As economic conditions in many urban centres deteriorate, considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to reciprocal relationships, i.e. social relationships based on kinship, friendship, or home town associations, especially in Africa. This, however, should not lead only to the view that reciprocal relations are sufficient to mitigate the crises caused by capitalism. The case study of a factory worker in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, suggests that capitalist relations and reciprocal relations do not merely exist as two alternative systems but mutually transform each other, and that the contradictory interaction between them is partly responsible for the crisis situation of urbanites. The crises that the factory worker encounters in his everyday life range from bodily ailments and fear of witchcraft to financial problems. However these problems are often interrelated and largely attributable to the contradictions between the logic of his kinship network extending from home and the logic of the factory he works for in the city. On the one hand, the recruitment of his kinship network into the factory enhances his image among his kin but it also increases his reciprocal obligations. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that he can meet these obligations, since the capitalist logic of the factory is strong enough to partly counteract the logic of kinship. Thus he suffers and has to manage his sufferings in this uncertain social and cultural space in between home and the city. An examination of problems that can emerge from this space may give some insight into the lives of urbanites in Africa.

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This paper is concerned with the historical points of articulation as well as disjuncture between quotidian life of hinterland villagers in western Borneo and the Southeast Asian politics in the 1960s, taking the borderlands between Sarawak and West Kalimantan as a case in point. From the early 1960s onward, the presence of another nation-state across the international boundary affected the life of Sarawakian peasants on the border with physical force. The independence of Sarawak from British colonialism and subsequent outbreak of military confrontation (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia led to a series of misfortunes including casualties, burnt homes, and evacuation, clearly and violently inscribing a national boundary on the minds of borderland residents. The following ethnography looks into the everyday location work of the villagers at the margin of the state, who encountered larger political processes originating in the outer realm of their lifeworld - the emergence of newly independent nation-states in opposition and the spread of communism in the Malay maritime world. By looking into their local experience and the series of incidents they endured, I examine the multi-layered relations between local everyday life and political turmoil. Particular attention is given to the villagers' recollection of a high-ranking political figure, who fled Sarawak just before the day of independence and sought refuge at a village house on his way to Indonesia. I shall look at the chain of historical causalities as well as ruptures surrounding his sojourn in the borderland village, which in the memory of the residents, is inexorably linked to the series of incidents that followed - the arrest of a villager by the authorities, the death of others, and the evacuation of the village. In carefully reconstructing these moments in history from the local point of view, I look into how villagers' interpretation of international political dynamics found common ground with their understanding of everyday life in the process of accepting, rationalizing, remembering, and consigning memory to oblivion.

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This article reviews the main trends in anthropological studies of the Ainu in Japan, from the past to the present. During the Edo period, detailed documents on the life and culture of the Ainu were already being published, along with official accounts of explorations produced for specific purposes. Ainu studies in the Meiji era developed further, ranging from travel literature to studies of Ainu ethnic origin, language and mythology. Following the work of CHAMBERLAIN, BATCHELOR, PILSUDSKI, and MUNRO, YOSHIDA and KINDAICHI began to study the language and folklore of the Ainu in the 1910s. After that, even though folklore studies flourished, ethnological studies of the Ainu only started in Japan with a joint survey by anthropologists and ethnologists in 1951. While few studies have been carried out on the social aspects of Ainu culture, so that various aspects of traditional Ainu social organization remain in dispute, recent ethnological studies do shed light on the contemporary issues confronting the Ainu, such as tourism, cultural revitalization, ethnicity and identity. Accounts of the Ainu in Japan have thus focused successively on their ethnic origins, their folklore and religion, and finally their ethnicity and identity.

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