A quarter century has elapsed since the publication of Writing Culture, which described how to write about and envisage the "cultural other," and which continues to influence anthropologists greatly. But it is little known that one quarter century before the publication of that book, a sociocultural movement already existed in Japan describing how to face and write about the "other." This article aims to trace the steps of that sociocultural movement, known as "Circle Village," which posed various questions about the definition of the other and produced a wealth of monographs to answer them.

The Circle Village was established in 1958 under the initiative of two excellent writers/organizers, Gan Tanigawa and Eishin Ueno, both based in Nakama City in the Chikuho district of Fukuoka Prefecture, an area with many coal mines. In the fifteen years immediately after World War II, the mines developed quickly, attracting many workers, including intellectuals. Near the end of the 1950's, though, the area's prosperity started to wane, sparking the emergence of several social and cultural movements that welcomed the intervention of people from the outside. Those were the circumstances in which the Circle Village became established in the area.

It is well known that after World War II, so-called "circle" movements were launched throughout Japan to publish literary works and criticism. Of those, Circle Village was unique in that unlike other circles—which arose in one workplace or with one area as a base—it was formed with the aim of bringing together members of different circles from various parts of Kyushu, and solving the common problems that they confronted.

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A major characteristic of African countries since the 1980s has been a growing obsession with belonging and the questioning of conventional assumptions about nationality and citizenship almost everywhere. This is an obsession shared with countries elsewhere, from Europe to North Africa, Asia and South America. Everywhere in the 21st century, identity politics are increasingly important, alongside more exclusionary ideas of nationality and citizenship, as minority claims for greater cultural recognition and plurality are countered by majoritarian efforts （in the USA, Britain, France and most of the Western world, for example） to maintain the status quo, and, in some cases, turn the clock back on more cosmopolitan and inclusionary identities （as with BREXIT and Trump's Make-America-Great-Again campaign and policies） cultivated through a careful negotiation and navigation of histories of unequal mobilities and unequal encounters of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In Africa, obsession with exclusionary indicators of citizenship and belonging have meant that minority （especially ethnic, religious, migrant and the transnationally mobile, refugees and others displaced by conflicts and natural disasters） clamours for recognition and representation are countered by greater and sometimes aggressive reaffirmation （in South Africa, for example） of age-old exclusions informed by colonial registers of inequalities amongst the subjected. This development is paralleled by increased awareness and distinction between 'locals' and 'foreigners', with an emphasis on opportunities and economic entitlements. Apart from official measures to restrict further access to citizenship by foreigners, public attitudes towards foreigners are hardening generally. Customary policies of inclusion by taking the outside in as means of taking the inside out – i.e. opening the society up to minorities and foreigners – is under pressure from the politics of entitlement to the benefits of economic growth in an era of accelerated flows of capital and migrants.

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It is often said that the Western modern prototype of the human is an autonomous rational one, based on such conceptions as human rights, state sovereignty, and the progress of human history. But the modern equation of the conceptions of human and citizen is said to have resulted in the deprivation of citizenship from those who were regarded as not autonomous or rational enough.

Since the 1980's, international relations（IR） scholars have argued that IR studies need to be more humancentric and aware of the logic of inclusion and exclusion embedded in the modern conceptions of humanity, citizenship, and nation-states. They have called for the deepening of the referent object of security from the state to the individual, and broadening the notion of security to include such issues as repression, poverty, environmental degradation, gender injustice, and social exclusion. Their argument contributed to the articulation of the famous term "human security." At the same time, such IR scholars have expected global civil society to overcome the limitations of the Western, modern, and state-based conception of citizenship, to transcend state sovereignty by forming universal norms from the bottom up, and to contribute to the realization of human-centered cosmopolitan ethics, thereby to serve for human security.

The main purpose of this article is to reconsider the conceptions of the human and citizenship in the era of global civil society and human security. The article first reviews existing literature on the conceptions of human and citizenship in this era, introducing two schools of thought. The first school claims that the idea of the human in "human security" is the same as the modern liberal prototype of an autonomous rational subject, and therefore carries with it the same old problem of the modern conception of citizenship. The second school argues that the human security approach entails the erosion of the classical conceptualization of the citizen as an autonomous rational subject.

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This paper examines the question of "Can women dance?" relating it to the sexual behavior and practices of bar girls in Kampala, Uganda. To explore that question more theoretically, two kinds of citizenship are considered: （1） women's social status and their marginality in the urban settings of Africa, and （2） the theme of subjectivity and agency, to be discussed with reference to Gayatri C. Spivak and Judith Butler. As case studies, this paper presents an ethnographic descriptions of bar girls' activities in nightclubs in Kabalagara, Kampala—the bulk of research for which was done in 2016 and 2017—though the basic fieldwork on citizenship in Uganda had been conducted since 2006.

The first kind of citizenship in African urban settings is the familial （and inclusive） one, which basically covers women's security and life insurance, in which women play the role of wives, daughters and mothers serving as primary pillars of their families. In Uganda, such familial citizenship is linked deeply to clan lineage systems. In poor circumstances, such as in the suburbs and slums of Kampala, it may force girls—particularly those who have dropped out of primary school—to work for the family under paternal control. The distinction between being married and single also matters for women insofar as their economic independence is concerned. Although married women are quite relational in their status, they do become more stable economically by running personal businesses at local markets. Single and divorced women, on the other hand, generally find it difficult to maintain their own businesses as they do not have the financial support of a husband.

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This paper discusses a type of citizenship that prevails within the ritual space shared by the deceased and the living among the Alur people. Although they were divided into people living in the West Nile region in Uganda and those inhabiting the northeast end of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the colonial era, the Alur used to perform the ritual of myel agwara (which means the dance of long flutes) some years after a person's death.

According to Alur belief, when a person dies, he or she becomes a tipo (spirit) and sometimes protects and sometimes challenges the bereaved before transitioning to the ancestral world. Alur people respectfully maintain the abila and jok, which are small shrine-like structures made of wood and grass, at home to communicate with their ancestors through the tipo of the father and grandfather. Although the practices related to communications with the tipo have been strongly rejected by the Christian church, the spiritual world continues to lie snugly against the real world.

The myel agwara is the final mourning ritual, and it is a three-night ceremony that includes music and dance, which are planned by the offspring of the deceased and other members of the clan. According to the Alur, myel agwara is performed only through the spiritual power of ambaya, which is a spiritual item made of the skin of a small animal and includes a whistle and some herbs, and is controlled by the power of kajagi, which is a long pole built at the centre of the ritual place. The ritual has not been performed in Uganda since 1987, because Uganda was in political turmoil during the 1970s and 1980s and people's lives were affected. I first discussed the myel agwara ritual with people of the Unu lineage of the Pamora clan in 2009, and we finally performed a selewa, which is a ritual similar to myel agwara, between 2 and 4 March 2012, despite encountering many difficulties such as a shortage of funds and agawara.

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Civic republicanism, which dates to Aristotle, and social contract theory are two concepts that have informed discourse surrounding freedom, citizenship and politics in liberal democracies. Both, however, have been substantially dependent on the exclusion of several groups, to the extent that citizenship used to take a form that disenfranchised slaves, women, and imperial subjects. The legacy of that may be discerned in the modern nation-state system, with the uneven distribution, for example, of citizenship benefits across various gradations, from "full" to "second-class" citizenship. While universal equality is an ideal by-product of official citizenship, the experiential realities of citizenship vary according to regional and historical contexts.

The material examined in this paper was obtained from field research conducted in a pastoral society composed of so-called second-class citizens who have been denied agency by the linear modernization theory of the nation-state from the colonial era to the postcolonial period. Against the backdrop of the decentralization of state power following globalization, the gaze of the West was directed toward the periphery of Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan, and forced disarmament and sedentary development policy that were heavily promoted in cooperation with the central government. Under such circumstances, how have the pastoral Dodoth in the Karamoja region of Uganda resisted the suppressive policy of the government against nomadism and the practices of ethnic citizenship? The Ugandan government, which has adopted a policy opposed to subsistence-pastoralism in pursuit of a national isomorphism of politics, economics, culture and society, has regularly raided the livestock of pastoralists living in the Karamoja area, making it impossible for the ethnic community to claim citizenship. The analytic focus of this paper, therefore, is on the way in which those pastoralists have embodied the practice of ethnic citizenship in defense of their habitat and as a means of resisting the dominant order, bypassing the normative idea of citizenship.

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This paper argues the effectiveness of a strategy by President Museveni's campaign for reelection to conduct a series of government re-burials of or commemorative ceremonies for great men with West Nilotic origin who had been murdered by then-President Idi Amin. The attempt is to describe the attitude of the Western Nilotic peoples in Uganda towards a series of events, and to confirm how individuals with voting rights are inseparably connected to the identity and sentiments of their ethnic group. The re-burials clearly show that modern presidential elections in Uganda have an emotional aspect as well as a civic one. The series of events, and the strategic effectiveness displayed, force us to rethink the universality of the idea of the concept of "citizenship." That concept—as with all concepts of Western origin believed to be universal—has been interpreted and appropriated reasonably within an autochthonous cosmogony, and might be seen to be interwoven with autochthonous concepts in Africa and other areas after being imported from the West.

Because of the series of events, the people of Western Nilotic origin, or at least those who can assert to have some connection, supported President Museveni as he honored the great dead men of their ethnicity. This time, the reburial was an epoch-making strategy to address the issue, and even successfully managed to integrate people based on their ethnicity, even though the late Oboth-Ofumbi was not especially beloved by all his neighbors. Another issue was the role of religious and spiritual dimensions in peopleʼs voting behavior. The government's honoring of the dead positively affected people in neighboring communities. It can be said that the dead thus demonstrated agency to the living, having intervened in the actions of the living. In a sense, they—ontologically, the dead—shared a social space with the living in terms of personhood, which, for people of Western Nilotic origin, inevitably includes those who have already died. A consideration of the state of the dead can thus greatly influence their voting behavior.

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