The straightforward expressions that compose magical acts have made anthropologists question how two completely different categories can be combined. This paper reinterprets magical acts reported in Papua New Guinean ethnography from the point of view of isomorphism in mathematical category theory. First, it is made clear that the set of elements that make up magic in the realm of living things and the similar set in the realm of the spirits are isomorphic; from this it is demonstrated that the two are so much the same that they are interchangeable. Furthermore, it necessarily follows from this that operation in the realm of the living corresponds to operation in the realm of the spirits, and conversely, operation in the realm of the spirits also corresponds to operation in the realm of the living. In this way, the concept of isomorphism can succinctly explain the combination of different categories and the pursuit of unique causal relationships, which the study of magic has focused on. All of these are derived from isomorphism and are an inevitable consequence of isomorphism. The limited role of the various characteristics of magic, including metaphorical expressions, becomes clear if one regards them as contrivances and efforts to meet the demands of isomorphism.

However, the condition for isomorphism—that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the set on the side of the living and the elements of the set on the side of the spirits—is by no means guaranteed. It seems that the people of Papua New Guinea are aware both of this lack of guarantee and of the way in which they should make efforts; and under these conditions they endeavor to actualize isomorphism, which is to say, they continue to practice magic. Here the important nature of magical acts—that they rely on the idea of isomorphism and aim at the realization of isomorphism—becomes clear.

The month following the East Japan Earthquake, I traveled to the town of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture. I spent half of the 18 months following the catastrophe in this small town and its neighboring cities. The local residents I met were people in a state of vulnerability, all of them having lost family members, relatives, or friends. All that I could do was to engage with them as supporter helping them to put their lives back together.

Into the 1980s disaster studies, which had been marginalized within anthropology, became one of its main topics, reinvigorated by a notion of vulnerability. Yet this was subsequently criticized for of its technocratic character, and hence, new analytic concepts were introduced in anthropological disaster studies such as resilience, disaster capitalism, disaster utopia, biopolitics, and affect economy.

This paper aims at examining the validity of these concepts by applying them to the cases I observed in the areas devastated by the tsunami. It aims also at realizing a synthesis of the firsthand data I collected in these areas with the analytic tools utilized in anthropological disaster studies.

This paper examines the relationship between Islamist political parties that seek to realise Islamic values in the public sphere, and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that attempt to separate religion from the public sphere through various issues over social developments in Bangladesh. Islamism is generally considered a political ideology or movement that seeks an Islamic transformation of state and society. In Japanese, the term is widely used as an alternative to ‘Islamic fundamentalism,' which contains an Orientalist bias. However, if Islamism is centrally defined as a religious movement that deviates from the secular concept of Western modernity, it will encounter the same problems as the ‘fundamentalism' of the past. Through an examination of the formation of bipolar politics in Bangladesh, this paper defines Islamism as the process of movements by which Muslim societies, in the process of constituting nation-states and civil society, reconceptualise Islamic values as a political ideology and put them into practice.

This introduction provides the methodological foundations for the special issue, proposing an approach to the imagination as a bodily capacity entangled with affects and embodied memories. We provide a literature review on affect in anthropology, social and cognitive sciences, relate it with research on the imagination and embodied memories, and highlight the theoretical and methodological issues. We advocate for a situated praxeological approach, which takes affective capabilities and enskilment into account, and focuses on experiences emerging through correspondences between affects and the environment, namely through “skills of feeling with the world.” We suggest an understanding of memory and the imagination as mutually related embodied capacities, and see the imagination as a capability involved in everything, from filling the gaps in the perception of objects to the engagement with immaterial knowledge. We suggest an approach that analyzes experience and the social as emerging through situated practice, in the entanglements between affects, the environment and memory, as non-deterministic conditions for the work of the imagination.

This paper focuses on Qigong practice in Shanghai, clarifying the role that bodily experiences, affect and imagination play in feeling qi. Anthropological research on Qigong usually focuses on analyzing the so-called “Qigong boom” in China from a historical perspective and does not sufficiently investigate the role of experiencing qi in Qigong. This paper aims at discussing how feeling qi emerges through the practice of Qigong. Firstly, I discuss the importance given to experiencing qi, showing that it plays a fundamental role in Qigong, although qi itself is rather loosely defined. Subsequently, I focus on Qigong practice, shedding light on the processes through which practitioners start feeling qi. I argue that bodily experiences grounded in affects and imagination play an important role in feeling qi, and that a focus on Qigong practice allows for a novel understanding of qi or feelings of qi as multiple bodily experiences, rather than as one single phenomenon as it has been theoretically conceptualized.

This paper focuses on bruising in pole dance in order to elucidate the affect which emerges during this extremely physical practice. It begins by arguing that the current understanding of affect has become too broad and vague and suggests allowing for multiple, specific definitions. In this paper, ‘affect' is defined as emerging within becomings, as they are discussed by Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Becomings' are defined as the processes of becoming something different than before, thus opening new ways of living and thinking with difference. Through this approach, this paper indicates how these bruises, captured by the practitioners in pictures as memories, suggest past processes of enskilment and arouse imagination of future risks in pole dance practice. It analyzes how the practitioners' memories and imaginings fuel their practice onwards and further examines how these becomings, and thus emergences of affects, unfurl in between the plane of their daily lives as social actors and the plane of sheer movement and possibility.

This article focuses on spirit possession during deliverance Masses of a Pentecostal-Charismatic church in the Southern part of the Republic of Benin, shedding light on the entanglements between affect, imagination and memory. Pentecostal Charismatic churches in sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by a strong tendency to demonize witches and other local spiritual entities. Research has pointed out that the idiom of the demonic that Charismatic churches propose is fundamental in providing the local imagination with new tools for understanding political and economic change. Yet, this paper posits the imagination as an embodied constituent of realities and aims at clarifying the conditions and processes through which it works, in correspondence with affects and memory. I argue that the practice of fighting demons and witches in the church elicits the emergence of the reality of such spirits as particular ‘things' or subjects through experiences of possession grounded in affects, enskilment, memories and the imagination, thus opening up new possibilities for spirits to create new realities.

This article explores experiences of people who healed from spirit possession through exorcism, while shedding light on processes of emergence of spirit entities and worlds. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered through fieldwork at Kenmi Shrine (Tokushima Prefecture, Japan)， I focus on the process of “capturing' of affects, analyzing how memory and the imagination entangle, and shedding light on their role in the efficacy of healing. In doing so, I show how the reality of both spirits and conditions of possession emerge as multiple through practice, intersubjectivity, and correspondences with the environment. I argue that a situated praxeological approach accounts for enskilment, education of attention and “feeling with the world，” can be useful for the understanding of the emergence of spirit ontologies. I claim that a processual model that sheds light on experiences of healing from possession as grounded in affects, embodied memories and the imagination can also be useful to understand the efficacy of (religious) healing.

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a pervasive global issue eliciting various responses at the local level. Drawing upon anthropologist Yanai Tadashi's concept “body social,” this article aims to discuss what Japanese general practitioners have attempted to protect from the uncontrollable “waves” of the pandemic. Based on the vivid narratives about their shifting patterns of responses from July 2020（the beginning of the so-called “second wave”） to February 2021（the end of the “third wave”）, it elucidates how the general practitioners' imaginings of the “body social” to be protected were flexibly transformed according to their perceptions of the pandemic situations in their immediate surroundings, from their physical bodies to their medical institutions, to their chiiki （communities）．Their engagements in expanding cooperation with other medical and non-medical actors to protect their chiiki as “body social” pose valuable lessons for anthropologists of infectious diseases and disasters beyond the realm of medicine.