The political space within a nation-state is not necessarily homogenous and uniform. There may be spots where the state governance and rule of law are not adequately established. When the inhabitants of that space exercise a certain sort of the self-governance, we call the entity a "small polity." Groups of criminals and warlords are examples that constitute small polities. Kingdoms and chiefdoms, which have been subjects of anthropological research, are also small polities. The aim of this article is, by examining the cases of "monyomiji cluster" that includes about a dozen ethnic groups in the south eastern part of South Sudan, to shed a new light on such small polities as anthropological research topic. By shedding a light not only the aspect of resistance to the state, but also on that of imitation, this approach would grasp a more nuanced and dynamic picture of today's small polities.

This paper explores the interactions between humans and nonhumans through the milpa in the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula as intersubjective processes, experienced through signs, perceptions, and actions. In a recent anthropological study, which seeks to free itself from anthropocentrism, the interaction between humans and nonhumans has often been the focus of attention. However, the empirical process of this interaction has not been sufficiently discussed in light of the perceptual experiences, which occur in iterative interactions between humans and nonhumans emerging as persons, and the links between shared objects or signs and actions in each interaction. The milpa is a slash and burn shifting cultivation that depends on meteorological conditions and forest products. Analysis of narratives on the milpa, focusing on the intersubjectivity that conditions the possibility of trading places among persons through their similar body "pieces" reveal a folded interaction, in which human and nonhuman perceptions and actions fold and unfold through signs peculiar to the milpa.

In this paper, I focus on a living care/employment continuation support type B business establishments which provides services for people with comparably more diverse needs based on their disabilities. My field is specifically a support office that cooperates with local agriculture and practices fertilizer-free and pesticide-free natural farming to utilize the power of living organisms. This paper aims to relativize the unique activities found there through recent Anthropological theories of care, based on how it is practiced, and to depict its diversity. In doing so, I will use Multispecies Anthropology to look at the potential for multiple types of associations in the field of care. The fields of natural farming develop a diverse array of associations, including not only humans, such as supporters and people with disabilities, but also cultivated plants and other plants, the soil in which they grow, and the insects and animals that live there. I capture care in the context of these relationships among various beings. Then, I clarify the process of how care practices and the relationships within these practices are born or disappear in response to the issues caused by supporters' beliefs.

Conventional studies of disabilities evaluated creative practices in which social movements, led by people with disabilities, built a new "culture" that generated a new logic of coexistence. However, problems have arisen over the lack of attention to the lives of people with disabilities who cannot act independently, the reinforcement of the dichotomic framework of able-bodied people and people with disabilities, and the international standardization of the definition of a disability and methods to guarantee the rights of people with disabilities that can spread to all countries of the world and lead in the direction of unified modernization.

This special theme focuses on the intersectionality and the noninstitutional phase of small groups and the microsocial relationships in reference to ethnographic research methodologies for disabilities in Japan, Asia, and Africa. It explores how the culture of coexistence—the situational and inconsistent manners, techniques, and ideas—emerges from the practice of cultivation.

Cultural anthropology's study of disability views it from a comparative cross-cultural perspective. It has criticized the Western-centeredness of disability policy and movements. Such studies risk reproducing a dichotomy between the West, with its well-organized welfare systems, and the non-West, with its less-organized ones. Its primary focus has been on physical disability, while few studies have focused on people with severe intellectual disabilities. This paper introduces an "insufficiently well-organized" perspective to overcome the dichotomy between societies with and without well-organized welfare systems. The paper focuses on the practices of people with severe intellectual disabilities who live independently in contemporary Japan using the critical disability studies perspective. By depicting the process by which the intentions of people with severe intellectual disabilities are expressed in coordination with other people and things, symbiosis is presented not as an abstract norm but as a tangible entity embedded in space.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the discourses linking disability and Islam in Malaysia and to discuss whether there is a "logic of coexistence" or a "culture of coexistence" that differs from the "unitary modernization" of modern Western standards. After the Islamic revival since the 1970s, "Islamic" discourses abound in Malaysia. However, in the discourse by Islamic "experts" linking Islam and disability, the concept of "Islamic" has been reduced to a superficial normative discourse, limiting the possibility of creating a logic of coexistence. In contrast, the discourses of the "parties" in the social networking sites of parents of children with disabilities and in the film "Redah," while not always explicitly labeled as "Islamic," do provide an opportunity for the emergence of a "culture of coexistence" that uses Islamic concepts. The so-called "Islamic" discourse does not necessarily present an alternative to "unitary modernization" or a solution to social problems.

Women with disabilities who are subjected to the "double jeopardy" of disability prejudice and sexism experience attitudes toward women and their movements that are different from the general run, according to the research perspectives of feminism and disability studies. This paper will organize the issues of both fields and then use the case of women with disabilities living in urban and rural Cameroon to analyze how gender roles in the community affect their livelihoods and care relationships. We will focus on the "double jeopardy" caused by the "intersectionality" of being a woman and a person with disability, while highlighting the contradictions that feminist disability studies have been caught up in. Finally, this paper will present a way of "coexistence" in which diverse people live together in the community and the community tries to include them as members of society rather than exclude them, accepting the fact that some individuals are unmarried women with disabilities and in precarious positions.

Against the backdrop of intensifying climate change and developing the international paradigm of disaster risk reduction, this study reviews a wide range of works related to the Great East Japan Earthquake (hereafter, 3.11), offering possible future directions for the anthropology of disaster. By mapping the possibilities, the study aims to support future encounters of anthropologists and practitioners with disasters. To do so, first, the global research trends in the anthropology of disaster during the 2010s, as well as the anthropological works related to 3.11, are summarized. Second, the study examines the efforts by anthropologists, as well as film directors and curators, to make the experiences of the 3.11 understandable for and sharable with the wider public. Third, the concept of traveler is developed as an anthropologist's stance to bridge the gaps related to the experience with and opinion on 3.11. Finally, the potential of the anthropology of disaster that can contribute to the study of the human is explored.