Korean kinship institutions underwent a profound transformation during the latter half of the Choson dynasty period (1392-1910), and out of these changes emerged the major features that characterize the so-called traditional Korean kinship system. Taking the anthropological model of Korean families proposed during the 1970s as the point of departure, the present paper traces the composition of households since the late seventeenth century by analyzing the household registers of Taegu region in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. The paper shows how drastic and profound the changes were. At the same time, it tries to ascertain what survived the transformation: the fundamental stem family structure of the households and women's positions as wives and mothers in them. In the final section of the paper, an attempt is made to assess the influence of Confucianism in this transformational process.

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This article examines how a shamanistic worldview is constructed and sustained in Okinawa despite the near lack of the occurrence of trance state among shamans. Observers have typically explained the strong reality that shamans ascribe to supernatural beings by referring to their altered states of consciousness. Such a psychologizing perspective, however, does violence to the distinctive ways in which shamans themselves report their experiences. Drawing on self-commentaries by shamans in the Miyako Islands on the immediacy of their communications with spirits, this article argues that grounds for the existence of supernatural beings are not so much psychological as conceptual.

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Northern culture refers to the mode of life unique to northern areas in terms of ecology, society and culture, dating back to the advance into Northern Eurasia by modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) in the history of human evolution and proliferation to North America. "Northern culture" describes a whole body of cultures, which have changed, descended and developed up to today. On the basis of this definition of northern cultures, changes of and products from northern studies in Japan are reviewed in each period: the Age of Exploration (c. 400-1867), the Age of Academics (1868-1945), and the Age of the World (1946-2000). As a result, research subjects for northern studies have changed from Ainu culture to a variety of cultures in broad northern circumpolar areas including Northern Eurasia, Japan and North America. Study methodology also has changed from folklore and ethnology to shizenshi - anthropology of nature and culture - and study objectives have shifted from the clarification of the origin of the Japanese and their culture to the clarification of universal issues in anthropological studies; i.e., "What are human beings?" Finally, since the northern studies have been developed to search for the universality of human beings, I present an outlook for the 21st century of anthropology as the Age of the Humanity.

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This paper reviews and discusses recent trends in Native North American Studies by Japanese anthropologists. I organize my review in terms of four regions: (a) Alaska, (b) Canadian Arctic, (c) Sub-Arctic and Northwest Coast, and (d) Southern Canada and the US mainland. Until the late 1980s, the majority of studies about Native North Americans were archaeological, but since the 1990s, cultural anthropological and linguistic studies have exceeded archaeological studies in number. Most of those studies have come about as the result of research projects financially supported by the scientific research grant-in-aid program of the Japanese Ministry of Education and, later, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and also by several international symposia organized at the National Museum of Ethnology and the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples. In conclusion, I will argue that historical and contemporary native studies have the potential to encourage the study of native peoples in other regions, as Native North Americans have experienced a variety of social and material changes that indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world have yet to experience.

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Although German "Japanology," -the study of Japan and her culture and society-has been dominated by philological methods, social and cultural anthropology - Ethnologie as it is called in Germany - has contributed to this endeavor: there is an increasing number of ethnologists devoting their work to Japan as well as of Japanologists who try to make ethnological/ethnographic methods and theories fruitful in their study of Japan. The postwar emergence of Japan as a once-again economic powerhouse with all characteristics of a modern society suddenly posed problems which eluded explanation by traditional philological approaches. The first attempts to transcend the narrow confines these "traditional" approaches made themselves felt at the University of Vienna, where, until 1965, Alexander SLAWIK (1900-1997) taught and practiced in the Institute of Ethnology (where, at that time, one of the centers of German historical ethnology was to be found). Since the time of its foundation in 1965, the Institute of Japanese Studies in Vienna was one of the centers of the ethnological study of Japan in the German-speaking world. In the years to come, ethnological theory has pluralized in Germany. Consequently, the approaches to Japan, its society and culture have multiplied and a variety of borderline studies (e.g., between ethnology and sociology) have been undertaken. The number of Japanologists drawing from ethnology, either methodologically or theoretically, has increased and is still increasing due to next decisive step, namely, the revival of culturalist theory, which again contributed to the multiplication of possible ethnological and ethnographic approaches.

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