What is Cultural Anthropology?(JASCA Award Lecture 2006)

<p>The present article is a development of the author's memorial lecture of the same title delivered on the occasion of his acceptance of the first prize of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, at the University of Tokyo on 3 June 2006. First, based on the author's personal experiences as one of the first students in Japan trained at the University of Tokyo following the curriculum of general anthropology, including physical anthropology, prehistory and linguistics, he discusses how a cultural anthropologist should be formed. Through reflection on the author's strong interest in physical anthropology and biology, and his experiences as a doctoral student in Paris, where anthropology and ethnology were conceived as a part of natural history, he stresses the importance of placing the science of the human being and its culture as a whole in the process of natural history. Upon these bases and his long experience of field research in Japan, West Africa and France, the author points out the following four characteristics as particular to cultural anthropology: (a) a meta-science, rather than a science specialized in a discipline; (b) amalgamation of maximum knowledge of the latest paradigm in anthropology on the one hand, and of personal knowledge obtained through the anthropologist's experiences in his or her field research, on the other; (c) attachment to a minor object, and a profound qualitative analysis of it; (d) a viewpoint to conceive the human being and its culture as a process of natural history. As the derivative aspects of cultural anthropology thus defined, the author enumerates the following: (1) a non-practical science which is not directly useful to the actual society, although through its broad view on the human being, it might correct the actual orientations of the present society in the long range, and thus it can be useful to the society in spite of its immediate lack of usefulness; (2) in that sense, cultural anthropology inherits the spirit of "humanisme" from the European Renaissance; (3) consequently, a cultura1 anthropologist should have a vivid interest in what actually happens in the society; (4) but different from the previous European "humanisme", based on anthropocentrism, the "humanisme" in our present world should be oriented to seek the way to place the human being in natural history, in search of a new inter-specific ethics. As examples of the author's practices in commitment to the actual society, he enumerates and describes: (i) annual "field work" on 15 August for many years, accompanied by his friends and some students including those from China, Korea or the U.S., to Yasukuni Shrine, its war museum Yushukan, and two other memorial places in Tokyo for the deceased of the last war, one non-religious (Chidorigafuchi-boen) and the other Buddhist (Tokyoto-ireido),followed by free discussions with beer; (ii) a long participation in UNESCO activities such as projects on material and non-material cultural heritage in the world, especially those in Africa; work as a member of the editorial staff of World Culture Report 2000; participation in the six-year project to restore the abandoned roya1 palace of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (Benin); (iii) investigations on some vanishing Japanese traditional techniques, such as ship-building, weaving of some special vegetal fibers, the fabrication of Japanese paper washi and the preparation of cat's skin and special silk strings for Shamisen, an important Japanese string instrument; (iv) commitment to international "development" issues including experience as an agent in the OTCA (presently JICA) working in Burkina Faso for two and a half years; serving as an executive board member of the Japanese Society for the International Development, for many years organizing study meetings on "development and culture";</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>