Ahiajoku lecture is an annual lecture organized by the Imo State Government of Nigeria. The purpose of this lecture is to praise the ethnic culture of the Igbo, the dominant ethnic group in southeastern Nigeria. The title of Ahiajoku 2000 was "Igbo Enwe Eze (igbo Have No King)". Anthropologists and colonial officers have regarded the traditional Igbo society as a democratic one where no central authority has existed. "Igbo Enwe Eze (Igbo Have No King)" is a proverb which expresses this character. By using this proverb in a positive sense, the lecturer of Ahiajoku 2000 meant to praise the "democratic" nature of the Igbo. However, contrary to his expectations, this lecture annoyed the audience and incited much criticism. This criticism was one reason why another lecture was held in a neighboring state. The title of this lecture was "Igbo Nwe Eze (igbo Have Kings)". The opposition between these two lectures shows the emergence of a new cultural Igbo self-portrait which considers their traditional society to be one with kings (igbo have kings). In this article, the author examines how this cultural self-portrait has emerged, especially from the viewpoint of their historical recognition of kingship. The emergence of this self-portrait is related to the socio-political situation surrounding the Igbo in contemporary Nigeria. Since late 2000, "Elect an Igbo President in 2003" was a common slogan for the Igbo who were feeling marginalized from the federal government which was controlled by other ethnic groups. It was in this political climate that "Igbo Enwe Eze (Igbo have no king) "was reinterpreted to mean that the Igbo lack the genetic ability to produce a sole leader from among them. The emergence of "Igbo have kings" reflected their frustrations with the implications newly drawn from the proverb, "Igbo have no king". However, even if the emergence of this new self-portrait was motivated by ethnic politics in contemporary Nigeria, it is approved as a cultural self-portrait in terms of their historical recognition. Therefore, this author examines the change in historical recognition on kingship at two different levels. One is the discourse on the ethnic origin of the Igbo, and the other is the discourse on the history of subgroups, especially the ones which had no central authority before the colonial age. Before the colonial age, the Igbo had no political system to unify them as one ethnic group. Igboland was merely an aggregation of small subgroups, called village-groups by anthropologists. These subgroups shared no common origin or traditions. However, some Igbo intellectuals and political leaders today regard the Nri, a village-group in Anambra State as "the ancestral homeland of the Igbo". Around 1960, an archeologist excavated ancient bronzes dated to the 9th century. Scholars believe these bronzes are products associated with the Nri. After this finding of some of the oldest bronzes in West Africa, some native scholars and Igbo political leaders began to accept the Nri as the origin of the Igbo and their culture. Importantly the Nri was one of the few subgroups which had kings before the colonial era. This new discourse on the Igbo's ethnic origin has given some people a reason to regard kingship as the proper ethnic culture for the Igbo. However, this alone can not explain the magnitude of the criticism against Ahiajoku 2000. In order to understand it, we must consider why these condemnations came even from the people from the subgroups without central authorities. In contemporary Igbo society, there are people called "Eze" (king). They were administrative chiefs under edicts executed in the 1970s. The history of administrative chiefs in southeastern Nigeria dates back to 1919 when the British colonial administration installed warrant chiefs. Many scholars have

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The purpose of this article is to present the details of de-nationalizing the state agricultural enterprise in the Republic of Kenya, and to explain the social context of what is locally received as "Economic Liberalization". Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are each undergoing major changes now. In connection with world wide economic liberalization the state restrictions on key industries, particularly upon agriculture, have been dramatically removed. This is true in Kenya as well. Since the acceptance of Structural Adjustment Policies in 1980, the production and distribution of commercial farm products has been gradually set free from the control of the state's marketing board. This situation does not only affect the state financial system, but also the life style of the people in each local community. Many researchers have started to call this movement either the "Second Wave of Freedom", following African independence in the 1960s; or the "Third Change", following colonization and de-colonization from European countries. Under this social-economic transition, people in the farm villages are trying to coordinate a cooperative relationship, but the obstacles are numerous and often difficult to identity. To inquire into the problem, I shall be reporting upon my investigation on "the frontier society", which offers valid and relevant data. Because, most of these out-of-the-way villages are planned and operated by larger enterprises, government or international organizations, anthropologists can easily observe recent political-economic transitions within the local people's lives. The frontier society which I have investigated is located within the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in the southern plain of Mount Kenya, Kirinyaga district. The Mwea Irrigation Scheme which was started by the British colonial government in 1954, has one of the largest paddy fields in East Africa. Residents are Gikuyu nuclear families originally from all over Kirinyaga district, and they grow rice for the scheme under contract to the National Irrigation Board. With the passage of time, the original settler's children have grown and become independent. The main workers of the paddy fields are now day laborers from neighboring villages. Moreover, the Mwea Irrigation Scheme also underwent the process of economic liberalization. To be more specific, in 1996, the production and distribution of rice were released from state control and Gikuyu settlers started rice farming without any governmental support to the scheme. They desired economic richness through the mass production of rice, which they approached enthusiastically. Nevertheless, the settler's family budget declined severely as a consequence of the reduced production of rice. In addition, newly created paddy fields expanded for a total of almost 1.5 times the original size, and a new problem in the form of a water shortage came about. This article pays attention to a particular Gikuyu family (the Muremi family) in Village M, a settler's village investigated by the writer, and tries to see how those family members got over the difficulties associated with the economic transition. As noted, the Muremi family was facing financial problems from both reduced rice production and a significant shortage of water in the paddy fields. Mr. Muremi's (aged 78 in 2002) strategies for the financial stability of his family are considered fully in this article. The changes he made to continue an adequate production of rice are summarized as follows: 1. Mr. Muremi asked his independent sons to manage his paddy fields. Mr. Muremi's sons were not contract farmers of the Mwea Irrigation Scheme, so they had a cash income from other established means. Since they became responsible for their father's fields, they were requested to employ other family members who needed work, and they were required to

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This paper aims to explore the complex relationship between feminism as both a theoretical position and social movement on one hand, and anthropological inquires into gender on the other. In English-speaking countries, these two seem to go hand in hand, in most cases, as indicated in the widespread use of the term, "feminist anthropology". In Japanese academia, however, feminist anthropology has never gained a wide usage despite a relatively large concern with gender-related issues. In this context, "gender" tends to be deemed a topic, rather than a perspective through which to approach certain topics. This paper thus raises the following question: can there be anthropology of gender without a feminist perspective? In other words, can we separate gender as a subject from gender as a research perspective? To answer these questions, the paper first looks briefly at the development of anthropological inquires into gender issues and examines the impact of feminism upon such academic endeavors. Next, it summarizes the examples of ethnographic studies on the societies of Java and Bali in Indonesia, contrasting those with a clear gender perspective and those without. It then presents the author's personal views on the problems and possibilities of practising anthropology of gender in Japan. Undoubtedly, anthropological studies of gender have produced a large number of theoretical writings, collected volumes and monographs over the last three decades. In the West, the development of so-called feminist anthropology has been closely related to the development of feminist theories since the early 1970s. Anthropology became "gendered" in the sense that fragmented concerns with sex roles, women's positions in families, as well as marriage systems, have come to constitute a solid, integrated area of research. At the same time, the universalist approach to women's subordination was clearly based on simplistic and Eurocentric assumptions that women's problems, as exemplified in the situations in the West, are essentially the same everywhere. In this vein, anthropological knowledge was expected to provide useful ethnographic examples for consolidating the constructed nature of gender. For anthropology, however, a problem arises from the fact that we study and discuss "other" people's gender, rather than our own. We are thus required to negotiate "for whom" the aimed social reform, embedded in feminist practices, is meant to be. In this light, the warnings against the "use and abuse" of anthropology have been voiced by some feminist anthropologists themselves, such as Michelle Rosaldo and Marilyn Strathern. There is also severe criticism from "Third World feminists" concerning an uncritical view of "women" as a homogeneous category. Consequently, anthropology of gender has renewed its theoretical concerns by looking at gender as a dynamic process, rather than as a given, fixed difference; and by paying more attention to the intersection of gender with other differences such as those based on race, ethnicity, religion and social class. In the body of anthropological literature on the societies of Java and Bali in Indonesia, an emphasis on the relative equality of male-female relationships was pronounced. Gender difference, it has been argued, is considerably downplayed in these societies; even when such difference is clearly recognized, complementarity rather than inequality was said to come to the fore. Such an "unproblematic" status of gender issues is also the norm in other societies in Southeast Asia; hence, the studies of gender in this region remained undeveloped until the 1980s. However, more recent research efforts incorporating gender as a perspective have cast light on the historical process in which socio-economic changes have enhanced or modified the foregoing gender

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James Clifford holds that the history of "exotic" displays in the West has provided a "context of enduring power imbalance within and against which the contact work of travel, exhibition, and interpretation occurs". Asymmetries of power generated through such displays have become visible in a highly genderized and racialized way in present-day area studies. The asymmetrical and even exploitative relations inherent in the Western studies of non-Western cultures often prevail, as held by Sakai, Chow and others. To correct the asymmetry more critiques of Orientalist discourse in area studies, including Japan Studies (nihon kenkyu), are much needed. Recently, a critique of the "first world feminist" religious discourse has given rise to voices of protest by non-Western women in diverse religious traditions. They have challenged, for example, dominant feminist theologian, Mary Daly's representation of non-Western women in religious worlds as the passive victims of a global patriarchy. In order to demonstrate the presence of this patriarchy in which she strips those women of their self-understanding and subjecthood, Daly has collected and displayed exotic specimens from non-Western cultural contexts, such as sati, female circumcision/genital mutation and foot-binding. The same kind of "othering" of non-Western women has been replicated in the study of Japanese religions. Lately we have seen a plethora of studies related to Japanese women's involvement with the mizuko kuyou ritual, a religious rite mostly performed for an aborted fetus. Among these studies is an award-winning book by a feminist historian of religion that attempts to situate mizuko kuyou in the overtly misogynist sex culture and gender ideology of Japan. This ethnographic study plays on the trope of "callous man and foolish women" in which contemporary Japanese women are represented as powerless accomplices of men who "eroticize" sexual transgressions of various kinds. The study paints Japanese women as lacking power over sexual and reproductive rights, and moreover, reduces Japanese women to voiceless victims who neither "resist" nor "negotiate". This mode of representation is what postcolonial feminists such as Mohanty and Shohat identify as the homogeneous master narrative of first world feminists which essentializes and congeals the differences between Western and non-Western women. Moreover, Mohanty's latest work criticizes the tendency to employ a non-everyday life image, such as dowry deaths, for example, as standing for the totality of women of India. It appears, by the same token, that the image of Japanese women being haunted by the spirits of aborted fetuses in mizuko kuyou has become a metaphor representing Japanese women's otherness. In other words, the tendency to draw a false divide between overstated images of victimized and liberated women would only result in privileging feminists of the first world, and thereby closing off the possibility for self-reflexive scholarship among Western women. It would only create distance by demarcating "difference". In sum, the issue of mizuko kuyou has gone beyond a single phenomenon in Japanese religion to become an arena of Japanese gender and sexuality issues where various scholars bring their particularized political agendas into play. While the text mentioned above has been praised for its "unquestionably feminist view" of sexuality observable in Japanese culture, scholars of Japanese religion have also raised some objections. That is, the researcher's political agenda has ended up taking precedence over the realities of the practice and actual experiences of the women concerned. It seems, therefore, that data complicating those agendas has been purposefully omitted to obfuscate the complexities of the women's practice. In

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Studies on sexuality (studies on gender and sexuality in particular) are undergoing significant change especially with the challenges to hetero-sexism since the 1990s. This change was generated by the critical argument that the concept of gender introduced by feminism studies was actually formed on the definitions of male/female based on hetero-sexism. Now, however, the concept of sexuality has been expanded beyond the definitions of hetero-sexuality to allow for an increasing number of studies on various forms of sexuality (e.g., gay, lesbian, transgender, transsexual, inter-sexual, etc.). This trend is also evidenced in the field of anthropology through the increasing number of anthropological publications in this area in the past ten years. There are, however, problems within the current expanded studies on sexuality. One aspect is that the mechanism of hetero-sexism, which was supposedly set aside to allow for various new studies, is discreetly casting a shadow on gender/sexuality studies. While current constructionist studies on gender/sexuality try to explain specific complicated mechanisms that create particular gender/sexuality differences, the fact is that others still regard gender/sexuality itself as "all made up" and void of any definition. Although there are studies that directly examine sexuality, these studies tend to become mired in the ceriticisms surrounding hetero-sexism. For example, while the focus of current studies is shifting to various forms of sexuality other than hetero-sexuality as mentioned earlier, the context of the concept of male/female based on hetero-sexism is only examined from the aspect of challenging hetero-sexism. This reluctance to conduct deeper examinations is the opposite of an overemphasis on hetero-sexism. The same issue exists in the analytical approach on sexuality that developed with the critical examination of hetero-sexism which is evident by the term "gendered sexuality". Obviously, challenging hetero-sexism is important and studies should be conducted in detail. However, discussing gender/sexuality based on the above structure, which is necessary for critical analysis, will only enforce the framework that sexuality (i.e., men and women) is essentially a result of hetero-sexism. This may consequently play a role in preserving the existing theory on hetero-sexism. Therefore, this paper will identify issues in the study of sexuality and suggest specific paths for further research through discussions on the example of Italian society. The social structure in Italy is, at first glance, extremely hetero-sexually oriented. This paper will venture to examine the issues of hetero-sexual based concepts of men and women in the field to identify discourse that should not be associated with hetero-sexism. Sexual codes in Italian society are widely recognized as extremely male-centered and hetero-sexually oriented. Therefore, it appears that the discourse on male/female categorization has been captured by hetero-sexism based mechanisms. Indeed in Italy, as seen in previous studies, the sexual division of labor is well established and living areas are clearly separated according to gender. In addition, there are numerous discourses and practices that establish the mutually complimentary aspects of male and female roles. This dichotomy between the two concepts, male and female, is at the same time realigned as male-centrism which leads to a hetero-sexism based theory. This theory is crystallized in the Italians' ethnically unique idea of "honor", which appears to regulate every detail of their daily lives. However, it is important to note that this male-centered, hetero-sexism theory, although it is a dominant one, is in fact only adequate in the context of a "male society". In Italy, there are places, mostly public squares, where men daily get together and develop close relationships (a male

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