inseparable in perception. In the sixth section, I revisit Gell's "The Gods at Play" (1980) in order to explore further the orientation of the dynamics of artworks. When Gell saw the photograph of "Siraha's swing at Alor" taken by Verrier Elwin, he posed an important question that anticipated' problematic of art as doing: "What is a swing doing in the forecourt of a village

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This essay proposes to rethink anthropological practice as a discipline of images (and not only of words), and to reconsider the role of ethnographic visual media in that science/art of the "anthropology of images." Here, following K. Iwaki, I take "image" to be all that appears to our consciousness (sometimes taking form, while at other times formless). From that point of view, the experiences in the anthropological field constitute a set of "images," part of which the anthropologist fixes by means of ethnographic visual media (above all through photography). Once returned from the field, the anthropologist works on his or her data with those "images" in mind. In that process of anthropological creation, ethnographic visual media plays, in general, a more important part than one might think. To see that, we have only to examine the ethnographic photography of three anthropologists of the classical era: Malinowski, Bateson and Levi-Strauss. Photography had a vital importance for Malinowski. Not only did he express himself by means of photography (in his main books he combined his texts with numerous photos in quite an original way), but we can also assume that his photography constituted important material for his anthropological thinking, since his photos, mostly extreme long shots, were ideal for functionalist analysis. Ethnographic visual media was also very important for Bateson: we may say that the expressive and analytical possibilities of the media that he explored (montage, sequence-shot or sequential photography, materiality, etc.) were exactly what his theoretical thinking needed. If some of his photos in Balinese Character are so penetrating, it is because his shots, fluctuating between medium and long shots, reflect his almost impossible need to capture, at once, the materiality, the action and the context of the event. Meanwhile, Levi-Strauss's photography is quite different from Malinowski's and Bateson's anthropological photography, in that he takes close-ups and candids with total freedom, with an artist's spirit. Nevertheless, his photography and his structuralist theory do have something in common: the invariable attention to "the sensible" no less than to the "intelligible." In any case, it is also undeniable that for these anthropologists, the discipline of images is subordinate to the discipline of words. And my contention is that this is not the only way-nor, perhaps, the most fruitful after all. But first we have to look more closely at what photography is (including films and videos). On the one hand, the photographic act is, in a word, "overdetermined" by the photographer and the photographed, both in the selection of the topic and in the selection of the variables (framing, focus, camera movement, etc.), so that the resulting image has always an "intention" much broader than that of the photographer. On the other hand, the photographic act is never a neutral event: the eternity, although hypothetical, of the preserved image always ensures that the photographed person finds himself or herself, consciously and unconsciously, in another reality. Surely, photography is not a copy of the existing reality: it is a record of the reality created in front of the camera. Those issues have been admirably approached and deepened by some of the most important "ethnographic" filmmakers, such as Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner, filmmakers who are rather marginal in visual anthropology (obviously Rouch himself was not marginal in the least, but his whole career overrides-significantly-the field of visual anthropology). Probably, the very fact that their films continue to be marginal, both in visual anthropology and in anthropology tout court, testifies to the still preserved freshness of their experiments. It is just so with Flaherty's

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What kind of meaning and possibility can be found in arguing about "art" from an anthropological viewpoint, or in analyzing "art" using an "anthropological methodology?" One characteristic of anthropological approaches to art is that art is never regarded in the modern European context as a self-evident subject, either in theory or in practice. This study is predicated on that premise, and presents anthropological studies of art as an act of looking deeply into human sensitivity. During the last few decades, discourses on art have changed remarkably as a result of critical studies on the social and historical contexts that produced art and the underlying Eurocentric ideologies. Amid such arguments, German idealistic aesthetics is often criticized as the main foundation for critical insights. Pierre Bourdieu declared that the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant is characterized by its independence from historical factors, and that it blindly generalizes specific works into ultra-historical models of artistic perceptions with no attention paid to the idea that individual art works should be looked at from particular spatial and temporal perspectives. That recognition-namely, that art works and the appreciative senses and perceptions of people who support art have been constructed in historical and social contexts-is of vital significance in the sense that it deprives art of its privileged status, and works well to modify modern Eurocentric philosophical and historical values. However, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that this kind of argument tends to overlook human senses, "artistic" originalities and the distinctive attributes and creativities of particular social agents. There is no doubt that German aesthetics provided the foundations for the idea that art is a function-free, spontaneous activity, and that art has a universal value. However, Kant used the word Asthetik as meaning the studies of human sensitivity, and Alexander Baumgarten referred to aesthetica as scientia cognitionis sensitivae (science about human sensitivity). Both of them intended to devise elaborate methodologies on the studies of human sensitivity. Furthermore, of the subjects presented by Kant, the arguments on the creative talents of artists make a lot of sense in approaching the situation in non-European societies. Konrad Fiedler also presented the viewpoint of looking at artistic creations as perceptive activities. His attitude toward art can be applied to all kinds of expressions by all human senses in natural and cultural environments, as well as to European "pure art." Kant's negative heritage has been so persistent that people in later ages regarded sensitivity as distinct from reason, based on his texts, and completely separated beauty from function. That is quite an extraordinary way of thinking, even seen on a global level. Even ancient Greeks, whom Europeans tend to regard as their ancestors, often identified beauty with good and truth. Examinations of ethnographical materials on Ejagham people living in the Cross River Region show that they have no idea of "pure art" in the context of Western Europe in the 19^<th> century, and that they neither focus only on aesthetical elements separately from other things nor describe those elements in this way. Ejagham people pursue "good" things that appeal to their sensitivity, "strike their mind" and are "enchanting," in connection with perceptions concerning gender differences and senses related to colors, sounds and physical movements, or in connection with the function of masked dancing and social and religious functions of eradicating crisis situations at the individual and community levels. They hold something as "good" and "enchanting" if it appeals to their senses and encompasses those factors in the highest esteem.

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In this article, I would like to explore two cases of the revival of prehistoric pottery by adopting a "life history approach" to pots, which are considered as things with social lives, and extend that approach to the component material of the vessels. The life history of pots and their materials, along with the life history of potters, provides a basic framework for discussion. The findings are meant to contribute to a general anthropological discussion on pottery and pottery-making. This paper brings into focus two potters who are very different from each other in quite a few respects, but also share an extraordinary experience: each of them revived, almost single-handedly, a long-extinct prehistoric pottery in his/her own region and set a course for the revival of a tradition of pottery-making. One of them, Raimundo Saraiva Cardoso (Mestre Cardoso) (1930-2006), was born in a remote village in the State of Para, Brazil, and started his career as a potter in the middle of the 1960s in Icoaraci, an Amazonian town known for its tradition of manufacturing utilitarian vessels. However, the pottery he started to make was very distinct from the traditional pots made by other potters. Getting acquainted with the prehistoric pottery of the region (lower Brazilian Amazon), Marajoara pottery (4c-17c) and Santarem pottery (10c-16c) among others, and deeply impressed by their technique and beauty, he made up his mind to make their replicas. After an earnest effort to conduct research and experiments, he succeeded in manufacturing excellent replicas. Since the 1970s, other potters from the town tried to catch on to his success, but due to many unfavorable conditions, ended up producing a variety of vessels that only remotely resembled the authentic prehistoric models. Those inventions, however, became the new Icoaraci style of pottery. The other of the two potters, Nampeyo (ca. 1857-1942), a Hopi-Tewa woman from First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, Arizona, started to make pottery inspired by the prehistoric Pueblo pots found in or excavated from the nearby "ruins," especially the Sikyatki pottery (14c-17c), in the final decades of the 19th century. Owing to the excellent quality of her work and the synergy of various factors (the Santa Fe Railway, the Southwestern sightseeing industry, philanthropists and patrons, the growing demand of non-Indian collectors for Native American goods, and so on), she became the first Native American artist nationally known by name. After her, her descendants and other followers came to build up a new tradition of pottery-making and a new style of pottery among the Hopi Pueblo. One premise that forms the starting point for the argument of this paper is that every single thing (object) has its own life history or biography. Things may remain in one "regime of value" (Appadurai) for life or travel across various "regimes of value." A "regime of value," that of the art world, occupies a self-assumed privileged position to recognize certain things as works of art, which are claimed to deserve special social recognition. A thing comes to be evaluated according to the criteria of each "regime of value," through which it passes or finds itself, but it never ceases to be a thing endowed with inherently plural meanings or "multivocality." Things consecrated as works of art are no exceptions in that respect. This basic stance vis-a-vis the world of things or material culture is maintained throughout this paper. People from various sectors of society have been involved in the process of establishing those new pottery-making traditions, and there are many possible ways of interpreting that process: their relationship to archaeological investigations, museum collecting, their commercialization and the market, collectors' taste for and patronage of the pottery as works of art, the economic

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This paper discusses how a global policy system adopts local customs, places and knowledge as cultural heritage, and how the "value" of heritage is constructed. That is done through an analysis of the process by which Sefa Utaki, a sacred place in Okinawa, Japan, became a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage (WCH) site. As a backdrop to that theme, two interrelated problems may be pointed out. The first concerns the structure of discourse over WCH. Due to a recent change in UNESCO's world heritage strategy, not only material heritages such as historical buildings or monuments, but also intangible heritages such as people's living spaces, religious places, and traditional rituals have been included among WCH under the name of "cultural landscapes" or "living heritages". Similarly, the core value of Okinawa's cultural heritage - "Gusuku Sites and Related Properties of the Kingdom of Ryukyu" - was specified as not being limited to archaeological value, but also to comprise living religious beliefs as well. That means that UNESCO's cultural policy continuously overlaps with the research fields of anthropologists. Secondly, in spite of those circumstances, little anthropological research has been conducted on that new cultural heritage trend. Cultural heritage, of course, has been dealt with in the anthropology of tourism and regional development research, but discussions there have focused on tourism, people's identities and local community itself. In contrast, an analysis of religious heritage from the viewpoint of that ever-expanding global policy has been rare. Based on those two issues, this paper directs attention to the "value" of heritage by inspecting those religious phenomena that are specifically indicated as "valued beliefs." For that purpose, I examined official documents and discourses authored by UNESCO, local governments and local volunteers working for Utaki. It turned out that the "belief' surrounding Sefa Utaki can be interpreted as having two different meanings. The first is the "belief' considered to be legitimate, having originated in the Ryukyu kingdom era with pilgrimages held by munchu descent groups. The second is the "belief' considered to be private or personal, like ritual and prayer by yuta, the Okinawan shaman. The former corresponds to the "value" of WCH, while the latter is classified as a matter removed from the heritage. In the above situation, where the essentially relativistic concept of "belief' has been divided into valued and valueless parts, I recognized an anthropological subject. I analyzed the subject of religion in modern society from the viewpoint of Anthony Giddens' "disembedding mechanisms." Giddens has shown that modern society detaches social activity from direct interaction between people based on local context, and reconstructs social relations across vast space and time by using, among other methods, an "expert system." I consider UNESCO, local governments, and the volunteers who execute cultural policy to be the "expert system" mentioned by Giddens. Consequently, the process by which a sacred place of local villagers becomes the common heritage of all humankind is the result of disembedding mechanisms. The current situation, in which the cultural heritage system involves local society, consists of a dynamics that promotes the grading of "culture" while newly inventing "valueless culture."

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