Japanese Journal of Ethnology
Online ISSN : 2424-0508
Volume 61, Issue 4
Displaying 1-24 of 24 articles from this issue
  • Article type: Cover
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages Cover1-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Article type: Cover
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages Cover2-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Article type: Appendix
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages App1-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Takami KUWAYAMA
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 517-542
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Despite the recent research focus on reflexivity in fieldwork experience, little has been said about what happens when "natives" read what anthropologists have written about them. In particular, the relationship between Western anthropologists and native anthropologists in the non-West has been almost unexplored. Native anthropologists are a special kind of Others whom Westerners encounter in fieldwork: they have the professional competence to engage in scholarly dialogue, but they are part of the cultural community under study. In this regard, native anthropologists may be defined as "professional Others." In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski argued that, since "primitives" are unable to explain their own customs and manners, they must be studied and described by professionally trained Westerners. He also contended that if natives could offer a systematic analysis of themselves, there would be no difficulty in ethnological work (e.g., Argonauts, p.454). Putting aside his Orientalist outlook on the world, I question Malinowski's view in light of the controversy that often arises between Western and native anthropologists. As Japanese criticisms of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword show, native anthropologists are often fierce critics of Western analyses and interpretations of their culture. In this article, I argue that this discord is derived from the structure of anthropological knowledge, rather than from personal and emotional conflict. More specifically, I submit that native scholars' dissent is related to the marginal role assigned to them in what I call the "world system" of anthropology. In this system, the "core" is occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France, which have the power to determine the kinds of desired knowledge in anthropology. Put another way, they dictate the anthropological discourse, with which scholars from "peripheral" countries must comply if they wish to be recognized. I further contend that in ethnographic representation, natives (those who are represented) are posited, but not spoken to, and that their exclusion is another source of discontent among native anthropologists, who are emotionally involved in matters that concern the natives. During fieldwork, natives are eagerly approached for the information they can provide ethnographers, but once fieldwork is over and the writing of research results begins, they are no longer addressed because the audience in ethnographic writing is the academic community to which the researcher belongs. The scholarly value of an ethnography is determined not by those who have been observed and described, but by those in a far-away land who may feign indifference to the adverse consequences that the representation may entail. The political basis for this "predatory" relationship has been Western hegemony in the modern colonial system. In order to strike a balance of power, a forum is necessary that would allow Western and native anthropologists to engage in fruitful dialogue on an equal basis. For this purpose, I propose that ethnographic representation be made as "open" as possible. By "open," I mean, first of all, the kind of representation that posits a diverse audience, both native and non-native, which contrasts with the "closed" representation that has assumed, as in the past, a homogeneous audience from one's own cultural community. An "open" representation will also permit "co-authorship" by the observer and the observed, as has already been experimented with the construction of life histories, and even "plural authorship," in which ethnographic texts may be written by more than one person, who take turns writing and reading to produce an open-ended forum of dialogue in the manner of a computer conference.

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  • Katsuo NAWA
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 543-564
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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    The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the implications of some ethnic categories used in Byans, Far-Western Nepal. The region, spreading over the territory of Nepal and India, is ihnabited by people who think of themselves as members of one ethnic group. Scholars and administrators, however, have used different ethnic terms for them according to their nationality. In India they are generally labeled Bhotiya (as a Scheduled Tribe), together with inhabitants of other Himalayan valleys in Uttar Pradesh. In the context of Nepalese ethnography, they are mentioned as Byansi. Local Hindu people call them Sauka. This paper will firstly sort out this confusion by investigating their own ethnic categories, and secondly illustrates that these ethnic categories are re-defined by two "modern" concepts: race and religion. The ethnic category of the people of Byans which connotes them in their own mother tongue is Rang. This category, together with other two categories, Pang (Tibetan) and Wolan (South Asian people), composes a triad of ethnic categories in Byans. The Rang category, commonly defined as "the people who live in Byans, Chaudans, and Darma", is different from both Bhotiya (which includes inhabitants of Johar, Niti, and Mana) and Byansi (which excludes inhabitants of Chaudans and Darma). Rang as a category, however, is not a direct outcome of some reality, such as place of residence, kinship ties or ecological constraints. Rather, it is a self-evident precondition for all the ethnic discourses of the people of Byans. The essence of the Rang category lies in a tautological categorical imperative that we (as the Rang] are the Rang. Those alleged criteria as their residence and kinship network have given this categorical imperative some pretended foundation and substance. Pang and Wolan, on the other hand, are two names for non-members given by those who consider themselves to be Rang. But actually the Rang category came into existence simultaneously with the formation of those two categories. People of Byans use, or avoid, many ethnic terms in other languages fairly opportunistically. They prefer Sauka when they speak Pahari, whereas Bhotiya is highly detested, mainly because the word, which means Tibetans also, is dreadfully derogatory to them. The term Byansi is used by at least some Nepalese Rang, as it reminds many Hindus of Vyasa Rsi, the legendary writer of Mahabharata. In recent years, the Rang-Pang-Wolan triad has been re-explained by Rang themselves, using foreign concepts of race and religion. According to them, the Rang are not Aryan but Mongolian, and the Rang are not Tibetan Buddhists but Hindus. The Mongolian/Aryan dichotomy roughly coincides with the distinction between Rang and Wolan, and the Hinduism/Buddhism dichotomy of Rang and Pang. The use of these categories has thrown a new light on their ethnic categories. It enables them on the one hand to create a counter-discourse in general terms against "Aryan" hierarchicalideas and practices. On the other hand, insisting that they are Hindus, they resist against the stereotyped wrong image imposed by Wolan that they are Tibetans and beef eaters. The people of Byans utilize those concepts to indicate themselves not as Bhotiyas but as Hindu Mongolians. This difficult strategy on two fronts has been only partly successful. The discussion above shows that the over-determinedness of ethnic categories is exploited by the Rang for their own sake. Here the over-determinedness can be observed both between ethnic terms in many levels and in many languages, and among diverse fixed narratives or discourses, not always mutually consistent. Despite these inconsistencies, however, the existence of the ethnic group is not doubted by its "imagined" members in most cases, because each and every individual is preceded by those ethnic categories and discourses. It is inaccurate,

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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 565-566
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Satoshi TANAHASHI
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 567-585
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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    The Cook Islands are called "a typical MIRAB society" by political economists. Since the 1910s a large number of Cook Islands Maori people have left their homeland in Polynesia for New Zealand as labor migrants. In 1996, while 18, 904 Maori resided in the homeland, almost 40,000 of them lived and worked in New Zealand. The economy of the Cook Islands has been kept alive only because of remittances from these labor migrants and of financial aid from the New Zealand government. The dispersal of the Maori population from their homeland and New Zealand's ever-increasing financial aid, which amounted to NZ$14 million in 1988, have worked against the Cook Islands, reducing the chances for domestic industries to develop and leading to chronic and sustained underdevelopment. As a result, the politico-economic and socio-cultural importance of the Maori homeland has been diminished drastically over the last three decades. However, while the politico-economic decentralization of the homeland has proceeded, the government and local communities in the Cook Islands have been attempting to recover Maori cultural identity and recentralize their homeland socio-culturally by way of a renaissance of "traditional culture." The characteristics and history of the cultural policies of the Cook Islands' government is discussed at the beginning of this essay. Then, as an example of recent local practices to revitalize Maori tradition, a vaka (canoe) building project is analyzed. Finally, the interaction, appropriation, and opposition between cultural strategies of the government and local practices are examined in detail. Through the discussions in this essay, I propose a new perspective to capture the present situation of Polynesian culture, which may help lead us to envision anew the discipline of cultural anthropology itself.
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  • Noboru ISHIKAWA
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 586-615
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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    This article portrays peasant societies situated at the international border in Western Borneo during rubber booms in the 1930s and the 1950s. The focus of the discussion is a historical process of exclusion of peasants from the state-led commodity production system; through their manipulative strategies and resilience, locals engaged in cross-border rubber smuggling and stuck to non-capitalist swidden rice cultivation. The nature of political and economic interaction among Malay peasants, Chinese merchants, and the state power in the region, both colonial and post-colonial, is also examined. By focusing on the border region which had been geo-politically divided by conflicting powers, i.e., Sarawak (subsequently the British Crown Colony) and Western Dutch Borneo (subsequently West Kalimantan, the Republic of Indonesia), the unit of analysis inevitably goes well beyond a single community, ethnic group or state. Trans-national interaction and the regional political economy are thus given due attention. The author examines the conventional anthropological analyses on Bornean societies which tend to have overvalued the social units and therefore undervalued the interconnectedness of the historical contingency of the units. The analysis starts with the assessment of the economic condition of Sarawak at the turn of the century under the second Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Brooke, who did not support the introduction of plantation-based rubber production. For that reason, Sarawak's participation in rubber production was much delayed compared with other rubber producing colonies in Southeast Asia. Then the agrarian condition of Lundu District in Southwestern Sarawak in the wake of world-wide expansion of rubber production in the 1920s is discussed. The historical process of local economy being transformed from gambier, pepper, and coconut to rubber production is reconstructed based on archival materials. The participation of Sarawak and Dutch Borneo in the International Rubber Agreement of 1934 greatly changed the agricultural landscape of Lundu District. The objective of the Agreement was to limit the amount of both rubber production and exports to stabilize rubber prices in the international market. Both governments prohibited new rubber planting and introduced strict control of marketed rubber by the coupon system. In response, rubber smueggline flourished between Sambas in Western Dutch Borneo and Lundu in Sarawak. Rubber smuggling to Sarawak territory was further given a boost in the 1950s by the economic chaos of newly independent Indonesia. The next section is on the state formation and the establishment of the national boundary in the studied region. The introduction of taxation systems and the restriction of the movement of locals as well as commodities across the border are of particular relevance. In Sarawak, cultivated rubber sheets became the most important dutiable commodity following the decline in jungle produce and therefore the crucial source of state income. The final section of the article presents an ethnographic case study of peasant villages situated on the Sarawak side of the border. The coastal communities which previously supplied a labor force to local coconut plantations functioned as smuggling points receiving rubber sheets from Western Borneo. With the decline of the coconut plantation industry, the Malays there began to turn on swidden rice cultivation and persistently stayed away from production of commercial crops such as rubber even during the boom periods. Their oscillating turn to self-sufficiency does not fit the theoretical premise in the study of macro-economic history which tends to presuppose linear capitalist penetration and to describe local peasants as a passive periphery in the modern world system.
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  • Keiji MAEGAWA
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 616-642
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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    Essentialist writing is being criticized by those who hold the viewpoint that cultures are "objectified". According to some writers, "objectification" means to make culture into "a thing" which is operative for a conscious end. This concept is well applied to the analysis of nationalist ideology or the discourse of traditionalist movements. The construction of culture in this sense is regarded as parallel to the subjective construction of a nation or ethnicity. This cultural "objectification" is well termed as "operational objectification". However, the term "objectification" was originally used by Roy Wagner in a different way. Anthropologists in the field objectify or invent culture in order to adapt themselves to the new circumstances of meanings and behavioral norms. This is the process of objectification as a cultural principle. There is also a general principle that social and cultural change occurs as a result of the dialectical relation between convention and invention. Accordingly, culture should be understood as being originally dynamic in the sense that it always changes while it continues at the same time. The difference between "operational objectification" and "objectification as a cultural principle" reflects on respective historical views. The former stands in the perspective of the historical discontinuation of culture, the latter in the historical continuation of culture. The former attaches ultimate values and importance to the present, perceiving that the past merely contributes to the conscious and largely political purpose of the present, while the latter regards the present only as a temporal point in passing from the past to the future. Admitting that the discourse produced by particular subjects of a society is operationally objectified, the aspects of the life and practice of the majority of society is left unstudied. These aspects are continually innovated as time progresses. Marshall Sahlins has analyzed the contact between the Hawaiians and Captain Cook. Sahlins does not see the indigenous Hawaiian society as monolithic. Rather, he admits that there existed various subjects in the society, and that the dominant subjects among them, such as the priests, took advantage of their interpretation of Captain Cook as the ancient god Lono in order to gain power and legitimacy. Nicholas Thomas also sees externality as a dominant part of the cultural constitution of indigenous societies. One of his main theses is that self-representation is oppositional or reactive. Thomas regards kerekere, the Fijian term for a popular kind of gift exchange, as a custom objectified and invented in the historical process of contact between Western agents and native Fijians. The idealized social attributes of Fijian customary life represented by the word kerekere are the inverse of those attributed to Fijian Indians and probably the Westerners as well. The oppositional characterization of Fijians as communalist is a form of "reactionary objectification". This concept stemmed from inter-ethnic rivalry. Thomas' main interest here is operational objectification and characterization as an ideological reaction. Interestingly, on this point, Sahlins puts it the other way round, arguing that the failure of white men to participate in kerekere led Fijians to construct themselves as selfish rather than that the selfishness of white men led Fijians to construct themselves as generous. Thomas also argues that various indigenous systems used to exist in terms of circulation based on reciprocal relations. After the contact with Europeans, goods such as muskets (guns) and whale teeth were introduced to the indigenous societies. These goods were appropriated and recontextualized in the indigenous societies, and treated as inalienable valuables with prestigious connotation. With such an account,

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  • Michio SUENARI
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 643-648
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 649-652
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 652-656
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 656-659
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 660-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 660-661
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 661-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 661-662
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Article type: Appendix
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 664-
    Published: March 30, 1997
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  • Article type: Appendix
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 665-666
    Published: March 30, 1997
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  • Article type: Index
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages i-iii
    Published: March 30, 1997
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  • Article type: Index
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages iv-vi
    Published: March 30, 1997
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  • Article type: Appendix
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages App2-
    Published: March 30, 1997
    Released on J-STAGE: March 27, 2018
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  • Article type: Cover
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages Cover3-
    Published: March 30, 1997
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  • Article type: Cover
    1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages Cover4-
    Published: March 30, 1997
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