Grassland degradation has been increasing in Inner Mongolia. Sparse vegetation and pasture grass degradation are the most typical phenomena of grassland degradation. Pasture grass degradation is mainly seen in the decrease of nutritious grass eaten by livestock, and the increase of the non-nutritious grasses not eaten by livestock. Overgrazing has been considered the main cause of grassland degradation in the area. Therefore, the government has implemented a policy of reverting grazing land to grassland (tuimu huancao 退牧還草) to help the environment, aiming at preventing livestock from grazing and allowing the grassland to regenerate. It mainly includes the'prohibition of grazing' (jinmu 禁牧), that is, the total prohibition of grazing on a piece of land for a certain period of time. However, grassland degradation did not occur on account of grazing. I will argue that the real problem likely lies in the change from traditional grazing to a system that triggers grassland degradation. In this paper, I aim to examine the process of grassland degradation by the transition from nomadic to settled pastoral life, and clarify the relationship between the state system and nomadic society changes, as well as the relationship between the national land policy and the changes in the nomadic system based on data collected during my fieldwork in the northern part of the Jaruud hoshuu (banner, an administrative division) in eastern Inner Mongolia. The paper consists of seven parts: (1) introduction, (2) outline and climate change of the Jaruud banner, (3) stock farming before the socialist revolution, (4) producers'cooperative societies and changes to stock farming under People's Communes, (5) changes to stock farming after privatization under the Reform and Opening Policy, (6) changes to stock farming after the implementation of an environmental policy, and (7) conclusion. The mobile pastoralism in Inner Mongolia has been affected by political and social changes. I examine how such changes have altered mobile stock farming in the region, and how that has influenced the natural environment in the stages outlined in each section. The main changes in stock farming in Inner Mongolia occurred in livestock ownership and the form of grazing. Although the change in ownership might have had an indirect influence on grassland degradation, the change in grazing form did have a direct impact. Before the implementation of socialist reforms, livestock was privately owned. Pastureland used to be owned by the hoshuu. However, the hota ayil, a group with patrilineal agnates as the core, used the pastureland in a way conforming to customary practices, seasonally letting livestock graze the land. During the socialist reconstruction period of Productive Cooperatives and People's Communes, however, livestock ownership passed from individuals to the state, while possession of the pastureland passed from the banner to the state. As far as land usage was concerned, there was almost no change from pre-revolutionary times, with production teams based on the hota ayil. However, the privatization of Reform and Opening Policy redistributed livestock ownership and land usage rights back to individuals. The livestock ownership was returned to a privately-owned system from the state-owned system in the People's Commune period. A completely different system was adopted for the pastureland, and landuse rights were distributed to individuals. After the land-use rights were distributed, livestock grazing became possible only within one's distributed land, so the frequency of seasonal migration fell rapidly. Grassland degradation especially became severe around winter camps. Although many generally felt that it was the socialist revolution that changed the paradigms of the society, it was actually privatization, encouraged by the Reform and Opening Policy, that altered the paradigms of the

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This paper examines how chiefs are viewed as persons wielding traditional authority in contemporary Pohnpei. According to Max Weber, tribal or feudal styles of political leadership or traditional authority could be replaced by rational forms of governance such as the modern nation-state and its attendant bureaucracies, what he labeled as rational authority. However, as enlightening as Weber's grand narrative of modernization has been, some forms of leadership and authority have not quite worked out in the ways he anticipated. Until 1990's anthropologists' major interest in traditional authority was to explain why persons having a particular office (such as kingly status or chiefly status) could retain legitimacy within a traditional society. In contrast, the anthropological emphasis in studies of traditional authority since the 1990s has been to reveal how chiefly positions (including kingly positions in the sense of the prior studies) should be articulated in a post-colonial state. In short, both studies have focused upon the social positions of the persons known as kings or chiefs. In the following, I suggest that two points cannot be explained in terms of social positions. First, because local participants may have different perspectives and attitudes toward the same events and objects, it is likely that according to each situation, some people regard the chief as authoritative, while others do not. Second, as suggested by George Marcus, a chief can have "two bodies," that is to say, there is more than one side to a chiefly person. From one perspective, the chief is a sacred being, separate from his people, and generally mystified in status. From another perspective, the chief is not a mystified being separated from his people, but is viewed as an exemplary person, respected and admired by his people. For those two reasons, chiefly authority is always ambiguous. The position is uncertain in terms of chiefly tradition and must be negotiated according to each interaction. Thus, it is necessary to situate the perception, understanding, or vision that people have of chiefly authority in each interaction. In order to consider the negotiations over traditional authority in situ, we need to look at the definition of interaction by those who are in the situation, as explored by Erving Goffman. In order to explain contemporary negotiations over traditional authority, this paper adopts Michel Gallon's approach to what he calls "framing and overflowing," adapted from Goffman's model of frame analysis. On the one hand, among those who interact with chiefs and other participants, any interaction is framed as appropriate to the situation. Yet at the same time, this act of framing brackets the outside world from the frame. This process defines the effectiveness of chiefly authority within a given exchange. On the other hand, however, activities framed in that way are always vulnerable, as framing does not actually abolish all the links with the outside world, which also inevitably relate to the contemporary political and economic order. Therefore, some outside elements may overflow from the bracketed outside world that they cannot frame. That leads to a process of constant negotiation and reframing among chiefs and other participants in the interaction. The 'framing and overflowing' approach helps to describe chiefly authority as a dynamic and ever ongoing process of change and exchange. The following case study focuses on some instances of this process in Pohnpei (which gained independence in 1986 as one state of the Federated States of Micronesia in 1986). It is largely acknowledged to be a chiefly society. Through the process of modernization and administration by foreign countries (Spain, German, Japan and the United States), Pohnpeian chieftainship has undergone some big changes. That is especially notable through the German

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Evans-Pritchard's (E-P) 1937 ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande has long been recognized as an anthropological landmark; however, its legacy was abridged in a version published in 1976, with an extensive focus on Chapter 4: "The notion of witchcraft explains unfortunate events" (M. Mills). This study aims to explore the hidden half-legacy of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by reviewing the unabridged Azande ethnography. Fortunately, the unabridged 1937 ethnography was translated from English to Japanese in 2001; E-P's works have been introduced to Japanese anthropology by Nobuhiro Nagashima since the 1960s. Unlike the modernity of witchcraft studies in post-colonial or globalizing Africa, this study does not offer a new theory on witchcraft, oracle and magic, but reveals the critical thinking aspect of E-P as "a historian with a philosophical bent" (W. James). The study addresses the following question: How did E-P's philosophical bent merge with history in the unabridged Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande? Data for the analysis was acquired by accumulating a series of lectures delivered by Michel Foucault in 1973 : Truth and Judicial Forms. Foucault presented a technique for the examination or search of truth, and posited that this technique is at the heart of power over life. In the lectures, Foucault suggested an analytical tool that might be called discourse analysis: It is not a philosophical concept, but a structure with a set of questions, answers and procedures, such as examinations, tests and investigations. He discussed the "birth of inquiry" in Greek thought, focusing on the discourse form of the Sophocles' Oedipus. He read it as a historical legal text to search for the truth using the "half-truth" discourse form, wherein a question should be answered with either a 'yes' or 'no.' Such discourse does not require examinations, tests and argumentation processes, which are needed to argue what the truth is or why it is the truth; namely, it does not directly address the 'why' and 'what' questions. In this kind of discourse, not only is discourse a regular set of linguistic facts, but also an ordered set of polemical and strategic facts. I would like to argue that in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, E-P adopted a technique for the search of truth similar to Foucault's half-truth discourse form. First, in Chapter 4, "the notion of witchcraft explains unfortunate events" clearly evidenced E-P's philosophical bent towards 'why' and 'how' questions when trying to understand the witchcraft beliefs of the Azande. It is common knowledge that Chapter 4 attracted the attention of Western philosophers such as Winch and Wilson. Furthermore, E-P's philosophical bent towards Western philosophy instigated debates on rationality. Second, to silence those emerging debates, E-P discontinued the usage of 'why' questions and employed only 'how' questions to conduct fieldwork on witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Therefore, E-P elucidated that those three represent Azande's social facts, connected in a triangle. He studied the Azande as a historian who desires to describe the sequence of historical events in detail. Comprehensively, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande became a prominent ethnography. Nonetheless, E-P's conclusion did not present a philosophical adventure such as the one observed in Chapter 4. Despite being a disadvantaged method for philosophical and anthropological theory, the 'how' approach to witchcraft, oracle and magic revealed the Azande style of discourse that stems from the benge poison oracle, which operates through the administration of strychnine to fowls and includes two tests:bambata sima

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The aim of this article is to examine how the Nuer people in post-independence South Sudan reinterpret their experiences through prophecies or the ku〓th (divinity) that supports the power of those prophecies. The Nuer prophecies, which have been handed down from generation to generation, are deeply related to the ways that many Nuer people grasp and cope with such new situations as civil war, development assistance, and national independence, as they live in various situations. Although most of the Nuer people do not know the entire prophecies, including elders, they are discovered and told among the people according to their personal interest. Previous studies on the relationship between religious figures and social movements in East African societies have focused on oral traditions and narratives about prophecies that can create moral communities among local people beyond regions and generations. Those studies try to identify some of the traditional elements, new idioms and articulations of these aspects of the narrative; however, the process of how local people come to realize that a certain prophet or a prophecy is "trustworthy" is not really clear. An investigation should be made of the reality of prophecies that may greatly influence contemporary conflicts, not only through researchers' analytical frameworks but also the view of local people who talk about prophecies. Evans-Pritchard (E-P) and Lienhardt illustrated the modes of people's experiences through a divinity that integrates political, physical and moral experiences in a single image, comparing them with modes of European thought. While referring to E-P's and Lienhardt's discussions, this paper explores how the Nuer people find their own experiences in the prophecies, focusing on three different situations: (1) the dialogues and narratives of the prophecies by Nuer people from different backgrounds, (2) practices related to prophetic events conducted in a church constructed for a past prophet, and (3) the movement of a prophet who has emerged in the current conflicts in South Sudan. Participant observation was conducted in a church constructed for the most prominent Nuer prophet, Ngundeng, who died in 1906. The powers of Ngundeng were revived through such various media as the "Bible" of Ngundeng, mobile phones that can record songs composed by him, and ethnographies written by earlier anthropologists. By using such media and practices borrowed from the Christian church, the people who gather at the Ngundeng church, for example, have tried to ascertain whether the mistreatment of Ngundeng by their ancestors in the past could bring misfortune to people in the current generation through the power of ku〓th. Their dialogues and narratives of past prophecies contain some plots and connection of the plots that cannot easily be understood through terms of causality, as the word "prophecy" implies what was prophesized and what happened. Lienhardt suggested the idea of images evoked by the configurations of experiences, which include what Europeans should distinguish as physical and moral experience in organic unity. Further, those images are complex, both separately and together, so even local people cannot easily distinguish them without the power of someone who is "together with the divinity," such as a diviner. By applying that idea, I illustrate how the Nuer people grasp those elements and distinguish their experiences from ku〓th in the prophetic behavior of Ngundeng and the prophetic events that they face. People who talk about the works of a prophet come to realize a new realm of experience that can support the powers of the prophecies and the prophet by discussing the existence of so-called "active subjects" that brought them to certain situations. During the civil war conflict in 2011, a man emerged who described himself as a prophet. He was

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In this paper, I reevaluate the thoughts of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt, whose works on the notion of spirit and divinity among the Nuer and Dinka are still worth reading today, and give useful insights to critique recent 'ontologicaP studies of animism. Rane Willerslev, in his studies of Northern Siberian animism, argues about the chain or hierarchical order of sacrifice substitutes among the Chukchi; in which reindeer does are substituted by-but are also more valuable than-reindeer bulls, which in turn are substituted by reindeer sausages and so on, with stones constituting the bottom of the order. That substitution seems to resemble that of Nuer sacrifice, in which oxen are substituted by cucumbers. However, the Chukchi logic analyzed by Willerslev differs from that of the Nuer as studied by Evans-Pritchard, in that the Chukchi logic may find a resemblance or contiguity between the victim and its substitute on the level of physicality. In addition, the soul is a form of the body, the continuity between which is emphasized by Willerslev. Evans-Pritchard, however, finds a similarity between the notions of the victim and its substitute, emphasizing the discontinuity between the notion and the physical, though such "ideationalism" is very different from so-called body-soul dualism. Like the Chukchi supreme God, the Nuer God is far away in the sky, but unlike the Chukchi God, which is described as "beyond contact," it intervenes in human affairs, and can be experienced directly by each Nuer, who also prays for and supplicates it. The Nuer God is thus very close to human beings, while being very remote. Tim Ingold's notion of meshwork in his "SPIDER" theory is applicable to an understanding of the paradoxical existence of God. The Nuer God can be regarded as an ideational 'spider' that spins unseen "immaterial meshes" that are also parts and extensions of God, or are God in themselves. The meshes are set up and spread through every aspect of Nuer experiences, and humans get possessed or develop diseases when caught in God's meshes. The particular points of the meshes (i.e., the aspects of their social life or experiences) where humans are caught determine the modalities of God (either the spirits of the above or below) that manifest themselves in possession or disease. The meshwork model thus well explains what Evans-Pritchard had in mind when he mentioned "refractions," saying that God is "both the one and the many." Meanwhile, Godfrey Lienhardt investigates-even further than Evans-Pritchard-the relation between powers or divinity (having adopted those words instead of "god" and "spirits"), on the one hand, and Dinka experiences on the other. He writes that divinities and powers must be regarded as the images of experiences and not as visual impressions, saying that they are rather conceptualizations of events or lived experiences. Divinities and powers as images configure the continuous flow of lived experiences as patterned constellations, so that humans can grasp and cope with them. Powers or divinities become repositories of "past events and experiences" that are "contingent on particular social and natural environment." Remembrances are brought to the Dinka from the outside through the advent of powers that manifest themselves in diseases and possession. The memories of experiences are not regarded as intrinsic and interior to the person remembering them, but as exteriorly acting on that person. The Dinka thus have no conception "which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of 'mind.'" The Dinka notion of the person does not necessarily predicate the body-mind dualism. Lienhardt was inspired by the work of Gilbert Ryle, who had criticized modern Western body-mind dualism as "the dogma of

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This paper aims to reevaluate and reexamine the program that Edward Evans-Pritchard (known as "E-P"to his colleagues) tried to complete within the history of anthropological thought. It also examines the inheritance from his intellectual legacy and methods, reconsidering them in the context of contemporary issues. Among E-P's programs and interests, demonstrated in his ethnographic books, articles, lectures, and private letters, the following aspects are particularly treated in this paper: (1) His continued attempt to clarify society as the entire field of human interests, and hence as the source of the selective principle that controls attention. (2) His insistence that anthropology was a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately one of philosophy and art, as it "interpreted" rather than "explained." (3) His consistent return to Montesquieu, whom he regarded as the original founder of modern anthropological thought, though E-P himself gradually developed an anti-sociological attitude and identified himself as "just an ethnographer." As already noted by Mary Douglas, E-P demanded an account of real lives in ordinary circumstances, rejecting misleading distinctions between "primitive" and "modern" in his book on the Azande. However, his intention was not necessarily understood by his successors. Even recent scholars, both in U.K. and elsewhere, who argued for the modernity of witchcraft during 1980s to 1990s, tried to show that witchcraft in Africa was not simply a practice of the "pre-modern" world but that it formed part of the modern world free of Western intellectualism. Their questions were derived from this prejudice: "Why do Africans still believe in witchcraft, though they were already civilized and modernized?" Opposed to such a prejudice, E-P tried to show that no one was primarily controlled by reason at any place or in any epoch. One may note again that he referred to Vilfledo Pareto's work when criticizing Levy-Bruhl's thesis that "savages are pre-logical in contrast to Europeans who are logical." E-P's profound philosophical skepticism concerning modern Western academic habits is also examined in the paper, though it is already known that he was also "a child of his era." His intellectual legacy and successors (especially Godfrey Lienhardt) continue to inspire us as profound commentaries on what anthropologists ought to describe and interpret about the languages and behavior of people they come into contact with, as well as on what questions they should ask in the field. They are also interesting and important critiques of modern Western intellectualism, representationism, language centrism, and dualism, as well as the subject-object and mind-body dichotomies. The style that Masuda and Nagashima referred to as the "school of intellectual history" is always to be remembered as one of the important characteristics of their academic practices. E-P's ethnographies on witchcraft among the Azande or on the Nuer religion appear at a glance to have renounced a consistent, reasonable interpretation. This paper notes that they instead represented a criticism of Western intellectualism and accountability, and still contain suggestions for non-Western scholars today. Moreover, E-P's empirical and humanistic fieldwork methods still give us suggestions for carrying out fruitful collaborative work between anthropologists and "natives," given the drastic changes in the ideal and physical circumstances for practicing anthropological fieldwork and writing ethnographies. E-P noted that his Azande book was written for the descendants of his Azande informants. It is not too difficult to find Azande in Africa and elsewhere who can read English texts of E-P and give comments and criticisms. We must sincerely think about how we

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