Throughout Africa, societies are found in which the practice of witchcraft confessions is observed. This paper provides ethnographic descriptions of witchcraft confessions among the Ejagham and other Cross River societies of the Cameroon-Nigeria border, which offer a key to reconsidering the interrelationship among witchcraft, morality and attitude of people toward witchcraft in Africa, and investigates the process that leads people to such confessions. The comparative typological classification of African witchcraft and societies proposed by Mary DOUGLAS will be revisited. This paper also reconsiders the issue of witchcraft and social equalization, thereby pointing out in more general terms certain risks and violence that are derived from strict beliefs about 'justice' related to 'morality'. Through these descriptions and analyses, I would like to suggest one approach which enables us to translate and interpret African witchcraft as something common to all human societies in present-day world, while reevaluating certain advantages of social functionalistic interpretations which have been routinely criticized by some recent anthropological discourses.

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What are elders and hunters trying to communicate in interviews and workshops? Of what subjects are they knowledgeable? How have they acquired such knowledge? What does knowing mean to them? In this paper, I focus on these basic questions to reconsider the concept of TEK (Traditional Environmental Knowledge) and propound an alternative view, based partly on my own research and partly on other studies of Inuit TEK. First, I briefly review current TEK studies to show that we cannot avoid such basic questions in developing TEK studies. Then, in the following sections, I analyze the storytelling of an Inuit elder to consider what he tried to communicate through storytelling. Based on this analysis, I show how the elder with words and gestures re-enacted and demonstrated past experiences. This is not information about environment independent of his own activities, such as abstract spatial positioning and wildlife itself, but the relationships between him and the environment, which reveal potential resources in environment, that is, 'affordance' in terms of ecological psychology (c.f., REED 1996). Furthermore, I re-examine and reinterpret what has been pointed out as the characteristics of Inuit TEK and thereby demonstrate that what has been referred to as Inuit TEK is a re-enactment of the history of the engagements between humans and the environment. Moreover, I suggest that Inuktitut (Inuit language) place names as clues to reveal the history of the engagements play a crucial role in Inuit TEK. Then, I argue that TEK should be regarded not as an alternative science, but as the practice of 'poetics of life', narratives of which give form with words and gestures to engagement between humans and the environment, and underlies any sort of knowing practice including modern science. Finally, I conclude with the viewpoint that 'poetics of life' suggests a way to overcome the problem of essentialism in anthropological research.

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This article reviews Australian Aboriginal Studies by Japanese scholars over the period from 1892 to 2006. Both literature-based and fieldwork-based studies are reviewed, and transformations in the representations of Aboriginal people are described. Especially following the reorganization of anthropology in Japan after the U.S. occupation, a rich variety of research results concerning Aboriginal people have accumulated through studies by Japanese scholars. Major contributions by Japanese ethnographers to the study of remote, urban and rural Aboriginal communities are introduced. In conclusion, I propose four categories of ethnographic description as a blueprint by which Japanese anthropologists can further cooperate in Australian Aboriginal studies in the future.

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The paper focuses on the problem of cultural borrowing and the invention of tradition. The study shows how local business and political elites used one community to achieve their commercial goals by importing a food product-olives-and inventing a local tradition by legitimizing practices. I analyze the process of the invention of the olive tradition and its naturalization with a view to the strategies, techniques, participants and results. I argue that olives are naturalized successfully on a visual level, as a symbol which builds local identity, but the invented tradition fails to be active on an everyday life level. The local people regard Shodoshima as the 'Olive Island', producing various practices and activities aimed at maintaining that image, but the actual consumption of olives is restricted in their eating habits. This very gap in the existence of the olives together with the lack of daily consumption demonstrates their invented tradition.

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This paper examines the Netting Hill Carnival in London as an "urban festival" by focusing on the structure and function of masbands, the social organizations of masquerade parades of the Carnival. First the background of the present Carnival will be described by exploring the history of the Carnival and Afro-Caribbeans called 'West Indians,' the main performers of the Carnival. Then the masbands constituting the masquerade parade will be classified and each masband will be examined to understand its various aspects. Masbands in London are not homogeneous but most of them follow the tradition of the Trinidad Carnival. This study of Caribbean masbands reveals the dynamism of West Indians reflecting multicultural aspects of Britain. Finally, an investigation will be made into the question of how West Indians symbolize their negative heritage as slaves from Africa in the masquerade art created in an effort to mould identity through masband activities.

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