Anthropological Research on Transnationalism and "Street" Phenomena

2009 report

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:19:41 +0900

2009 report was updated.

SER vol.80 & 81, Contents and abstracts were updated

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:09:24 +0900

Contents and abstracts of all articles of Senri Ethnological Reports vol.80 and 81 were updated.

2009 Report

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:02:48 +0900

2009 Report was updated.

Prof. and Dr. Monika Salzbrunn attends two Conferences with Prof. Yasumasa Sekine

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:31:19 +0900

Dr. Monika Salzbrunnを迎えての研究会・シンポのご案内 Monika Salzbrunnさんは、ドイツのご出身ですが、長年パリのベルヴィルという移民の多い地区で空間性を意識した深い調査をしてきた方です。昨年パリを訪ねたとき面白い場所を案内してくださいました。今回はストリートの科研で関根が招請しまして、東京を中心に日本の都市のフィールドワークを共同で行う意図で、２月２５日~３月１０日の期間、滞日します。下記のように、東京で２月２８日、大阪で３月４日、二度の研究集会を開催します。ご興味がありましたら、奮ってご参加ください。残念ですが、旅費をお出しすることはできません。ご参加いただく場合は、下記の関根宛メールに必ずご一報ください。問い合わせも同じメールです。 muttamman@gmail.com 成城大学でのミニ・シンポジウム小田亮さんの主宰するコミカル研究会・上杉さんの主宰するグローカル研究会と関連付けて集会の場をセッティングしてくださいました。以下の要領で開催します。シンポジウムタイトル: 「現代都市における共同性・複数帰属・ストリート」 Multiple Belonging and the Street：Urban Communality in the Era of Reflexive Modernization. 日時　2月28日（日）午後　14：00～18：00 会場　成城大学（3号館3階大会議室）構成発表１ “Multiple Belonging in Urban Neighbourhoods: How Festive Events Create Communality” 　Monika Salzbrunn (Prof. Dr. Monika Salzbrunn（Fuculty of Social Science, 　　Ruhr-University Bochum, & Researcher at the CRIA (CNRS-EHESS), 　Paris）発表２ “Toward an Anthropology of the Street：Street Phenomena in the Era of Reflexive Modernization” Yasumasa SEKINE　(Japan Women’s University) 司会　上杉富之（成城大学）コメンテーター　植村清加（東京国際大学）　泉水英計（神奈川大学）未定質疑は日本語で通訳あり国立民族学博物館共同研究会竹沢尚一郎（民博）さんの主宰する共同研究会「移民と国民国家」の研究集会で場を提供していただきました。以下の要領で開催します。私の発表は添えものです。２０１０年３月４日（木）１３：３０～国立民族学博物館　大演習室（４階）発表１“From Immigration to Diversity in Urban Spaces: a View from the Street” Monika Salzbrunn（Prof. of Fuculty of Social Science, Ruhr-University Bochum, & Researcher at the CRIA (CNRS-EHESS), Paris）発表２「英国ロンドンにおける南アジア系移民社会の近年の動向を巡って」関根康正（日本女子大学）総合コメント　　野村雅一（総合研究大学院大学副学長）

In the International Symposium held at Kyoto university, Pfof. Sekine presented his paper on "An Anthropology of Street"

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:03:29 +0900

International Symposium: “The Future of Anthropology and Ethnological Museum” First Day: “The Future of Anthropology” December 7th 2009, 10:30-17:00 at Siran Kaikan of Kyoto University Chairperson: Suehara Tatsuro, Professor, Kyoto University Program: 10:30-11:30 Key Note Speech: Maurice Godelier, Professeur, EHESS, France ”In Today’s World Anthropology is More Important than Ever” 13:00-15:00 Presentations: Sekine Yasumasa, Professor, Japan Women’s University “Toward an Anthropology of the Street: Street Phenomena in the Era of Reflexive Modernization” Kasuga Naoki, Professor, Osaka University “Toward the Science of Human-Nature” Takezawa Shoichiro, Professor, National Museum of Ethnology “Anthropology, Museum and Seeing: Reconsidering the Representation” 15:30-17:00 Discussion 1800-20:00 Party

2009 report

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:36:38 +0900

2009 report This project on Anthropology of the Street has explored new themes and methodologies for anthropology by focusing on ‘street’ phenomena in contemporary society – a society marked by increasing fluidity driven by the ‘reflexive modernization’ associated with neo-liberalism and transnationalism. Challenging the constraints of the control society at its periphery, and flouting that society’s home orientation, street phenomena are doubly repressed and hidden. The first task, therefore, was to clarify what street phenomena are and where they are taking place. Having excavated the genealogies of street phenomena, the second task was to compile systematic ethnographies, taking into due account the power relationship between the centre and the periphery. By rereading the ‘peripheral’ as the ‘liminal,’ we have sought a new horizon for anthropology that will offer resistance to the overwhelming neo-liberal tendency.

An Anthropology of the Street, Senri Ethnological Reports 80 & 81

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:30:39 +0900

An Anthropology of the Street An Anthropology of the Street Contents An Anthropology of the Street Vol.1 (Senri Ethnological Reports 80) 【Contents】 Preface SEKINE, Yasumasa Introductory Section: The Aim and the Range of Street Anthropology Introduction SEKINE, Yasumasa Chapter 1 On the basis of “Street Anthropology”: From Pollution to Urban Footpaths SEKINE, Yasumasa Chapter 2 Advocating the Potential of Street Anthropology SEKINE, Yasumasa Chapter 3 Comments on the Advocacy of Street Anthropology from the Perspective of Locality and Mannerization NOMURA, Masaichi Part One: A Quest for Methods of Street Ethnography [How to be Receptive to the Urban Unconscious: Effects of Allegory] Chapter 4　Flânerie and Traces on the Street: On the Technique of Reading Urban Memories CHIKAMORI, Taka’aki Chapter 5　The Urban Unconscious Seen from the Street and the Project of Psychoanalysis of Cities MINAMI, Hirofumi [Changes in Approaches to the Urban Street: Between the view from above and the view from below] Chapter 6　A Review of Street Studies in Spatial Theory: Focusing on the Way of Seeing the City in Urban Geography KATŌ, Masahiro Chapter 7 Towards Actualizing the Street: Critical Reflections on the Time-geography of Disciplinary-control society KATŌ, Masahiro Part Two: The Practices of Writing Street Ethnography Now Section One The Viewpoint of Power and the Viewpoint of the Street at Cross-purposes [The Living Street Society of Homeless People] Chapter 8 Contesting the Streets: Shelter-Resistant Homeless Men and Encampments in Japan, America and Britain GILL, Tom Chapter 9 Women Living on the Street: Everyday lives of Homeless Women MARUYAMA, Satomi [The Street as a Vanishing Point of the Value of Progress: Hope without Hope] Chapter 10 Searching for the Potentiality of “Loitering on the Way”, as seen in Twan Yang’s “Houseboy in India” ISODA, Kazuhide Chapter 11 Country Men on the City Street: Timorese Waste Collectors and their Hopes MORITA, Yoshinari [Body Reflecting Social Environment: Implicit Space for Contestation] Chapter 12 Bodies Shaped by the Streets: The ‘Poverty Space’ in Santiago, Chile NAITO, Junko Chapter 13 The Streets as an Arena: Those who Arm Themselves with Makeup and Hide Themselves with Makeup TAMAKI, Yasuko Section Two Living Force Generated from Streets: Habitus and Bricolage [The Street as a Contested Arena: Managing Resources of Culture and Religion] Chapter 14 A Sacred Path to Divine Otherness: the Hindu Goddess Bahuchara and Hijras as her Devotees KUNIHIRO, Akiko Chapter 15 Sacralization of the Urban Footpath, with Special Ref¬erence to Pavement Shrines in Chennai City, South India SEKINE, Yasumasa [Styles of Knowledge and Violence found in City Streets: Toward Generative Commonality] Chapter 16 Producing Meanings in the Street: the Semantics of Street Culture in Abidjan SUZUKI, Hiroyuki Chapter 17 From Street Slang to a Linguistic Tool of Propaganda: The ‘Street-ness’ of the Sheng Language KOMMA, Toru Chapter 18 The Street and Collective Violence: With Special Reference to Post-election Violence in Kenya 2007-2008 MATSUDA, Motoji An Anthropology of the Street Vol.2 (Senri Ethnological Reports 81) 【Contents】 Part Three: Historical Perspectives on Street and Translocality Section One Reconsidering Placeness Today from the Viewpoint of History and Memory [Historical Changes of Concepts of Street: Relativization of Modernity] Chapter 19 The Relationship between Community and Street viewed Historically: the Case of Hakata TAKEZAWA, Shōichirō Chapter 20 The Street as a Changing Social Arena in Medieval Europe KLEINSCHMIDT, Harald Chapter 21 On a Little Bridge in Beijing: The Global History of the Street Corner SEO, Tatsuhiko [Changes of Local Placeness and Contestation among Plural Viewpoints: Between Memory and Present Reality] Chapter 22 Wholesale Markets Past and Present: a Case Study of the Transition of ‘Placeness’ in a Local Wholesale Market of Agricultural Products in Nagaoka City SUZUKI, Shinsuke Chapter 23 The Street as Contested Space for Emerging Locality: A Case Study of Tree Ceremonies in Southern Germany YAMADA, Kaori Chapter 24 The Conflict over Seascapes in the Torres Strait, Australia: Between Aboriginal People’s Sense of Place and the Authorities’ Sense of Legitimacy MATSUMOTO, Hiroyuki Chapter 25 Street and Stream: Some Notes Towards a Study of Street Phenomena in Polynesia TANAHASHI, Satoshi Section Two Transnational Flow and Recombinant Generation of Locality [Locality and Street-ness Constructed among Immigrants’ Social Spaces] Chapter 26 Construction of “Recombinant Locality” as a ‘Lived place’ among South Asian Migrants in Hawaii: Bricolage between Packaging (Capital) and De-packaging (Resources) SEKINE, Yasumasa Chapter 27 From Chinatown to Global City: The Papua New Guinean Chinese Experience of Streets in Rabaul, Port Moresby and Sydney ICHIKAWA, Tetsu Chapter 28 “Ethnic Town” and Street: The Case of “Cambodia Town” in Los Angeles County ASAHI, Yumiko Chapter 29 Streets Connected to the Place of Daily Life: Café Life among Tunisians in Paris UEMURA, Sayaka [Locality and Street-ness in the Post-Socialist Environment] Chapter 30 The Post-Socialist Street: The New Urban Transformation in Ulaanbaatar City, Mongolia NISHIGAKI, Yu Chapter 31 A Sub-culture Becoming High-cultural? Popular Music and Street Culture in Post-socialist Mongolia SHIMAMURA, Ippei Concluding Section: Towards “Living Space” [The Generation of “Living Space” in/against Neo-liberalism] Chapter 32 Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Street as Viewed from “Hinterland Theory” ABE, Toshiharu Chapter 33 Reclaiming the Streets as Spaces of Everyday Life ODA, Makoto Chapter 34 Conclusions: For the Theory and Practice of a Critical Ethnography of “Street Anthropology” SEKINE, Yasumasa The Collection of Abstracts An Anthropology of the Street Vol.1 (Senri Ethnological Reports 80) Chapter 1 On the basis of “Street Anthropology”: From pollution to urban footpaths SEKINE, Yasumasa (Japan Women’s University) This chapter starts by describing the conceptual trajectory that took me from my original theory of ritual pollution in an Indian context to my present concern with urban streets, especially the sidewalks where all kinds of social, cultural and economic activities are taking place in Indian megacities. I found a common theoretical perspective penetrating both phenomena, namely the entangled co-existence of centripetal and de-centripetal viewpoints. In pollution theory the latter viewpoint of “pollution” holding a positive and generative sense should be distinguished from the former viewpoint of “impurity” embodying negative connotations. Similarly, the street is a contested arena where the weaker section of people living on sidewalks are surviving by resisting the dominant social force and at the same time appropriating its properties. In this sense, my pollution theory provides the basis for formulating “Street Anthropology.” Chapter 2 Advocating the Potential of Street Anthropology SEKINE, Yasumasa (Japan Women’s University) This project on Anthropology of the Street has explored new themes and methodologies for anthropology by focusing on ‘street’ phenomena in contemporary society – a society marked by increasing fluidity driven by the ‘reflexive modernization’ associated with neo-liberalism and transnationalism. Challenging the constraints of the control society at its periphery, and flouting that society’s home orientation, street phenomena are doubly repressed and hidden. The first task, therefore, was to clarify what street phenomena are and where they are taking place. Having excavated the genealogies of street phenomena, the second task was to compile systematic ethnographies, taking into due account the power relationship between the centre and the periphery. By rereading the ‘peripheral’ as the ‘liminal,’ we have sought a new horizon for anthropology that will offer resistance to the overwhelming neo-liberal tendency. Chapter 3 Comments on the Advocacy of Street Anthropology from the Perspective of Locality and Mannerization NOMURA, Masaichi (Graduate University for Advanced Studies) [The abstract is not available but the full text of this chapter is found in the next section of Collections of Field Research Reports] Chapter 4 Flânerie and Traces on the Street: On the Technique of Reading Urban Memories CHIKAMORI, Taka’aki (Japan Women’s University) This paper is an attempt to enquire into the theoretical meanings of the flâneur’s experience of ‘intoxication’, which appears in Walter Benjamin’s texts on the city, with reference to the concept of ‘trace.’ Flânerie as a condition of intoxication can be seen as an experience of touching the deeper level of urban memories. In order to elucidate the theoretical meanings of the experience, the paper follows two lines of Benjamin’s thought in detail. One is the line of linguistic philosophy, along which are related key themes of the image that contain similarities as well as the mimetic faculty, and the other line is the theory of memory that include topics such as Proustian involuntary memories and Freudian psychoanalysis. After pointing out that the concept of ‘trace’ can be located at the intersection of the two lines, the experience of the flâneur in intoxication is reconstructed as an act of recollecting the forgotten past, which is achieved in the course of collecting traces on the street and reading mimetically riddles encoded in the distortion of such traces. It is concluded that we can derive theoretical suggestions from Benjamin’s flâneur in intoxication, whose act consists of three moments of ‘reading’, ‘recollecting’ and ‘getting lost’, as well as concerning how to see and be on the street, that is, the epistemology and ontology of the street. Chapter 5 The Urban Unconscious Seen from the Street and the Project of Psychoanalysis of Cities MINAMI, Hirofumi (Kyushu University Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies) What kind of a place is the street? What are the modalities of transaction between walkers and streets? I pose these questions as an environmental psychologist who is interested in merging depth psychology and environmental psychology through field studies aimed at the “Psychoanalysis of Cities.” My search for the urban unconscious looks at urban renewal in a district of Hiroshima, street vendors in Asian cities, and the fruits of street strolling coupled with psychoanalytic sessions by the author in the city of New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Benjamin’s concept of the ‘flaneur’ was incorporated as a methodological means for acting out the unconscious transactions between urban strollers and the unconscious environment, through the medium of street photography. The photographic images taken were considered as constituting self-presentation of the city and physiognomic image building of the dream seen by the city, working rather like the free-association method in psychoanalysis. Chapter 6 A Review of Street Studies in Spatial Theory: Focusing on the Way of Seeing the City in Urban Geography KATŌ, Masahiro (Ritsumeikan University) This article identifies a number of studies deeply related to the idea of ‘the streets’ from among major urban theory discussions, analyzes their references, mutual influences, and contemporaneousness, and seeks to tie them together genealogically to constitute an alternative urban geography. Having a deep relationship to the idea of ‘the streets’ here does not necessarily mean that they treat ‘the streets’ as their object of study, but rather indicates a totality of practice discussing and portraying the city on the basis of experience of spaces ‘on the streets’ and the ‘sense of place.’ Among these, special attention is paid to Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, the Situationists, David Harvey, and the Los Angeles school of urbanism. By grafting together arguments that are wound around the spatial imagination in the era of globalization, such as the theoretical scheme of tactics and strategy (de Certeau), the production of space (Henri Lefebvre), the geographical imagination (Harvey), cognitive mapping (Frederic Jameson), the global or progressive sense of place (Doreen Massey), and situated knowledge (Donna Haraway), a vista of possibilities is opened up for a theory of urban studies that takes its origin from experiences that have been lived on ‘the streets.’ Chapter 7 Towards Actualizing the Street: Critical Reflections on the Time-geography of Disciplinary-control society KATŌ, Masahiro (Ritsumeikan University) This paper attempts to elucidate characteristics of the movement from a ‘disciplinary society’ to a ‘control society’ from the viewpoint of time-geography. Time-geography is a conceptual and analytical framework first proposed by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hagerstrand, and is characterized by its ability to map the time and space of human behavior regardless of scale. It also considers behavioral patterns by looking at the various elements which constrain human behavior and their spatial nature. In this paper, utilizing the concept of ‘domain’ which is a part of that spatial nature, I will try to make clear the social and spatial transformation (including the process of subjectification) that has arisen in the movement from a disciplinary society to a control society. And finally, positing ‘the streets’ as an opening gap in the control society, I will also consider the creation of the ‘outside’ or of ‘events’ which elude control. Chapter 8 Contesting the Streets: Shelter-Resistant Homeless Men and Encampments in Japan, America and Britain GILL, Tom (Meiji Gakuin University) The streets, as Sekine observes, are contested space. According to context that contest can take many forms, but this paper deals with a particularly literal form of street contestation: that which occurs between homeless people and other players in the urban environment – mainstream society and the city authorities. Using case studies from Japan, the U.S.A. and Britain, this paper studies individual and collective responses to the challenges of living on the streets – broadly defined to include other public spaces – in 21st century industrialized cities. Homeless people are often portrayed as passive victims of modern urban society. In fact they show a range of strategies in their frequent encounters with the authorities, ranging from reluctant accommodation to active resistance. Chapter 9 Women Living on the Street: Everyday lives of Homeless Women MARUYAMA Satomi (Ritsumeikan University) Many researchers working on the homeless in Japan have challenged the stereotypical view that they are deviant and need rehabilitating, emphasizing homeless people’s subjectivity by stressing their resistance to the mainstream and their work activities. This approach, however, assumes that they are adhere to another stereotypical norm – that of the independent working man. This paper focuses on the everyday lives of homeless women, which are very different from those of homeless men. Mostly they do unpaid work even on the street, obliging them to be economically dependent on others. The decision on whether to continue life on the street or to quit rough sleeping also depends on others, to whom they feel responsible for caring. A focus on homeless women opens up fresh analytical possibilities. We see their experiences on the street as intertwined with those of others, which is rather different from presuming a modern subjectivity. Rather, they emerge as individuals who have the will to choose their own life outcomes. My paper will also address the positionality of researchers who go looking for signs of resistance in the lives of homeless people. Chapter 10 Searching for the Potentiality of “Loitering on the Way”, as seen in Twan Yang’s “Houseboy in India” ISODA, Kazuhide (Seijo University, Institute of Folklore Studies) A standpoint that criticizes modernity in terms of its obsession with efficiency and speed is sometimes described as “loitering on the way” (michikusa o kuu in Japanese) because it makes people relaxed and allows them to regain their dynamism . Loitering, however, is a subordinate act: you loiter on the way to somewhere you have to go at someone’s command, or at your own inner command. You cannot loiter “on the way” if you aim at loitering itself. In that sense, loitering on the way is a practice done in the space of the other (de Certeau), not a right to be retained. Reading Houseboy in India, the autobiography of Twan Yang, who was born to a Tibetan mother and Chinese father, became an orphan and survived as a houseboy in British India, I argue that loitering on the way is an everyday practice done in the space of the other, not a subjective act. On that basis I seek to ascertain the potentiality of this act. ` Chapter 11 Country Men on the City Street: Timorese Waste Collectors and their Hopes MORITA, Yoshinari (Osaka University Graduate School of Human Sciences) In Kupang, the main city of West Timor island, eastern Indonesia, male laborers from the underdeveloped mountainous hinterlands engage in waste collecting labor as a means of obtaining cash income. These people are called “Ana Botol” (children of bottles). Their villages are connected to the city of Kupang by a trunk road, along which they make frequent trips. In Kupang, these Ana Botol often enthusiastically talk about travelling further, to new places – travels which have yet to be realized. In fact, having moved to an unfamiliar urban environment, Ana Botol find a host of new places and objectives on which to focus their hopes. In this paper, I look at some of the scenes from their daily life in order to discuss the Ana Botol notion of hope as it is projected on the streets of Kupang. In doing so, I clarify that their hopes continue to be narrated as such precisely because of their uncertain realizability. Chapter 12 Bodies Shaped by the Streets: The ‘Poverty Space’ in Santiago, Chile NAITO, Junko (Japan Society of the promotion of science / Japan Women’s University) A slum is not only a home to poor people, but also an environment which embodies the habitus of poverty and is in turn shaped by this body. Because this cycle cultivates and strengthens physical and sensory attributes as well as values adapted to impoverished living conditions, the slum appears closed, static, and cohesive. This paper, however, uses a study of urban poverty in Chile to treat slums as ‘impoverished mother ships,’ constructing a fluid, dynamic ethnography of poverty in the modern world. With advancing globalization, the numbers of the poor in cities are increasing, and they are beginning to wander through sight-seeing areas and wealthy residential districts which are not their homes, in search of resources. We can envision them as tentacles extending across the city from the mother ship. They pick up various resources – from food, to scraps for recycling, to artifacts of popular culture, and even ideas for miscellaneous jobs – sift through them, bring them back to the mother ship, arrange them as they please, and incorporate them into their lives. This paper re-evaluates the obvious raw diversity and complication of their living environment, that is, the context in which they live and their umwelt, focusing on bodies shaped by the streets and re-asking the ‘poverty question.’ Chapter 13 The Streets as an Arena: Those who Arm Themselves with Makeup and Hide Themselves with Makeup TAMAKI, Yasuko (Osaka Shoin Women’s University) On the street everyone hates makeup and regards their makeup as a problem. But for makeup enthusiasts, the street is a stage to showcase their own style of cosmetics as well as clothing. The street then becomes an arena of competition. Usagi Nakamura, who is always battling without knowing the outcome, once said “If I always feel uncomfortable in the street, I feel like a white crow when I exit the arena.” As long as the street remains an arena she can continue living. However, not everyone can live like this. In the street-arena, many people use makeup as camouflage to hide their scars and survive. They use this camouflage to hide themselves and disappear into the crowd. Makeup is used as a cloak of invisibility for their existence, and it becomes their way of life. Chapter 14 A Sacred Path to Divine Otherness: the Hindu Goddess Bahuchara and Hijras as her Devotees KUNIHIRO, Akiko (Gunma Prefectural Women’s University) This paper focuses on a place that is sacred to the Hindu goddess Bahuchara, and to her devotees known as hijras. The temple of Bahuchara is located in the northern part of Gujarat state in India. Every full-moon day, thousands of people make pilgrimages to that temple, where inevitably they come across Bahuchara’s devotees, hijras. Hijras are men who have sacrificed their masculinity to the goddess through the ritual of emasculation, and at the temple they practice religious rites that can confer blessings on the pilgrim. Hijras are regarded as neither men nor women; in other words, they cannot play parts in generating their own genealogies. As such, they are usually considered as social deviants at the worldly sphere. At the Hindu temple of Bahuchara, however, hijras are never driven away to the margins. Those who are in need of the divine power of Bahuchara implore the hijras to make channels to the goddess so that their prayer may be heard by the goddess. In short, at the sacred place of the Hindu goddess Bahuchara, hijras are no longer peripheral others, but rather are on the conceptual border between the sacred and the profane. Chapter 15 Sacralization of the Urban Footpath, with Special Ref¬erence to Pavement Shrines in Chennai City, South India SEKINE, Yasumasa (Japan Women’s University) With regard to urban footpaths, there are two actors with different interests, the municipal authorities who, in theory, pursue town plan¬ning and maintain footpaths for the convenience of pedestrians, and the poor homeless living illegally on footpaths with the constant fear of being forced to leave. There exists a clear difference in stand-point between authorities and pavement dwellers on the use of footpaths: the former has a power to keep the public space free from encroach¬ment but the latter finds the footpaths a space advantageous for living. The discussion focuses on pavement shrines that have become more ubiquitous in Chennai city, South India, since the 1990s and are mostly built and maintained by the socially and economically weaker sec¬tions of the city population. Footpath shrines may have and represent a power of resistance against authorities in the name of the sacred places they have been erected on, and are thus a weapon of the weak in their tactics for survival in the city. This ethnographic example holds an important theoretical connotation in terms of the emergence of a dynamic concept of the sacred by suggesting that the edge or boundary of the dominant ideological social space or the boundary between the legal and the illegal in its context embraces a potentiality of producing sacrality, as is suggested by Veikko Antonen’s rethinking of the notion of sacred from the viewpoint of cognitive categorization. Chapter 16 Producing Meanings in the Street: the Semantics of Street Culture in Abidjan SUZUKI, Hiroyuki (Kokushikan University)　 The street culture created in Abidjan, capital city of the Ivory Coast, is analyzed semantically in this paper. In the street, which is a social closed field, street boys live in a universe filled with meanings understood only between them. In this universe, the slang spoken by the street boys segmentalizes their realities, giving them a street sensibility and systematizing the cosmology of the street. This process will be analyzed specifically in relation to the boys’ system of human classification and their spatial perception. After this I analyze the relationship between the value system created on the street and the concrete actions of the street boys by using the analytical concept of langue and parole. Lastly I examine the mechanism of producing meaning in the street by using the analytical concept of bricolage, and point out that street culture is the product of the street boys’ intellectual activity. Chapter 17 From Street Slang to a Linguistic Tool of Propaganda: The ‘Street-ness’ of the Sheng Language KOMMA, Toru (Kanagawa University) Sheng is a new mixed language, born on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya within the last few decades. It is syntactically based on Swahili and derives its lexicon from all the languages spoken in Kenya, mostly English and Kenyan vernaculars. In the early days, Sheng tended to be dismissed as mere slang used by Nairobi street children. Later, the emergence of an elite version of the language (Engsh, an anagram of Sheng) promoted it to the rank of an identity marker for students. The liberalization of FM radio in the 1990s drastically heightened its popularity, to the extent that Sheng rapidly began to filter into the national consciousness. Hence Sheng was selected as the linguistic tool of political propaganda, notably in the nationwide anti-AIDS campaign. The Kenyan Government, however, came to see Sheng as a serious threat to the two official languages (English and Swahili), and allegedly took steps to suppress Sheng. Recently, probably as a result of government disapproval, the frequency of Sheng usage on air has been reduced significantly. On the other hand, prominent Kenyan companies, both local and international, have started to use Sheng in advertising, and this has elevated Sheng’s commercial importance in the era of globalization. Chapter 18 The Street and Collective Violence: With Special Reference to Post-election Violence in Kenya 2007-2008 MATSUDA, Motoji (University of Kyoto) This study considers how emergent communality can be created in the process of street violence, focusing on post-election violence in Kenya in 2007-2008. Kenya suffered from serious episodes of ethnic violence in the 1990s, especially in Rift Valley province. It caused several thousand deaths and 500,000 IDPs (internally displaced persons). These conflicts took place in rural areas and the distinction of perpetrator and victim was clear and absolute. On the other hand, the post-election violence of 2007-2008 was observed mainly on city streets, and the roles of perpetrator and victim were not fixed but interchangeable. Interviews with riot-participants in Nairobi focused on communal consciousness and social norms that emerged through the process of violence. Urban anthropological studies of the 1980s and ‘90s showed that ‘traditional’ ethnic and cultural identities were the main forces binding together communities, but those forces were unable to prevent this round of post-election violence. Ethnicity appears to have been the main factor in the post-electoral violence, but it was disguised as ‘natural animosity.’ While the riot-participants spoke openly of their ‘tribal’ identity to legitimize their violence, they were in fact reorganizing themselves into ad-hoc groupings irrespective of ethnicity or cultural tradition. This process is creating or recreating an emergent communality, which has the potential to be mobilized to confront the state’s power to control the streets. An Anthropology of the Street Vol.2 (Senri Ethnological Reports 81) Chapter 19 The Relationship between Community and Street viewed Historically: the Case of Hakata TAKEZAWA, Shōichirō (National Museum of Ethnology) The aim of this article is to reconsider the relationship between community and street through a case study of Hakata, a major port city in northern Kyushu. Facing the Korean peninsula, Hakata is one of the oldest cities in Japan. Distanced from political power, it developed during the Edo era as a city of merchants and manufacturers. The smallest unit of Hakata was the chō, composed of about thirty houses (about 250 people). It functioned as a social and religious unit, controlling family registers, collecting taxes, maintaining streets, bridges, wells, drains etc. One of its most important tasks was to organize annual festivals, called Hakata Gion Yamakasa, constructing beautifully decorated floats (dashi) to parade through the streets of the whole city. During the festival, participants ate, drank and discussed civic affairs on the street. Far from being the opposite of the community, the street constituted an essential part of it. The city festivals were conceptualized as ways of drawing social and economic resources into the city from the surrounding areas. The more spectacular they were, the more spectators would come to Hakata and spend money. After the Meiji Restoration, the central government began to control collective popular activities. Now it was not the local community but the government that maintained the streets. The city festivals were prohibited on the pretext of wastefulness and savagery. Ten years later, the festivals reopened. But the local community had already lost its dynamism. Chapter 20 The Street as a Changing Social Arena in Medieval Europe Harald Kleinschmidt (Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba) This paper positions the street as a changing social arena and traces the changes of the perception of street from venues of communication, transportation and exchange to habitats with thinned-out security regimes in medieval and early Modern Europe. While cities may actually have been safer and better ordered places during the Middle Ages up to the fifteenth century than at any later time, it is difficult to specify just how wide the gap was. By contrast it is far easier to determine the change of the perception of the relative success or failure of security provision through rulers and governments. As the perception of the security gap between cities and the countryside waned and cities opened themselves to the countryside from the fifteenth century, parts of cities became recognized as theatres into which the subcultures of beggars, vagrants and petty criminals could sneak. The larger the cities grew, the less capable became the authorities to register the city’s inhabitants, monitor their doings, enforce law and maintain order. As a consequence, the gap widened between the demand for security resulting from the predominant contractualist theory of legitimacy of government on the one side and, on the other, the perception that rulers and governments were becoming less successful in providing security. Chapter 21 On a Little Bridge in Beijing: The Global History of the Street Corner SEO, Tatsuhiko (Chuo University) The aim of this paper is to locate the history of bridges in mainland China within the megatrends of human history, using the case of Ginjōkyō (銀錠橋), a small bridge in Beijing, as an analytical case study. Bridges symbolize the history of streets and the function and symbolism of bridges will change with the transformation of global perception. Bridges, as permanent structures, made their appearance along with the birth of the city and the state. As well as securing the smooth flow of goods and information, they also became sacred sites mediating between the human, natural and supernatural worlds. However, the great movements of pastoral people from the 4th to 7th centuries a.d. brought great changes in world religions: individualism started to emerge, making the human world increasingly independent from its environment. The sacred character of bridges weakened and instead they became increasingly associated with leisure. The Ginjōkyō, first built under the Ming dynasty in the early 15th century, not only reflected urbanization and changes in public mores: it also reflected the attempt to turn a Mongol pastoral city into the kind of horticultural city favored by the Jiangnan people　(江南人). Building beautiful bridges and gardens neatly satisfied the desire of the people for a beautiful environment and that of the political leadership to expunge all traces of the Mongol dynasty. Here we may perceive the first steps toward a modern state founded on the culture of the common people. Moreover, modern bridges, with their memories of their old function of bridging the gap between sacred and profane in pre-modern times, will lead the way towards the postmodern world. Chapter 22 Wholesale Markets Past and Present: a Case Study of the Transition of ‘Placeness’ in a Local Wholesale Market of Agricultural Products in Nagaoka City SUZUKI, Shinsuke (National Museum of Ethnology) In this paper, I examine the transition in meaning and nature of ‘place’ in a wholesale market of fruit and vegetables in Japan. Wholesale agricultural markets used to play a crucial role in maintaining a smoothly functioning, government-regulated supply network. In recent years, however, the relative oversupply of products, primarily caused by dwindling demand, and the rise in the proportion of transactions outside the market, have made the process of distribution far more complex. Far less actual dealing now takes place in markets. A case study of a market in Nagaoka City (Niigata prefecture) shows that seri, the traditional face-to-face auction, has practically been abandoned, with wholesalers trying instead to resell their surpluses to other wholesalers in remote areas. Elderly people associated with the market often tell stories of ‘the good old days’ when there was still something that might be called a ‘market place’ in the sense used by Theodor Bestor in his book on Tsukiji fish market (Bestor 2004). The market place was robust with human relations and trade. In contrast, nowadays, the movement of agricultural products, along with changes in supply and demand, and improvements in information technology and transportation, is opening up a new space for trading that does not require a specific ‘market place.’ Chapter 23 The Street as Contested Space for Emerging Locality: A Case Study of Tree Ceremonies in Southern Germany YAMADA, Kaori (National Museum of Ethnology) The Maypole – a tall pole fashioned from a tree-trunk, decorated with ribbons and danced around on May 1 – is a famous traditional custom in western Europe, notably in the German language area. It is thought to date from before the evolution of Christianity and is very much alive today. Maypoles are typically set up in the street, there to be admired by the local community. They are an article of civic pride, and sometimes of conflict between rival communities. Town A, in the vicinity of Munich, where I did my fieldwork, experienced a feud when two parts of the town came into conflict in the 1950s. It began with a dispute over possession of a maypole and took 20 years to reach a peace. In this paper I describe the custom of the maypole, trace the process from conflict to peace, and analyze the change of the concerned parties’ interpretation of this event. I argue that the maypole in this incident became a focus for disputation over the meaning of the street as a public space. Chapter 24 The Conflict over Seascapes in the Torres Strait, Australia: Between Aboriginal People’s Sense of Place and the Authorities’ Sense of Legitimacy MATSUMOTO, Hiroyuki (Nara Women’s University) The problem of ‘streetness’ goes beyond the enlightened humanism of western-style modernity, and it seeks to reconsider the restoration of rights to places where people can live. One of the troublesome inheritances of western-style modernization has been the history of colonialism and its creation of ‘aboriginal’ peoples. Enlightened humanism is not a universal ethic, but merely one local style of thought. Between the first world colonizers who founded their states on enlightened humanism, and the fourth world aborigines who are internalized by it, there is a conflict that goes beyond economic interests to a conceptual level at which the aborigines’ sense of justice founded on place confronts the colonial authorities’ more abstract sense of legitimacy, giving birth to the postcolonial condition. There is a great gap in geographical imaginative power between the cultural quality of the aboriginal sense of place and the legitimacy of the western-style modern nation-state. Unless the authorities can get away from enlightened humanism, that lodestone of western-style modernization, and gain an awareness of the aboriginal perspective based on a sense of place that is the original form of human nature, there is no way to open up the road to a peaceful reconciliation between the first world and the fourth world. Chapter 25 Street and Stream: Some Notes Towards a Study of Street Phenomena in Polynesia TANAHASHI, Satoshi (Ochanomizu University) Ever since the 19th century era of colonial rule, the islands of Polynesia have been objectified by outsiders as an isolated, fragmented and remote world at the extreme periphery of world capitalism. On the other hand, Polynesians themselves see the history of their islands as a long process of streaming and seafaring connections. This concept has played a significant role in restoring Polynesian dignity in anti-colonial cultural renaissance movements since the 1970s. At the same time, tens of thousands of Polynesians have moved to Pacific Rim cities such as Auckland, Sydney, Honolulu or Los Angeles as migrant laborers. Although life overseas has never been easy for Polynesian migrant laborers, many have successfully settled down in host societies in the last five decades, while contributing enormously to supporting homeland economies through remittances and opening up a new dual life style based on the homeland and migratory destinations. Migrants understand themselves as following in the seafaring traditions of their ancestors, laying their experiences on top of the conventional historical recognition of streaming. To them, the roads on their home islands are directly connected to the streets of the metropolises where they work, forming a single stream of Polynesian history. Chapter 26 Construction of “Recombinant Locality” as a ‘Lived place’ among South Asian Migrants in Hawaii: Bricolage between Packaging (Capital) and De-packaging (Resources) SEKINE, Yasumasa (Japan Women’s University) The liquidity of contemporary society requires people to have ‘street wisdom’　for their survival. One invaluable stock of such street wisdom has historically been accumulated by the desperate efforts of diasporan migrants. However, the ‘society of flow’ that has emerged since the 1990s requires not only de-territorialized migrants and refugees but also ordinary sedentary people to acquire street wisdom. In that sense, street dwellers and migrants might be regarded as the forerunners of our present society. In this paper, I seek to identify street wisdom through the new arrangements (or bricolage) of things in the torn situation of socially repressed places, which I define broadly as ‘street’ as opposed to ‘home.’ I analyze the shift of viewpoint from capital to resource, with special reference to the case of construction of a religious centre among South Asian migrants in Hawaii. People today are surrounded by packaged things, i.e., the commodities produced by ‘packaging from above’ or the neo-liberalist global capitalism, and the socio-cultural setting in which migrants live can be understood as a busy intersection where various packaged things intensely coexist and compete. However, migrants actively appropriate ‘packaging from above’ in order to (re-)construct their own place in a foreign country. Their tactic of bricolage or ‘packaging from below’, provides us with a clue to the kind of street wisdom we need to survive in the contemporary liquid world associated with reflexive modernization. Chapter 27 From Chinatown to Global City: The Papua New Guinean Chinese Experience of Streets in Rabaul, Port Moresby and Sydney ICHIKAWA, Tetsu (The Asian Institute of Intellectual Collaboration, Rikkyo University) Although migration is often regarded as a representative phenomenon of transnationalism, transnational migrants do not spend all of their lives on the move. The immigrants lead most of their lives in particular places, within nation states. Therefore we cannot ignore the particularities of immigrants’ destinations if we hope to understand their life worlds. That is the perspective this paper will adopt in discussing the characteristics of migration and locality of Papua New Guinean Chinese. Chinese migrants started to arrive in New Guinea in the late 19th century, establishing communities in some cities and towns in northeastern New Guinea. Their biggest community was at Rabaul, where they congregated in a Chinatown. After 1960 a new wave of Chinese arrived at Port Moresby, on the southeast coast of New Guinea. In the run-up to Papua New Guinea’s achievement of independence from Australia in 1975, most of the Chinese re-migrated to Australia, especially Sydney and Brisbane. To understand the nature of their re-migration, this paper analyzes the Papua New Guinean Chinese experience in three cities: Rabaul, Port Moresby and Sydney. These cities’ streets all have different characteristics, so this paper discusses how the transnational activities of Papua New Guinean Chinese are influenced by their experience in the streets of the three cities. Chapter 28 “Ethnic Town” and Street: The case of “Cambodia Town” in Los Angeles County ASAHI, Yumiko (Institute of Asian Cultures, Sophia University) The dilution of the connection between a place and humans, especially in an urban society, under modernization and globalization has often been pointed out. Against this phenomenon, in many parts of the world, people are attempting to reconstruct or produce these ties through such means as traditional festivals, religion, and ethnicity. In a global city like Los Angeles, there are many ethnic minority communities, and some of the places have been officially recognized as “ethnic towns” – for example, China Town, Korea Town and Little Tokyo. Here I introduce the case of “Cambodia Town”, a district in the center of Long Beach, Los Angeles County, newly designated on July 3, 2007 by the city council, to see how it may become ‘home’ to one of LA’s more recent ethnic minorities. The official naming was done at the request of Cambodian community leaders, who hoped thereby to instill pride in their community and overcome inter-ethnic community conflicts (mainly with the large Latino population in the area) and among Cambodian-Americans themselves. I will look at the dangers and opportunities inherent in this strategy. Chapter 29 Streets Connected to the Place of Daily Life: Café Life among Tunisians in Paris UEMURA, Sayaka (Tokyo International University) This paper focuses on the frequenting of cafés by Tunisian migrants in Paris, showing how the street is connected to the place of daily life. Paris, a global city, is a historical destination for Tunisians and also a kind of crossroads, where they stop, stay, and/or leave. In Paris, they often go to cafés on their own, and go from café to café. They enjoy the multiple elements of the varied environments they find in each of these places. Through the constant repetition of these practices, each person develops social technique and social networks. They not only spend time at the café as customers, but also watch people there or observe the café itself so that they can collect ideas about trade, exchange, new business and so forth. They also develop plural give-and-take relations which are not mediated by capital. These practices create a trans-spatial linkage of multiple elements in various cafés and networks and bring tiny but incremental changes to the street. Chapter 30 The Post-Socialist Street: The New Urban Transformation in Ulaanbaatar City, Mongolia NISHIGAKI, Yu (Osaka University Graduate School of Human Sciences) This paper examines urban street life in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, during the transition from the socialist to the post-socialist era, especially after the rapid privatization of state enterprises in the 1990s, in an attempt to elucidate the modality of the post-socialist era. Actually, the street has diverse modalities. In this paper I discuss not only the post-socialist modality, but also the pre-socialist and socialist modality of the street, in order to elucidate the specific characteristics of the post-socialist street modality. In the first part of this paper, I introduce the history of Ulaanbaatar in the 19th and 20th centuries, and examine the transition process from pre-socialist to socialist modality of the street. In the second part, I focus on the appearance of the post-socialist modality of the street in the privatization process that started towards the end of the 20th century and still continues today. Chapter 31 A Sub-culture Becoming High-cultural? Popular Music and Street Culture in Post-socialist Mongolia SHIMAMURA, Ippei (Shiga Prefectural University) Musical genres like rock and hip-hop were originally born as subcultures of countries like the USA and UK, countries at the center of world affairs. This paper looks at the ways in which these subcultures have been adopted at the global fringes, using post-socialist Mongolia as a case study. In Mongolia, rock and pop music are taught on the state school curriculum, and musicians enjoy high status, often performing at election rallies etc. On the other hand, their lyrics may include criticism of the government or denunciation of foreigners, showing that Mongolian popular music cannot easily be slotted into a dichotomy between high culture and subculture. Rather, it needs to be studied in relation to the concept of culture that developed during the socialist years. The paper also shows how the street, where rock and pop were born, has been brought indoors in Mongolia, an inevitable development perhaps in a very cold country. During the socialist era this internalized street was not located in party-sanctioned places like theatres and clubs, but rather in the communal lobby areas of giant housing projects, where youths would gather informally to play their guitars and chat. This way of using indoor public space can probably be traced back to the ger, tents used in Mongolia’s traditional pastoralist society that served as dwellings and thus as private space, but also had a public/communal aspect to them as social nodes where people would gather rather freely. Chapter 32 Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Street as Viewed from “Hinterland Theory” ABE, Toshiharu (Saitama University) The street, or something like it, has doubtless existed since the dawn of human history. Fresh footmarks in the undergrowth of a tropical rain forest around a hunters’ camp; the narrow paths linking villages in the savannah; the streets of settlements in a high-level consumer society; even the sea-front wharf of a tiny coral island community where people pass the time together – all have something of the street about them. Without some kind of street-space, as Tetsuro Watsuji observes, humans themselves could not exist. This paper starts far away from the contemporary city, looking at the co-residential groupings that form the foundation of grass-roots human society to recreate the fundamental ‘street experience’ out of the resonances between the many kinds of street to be found across time and space. We find that even in the contemporary city, apparently dominated by modern systems such as the state, market economy and technology, the pulse of the street is still alive. The street is always ‘in the vanguard.’ At the same time, however, it is the nearest to us of all our living spaces. So to ask what is going on in the street is to question radically the nature of the world in which we live. This paper, admittedly preliminary and speculative, proposes a hypothetical model of the street, one that looks at world history from the perspective of the hinterland, which it then uses to investigate the street in contemporary society. Chapter 33 Reclaiming the Streets as Spaces of Everyday Life ODA, Makoto (Seijo University Faculty of Arts and Literature) Some say that streets are the sites of encounters with others, where people get freed from the order of daily life. Others retort that far from being sites of liberation, streets are places dominated by capital and dedicated to the transportation and consumption of goods. But neither of these opposing views applied to the streets of pre-19th century Paris, which were places of daily life where people formed close personal associations that found expression in either riots or festivities. Since the 19th century, the streets of cities such as Paris have lost their role as places of daily life and have been changed into tame spectacles of commodities. This change produced the romantic and nostalgic vision of the streets as places that freed people from the order of daily life. Present-day activism to ‘reclaim the streets’ seeks to make the streets places of daily life again, but has done no more than turn them into temporary places of encounter and liberation, divorced from daily life. This paper aims to reclaim the concept of the streets as places of daily life, characterized not by spectacles of commodities but by heterogeneity. For this purpose, we should focus on the plurality and excess of human relations in daily life. In authentic societies, as defined by Lévi-Strauss, this plurality and excess turns the streets from ‘striated space’ for the police and spectacles of commodities for the public into ‘smooth space.’ Chapter 34 Conclusions: “Street Anthropology” Questing for a Critical Ethnography SEKINE, Yasumasa Contemporary anthropology in the post-Fordist society marked by pervasive social control should target the social periphery as the frontier of anthropology today. Such a peripheral life world, holding relatively little power of self-reference, is crying out for deep interpretation by which the life world could be conveyed as a creative art work. In other words, the potential dimension of the life world would be disclosed by such an act of criticism – criticism in the sense intended by Walter Benjamin in his concepts of ‘art criticism’ and ‘an awakened history’. In this regard, it is Street Anthropology that most exactly pursues the task of contemporary anthropology.

2007 report

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2007 report under construction

2008 report

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2008 report under construction

publications

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publications test

Other information

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Other information test

Meetings conferences test entry

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Meetings conferences test entry

!test! Research in Progress

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!test! Research in Progress

Research Background

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This research project is entitled ‘Anthropological Studies on Transnationalism with special reference to “Street” Phenomena’ (Toransunashonarizumu to ‘Sutoriito’ Genshō no Jinruigakuteki Kenkyū), or more informally as the ‘Street Anthropology’ project. It is headed by Prof. Yasumasa Sekine of Japan Women’s University and was launched in academic year 2004, after being selected for a grant by the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. Members meet at the museum four times a year (three times in the first year); meetings are conducted in Japanese. Originally designed as a three-year project, it has recently been approved for a fourth year which will take it into spring 2008. To date it has met ten times, hearing presentations from researchers active in a wide variety of fields that relate to street phenomena. Abstracts of presentations may be seen (in Japanese only) at this address:
http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/research/jr/04jr070.html

This venture has its roots in a previous research project also held at the National Museum of Ethnology, entitled ‘Toshiteki-naru Mono’ towa Nanika?’ (What is the Urban?), also led by Yasumasa Sekine. The fruits of that project were published in a book entitled ‘Toshiteki-naru Mono’ no Genzai: Bunka Jinruigakuteki Kōsatsu (The Present Condition of the Uraban : Cultural Anthropological Inquiries), published in February 2004 by University of Tokyo Press. The present street anthropology project was designed to build on the achievements of the urbanism project.

The fact that this project builds on two previous ones gives it an extremely firm foundation, without which the present project could never have been imagined. The continued discussions between project members and guest speakers with a rich variety of fields and research interests constitutes a valuable asset and a shared foundation for continued research. We view this as part of an on-going process in which members will take with them the perceptions gained in debate at our meetings as they return to the field to make further and deeper studies of street phenomena. We place great emphasis on the research contributions of the senior members of the group, while also strongly encouraging the younger members to engage in relevant fieldwork. The developments of present-day society will surely live most vividly in the fieldwork conducted by young researcherswho are sensitive to the trends of the times, and we keenly anticipate fresh insights from their endeavors. While we have held regular meetings for three years now, we are keenly aware that there has still not been enough fieldwork done, and that an intense need remains to carry out more detailed observation and recording of street phenomena in locations around the world.

Assignment

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Research Objectives We define the concept of ‘the street’ as a broad field that constitutes one of the major challenges confronting contemporary anthropology. Why, now, do we need an anthropology that focuses on the street? To put it simply, the fact is that a dramatic trend towards a society based on ‘space of flow’ in a Castells' sense has come to define the post-modern condition. That reality is of course a continually developing research theme that is now increasingly occupying the whole spectrum of the social sciences, under the banner of such concepts as globalization and transnationalism. In sociology, a different discipline but one that is drawing steadily closer to anthropology, we see for example the increasing application of media theory in a bid to ask what is going on in everyday life and elucidate the reality hidden behind it. Though the fruits of such research are most meaningful, they do tend to seek for ever more refined methodologies rather than doggedly recording reality, and as a result, reality tends to become dwarfed to the impetuous theoretical gaze. The knife is sharp, but whether it cuts to the heart of the matter is a different question. These impetuous attempts to use theoretical frameworks to ‘understand at one blow’ tend to leave the theoretician observing from up in the sky, at risk of missing the finer points of reality within the panoramic view. Reality is complex and in constant flux. The vital feature of anthropological research is its constant use of the heuristic approach, a methodology that emphasizes a gradual closing-in on understanding by a series of trial-and-error personal learning experiences. This anthropological research style, with its willingness patiently to close in on our incomprehension of reality, and then to continue its relationship with that incomprehension [for as long at it takes to come to terms with it], is where we sense the possibility for anthropology to make a distinctive contribution within the social sciences. As one may see from this methodological feature, anthropological research has a close natural affinity to “the view from below,” with which there is a need to describe and analyze contemporary reality, as presently being studied under the ambit of the space of flow, globalization, transnationalism etc. This research project emerged from an awareness that applying the above anthropological methodology and perspective to the ‘street phenomenon’ could be highly effective in developing one branch of the transnationalism research that is of such vital importance for the world today. That is to say, the word ‘street’ as used here includes two meanings. The first meaning is relatively literal: it signifies the street phenomenon in all its multilayered complexity, covering a range of research targets, from actual streets themselves to the globalization of people, things and words or the dimension of streets as transnational pathways. The second meaning of the term is the ‘view from below’ – the street as a methodological vantage point. In other words, the term denotes ‘transnationalism from below’ – a methodological viewpoint fitting to the objective of describing the kind of reality that cannot be described from the transcendental perspective which is ‘transnationalism from above’ (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). Such was the thinking that led us to define our research objective as ‘Anthropological Studies on Transnationalism with the special reference to the “Street” Phenomenon.’ Steven Vertovec, a leading figure in transnationalism research within the discipline of anthropology, divided the analytical framework for that research into six main sub-fields: “transnationalism as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness of belonging, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of ‘place' or locality” (Vertovec 1999). In this project we recognize the need to remain aware of all six elements in this schematization, but propose to focus primarily on the two that are most susceptible to the anthropological approach: cultural reproduction and reconstruction of place. We hope to investigate the problems that arise in relation to change and reconstruction in specific localities and local cultures as they are buffeted by the storms of globalization. Tomiyuki Uesugi, in the course of a paper summarizing recent developments in transnationalism research, emphasizes the possibility for anthropology to make a contribution in one of Vertovec's sub-fields, that is, ‘type of consciousness of belonging,’ an area that Uesugi sees as under-researched, covering issues such as the multiple consciousnesses of international migrants and their multifaceted networks (Uesugi 2004). While taking due account of this view, we principally want to look at the hitherto under-theorized fields of locality and translocality. This is because we think that the realities of local spaces await a more detailed analysis even than that expressed in the term ‘transnationalism from below.’ This is a project that cannot be accomplished except by the kind of intense empirical survey that goes beyond the work of our rivals in the field of cultural studies, to generate accurate descriptions of change and creation in local spaces – those most delicate of fieldsites. In order to describe that delicate reality in contemporary local spaces, Yasumasa Sekine, currently head of this project, has stressed the importance of maintaining a clinical separation between two types of locality: ‘victorious localities’ and ‘defeated localities’ (Sekine 2005). The idea of the distinction between two types of locality is borrowed from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1999), where Benjamin coined ‘the history of the defeated’, often taking the narrative form of a natural history of ruined sites, in contradistinction to the history of the victors based on the so-called 'theory of progress'. This research project has adopted the hypothetical perspective outlined above with a view to excavating the history of ‘defeated localities.’ However, rather than contenting ourselves with micro-level studies, we hope to take on the challenge of re-locating these micro-level realities within the macro-structure of contemporary society. This signifies an attempt to make a more accurate analysis, a finer dissection, of realities that hitherto have been rather roughly expressed in such terms as ‘globalization’ and ‘alter-globalization.’ In that sense, the concept of ‘street phenomena’ is an ideal tool for thinking not just about ‘victorious localities,’ which have been verbalized and incorporated in contemporary discourses, but also the ‘defeated localities’ that have tended to be left on the other shore or to be hidden in the shadows cast by victorious localities. ‘Street phenomena’ include those of the center and those of the margins. That is what gives us the concrete image of victorious and defeated localities. Since the 1990s, Sekine has been continuing research on street phenomena in the major Indian city of Chennai (Madras). An example of dominant street phenomena would be Vinayaga Chatrthi, a city festival organized by Hindu nationalist elites, in which Hindu idols are paraded around the streets on giant floats. In contrast, an image of marginal street phenomena would be the construction of ‘pavement temples,’ mainly by members of the poverty class, some of them homeless and living on the sidewalks. Far from being unrelated to the trend toward transnationalism brought on by economic liberalization, Sekine has found that this kind of micro-level practice is actually made possible by that very trend (Sekine 2004). Both phenomena are proceeding in parallel, and it is impossible to meaningfully discuss just one of them. However, we will not get any closer to the reality of marginal phenomena if we continue to view them simply as ‘marginal.’ In order to get a clear view of ‘defeated localities’ it is necessary to move into the ‘margins,’ and to switch our perspective to that of the marginal location. With this switch of perspective, the ‘margins’ are transformed into ‘boundaries,’ places with the potential for creative living, and the landscape changes at a stroke. A new kind of place comes into view, a borderland in which difference itself is the stake, and which conceals the possibility of imagining/creating a ‘world as it might have been’ in the space between ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it is not.’ Based on this kind of vision and perspective/methodology, this research project sets as its basic objective a concrete and detailed description of street phenomena, with all the multiple dimensions concealed within it, through intensive fieldwork carried out by members of the project team and other collaborators in a variety of local societies around the world. During this four-year project, and especially in the final two years, we plan to use this detailed description as a foundation for inquiry into the methodological and theoretical prospects for delineating ‘defeated localities’ within the context of ‘transnationalism from below.’ That is to say, this project's anticipated outcomes include an accumulation of data and a degree of theorization of that data. The point of this anticipated research outcome lies in what should be the perception at the very core of the transnationalism research perspective, namely a movement or shift of the gaze with which we look upon the world. Put simply, this is a shift from a gaze that views movement as an abnormal condition seen from a fixed point of residence to one that acknowledges that mobility is in fact the reality of the world we live in. In the material accumulated to date in transnationalism research, realistic empirical studies on this perception have not been adequate to match its importance as a subject of study. This research project aims to directly take on the challenge of remedying this deficiency. The significance of this project's research findings, which will be derived by learning from detailed observation of reality the need for this kind of shift in perspective, will lie in its contribution to an accurate grasp of the reality of the so-called ‘fourth world’ problem – that is, the problem of homeless populations within first-world societies. Homelessness here is broadly defined, with the understanding that people with fixed abodes are also in a sense becoming homeless. The fourth world has actually become more apparent as society enters the phase of post-modernity. If we fail to adopt a field of vision that grasps the reality of this shift of perspective, and continue to gaze upon modern society from a fixed/settled perspective, we will not be able to find appropriate responses to the various problems occurring continuously before our very eyes in contemporary society – problems that have ‘the appearance of abnormality’ – and the situation will merely become more chaotic while solutions are postponed amid unnecessary prejudice and misunderstanding. It is therefore fair to describe this research project as basic research that has good prospects of contributing to society by putting to use the strengths of anthropology as a mode of study that is ready and able to change the gaze with which it looks upon the world. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter, 1999, The Arcades Project (originally published in German as Passagenwerk, 1927-40). Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press. Smith, Michael P. and Louis E. Guarnizo, eds., 1998, Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Vertovec, Steven, 1999, Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22-2. Sekine, Yasumasa, 2004, ‘Toshi no Heterotoporojii: Minami Indo, Chennai (Madorasu)-shi no Hodō Kūkan kara’ (The Heterotopology of the City: As Seen from the Space of a Sidewalk in Chennai [Madras], Southern India). In Sekine Yasumasa, ed., ‘Toshiteki-naru Mono’ no Genzai: Bunka Jinruigakuteki Kōsatsu (The Present Condition of Urbanism: Cultural Anthropological Inquiries). Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 472-512. Sekine, Yasumasa, 2005, ‘Contemporary Popular Remaking of Hindu Traditional Knowledge: Beyond Globalisation and the Invention of Packaged Knowledge.’ In Christian Daniels ed., Remaking Traditional Knowledge; Knowledge as a Resource. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. 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