The upheavals experienced by the modern world have directly affected the field where anthropologists conduct their research and the people who live there. Problems such as civil wars and massacres, development and environmental destruction, immigration and exclusion, and poverty and infectious disease are not simply local in nature, but manifest themselves as well in the context of global relations of dependence. Moreover, it is now an everyday occurrence for anthropologists in the field to become themselves embroiled in violent confrontations, to become involved in such activities as environmental destruction and large-scale development, or to participate in social movements to protect the environment or oppose development projects. Under such circumstances, anthropology has moved from a position that emphasizes neutrality and objectivity in the field to one that actively endorses engagement and value judgments with respect to its research subjects. Contemporary anthropology, being acknowledged as having a universal standard of values based on the ideas of human rights, environmental preservation, and democratic governance in a globalized age, has attempted to intervene in other cultures. However, the expansion of universalistic values like this gives birth to several doubts and reactions. At the center lies the question, what logic justifies engagement and intervention in the field? In its attempt to clarify the sudden rise of that universalism, this essay examines its inevitability and dangers, and tries to consider how anthropology can henceforth articulate or negotiate a relativistic epistemology with the reappearance of a universalistic worldview. However, that attempt is neither a simple rejection of universalistic thought to revive old-fashioned cultural relativism, nor contrarily a dismissal of relativistic thought in order to place a universal standard of values at the heart of scholarship. The goal of the present essay is instead to provide an answer to the question of how contemporary anthropology can articulate those two worldviews and establish an orientation that responds to an increasingly complex world reality.

View full abstract

This article seeks to investigate the concept of "cultural resource," and elucidate active and dynamic processes that take place when some actor mobilizes and deliberately uses certain cultural items as resources to attain certain socio-political goals. In tackling this theoretical problem, this article explores, as a concrete case study, French colonial policy and its application to the colony of Madagascar at the interwar period, especially focusing on a magnificent "colonial ritual" organized by the French Government of Madagascar in 1938, which consisted in the transfer of the remains of the late Merina Queen from Algeria to Madagascar and its reinterment at the tomb of the former Merina palace. A detailed examination of this ritual reveals that at the heart of the theoretical theme of cultural resources lies a fourfold question of (1) "who" mobilizes (2) "whose" culture (3) as "whose" culture (4) "vis-a-vis whom."

View full abstract

Landscapes and human bodies scarred by past tragedies can serve as depositories of memories and meanings that can be drawn as symbolic resources by the surrounding communities; but it can also contaminate these communities with stigma and the fear of further calamities. Through the discussion of this Janus-faced nature of such "commons of tragedy" this article explores people's relationship to the toxic hotspots left behind by the United States use of Agent Orange in A Luoi valley of Thua Thien Hue province, where I conducted my field research in 2008 and 2009. I argue that the people of A Luoi construct the sense of normality and exceptionality vis-a-vis the concrete presence of toxic hotspots (including victims' bodies). Such commons of tragedy as exceptional examples of ubiquitous legacy of Agent Orange allows the individuals most closely marked by this poison to reckon with this tragedy, while preventing its negative implications from taking over their life.

View full abstract

This article is an anthropological study of the Rongelap people in the Marshall Islands, and their recovery in the aftermath of the radiological contamination from nuclear bomb testing. Pursuing registration as a world heritage site and the reproduction of traditional local food are important ways in which the community has worked to reconstruct their lives based on a temporary island. It is important for them to reproduce dried pandanus in a temporary island, in particular, as it is a traditional and principal product of Rongelap people. They have been trying to overcome the tragedy set in motion through the military nuclear-weapons testing and have make renewal life reproducing of tradition.

View full abstract