The Waseda Society of Cultural Anthropology was founded in 1999, and began to publish its own annual journal, Waseda Journal of Cultural Anthropology. The paper examines its history and the academic environment that frames the publication. The Journal is characterized by repeated difficulties: insufficient membership, insufficient budget, unsuccessful symposiums, etc. However, these have not only been caused by the ineffective editorial management, but rather by the overall academic ecosystem surrounding Japanese researchers. The Japanese world of cultural anthropology is composed of a variety of study groups who mostly have only several years of life, characterized as cliques. The paper shows the system of study groups as a result of cultural anthropologists’ adaptation to the Japanese academic environment, and highlights how it functions as a production system of discourses. The development of e-journals is now changing the environment. In this change, the traditional role of academic journals to promote discussions demonstrates further importance even for e-journals.

  Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology (formerly Japanese Journal of Ethnology) has been a flagship journal of the field since 1935 in Japan: its function may seem self-evident for most Japanese anthropologists. However, once you are inside its editorial board, you begin to see it as something much more vulnerable, which needs to be continuously taken care of. In this essay I summarize my reflections on the modus operandi of this journal through my several years’ work on the editorial board (which includes my engagement in essential reforms about cover design, peer-review system and contribution rules). This work has given me the opportunities of comparing the journal with those in other fields or other countries, as well as of discovering the journal’s past history. My conclusion is simple: we must definitely safeguard its "life", precisely because it is inseparable from the life of Japanese anthropology itself.

  In this paper, I analyze how the people of Palau, Micronesia reify their oral narratives through textualization. I will also examine how the act of textualization―putting words on paper or into an electronic format―affects the oral practices and transmission of stories that are originally embodied knowledge.

  Some recent linguistic anthropological studies on Oceania have been based on a critical view of the dichotomous between spoken narratives and written text [Ong 1982]. They have sought to re-orient textualization as a practical form of “voicing” (acting a word) instead of a unidirectional form of transmission from orality to literacy situated within the process of modernization [Finnegan 1988, Besnier 1988, 1995]. The mutual relationship, between orality and literacy and the regional specificities of the practices of textualization are now being studied in regard to Oceanian oral traditions [Besnier 1988: 732].

  In Palau, Palauan and English are the two official languages, and people use both languages on a daily basis at home, school, workplace and in their local communities. Opportunity to use English have increased in Palau as a consequence of the arrival and acceptance of overseas workers. With increased exposure to the Internet and the effects of globalization on the culture, especially among young people, the Palauan language is now more rarely spoken. Under this accelerating crisis of language extinction in recent years, the need to continue of oral traditions to the next generation has become ever more urgent.

  In this paper, I focus on the practices of the textualization of oral traditions. I analyze two case studies in right of, 1) the textualization of oral narratives on the local level since the time of Japan rule (1914-1945) to the present; and 2) national cultural promotion movements aimed at collecting and textualizing traditional oral narratives since the latter half of American colonial rule in around late 1960’. Through this analysis, I attempt to explain the process of textualization and the characteristics of oral traditions in contemporary Palau society.

  This paper discusses how history is evoked in oral folktales by analyzing the interpretation of tongue twisters [Qončaan qoyor kövün] passed down in Khobogksair Mongolian Autonomous County in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China.

  A tongue twister is originally a word game where people compete in speaking faster and better words that are hard to pronounce. Syllables of many of the tongue twister words line up in order of difficulty in moving the tongue, and the meaning of the words are hard to understand. Nevertheless, Khobogksair Torgud people made tongue twisters [Qončaan qoyor kövün], have passed them on and told them to their children, making the words sound as if they were word games, and have spread them among the Torgud people with the aim of avoiding interference by Imperial Russia. It is understood that Torgud people who lived in the riverside area of the Idil River interpreted the messages hidden in the tongue twister words spoken by children and began to prepare for migration.

  This paper explores two examples of interpretation concerning the twister tongue words, and focuses on imagining the history of Torgud by excavating their history from the word games with unclear meanings, rather than focusing on whether the tongue twister words were actually used as secret codes for transmitting information for migration. The results showed that Khobogksair Torgud people were fully equipped with an oral communication system for transmitting information on their history of returning to their country.

  Doing fieldwork in “their” place and writing ethnographies to “our” readers is anthropology’s traditional way to produce knowledge. Yet today’s changing circumstances of the discipline elevate the significance of revisiting how to do anthropology. Forming a research group of “professional” anthropologists who undertake collaborative projects with non-academic actors and a practitioner of ethnography in a consulting company, we observed mutually what anthropologists do in the field and discussed it over shared field notes. It was tricky research since it blurred boundaries between the researcher and the researched, and between on and off hours. We dub this experimental method “1.5-order ethnography.” Our research suggests that our notion of doing anthropology should be expanded enough to include seemingly-peripheral jobs, such as drafting proposal or playing any role expected by interlocutors, as its integral part, and that the feature of doing anthropology is to keep (excessively-)detailed notes on the field.