One of the goals of anthropological description is to approach the totality of events that includes "imponderabilia of actual life." From this viewpoint, studying musical performances can be seen as a touchstone, as most anthropologists tacitly accept the musicological premises that extract and objectify "music" from the total event of musicking. Herein, I will try another alternative vis-à-vis describing the worship services of the Pentecostal/Charismatic black churches in America by using affordance theory. Their services are full of sound that does not fit into the framework of "music," in addition to miscellaneous behavior as well as musical performances and singing. Here, I present how congregation's behaviors are affected by sound, and how they interact with one another in the sound, through written descriptions, diagrams showing their successive behaviors, and video data. With these, I aim to extract the social affordance of sound/body. What emerges here is behavior that is not controlled by conscious selves, as well as "groove (nori)" that flows in between the individuals.

Pentecostal Christianity experienced a significant increase in congregations worldwide during the second half of the 20th century. Among the large numbers of converts were French "Gypsies," that is, Gitans, Manouches, Roms, and Voyageurs (Travellers), who had traditionally been Catholics. Established by the Gypsy Evangelical Mission (Life and Light), this religious movement has been stigmatized in an increasingly secularized French society as a sect that isolates itself. Anthropological and sociological studies have also revealed the ethnic populism and religious pan-Romanism of Pentecostal churches, which depicted "Gypsies" as the "chosen people." This study reconsiders the relationship between religious movements and nationalism. Drawing on insights from the "anthropology of Christianity," which challenges prevailing Western concepts such as individualism while focusing on the theological framework within which believers live, this study examines adherents' narratives that emphasize direct, unmediated communication with God. Moreover, it explores the individual and collective practices that foster a communality of prayer.

Can ethnography become a site for mourning where we, as writers or readers, are allowed to dwell with loss, attempt to share with people in pain of grief, and seek the presence of those absent? What are the ways of writing ethnography if its purpose is not merely to represent and understand the cultural Other but to revisit the moments of perplexion, regret, or longing for others encountered during fieldwork? What are the possibilities of such affective knowing and "vulnerable writing," and what are its limitations? This special issue on "Ethnography of Mourning and the Pain of Ethnographer" attempts to expand the contours of ethnographic writing by addressing these questions. Each essay performatively poses a question of whether there is any sense in bringing back the "pain" of the ethnographer themselves in touch with those of the interlocutors, and how, if ever, that could be achieved. This introductory article sets the context for subsequent essays and envisions their potential to challenge conventional academic practices.

Drawing on my fieldwork in 2009 in Northern Sri Lanka in the wake of the island's thirty-year civil war, this ethnography addresses the intimacy, dependency, and asymmetry between the observer and the observed, myself and my subjects. Angela Garcia (2010) sees this as an "ethical call" in an ethnography of deep suffering. By doing so, I was able to guide myself out of "existential murk" —a kind of numbness that has haunted me beyond fieldwork—and account for my role as an ethnographer from Japan, the largest donor nation (1986–2008) to Sri Lanka, conducting fieldwork in a field site where the Sri Lankan forces had just carried out a massacre using cluster bombs referred to as "Japanese bombs." In Hannah Arendt's words, I became the "subject" of my own ethnography in the double sense of the term—namely, actor and sufferer—when I stopped being its author.

After having lost my child in stillbirth, I took up the topic of "pregnancy loss" and travelled to the Philippines to conduct fieldwork in a squatter area in Metropolitan Manila. In my field site, women have experienced multiple pregnancy losses that could not easily be distinguished between miscarriage and abortion despite their clear differences from the standpoints of choice and legality in the Philippines-a predominantly Catholic nation where abortion is both constitutionally prohibited and stigmatized as a terrible sin while miscarriage and stillbirth are attributed to God's will and considered not worth discussion. This ethnography attempts to describe these women's "silent grief" surrounding pregnancy loss that never comes to surface. At the same time, it is an ethnography of a murk or "deposit (澱み)" in my understanding that I carried from the field, incapable at times of understanding the women's narratives of pregnancy loss and disenfranchised grief.

We may fear others because in them our inner pain that arises from oppressing ourselves out of a desire to be loved is projected. By attending to and mourning this pain to which we have numbed ourselves, we may realize who we truly are/could be. Jude Ratnam—director of Demons in Paradise (2017), a film that grapples with the pain of the Sri Lankan Civil War—says, "Pain made us cruel. When you release the fear of seeing pain, fear no longer has power over you." Applying the "hospitality" concept to comprehend a researcher's experience realizing his/her own pain upon being shaken by the pain of the people whom s/he engages in the field, what kind of experience can fieldwork be? Moreover, how can the writing of ethnography guide the writer to be her/his true self, a primordial way of being "I/we"? This paper discusses these questions based on the author's experience in post-conflict Sri Lanka.

In 2023, Jude Ratnam made his first visit to Japan from Sri Lanka to screen his film Demons in Paradise. This essay describes the transformation I underwent as I accompanied Ratnam across Japan for the film's four screenings. The journey opened my "eyes" and gave me a new way of seeing the world as I, through "belly" and not by way of "head，" retraced the rebirth that Ratnam experienced through his filmmaking. Just as the film's content and form were inseparable for Ratnam, my new perspective has inseparably influenced my way of writing. By presenting my experience in this new way and appealing to the reader's gut ("belly") and not to the reader's mind ("head"), this essay aims to effect transformation in the reader.

Previous studies have commonly depicted cynicism as a mentality that both perpetuates existing power structures and undermines them from within. However, perspectives on cynicism's material and bodily aspects have been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap through the lens of Marxism's concept of false consciousness, material religion theory, and Foucault's analysis of kynicism (the etymology of cynicism). It explores how authority projects its order and intention and how cynicism affects people's bodies by employing two terms "Material Semiotics System" and "Cynical Body." Finally, it proposes a new approach to resistance against cynicism, which is to embrace things beyond the power's grasp.