The aim of this paper is to clarify how so-called traditional authorities get involved in land disputes, by using cases of high court judgments and actual removal, focusing on pastoral conflict between the Himba and Herero in northwest Namibia.

In African countries since the 1990's, land reforms have been carried out to stabilize the rights of land users, with movements to clarify the rights to customary places that had been previously unclear. Previous studies have pointed out that traditional authorities established during the colonial-rule period have retained their influence, as their authority concerning land is allowed by national law. Especially in the countries of Southern Africa, the experience of the apartheid-era indirect rule policy and the subsequent integration of the homelands have been discussed in terms of their relationship with democracy. Looking at pastoral society, land restructuring in East Africa was carried out by introducing a ranching system and creating wildlife protection areas. Classification of the land based on principles that differed from the past caused armed conflict between pastoralists, and the external power became stronger than that of the traditional authorities who had held the power internally.

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In a previous study, the author argued that the core character of magic was not its analogical inferences but the actualization of thoughts. As cognitive science developed, it was revealed that analogical inference is not limited within "magic," but a universal cognitive function. Therefore, a new theory of magic became necessary to understand the character of the intellectual world of magic. To establish the new theory, the author introduced the idea of the "actualization of thoughts." In this paper, by deepening the idea of actualization of thoughts, the author attempts to solve the problem of the definition of the modern concept of magic, putting forward a new definition of it. The author asserts here that the core character of the modern concept of magic is its inclusiveness, and that the inclusiveness caused by "magic" denotes an inference actualized by religious cognition.

Recent arguments on the concept of magic are confusing. While some scholars assert that the modern concept of magic should be abolished, others suggest that it should still be maintained. In the author's view, that inconsistency derives from those scholars' lack of understanding of the inclusiveness of the modern concept of magic. While they attempt to introduce alternative concepts to magic, they ignore the fact that the modern concept of magic has historically developed as an inclusive concept. The core character of the modern concept of magic is its inclusiveness, and its modernity rests on that point.

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This paper discusses conflicts between two technological modes— infrastructure and boundary objects— and their symbolic values, through an analysis of a new technology for composting organic waste. The technology was invented by a Japanese engineer participating in a project for international cooperation that was conducted by a local government from Japan in Surabaya City, located in east Java in Indonesia. In recent years, the concept of infrastructure has attracted many sociocultural anthropologists working in the field of non-Western technological systems, including roads, water supply, sewers, and electricity. The anthropological usage of the word "infrastructure," however, is so ambiguous that it has come to mean a variety of things since first appearing in the United States in the 1980's. This paper particularly focuses on Susan Leigh Star's discussions of infrastructure.

Star (1954-2010) argued that infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept that becomes real infrastructure in relation to organized practices. Thus, she said, we should not ask "what" infrastructure is but "when" it is. Through the study of a database system for worm biologists, she defined infrastructure as having several properties, indicating the direct influence she received from the theories of the communities of practice and symbolic interactionism. Her most famous concept—"boundary objects"—was also influenced by both theories, so she conceptualized infrastructure as a standardized boundary object, generated from cooperative networking, without the consensus of the actors. This paper, however, argues that there is quite a difference between those modes of existence of technology. Star conceptualized that infrastructure as a certain type of boundary object, but simultaneously introduced the assumption that the cooperative network automatically endures for a long time. Hence, her concept needs to be re-analyzed critically. The analysis of a kind of waste-management technology known as "T composting" suggests a difference between the two modes.

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Dominant development paradigms have viewed infrastructure development as a prerequisite for attaining modernity. As previous studies have indicated, the construction of infrastructure is not based solely on functional improvement or economic rationality. In many developing countries, given their spectacular materiality, infrastructure serves as a symbol of a successful process of modernization. Such a process can currently be witnessed in Vientiane, the capital of the Lao People's Democratic Republic （Lao PDR）. Approaches that focus on the symbolic capacities of infrastructure, and the ability of infrastructure to operate in the uncanny registers of fetish, or a failed or successful spectacle, are crucial for transcending the view that the essence of infrastructure is ultimately technological. More specifically, they are invaluable in making sense of the mode of infrastructural development in Vientiane.

Since the Lao government began viewing infrastructure as the country's key sector of development, Vientiane has become full of such development projects. In preparation for the ASEAN Summit in 2004， the appearance of the city center, which lies along the Mekong River, drastically changed. The transformation was so intense that many scholars refer to that year as a "turning point." However, many aspects of those projects, including their technical specifications and more generally their priorities, have become subjects of debate and controversy among expatriates, especially those who work with international organizations and developmental consultancies. What leads to such denunciations is that in the unseen areas, where most people in Vientiane live, unpaved dirt roads remain and changes which happened as part of the ASEAN Summit preparation could hardly be seen. Thus, many expatriates say that while Vientiane's material infrastructure seems modern, it is a mere "appearance," hence faux modernity. Projects simply imitate, or "mimic" what Lao officials imagine to be modern, but really aren't so.

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The Khumbu region, the northern part of the Solukhumbu District of Nepal located on the southern foothills of Mt. Everest, is a famous mountain tourism area. More than thirty thousand foreign tourists visit this Sherpa residential area yearly, guided in their treks and climbs by "Sherpa" (trekking industry workers including Sherpa and other ethnic groups) as they walk along the steep mountain trails. In this rugged mountainous region, what is a road is not so obvious. Mountain trails often disappear because of such weather conditions as heavy rain and snow, and reappear as people or animals move on them. Also, people refer to such trails as bāto ("roads") in the same way that they do motorways in the lower regions or fixed ropes near the summit of a high mountain. The purpose of the author's paper is to analyze these mountain "roads" from the viewpoint of infrastructure.

Chapter 1 presents the focus and outline of the paper. Chapter 2 then provides a brief review and critique of the anthropological studies on infrastructure and roads. In the history of anthropology, roads are usually regarded only as a stage on which people conduct important activities, such as movement, trade or war. Though some scholars have focused on newly-constructed motorways, analyzing their symbolic value and effects on communities, the road itself has never been regarded as a subject of study. From the early 2000's, the anthropological study of infrastructure has become an active field of research. Infrastructure is considered in general to be a huge network constructed by modern society; anthropological studies have stressed how the infrastructure that supports our self-evident everyday world becomes invisible as it works. Following that same current, some studies treat roads as key "actors" that symmetrically interact with people and societies, but anthropological literature on roads still has almost exclusively focused on motorways. Thus, the human bodies walking on the roads were never considered as part of them, as will be discussed later. Instead, the notions of infrastructure and roads have been deemed universal, and applied to many societies as such.

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This paper explores discourses of the future that emerged in Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 nuclear meltdown. The future is everywhere in post-disaster Fukushima. That does not mean that Fukushima necessarily has the positive future so often depicted in such discourses, nor does it mean that it has no future at all. But the symbolized futurity is vivid in the broken landscape. More precisely, the future itself appears everywhere as a major keyword in disaster reconstruction projects. Often supported by the government's disaster reconstruction budgets, many infrastructural and institutional projects—such as public schools, research centers, recovery funds, NPOs, alternative energy projects, and so forth—are now named after the future. Among these various "futures" that have emerged in post-disaster Fukushima, this paper focuses on a floating offshore wind turbine named "Fukushima Future."

In recent years, a number of anthropologists have emphasized the need to make the future itself the object of study. Thanks to their contributions, the anthropological tradition seems to be changing, with many scholars engaged in intriguing ethnographic research about the future. Such studies includes research on finance, religion, development, and also the Anthropocene. In fact, as they demonstrate, the future has been omnipresent, and its different forms are frequently reproduced within the framework of "futurism."

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A "snow-flowing gutter" is a system for treating snow that is unique to Japan, in which roadside gutters, installed for river water or treated sewage, are used to transport snow dumped into it away to a river. Snow shoveled off from walkways or roadways and piled onto the roadside needs to be manually dumped into the gutters by residents for it to be continually treated.

The snow-flowing gutter is thus a type of social infrastructure necessary for people's daily lives, requiring human labor and the cooperation of road administrators to be effectively used. It differs from other snow-treatment methods insofar as the infrastructure calls for residents to cooperate in operating the system, as it can function only when the whole community uses it. Cold, snowy weather has historically consolidated relations among residents using the facility. Now, however, such communities face the problems of aging and the degradation of the snow-flowing gutters, creating a crisis in the snow-treatment system.

From an anthropological standpoint, the cooperation of the community required to use the gutters can be treated as an issue of development anthropology.

Though the cooperation by the community members is overwhelmingly accepted as a concept supporting bloated municipal services, development anthropology actively discusses the issue in two ways: either affirmatively by those trying to find new meaning in its concept, or negatively by those concerned about its adverse effects on regional development.

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Ong's seminal book Orality and Literacy has deeply influenced cultural anthropology and other cultural studies in Japan, though some of the works citing his book did not place such a high value on the academic context and the severe criticism on his and his colleagues' works. This review introduces the context of Orality and Literacy, the development of a research field called "New Literacy Studies," and suggests a vision for future orality studies.

From the outset, research on orality and literacy has been an interdisciplinary topic. Parry and Lord were two of the earliest scholars who noticed a distinct linguistic style in oral tradition. Influenced by their research, Havelock argued that there was a great transition from oral to literate culture in ancient Greece during the time of Plato, whose theory of ideas, he said, was the outcome of 'literate culture.' While that research focused on Western culture, Goody expanded its focus to "primitive" non-literate cultures, insisting on the contrastive nature between orality and literacy. A similar discussion was also seen in research on intercultural comparative psychology by Greenfield and Olson. Of course, McLuhan's media study also exerted a prevailing influence on the topic. Ong's Orality and Literacy can be seen as one of the clearest summaries of the various works on orality and literacy, with some vision to further studies of electronic media.

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