The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis in conducting conventional cultural anthropological research. However, it has also provided an opportunity to consider conducting research when anthropologists are not present on the field. This study examines the potential of remote ethnography, with the use of photography, through an experiment, wherein visual data from the field are shared progressively between two members. In this approach, fieldworkers separate the visual information in the photographs from the contextual information, and share the photographs with other researchers step-by-step. This approach created scope for "overinterpretation." Overinterpretations generated by researchers who did not conduct fieldwork may provide new insights and suggestions for those who conducted fieldwork.

This article explores the concept of tropism as a material-semiotic tool for comprehending complex entanglements among humans and non-humans within a homeless village located along Japan’s Tama River. Tropism, originally a biological term, is reimagined as a figurative lens, illuminating the notion of a response-ability that transcends human-centric interactions and embraces the interconnections of diverse entities and environments. The article navigates a range of phenomena in the village, from resource utilization to informal waste management, structural violence, and collaborative initiatives, to name a few, all through the tropismatic (dis)entanglement framework. The analyses showcase how tropism provide a non-hierarchical perspective, facilitating a bridge between disparate worldings and promoting a diffractive approach to interactions with both human and non-human elements. This method not only fosters nuanced understandings of intricate relationships but also encourages scholars to embrace rich tapestries of human-nonhuman relationships across diverse contexts, transcending the boundaries of the homeless village.