Directory

Cultural Anthropology,  African Studies
(The Anthropology of the States and the Market, Human Mobility, Poverty and Development Aid)

I encountered cultural anthropology during my sophomore year of undergraduate studies, and ever since then, I have been drawn to the fascination of fieldwork, which led me to pursue an academic career. After conducting fieldwork on the Shimane Peninsula and the Yaeyama Islands in Japan, I took a one-year leave of absence after completing my junior year and traveled to Ethiopia with two friends—that was my first experience of “Africa.” Living alongside people in the field and building relationships with them allows me to view the world through the tiny eye of a needle—the perspective of those living their daily lives. I believe the anthropology, which is grounded in these lived experiences, is not a discipline that seeks general “answers” like generative AI, but rather one that uses “myself” as a foundation from which to contemplate the world.

Over the years, I have conducted fieldwork primarily in Ethiopia in East Africa, as well as in Japan, the Gulf States of the Middle East, and Europe. In my research in rural Ethiopia, spanning over 20 years, I examined questions of property relations and distribution of wealth, such as land and crops (Anthropology of Possession and Distribution). Since the late 2000s, as women from the villages I studied began migrating to the Gulf states in the Middle East for work, I have also been engaging with the question of cross-border human mobility (Across the Sea: Stories of Human Mobility). As market economies globalize and the movement of people and goods across borders accelerates, I wish to explore from a cultural anthropological perspective what borders are, how we can understand the political system of the nation-state defined by those boundaries, and how we interpret the wars and violence that occur along them. Rather than viewing “Africa” merely as a geographical region, I hope you will study cultural anthropological research on “Africa” as a starting point for contemplating universal questions relevant to human beings. I have also published some Japanese books on how to study cultural anthropology, so please start by picking up those (The 30 Essential Books on Cultural Anthropology, Thinking Anthropologically, and The Circling Anthropology).