This paper explores practices and discourses of Tibetan refugees in Kathmandu about the ceremonial scarves called"khata(kha btags)"and focuses on how the"khata"changes its usages, from the gift item and other usages to its final disposal. It especially pays attention to how the"khata"made of synthetic materials evokes anxieties among some Tibetans when they make it disappear. It also shows how they have dealt with the ban of the"khata"in the name of the environmental protection by the Chinese and Nepali governments. I focus on the campaign preventing from putting or burning the "khata" in a specific place and shows that the logic of karma, beyond human control, forced some Tibetans to run the campaign. In conclusion, I insist that their prime interest is in struggling with the "karmic issues" to achieve the "good life" and "good lifeworld," not with the environmental issues.

This study examines the exclusion of Southeast Asian migrant workers from gambling interactions in Macau casinos, focusing on how uncertainty is socially constructed and managed. Previous gambling studies have assumed that all gamblers and predictors participate equally, regardless of their personal attributes. However, Chinese gamblers, the primary clientele in Macau's casinos, actively avoid interacting with Southeast Asian migrant workers, thereby reinforcing a distinct social division. Referring to Cultural Theory of Risk by Douglas and Wildavsky, this study argues that Chinese gamblers engage in essentialist discrimination, perceiving Southeast Asians as carriers of impurity and misfortune because of their physical attributes. Southeast Asians have, therefore, been systematically excluded to preserve the perceived purity of the cosmology of the gambling world. This exclusion is not merely a social practice but a retrospective and performative process that constructs and reinforces the certainty inherent in the cosmology of the gambling world itself, shaping how gamblers perceive and engage with uncertainty in the casino environment.

This special theme examines the process of creating places from the perspective of refugee economies. Refugee economies are not only a specific and concrete aspect of refugees' lives but also formal and informal intermediaries that bridge their daily life with local communities, nations, and the transnational world. Previous studies critically considered the image of the dependent refugee through the lens of refugee economies. These studies focused on the ways in which refugees can be reconfigured into the existing economic and social order. By contrast, this study discusses places that are created with contradictions and tensions, including interactions with non-humans. This study examines refugee places from three perspectives: uncertainty and placemaking, places without consensus, and places created from devastation. In this introduction, the authors also focus on the existence of non-human agents to approach refugee studies from a cultural anthropological viewpoint.

This study examines the process by which Tibetan refugees in Delhi (re)construct urban spaces through their economic practices and political claims. Focusing on the concept of "refugee urbanism," it explores how refugees engage in the production of urban spaces through economic practices and interact with various actors, such as the Indian government, local governments, and NGOs. Cities are political and economic places where different authorities and relationships intersect. Majnu Ka Tila, an unauthorized settlement for Tibetan Refugees in Delhi, became a target for regularization and was designated as an official "food hub" of Delhi. Based on this case, this study analyzes how India's policies and urban planning influence the economic practices of Tibetan refugees, particularly in the food industry. It aims to clarify how refugees' economic practices and political claims contribute to the (re)construction of urban spaces and the negotiation over power within the city.

This study analyzes the Myanmar refugee camp in Thailand as a "non-place." The concept of non-place encompasses temporality, anonymity, and the recombination of multiple locales; accordingly, this article demonstrates how economies circulating through the camp and its adjacent village continually reshape spatial and social boundaries. Under recent aid reforms, rations have been replaced with electronic money, ostensibly enhancing self-reliance; however, refugees utilize long-standing survival tactics to bridge inevitable shortfalls. Beyond small businesses, they upload YouTube videos and send goods to third countries, thus generating transnational circuits that extend to and from resettlement destinations. The neighboring Thai village mediates these flows, consequently tightening interdependence and gradually integrating the camp into local society while simultaneously "camp-ifying" the village. The fluid, hybrid landscape produced by these flows of people, commodities, and information undermines the fixed camp/village dichotomy. Therefore, the refugee camp is reconceived not as a bounded humanitarian site but rather as an evolving non-place generated by refugee economies.

This article examines how places are made through the entanglements of refugees and things and how refugees produce communal order and social relations in the process of place-making in a Kenyan refugee camp. Being embedded in global capitalism, Kenyan refugee camps are now reconfigured as the market frontiers that attract investment and development. Refugees' lives become increasingly uncertain as they seek to maintain their own order and social relations with their homes. Based on ethnographic research with the South Sudanese Lopit refugees in Kenya, this article describes how they build the square for dancing, create musical instruments and attires from waste accessible through humanitarian aid and market activities, and enact ritual activities. It reveals how the interaction of humans and things can lead to reconnected social ties between the displaced and people at home, as well as to the emergence of an order that differs from the bureaucratic camp governance.

This study examines the characteristics of former Angolan refugees' places through their economic activities in Zambia. The study analyzed former refugee economies, especially subsistence economies, in response to local integration from the perspective of ecological anthropology. The basis of a subsistence economy has existed in the South-Central African region since the 17th century. Since 2014, the Zambian government has legally transitioned Angolan refugees to resident foreigners and relocated them from refugee settlements to resettlement; however, many did not move to resettlement. To handle this unstable situation, former refugees established subsistence economies with kin, utilizing cassava and maize, and using different natural sites. They created places through their economic activities, and in these places, they operate subsistence economies, strategically choosing their relationship with the state and market as needed. Faced with uncertainty, former refugees continue to create places of life based on their circumstances.

This paper presents a comparative study of refugee economies within the "spaces of control" of large, long-term refugee camps (mega-camps), examining them across different regions. Focusing on the informal economic and political linkages, or "shadow networks," that often transcend national borders during conflict, the study explores how assemblages of survival activities paradoxically generate emergent public spaces. The study compares mega-camps in Africa and Asia that differ in terms of their ecological settings, colonial histories, refugee policies, and cultural contexts. Particular attention is given to the dynamics of "market peace," where refugees and host communities exchange goods, and to the ways in which these spaces emerge or disappear. The paper also highlights the impact of the global shift toward cash-based aid since the 2010s. Drawing on literature concerning Anthropocene war economies, refugee economies, and distributional politics, the paper presents ethnographic cases from the Dadaab camp in Kenya and the Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh. It examines how cash transfers interact with shadow networks within these humanitarian landscapes.

Formerly, Japanese funerals were supported by religious rituals and local customs, providing a shared framework for understanding death. However, in modern society, such collective narratives are becoming less prominent, leaving bereaved families and attendees to individually interpret the meaning of death. In recent years, "musical funerals" have become more common in Japan, with music serving as the central medium for mourning the deceased. This study focuses on the ritualistic nature of music and examines how it accompanies "little narratives" in contemporary Japanese funerals, helping individuals gradually come to terms with their loss. Music at funerals not only shapes the flow of the ritual but also evokes emotions and memories, bridging the gap between formal structure and personal meaning. By analyzing specific examples of music performances, this study highlights how music contributes to diverse ways of accepting death in modern society.

As early as 1931, Kotaro Konobu, an Ainu scholar decried the dehumanizing gaze of wajin (Japanese) scientists toward the Indigenous people. His subaltern voice was silenced as fascination with the wild, indian, and Other gathered momentum in Taisho and early Showa Japan, and intellectuals pursued racist science as a profession in an increasingly chauvinistic state academy. This paper explores why the subaltern cannot speak in contemporary Japanese anthropology by drawing on the work of Mai Ishihara, a multi-racial anthropologist with Ainu roots who brought Indigenous feminism to Japanese anthropology. I argue racism and wajin-chauvinism in the forms of primitivism and romanticism—however subtle—still prevail in Japanese anthropology. What keeps Japanese anthropology still a "wajin public space"(cf. J. Hill's "white public space") are these practices of silencing that occur at the epistemic level—namely, the gaze of Natural-History, the roots of which can be traced to 17th-century Europe.