This paper explores some of the ways in which tribal people have recognized state power in their world and taken an attitude toward it. In his book, The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott adequately describes the historical process of the formulation of tribal people in mainland Southeast Asia, focusing on their attempts to evade state control—namely, as “an anarchist history.” However, he does not mention the everyday forms of individual evasions that may have occurred in such tribal societies. In addition, he does not really scrutinize their ambivalent attitudes toward state power: while they have evaded state control, they may have actively engaged with the state and appeared to accept state power in the forms of a tributary relationship in the past and the negotiation of development support at present. How have they evaded state control at the level of their everyday lives, and what has it yielded about in relation to the position of their tribe in the state hierarchical system? Also, how do they recognize state power with such an ambivalent attitude? Describing practices and thoughts among the Suku Asli, post-foragers living on the eastern coast of Sumatra, I try to explore their attitudes toward state hierarchical power and grasp their cultural image.

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This paper aims to clarify the ethnic perceptions of Japanese wives married to Zainichi Koreans (Koreans permanently living in Japan), and subsequently considers the role of the intimate realm in the change of their perception. Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and the turmoil that lasted during the decade following liberation in 1945 caused a mass emigration of Koreans to Japan. In this paper, I use the term “Zainichi Korean” to refer to Koreans who immigrated to Japan during that period, as well as to their descendants. The notion that ethnic groups are socially constructed is widely shared, and many studies have argued why that remarkably socially constructed category bears a reality to people. Among others, ethnic studies that rely on a cognitive perspective have linked several different perspectives on the subject. They have clarified how human cognition and people’s interaction, as well as authoritative institutions, such as the 民族認識の変容における親密圏の役割 601 state and media, interrelate with each other to constitute an ethnic reality. Referring to that perspective, I define “ethnic perception” as “the frame of perception used to interpret an event or to interact with others by relating them to social categories based on origin such as race, state, or ethnicity.” According to that cognitive perspective, ethnic reality is constructed when people use that frame of perception within interactions or for the interpretation of an event. However, because that frame is constituted by a collective knowledge socially shared through media representation, state policy, and education, change in the frame is generated by changes in propaganda or representations of ethnicity. In that way, the cognitive perspective presupposes that everyday interaction is not a strong foundation to change ethnic perception. That presupposition is also shared by studies about the intimate realm of Zainichi Koreans. Recently, several studies have pointed out that the public realm newly organized by Zainichi Koreans is transforming ethnic norms shared within their own community as well as in Japanese society. However, studies about their intimate realm presuppose that the ethnic perception in the intimate realm depends on that of the public realm, by pointing out that “changes with the times” allow the diversity of the perception in the intimate realm. On the other hand, Junichi Saito proposes that the intimate realm can be political, transforming the existing order in society. Hannah Arendt claims that only the public realm enables the political action of human beings by generating “the space of appearance.” However, Saito insists that the intimate realm also enables political action, arguing that the intimate realm cannot be separated from physical experience. Therefore, one is inevitably exposed to other people’s needs or difficulties, which generates empathy and acceptance by others. That induces “the space of appearance,” and the intimate realm becomes a foundation to ght against social constraint and the existing social order. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

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Since the 17th century, historians and philosophers of science have thoroughly documented the powerful influence of public scientific experiments and how they have been mediating between human a airs and the production and management of things in Europe. Anthropologists and sociologists, on the other hand, added important new insights to this line of research by exploring the ways experimentation creates its own worlds, collectives and divisions. Authors who highlight the inclusion of lay people and values in the conduct of scientific research often regard this constellation as a new regime of knowledge production that goes beyond the laboratory. My aim in this paper is to direct such important epistemological insights about knowing nature back to the issue of experimentation, which, as I will argue, is both a method and the world that is being shaped. I will explore how Japanese medicines and Hungarian bodies become enmeshed in each other through care, experiment, and comparison in a way that I term the “worlding of the metabolism.” Following anthropologist Mei Zhan, I contend that the metabolic body “needs to be ‘worlded’—made visible and thinkable rather than concealed and ‘banished to the earth’—through cultural analysis and as cultural analysis.” I use metabolic circuits here as a metaphor not of our interconnected world but rather through the conduct of an ethnographic experiment. The ethnographic focus of the article is DRC, a small clinical trial center in western Hungary. Through a unique collaboration with family doctors within a 70-km radius of the center, the DRC can provide a large pool of patients with otherwise limited access to specialized treatment of chronic conditions such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, making it an ideal location for outcome studies that compare the effectiveness of two different therapies. Among the many difficulties of conducting long-term outcome studies that focus on chronic diseases, one of the most perplexing is that of coordinating the strict methodological imperatives of clinical research with the more fluid reality of outpatient care that participants receive at their family doctors. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

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The development of the drugs Artemisinin and Ivermectin won their creators the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Although it is significant that the Nobel Foundation awarded the prize to contributions in the field of global health, the event strengthened the pervading view of pharmaceuticals as magic bullets. The development of new pharmaceuticals, however, does not lead straightforwardly to the eradication of infectious disease. There are many difficulties in distributing and administering pharmaceuticals “correctly.” This paper elucidates the practicalities of dispensing pharmaceuticals by describing how health workers engage in the mass Ivermectin administration program and the vaccination of infants in southern Ghana. Previous studies in the anthropology of pharmaceuticals have insisted that the many informal pharmaceutical vendors in sub-Saharan Africa play a crucial role in the distribution of pharmaceuticals. However, informal pharmaceutical distributors are relatively rare in Ghana, while licensed chemical sellers are popular, especially in rural areas. Chemical sellers are unique pharmaceutical distributors, as they are licensed by the government, yet have no formal education in the field of biomedicine. People living in rural areas mainly obtain pharmaceuticals through such private chemical sellers and public health centers. Although chemical sellers contribute to the expanding availability of pharmaceuticals, they cannot substitute for health centers. One reason is that chemical sellers do not provide all the same types of pharmaceuticals as do health centers. In particular, Ivermectin and the vaccines that this article focuses on are only available in health centers. More importantly, there are differences in how chemical sellers and health centers treat pharmaceuticals. It should be emphasized that in health centers, the distribution of pharmaceuticals is recorded precisely, and nurses in health centers pay careful attention to the timing of administration. That record keeping is not only for avoiding human error but also for locating pharmaceuticals in time. According to the pharmaceutical and medical sciences, it is vital to take pharmaceuticals at regular intervals. The timing also depends on the character of the relationships between the drugs’ active ingredients and their target disease agents. This paper proposes that the anthropology of pharmaceuticals in sub-Saharan Africa ought to explore how pharmaceuticals are administered according to an accurate time schedule, using the concept of a chemical milieu, following Foucault’s notions of dispositive and milieu. This study focuses on town “A” in the western part of Ghana’s Eastern Region, where I stayed intermittently from 2005 to 2016 for a total of three years. Approximately 2,500 people over the age of eighteen live in “A,” the main products of which are cacao, oranges, palm, and timber. Town “A” has five chemical sellers and one health center, but no hospitals or pharmacies. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

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This article examines how indifference towards suffering associated with illness has become increasingly prevalent, as well as how initiatives of engagement with people who need care have been systematically dissolved, in contemporary Ethiopian society under the strategy to eliminate the HIV epidemic through universal treatment. The “treatment as prevention” strategy is the key framework of contemporary HIV intervention based on the theory of infectious disease epidemiology, which aims to end the global epidemic of HIV by offering access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) to everyone, including those living on the African continent. The strategy is the remarkable culmination of accumulated public health knowledge that envisages effective control of the epidemic, combined with civil justice that demands treatment for all. However, this article argues that apathy towards the suffering of some HIV-positive people who have failed to re-establish their lives has become prevalent in contemporary Ethiopia. It also argues that the scope of the “treatment as prevention” strategy fails to capture the precariousness of the lives of people affected by the disease. This article describes some of the salient features of the “treatment as prevention” strategy and their effect on the experiences of some Ethiopians living with HIV using the concept of therapeutic citizenship as a framework. Therapeutic citizenship is defined as the system of claims and ethical projects concerning the use of biomedical knowledge and techniques. It may refer to the associations and networks of HIV-positive people who claim their right to access to ARVs. However, at the same time, it also refers to a biopolitical form of governance that concerns itself with technologies for controlling the risk of infectious diseases. The “treatment as prevention” strategy is a form of risk governance that involves controlling populations in an HIV epidemic. What is remarkable about the strategy is that it “bypasses” the moral and behavioral aspects of personal life by dealing with populations rather than individuals. However, that feature has a dual effect on the individual experience of the HIV epidemic. At the same time, it can also be regarded as a “liberal” project, that is, one that is less concerned about individual (sexual and other) behaviors and the moral issues attached to them. Nevertheless, it also appears indifferent to personal suffering and the precariousness of people’s lives disrupted by the illness. Ethiopia’s health system, which provides ARVs free of charge to its HIV-positive citizens, can be considered the embodiment of the “treatment as prevention” strategy. The Ethiopian government and the networking body that represents HIV-positive people in the country both receive considerable support from international sources, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In Ethiopia, the promotion of group activities to facilitate medication adherence has been associated with the half of existing activities to provide more personalized care for individuals and their families affected by the virus. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

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This paper describes how de-pharmaceuticalization emerged among patients with atopic dermatitis in Tokyo. It is regarded as an example of a movement of biological citizenship. Topical steroids are used as the rst line of therapy of standard treatment for atopic dermatitis. However, since around the 1990’s, after a TV program broadcast the side-effects of steroids, some patients began to fear them and stopped using them. Some doctors observed such patients, and found that their symptoms recovered naturally in a few months or years after the withdrawal symptoms abated. Based on such experiences, some doctors started to develop steroid withdrawal treatment, which aims to cure symptoms by discontinuing the use of steroids. The treatment is oriented toward de-pharmaceuticalization, while standard treatment is oriented toward pharmaceuticalization. Thus, the two treatments stand in opposition to each other, and patients are torn between them. From the perspective of standard treatment, de-pharmaceuticalization occurs because patients have the wrong idea about steroids, so if the right information is given to them, the problem will be fixed. However, was de-pharmaceuticalization really caused by patients having ‘wrong’ ideas? Even though de-pharmaceuticalization seems wrong from the perspective of standard treatment, how do patients actually experience and understand it? Taking pharmaceuticals or withdrawing from them has a broader meaning than merely being affected by substances on a chemical level. Pharmaceuticalization and de-pharmaceuticalization are also processes of self-construction on a biosocial level. Withdrawal from pharmaceuticals affects patients’ perception, influencing their understanding toward medicine and the process of decision-making regarding their treatment. The outcome of such decisions affects their body and understanding toward medicine.

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This article aims to show what dance anthropology is and how it has appeared. Through that, it aims to open a space in which many anthropologists involved in the anthropological study of dance in Japan can share important related literature with each other.

The subject of dance has long been very familiar to anthropology. The phenomena of dance can be seen all over the world, with the category of dance anthropology first appearing in Western academia in the 1960’s. Dance anthropology is a branch of the anthropological studies of dance that positions dance in a sociocultural context. It originated as a separate category with the American dance ethnologist, Gertrude Kurath.

Among various kinds of dance research taking place out of anthropological interest, dance anthropologists have tackled such questions as ‘what is dance?’, ‘what are people doing when they dance?’, and ‘how can we capture the process of dance happening right now?’.

Dance anthropology can be described as a field of dance research based on all the discussions and debates occurring since the time of Kurath, combining a culturally relativistic view of dance with a process-centered approach.

Dance anthropologists currently conduct research on dance around the world using the Study Group on Ethnochoreology of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) as well as the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) as their bases.

A noteworthy feature since the 1990’s has been the successive publication of several treatises on dance using ethnographic methodology. They are often described as “dance ethnography journals.”

According to Theresa Buckland, a leading dance scholar, dance has gradually emerged from several disciplines: anthropology, sociology, folklore studies, performance studies and cultural studies. With the utilization of ethnographic methodology by dance scholars trained in each of those disciplines, key concepts of participatory- oriented methodology, such as ‘reflexivity’ and ‘embodied knowledge,’ have become more commonly used in dance studies than previously. For instance, Yasuko Endo, a leading Japanese dance scholar, has introduced Western dance anthropology to Japanese dance research. Since the 1980’s, she has worked with Jiryo Miyao, a theater scholar, to introduce those themes.

Meanwhile, the efforts by ethnomusicologists to examine dance within music studies must also not be forgotten. In recent years, they have tended to focus on dance as an integral aspect of music more than they used to.

Although few anthropologists in Japan know about the academic category of dance anthropology, it will become increasingly important for them to follow discussions in dance anthropology and participate actively in them.

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