Machi: Neighborhood and Small Town—The Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan

The term machi, signifying both neighborhood and small town, is a key element for understanding Japanese urban form and city planning. After tracing the origins of the term, this article explores the historic and contemporary significance of the concept and its particular spatial and socioeconomic forms. The article then argues that the concept of machi influenced the ways in which Japanese planners picked up foreign concepts through the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, absorbing some ideas and rejecting others. Building on their perception of the city as composed of urban units that allowed for planning in patchwork patterns, leading Japanese planners carefully selected models—independently of international appreciation—making, for example, the book The New Town by the German planner Gottfried Feder a standard reference. The article concludes by arguing that foreign observers must understand the concept of machi to comprehend contemporary Japanese neighborhoods, city life, and urban forms

Space as method: field sites and encounters in Beijing’s green belts

Great urban transformations are diffusing across the Global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic practice, requiring critical reflection on both spatiality and method in fieldwork at the urban margins. This article draws on fieldwork experience in Beijing’s green belts, which could also be labeled the city’s urban margin or frontier, to reflect on the space-time of encounter in the field. I aim to demonstrate how space foregrounds not only our bodily experiences but also ethnographic investigations of the daily life, and hence becomes a method. Beijing’s green belts symbolise a historical-geographical conjuncture (a moment) emerging in its urban metamorphosis. Traditional endeavours (immanent in various spatial metaphors) to identify field sites as reified entities are invalidated over the course of the space-time encounter, requiring a relational spatial ontology to register such dynamics. The use in fieldwork of DiDi Hitch, a mobile app for taxi-hailing and hitchhiking, reveals the spatiotemporal construction of self-other relations needing recognition via the dialectics of the encounter. In this relational framework, an encounter is never a priori but a negotiation of a here-and-now between different trajectories and stories as individuals are thrown together in socially constructed space and time

Max Planck dependence, in context

Comment on “Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society” by Vita Peacock, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Summer 2016

Unser aller Kulturgut: Eine ethnologische Annäherung an das UNESCO-Welterbe

Der UNESCO-Welterbetitel hat sich zu einer global beachteten und begehrten Auszeichnung entwickelt, die öffentliche Vorstellungen von Kultur stark beeinflusst. Der Artikel berichtet über eine multilokale Feldforschung in dieser Arena, die mit dem Welterbekomitee, dem zugeordneten UNESCO-Sekretariat, diversen Experten-NGOs und den Staatsvertretern sehr komplex und von gegensätzlichen Interessen bestimmt ist. Der ethnographische Zugang erfährt zwar gewisse Einschränkungen, erweist sich aber trotz der Schriftlastigkeit der Vorgänge als genauso ergiebig wie in weniger formalen Kontexten. Für das Welterbe-Geschehen bestimmend ist der Vorwurf des Eurozentrismus, der in jüngerer Zeit zu einer Öffnung hin zum Alltagserbe, neuen Kategorien wie Kulturlandschaften, der Erweiterung der Authentizitätsstandards und stärker konzeptgeleiteten Nominierungen geführt hat. Die dennoch anhaltende europäische Dominanz provoziert jedoch einen Nord-Süd-Konflikt, bei dem sich starke Staaten des Südens zusehends über die Empfehlungen der zumeist euroamerikanischen Experten hinwegsetzen. Dies reproduziert aus anderen globalen Steuerungsversuchen wie etwa beim Klimaschutz bekannte Tendenzen und demonstriert die Grenzen des Multilateralismus in einer weiterhin nationalstaatlich strukturierten Welt. Summary UNESCO's “World Heritage” designation has become a globally observed, coveted distinction that strongly influences public ideas about culture. The article reports on multi-sited field research in the complex and contested arena formed by the World Heritage Committee, the UNESCO convention secretariat, several expert NGOs and the state representatives. This arena is dominated by written materials, and access to it is subject to certain restrictions, yet ethno-graphic research proves no less rewarding here than in other, less formal contexts. In response to accusations of Eurocentrism, the designation process has in recent years shifted to everyday heritage, new categories such as cultural landscapes, a broadening of authenticity standards, and concept-driven nominations. European dominance persists, however, and has provoked a North-South conflict in which leading states of the South increasingly challenge advice received from the mostly Euroamerican experts. This reproduces tendencies found in other global regimes, such as that for climate control, and demonstrates the limits of multilateralism in a world that continues to be structured by nation states

Introduction: UNESCO World Heritage –Grounded?

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives

This book captures the dynamics of history, memory, and territorial cults in Houay Yong, a Tai Vat village situated in the multiethnic highland frontier between Laos and Vietnam. By taking seriously the experiences of the villagers, it partakes in a broader movement to reintegrate highlanders and their agency into history at large.Based on comprehensive fieldwork research and the examination of colonial archives, this book makes accessible, for an English-speaking audience, untapped French archives on Laos and early publications on territorial cults written by French ethnologists. In so doing, it provides a balanced perspective, drawing from the fields of memory studies and classical historical research. Following a chronological approach stretching from the nineteenth century to the present, it extends narrative analysis through a comparative ethnography of territorial cults, a key component of the performative and material presentification of the past.Highly interdisciplinary in nature, History, Memory and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos will be useful to students and scholars of anthropology, history, and religious studies, as well as Asian culture and society.info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Einleitung: Ein neues Japan? Politischer und sozialer Wandel seit den 1990er Jahren

Die Sondernummer der Zeitschrift Asiatische Studien versammelt eine Auswahl der Beiträge aus den Sektionen Ethnologie, Politik und Soziologie sowie dem Forum zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Japanforschung am Japanologentag 2012, welcher Ende August an der Universität Zürich durchgeführt wurde. Als übergreifendes Thema der drei Sektionen wurde im Call for Papers die Frage nach dem sozialen und politischen Wandel im gegenwärtigen Japan und den ihm zugrunde liegenden Triebkräften formuliert. Um den zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext dieser Fragestellung zum gegenwärtigen Japan zu verstehen, gilt es vorerst auf das Bild Japans seit dem Platzen der Spekulationsblasen im Aktien- und Immobilienmarkt in den frühen 1990er Jahren einzugehen, wie es sich aus Sicht westlicher, aber auch vieler japanischer Medienbeobachter darstellt