This article is a succession of my paper published in Annual Report of Social Anthropology Vol. 45, and is part of a series of studies that, from an anthropological standpoint, fundamentally criticize the trend of neoliberalism that prevails in contemporary society. As G. Agamben points out, the present society where biopolitics is practiced is in the process of "normalization of the state of exception" in the form of proxy democracy based on information technology and statistics. In fact, a majority of the people around the world live in societies where they are not only disparate but also abandoned, such as a Homo Sacer state. Over the past two decades, my research of Street Anthropology has undoubtedly taken the standpoint of the oppressed victim who suffers from those post-modern predicaments. The research has focused on the far more profound history of people who W. Benjamin considered "the defeated," that is, a shadow aspect that tends to be hidden by the progress-oriented shallow view of "the victorious history" from the neoliberalist standpoint. Thus, the research aims to build a place for hope and relief by discovering and learning the true "history of the defeated" from the viewpoint of the bottom. Therefore, I, as a person who shares the same social space, continue to place great importance on the socially marginalized people who live at the "street edge," paying strong attention to how they survive and make their home here. As a result, you find that it is inevitable to have a comprehensive view with "duplexed gazes" acquired by reversing the exclusive gaze from the victorious side standpoint to the more inclusive bottom–up gaze reflecting the hidden standpoint of the defeated. This article, mainly through a critical examination of G. Agamben's State of Exception, proves that it is necessary to hold such "duplexed gazes" in order to survive present neoliberalist society. Although the study basically shares the goal of truly seeking Agamben's sense of "new politics," my unique consideration is based on not only my recently edited book "Street Anthropology" but also my former book "Anthropology of Pollution," which was the starting point of my research and attempts to complement some limitations of Agamben's thinking. Through these reflections, I became aware that "Street Anthropology" can be retrospectively traced to "Anthropology of Pollution," and then saw clearly that my present work has been formed through the dialogues with the works of M. Foucault, M. Merleau-Ponty, W. Benjamin, and Iwata Keiji. Finally, the fundamental structure of the theory of Street Anthropology is presented here as a comprehensive result of such discussions.

From the 1980s, tattoos were no longer considered peculiar by middle-class western society. This is not the case in Japan, where tattoos are regarded as socially undesirable and those with tattoos remain in the minority. Tattooed individuals face several limitations in Japan, particularly insofar as tattoos are associated with the Yakuza and their irezumi tradition, making tattoos disadvantageous to those who get them. However, tattoos are necessary for the core life practices of some Japanese individuals. Through an ethnography of young people in Chiba city, this study explores the way in which tattoos serve to forge special ties between people. For these individuals, getting tattoo signifies a deviation from the norms of general society and subordination to the norms of their community. Tattoos provide an alternative way of life in the context of destabilized employment and neoliberalism. Exploring these dynamics, this study illustrates the differences between mainstream Japanese society and the community created by these young people.

Over the last few decades, East, Southeast, and South Asia have experienced tremendous economic and social transformation. This special issue explores continuity and change in personal and household consumption in contemporary Asia, which is often considered both a motor of global economic growth and a major potential source of global catastrophe. This introductory article offers an overview of recent consumption scholarship and discusses how personal and household consumption may be better analyzed. The article suggests that the recent "practice turn" in the field provides a good starting point for examining the nature of ordinary consumption as well as its social and environmental consequences. However, anthropological analyses of consumption should combine practice-theoretical and other approaches to develop a multifaceted approach that can examine broader aspects of consumption practices that include actions as well as routines, and conscious reflection as well as embodied sense.

This study examines the consumption practices of the affluent middle-aged in contemporary South Korea who were once identified as the "new generation." In the 1990s, a discourse about the young generation, who were the earliest beneficiaries of economic growth in the modern history of South Korea, arose, and these people were identified as an emerging symbol of modern consumerism. This study focuses on the upper-middle class of this demographic section and investigates the cultural dynamism that practically governs contemporary consumption patterns. The growing significance of neo-liberalism in consumption attitudes is discussed in terms of not only self-management but also seeking a new social appropriateness in traditional collectivism. The framework of interpersonal perceptions of uri – nam is applied to elaborate on the interplay of global capitalism and a deeply rooted familyism, exhibiting the South Korean cultural sentiment as one that balances individualism and traditional virtue.

This paper examines the trend of medicine consumption by Chinese tourists visiting Japan from the perspective of "anti-risk consumption." In Japan, Chinese tourists' expenditure constitutes over 30% of that of foreign tourists. Furthermore, one of their most purchased commodities is medicine. Although their main motivation for visiting Japan is not to buy medicines, Chinese tourists spend considerable time and effort searching for and buying medicines for others, such as family, friends, and acquaintances, rather than for themselves. This indicates an increase in health and risk consciousness in China. People consume products to avoid a variety of risks, such as environmental, health, and crime risks. Nevertheless, in different social and cultural contexts, the concept of "anti-risk consumption" has different meanings. By studying the pattern of medicine consumption by Chinese tourists in Japan, this paper aims to explore the characteristics of consumption practices that have been adopted to cope with uncertainty.

The citizen-consumer, a concept that is often found in discourse on consumer studies, implies the amalgamation of two polarizing ideologies: consumerism and citizenship. The ideology of consumerism is based on a willingness to satisfy one's desires by purchasing commodities, whereas the ideology of citizenship is based on a collective consciousness to pursue social justice. While the implications of this concept have been empirically examined, they are limited to Euro-American societies. This article offers an account of the implications of the "citizen-consumer" in the Japanese context, where, compared to Western societies, the concept of citizenship is not historically rooted and has not been sufficiently fostered. This is brought forward through a case of student activities that aim to enhance fair-trade.

From archeology-inspired accounts to multispecies ethnographies, recent research into materiality in anthropology has reaffirmed material rootedness of people's worlds, opening channels to holistically explore human experiences. Solid foundations have been laid to overcome agentic versus non-agentic dichotomy regarding human and nonhuman actors; non-relational perspectives facilitate the focus on how objects, in themselves, remain largely unknown to humans. This special issue aims to further develop and assess the applicability of these ideas, examining various modes of human engagement with materiality and potentialities of access to things. Scenes explored include silk-producing sites, cemeteries, pilgrims' paths, self-defense classes, care homes, and marine laboratories. Each author poses a question connected to how humans experience and understand various materialities through tangible interactions, and what meanings and forces these materialities generate in this process. The findings hint at new directions to understand and further study the meaning of being a human in-becoming in a material world.

This paper explores the material agency of West African wild silks by inquiring into local conceptions of the material with regard to its production and consumption in Marka-Dafing communities in Burkina Faso. By transcending common notions on aesthetics and materiality of silk, the paper investigates its cultural significance and delves into Marka-Dafing's material epistemology and cosmological implications of the sheen of indigenous silks. In Marka-Dafing communities, the sheen of wild silk is embedded into people's social, natural, and spiritual world. Hence, this paper presents an ethnography of wild silks materials that helps uncover silks' cultural meanings as a manifestation of complex networks of material and power intra-relations. This paper examines the efficacy and agency of sheen by focusing on wild silks' material properties and qualities that allow people to engage with the invisible world as a means of empowering the self, gaining social visibility, and resolving social disputes.

This study draws on ethnographic data obtained in Japan to investigate an affective, material practice of grave-caring by Russian-speaking migrants. Grave-caring is a small-scale but regular communal event, made visible through online migrant groups. To explicate the constitutive role of materiality in people's lives, I describe the practice in concrete terms, paying attention to material qualities of cemeteries and graves and to the material interactions between people and things. I argue that bringing strangers' graves into one's material image-scape denotes a need to render death in a foreign land conceivable. Migrants may perform this act as part of imagining the conclusion of their journey in the context of migration. Simultaneously, the act serves as an affective practice of "kinning" (creating kinship). It encompasses the material image-scape of the past and future and helps to stabilize one's place within one's own life cycle and in the continuity of generations of migrants in Japan.

Following recently expanded definitions of "pilgrimage," this paper examines how travelers heading for a specific destination create relationships with things. Here, I distinguish between two conventional approaches to "things": one focused on examining things as a means of human recognition and the other on examining a world of things unrelated to humans. By adopting an approach that lies between these, I posit that sensory experience can encompass "things," regardless of whether they are tangible or real. Constituting an ethnographic study of the Camino de Santiago, which highlights senses of direction and distance, this paper shows how pilgrims build and rebuild relationships with various things that tend to be dampened in daily life. Furthermore, I propose a theory for interpreting Heidegger's concept of "ready-to-hand" (revealing our involvement in the world). To achieve this aim, I have developed a new concept of "out-of-reach" which refers to providing an aspiration for something that is neither confined to nor segregated from the world experiences that pilgrims undergo.

Perceptions of young women in Japan are examined in relation to female self-defense. Several women in Japan were surveyed, with some chosen for interviews. It seemed that self-defense was often connected not to learning assault-prevention techniques but to purchasing self-defense tools. This finding opens two avenues for discussion. First, the marketization of personal safety is explored, as is the genderization of these tools and the subsumption of women's safety into a logic of consumption. Second, the shift from viewing the body as a weapon to viewing the object as one, which projects various forms of subjectification onto women, is discussed. These include the outsourcing of women's agency to an external object. It is concluded that this outsourcing often results in the reinforcement of tropes of fragility and the neutralization of resignifications of the female body that emerges from practitioners who focus on the body as the instrument of self-defense.

As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots to assist in elder care. However, Japanese society is increasingly experiencing the phenomenon of people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines such as social robots, and the introduction of social robots into the realm of elder care can be perceived as contentious by elders, caregivers, and family members. By exploring human engagement with social robots within the care context, this paper argues that introducing emotional technologies into the care equation neither provides the same kind of experiences as human–human interactions nor is necessarily psychologically deceptive, but gives rise to new relationships and ways of interacting.

In the context of the climate crisis, seawater scaling reveals the precarity of the ocean. Yet scaling as a process of knowledge production in ocean science unavoidably allows us to overlook the representation of complicated local biophysical relationships by using universalized measurements. Based on observations I made with a team of marine physiologists who investigate the effects of ocean acidification on mollusks, this paper shows practices of knowledge production about ocean precarity in Japan. By describing human-nonhuman entanglements that emerge in ecological disturbances, I demonstrate relational contestation over the measurement of unevenly distributed biosocial vulnerabilities. The sometimes unexpected interactions of sessile organisms, measurement devices, and marine physiologists with mollusks show complex processes of encounter rather than stylized biophysical representations. Recognizing the material semiotics of ocean acidification, in which chemical compounds, biological organisms, hydrological and geomorphological parameters, and other "things" become entangled, allows us to go beyond scalable metrics to understand the Ocean as a precarious place.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the practices of scientists who place their practices as distinct from "naturalistic" science, which assumes a sharp distinction between human beings and the Reality. The practice of these solid geophysicists, termed "fusion" in this paper, is characterized by seemingly odd concepts such as "distrust of observed data" and "a priori data." The practice of "fusion" does not create objective representations of the world, but hybrid images in which observation data and human model evaluation are mixed in its own way.

Criticism of Naturalistic Ontology and "Science as Fusion" Philippe Descola states that the ontology that defines the Modern is "naturalism" (Descola 2013: 173). There are various uses for the term naturalism, but by his terminology it is characterized by the continuity of the physical world and the discreteness of the inner world. Naturalistic ontology has developed mutually with representational epistemology of science. However, Science studies imply that modern science practices oppose such epistemology and ontology. Through various criticism, natural science is no longer a sovereign domain of modern culture to explain the Reality, and is re-interpreted as a human and nonhuman plural and heterogeneous networks. These criticisms also seems to overcome the premise of naturalistic ontology.

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This article describes how the beginning of cash crop production transformed social relationships in a village in Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Indonesia. For this purpose, the author analyzed the relation between a middleman and cash crop farmers as a relation with indigenous notions of kinship.

From the late 1990s at the field site, people began to produce gambir, a natural ingredient taken together with the chewed betel (Piper betle L.) leaf. The main factor associated with this new production was the return of village communal land from the central government as a result of the movement for revitalization of customary laws. In Suharto's New Order regime, traditional villages in Indonesia were disaggregated into small administrative units for national development policy. In some areas, including West Sumatra, village communal lands that had been controlled by traditional villages had been taken by central government because of dissolution of the village structure. After collapse of the New Order regime, a corresponding decentralization policy was enacted: people in these areas claimed the return of these communal lands based on the logic of customary law. Gambir production at Teluk Dalam, the field site chosen by the author, was conducted on village communal land that had been returned.

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The anthropological conceptualization of hospitality originated within classical wisdom on reciprocity and mediated "otherness" (Benveniste 1986; Pitt-Rivers 1968; Akasaka 1992; Komatsu 1995). Nevertheless, as the global age has blurred social boundaries, considerable interdisciplinary attention has been paid to the concept of hospitality, especially with regard to the relationship between the self and the other; this research trend has been influenced mainly by the philosophical thought of Jacques Derrida (cf. Candea and da Col 2012a: iii). In this introduction to this special theme, I redefine the category of hospitality in order to present an anthropological alternative to Derrida's philosophical arguments by reviewing not only his conceptualization of hospitality but also anthropological studies on the topic.

Hospitality as an Aporia Based on his own thoughts regarding the "impossibility" of the gift, the autoimmunity of democracy, and Emile Benveniste's etymological examination of hospitality, Derrida combined the words "hospitality" and "hostility" and coined the term "hostipitality" (Derrida 2018: 83). This neologism implies that the act of offering seemingly unconditional hospitality to the other always entails the risks of turning hospitality into hostility between the self and the other. He offers hospitality as an antinomy, thus uncovering an aporia between the ethical requirement of treating the other with absolute openness and the exclusionary sovereignty of the self. His proposition compelled one to consider hospitality with the assumption that it is conditioned by political, legal, or moral imperatives.

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Introduction

This paper examines the relationships between commercial hospitality and social hospitality, from the perspective of how they affect tourists and migrants who arrive in Japan's Ogasawara (sometimes known as Bonin) Islands.

In the past decade, a number of studies have sought to determine the effects of hospitality on each society. "The return to hospitality: strangers, guests and ambiguous encounters," an article by Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col that appeared in a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012 represents the most recent significant anthropological work on the issue of hospitality. The discussion by itself, however, concerning tourism and hospitality was not by itself sufficient discussed, although this special theme was an attempt to re-examine hospitality in the present day. This problem was suggested by Maribeth Erb (2013), who examined the aporia (that is, an unresolvable contradiction) of hospitality from the perspective of the phenomenon of tourism development and hospitality on Flores Island in eastern Indonesia. Erb's study helps us to understand hospitality in the present day. Her approach is useful in considering the relationship between hospitality and tourism. Her study, however, focuses too much on host and guest relationships in the context of tourism. Other contexts that affect host and guest relationships must be examined. It is not sufficient to focus only on tourism. It is necessary to examine the larger context of hospitality and tourism. Therefore, in order to identify the relationship between hospitality and tourism, the analysis of Conrad Lashley (2000) provides important guidance. He suggests that hospitality activities exist in "social," "commercial," and "private" domains. Further, he illustrates the point of view that one should focus on each domain as an independent entity while recognizing that there will be areas of overlap. Following the framework of overlapping areas of hospitality in each domain, this paper especially examines the relationships between social hospitality and commercial hospitality as seen in the phenomenon of tourism in the Ogasawara Islands.

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This paper focuses on the practice of co-residence and indigenous logic of hospitality in ‘Are‘are, the southern part of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands. Many villages in the region hold more than a dozen families - several, based on the principle of paternal origin and husbandry, have been settled in these village for generations. Then there are also frequent visits by different people, such as those made for fixing marriage alliance and short ones by relatives and friends. Moreover, since the flourishing of the indigenous movement in the middle of the 20th century, a village has generally held several families from different clans. In such a situation, welcoming visitors and living together are essential issues for the region‘s people today, and they face these challenges in their own ways. This paper explores how the ‘Are‘are people can continue to live together by persisting with attempts to manage their differences in their daily lives.

Introduction

Few anthropological studies of Melanesia address hospitality as a subject. However, as Roy Wagner notes, in pointing out such a trend, the treatment of the strange and otherness has traditionally been a major concern (2012). Rupert Stasch, for example, portrays the style of social relations of the Korowai people of West Papua based on their internal engagement with others (2009). In addition, Ryuju Satomi, who conducted fieldwork on Malaita Island, has researched the non-identity of the social group in the island‘s northern part from the perspective of focusing on the otherness latent in their social life (2017).

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Introduction: Dwelling and Hospitality

In relation to the subject of hospitality, which has been debated in terms of boundaries between one‘s own space and that of others, houses are often discussed as spaces that inevitably create hospitality. This demarcation of space may be understood by considering the image of "others" or strangers breaking into someone‘s home, which is an intimate space (Derrida 2018: 86, 106). However, the presumption that there is a comfortable place called home that can be invaded by strangers perhaps reveals the relationship between modern Western houses and their inhabitants. On the other hand, this paper relies on paying attention to the passive nature of hospitality, which can be seen in Emanuel Levinas‘s theory of hospitality, where living consists of enjoying the company of others (Levinas 2005: 314).

The abovementioned contrast can also be found in the difference between the concepts of "building perspective" - the viewpoint that people import their ideas, plans, or material representations into the world that people build - and "residential perspective" - the viewpoint that people are already dwelling in spaces while practically interacting with surrounding environments (Ingold 2000: 5, 178-88). This paper relies on the arguments of Ryoko Sachi, who drew on Tim Ingold to advocate the need for focusing on the physical activities that "weave" space (Sachi 2013). The author adopts the viewpoint that living space is created by interactions with other people or surrounding environments because importance is attached to certain characteristics of living spaces in Mongolia.

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Introduction

This paper explores the contested yet inevitable entanglement between the local manner of guest catering and self-interest in the feasting of Hani mountain peasants in the southern area of Yunnan province, China. Particularly over the last 10 years, these people have spent enormous amounts of energy and time and have used valuable property, including livestock, to hold ritual feasts through which the host households have good opportunities to receive neighbors as guests. As both hosting ritual feasts and being a proper guest are referred to as a "man‘s business" and are a recognized way to maintain social relations, it seems there is a rational calculation of profits and losses or a mode of reciprocity underlying the welcoming practice. Analyzing the narratives and behavior of people who participate in the ritual feast in the Hani peasant village, the author attempts to clarify the politics of feasting and the local logic on which it depends. A feast is no other than a typical occasion of guest catering or welcoming others. However, previous classic anthropological arguments on feasting have paid more attention to the construction of social relations caused by property and prestige, as potlatches are understood from the viewpoint of gift exchanges (Mauss 2014), and Polynesian feasts are discussed in relation to chiefly redistribution (Sahlins 1984), rather than hospitality itself. On the other hand, the interdisciplinary argument on hospitality put forth by Jacques Derrida, who conceptualized ideal absolute hospitality as welcoming others without the expectation of any rewards (Derrida 1999), developed perspectives apart from this by focusing on reciprocity when considering the relationship between the self and the other. Accordingly, recent anthropological discussions tend to concern particular situations and feasible conditions surrounding the encounter of the host and the guest, not only the consequences (Candea and da Col 2012).

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This paper aims to analyze the narratives of people who ordinarily sense spiritual beings while sharing our lifeworld and elucidate what their experiences are. Furthermore, we discuss how the ability to perceive or sense spiritual beings might be understood from the standpoint of an interviewer or someone who hears stories about spiritual experiences.

If you encounter with some strange incident and tell someone that it is an act of spirits, it means you refer the cultural idiom of "spirits." Yet, it does not necessarily mean that the perception has been culturally constructed. When we communicate with "spiritually sensitive" people, we get the sense that they perceive something antecedent to cultural construction – this premise, and what can be derived from it constitute the stake of this paper. I use the word "empathy" to correspond to this communication.

In academic literature, spirit possession has often been considered to be socially constructed, if not ascribed to psychiatric illnesses. The cause of spirit possession has lost its focal point in more recent works. Anthropologist Michael Lambek leaves the question of "why possession occurs in particular societies and to particular individuals or classes of individuals within those societies" (Lambek 1980: 318), and describes spirits as agents who equal humans, viewing spirit possession as a system of communication (Lambek 1980). I would like to suggest considering spiritual beings as devices to think with, through whom we can question the relation between our perception and existence, rather than trying to understand the nature of possession in a society where spirits naturally exist. For that, it is needed to think of the differences between informants who perceive spiritual beings and researchers who do not – for now – in plain and blunt terms.

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