This article is a succession of my paper published in Annual Report of Social Anthropology Vol.45, and is part of a series of studies that, from the anthropological standpoint, fundamentally criticize the trend of neo-liberalism that prevails in contemporary society. As G. Agamben points out, the present society where bio-politics is practiced is in the process of "normalization of exception state" in the form of proxy democracy based on information technology and statistics. In fact, majority of the people around the world live in the society where they are not only disparate but rather abandoned such as a "homo-sacer" state. Over the past two decades research of my "Street Anthropology" has undoubtedly declared a standpoint from the side of the oppressed victim who suffer from those post-modern predicaments. The research has focused upon the far more profound history of people who are considered as "the defeated" in W. Benjamin's sense which tends to be hidden by the progress-oriented shallow view of "the victorious history" from the neo-liberalist standpoint. Thus, the research aims at building a place for hope and relief by discovering and learning the true "history of the defeated" with the viewpoint from the bottom. Therefore, I, as a person who share the same social space, have provided huge importance to the socially marginalized people who live at "street-edge" and have paid strong attention to how they survive and make their home on street-edge.

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The purpose of the present study is to explore a new direction for the anthropology of religious conversion, based on the examination of Christian narratives among the Duruma, a people who inhabit in the coastal areas of Kenya. Among Duruma Christians, while devil worshippers are said to interrupt the activities of Christian churches, possessive spirits have acquired the character of an enemy of God. Though it apparently seems to be a consequence of syncretism between Christianity and traditional religion among the Duruma, it is difficult to find the contrast between world religion and traditional religion, as well as some Christian connotations of the concepts of conversion and religion, in the folk terms and testimonies. Given this situation, this study proposes to describe the lifeworld which consists of spiritual insecurity, instead of tracing the process of syncretism, as a task for the anthropology of religious conversion.

Studies in cognitive anthropology address the difficult problems of how to examine knowledge that is not expressed explicitly, how to identify those to whom folk knowledge is indigenous, and the question of whether we are really able to understand others. The anthropology of interaction approach offers a promising solution to these problems. However, it has not sufficiently examined how gesture and other semiotic resources distributed in the environment are used for organizing wider interactions. This paper examines the wayfinding practices of the Gǀui/Gǁana, two closely-related groups of the San. It is focused on indexicality in the uses of proximal and distal demonstratives, as well as those of deictic and depicting gestures, while the Gǀui/Gǁana move in the bush and hunt in dry valleys. This paper discusses the process by which the Gǀui/Gǁana deepen their engagement with the environment through involving various people in a number of culturally distinctive social situations.

This paper aims at analyzing the expression of Khap Samneua with the semiotic communication theory of Michael Silverstein, Koyama's event model, and Ethnopoetics to illuminate how Khap Samneua is embedded in the situation and context. In this paper, a performance of Khap Samneua at a night of merit-sending ritual in 2013 is analyzed. The sequence of performance can be categorized into "dialogue about ritual," "Khap too nyee (mocked flirting duet)," and "celebration to listeners who left a tip in a cup." In the sequence, singers manipulate its indexical/symbolic expressions to put their performance properly between real and ideal context and shift their communication structure. Through semiotic analysis, it is revealed that the practice is based on the interpretation framework which a constant sound indexes, singers sound many voices in their duet singing with changing footing, and connect symbolic world and empirical world with indexical textualization and contextualization by using poetic expressions.

This paper aims to integrate the linguistic anthropological perspective into the recent "ontological turn" in sociocultural anthropology. First, the paper discusses Roman Jakobson's schematization on "poetic language," which was further developed by Michael Silverstein through his semiotic theorization on ritual as indexical icon or "diagram." Second, the paper examines the process of colonial time documentation and its diagramatization of social groups in Fiji, through which the category of itaukei ni vanua (people of the land) was foregrounded among Fijians along with their repetitive acts of visiting abandoned ancestral sites and engaging in ritual speech to glorify their mana. Third, the paper recognizes the conceptual similarity of "poetic function" with Roy Wagner's insight of "figure-ground reversal", which later became the basis of Marilyn Strathern's work on Melanesian personhood, and thus illustrates that such ontological turn in Oceania is also semiotically comprehensible as a shift in language use. In this way, building on the linguistic anthropological viewpoint, the paper tries to identify a way of cultural description after the ontological turn.

This paper addresses the role of language in missionary activities and their impact on local societies in the aftermath of Christianization. In the first section, articulating linguistic anthropological perspectives on indexicality and metapragmatics, I reframe missionary activities as attempts to implant certain patterns of language use considered to embody Christianity among non-Christian people, which often result in changes in local verbal behaviors. The second section introduces the ethnographic outline of the case study: Christianization of the indigenous population in the South American Jesuit missions during 17-18th centuries. The third section details the "genderlect" of native Chiquito language, which consists of male and female varieties, and explains how the Jesuits metapragmatically conceptualized and differentiated their usages in missionary activities. The fourth section discusses the consequences of the aforementioned transformation of indexical meanings of genderlect, with a particular focus on two different contemporary speeches in Chiquito language: sermón and canto. I demonstrate how the difference in the uses of varieties in sermón and canto reflexively indexes the "Christian" nature of each speech.

This paper, based on a longitudinal research at a Japanese junior high school, analyzes how Japanese girls wove non-traditional metapragmatic interpretations and indexicalities about their gender-crossing first-person pronouns and how these girls shifted traditional gendered language ideologies at school. Based on post-structuralist theories, which help us analyze language as being constructed moment to moment in a specific context, this paper examines how girls severed the taken-for-granted indexical connection between female and feminine language and created gender independent indexicalities, through daily activities of non-traditional metapragmatic meaning making. The detailed descriptions of how gakkyuu-houkai (collapse of classrooms) proceeded through linguistic and bodily power negotiations between girls and their teacher revealed a shift in the traditional gendered language ideologies in the calssroom. This example shows that linguistic anthropological concepts provide an excellent tool to understand the interactions of social structure and agency, and macro and micro.