Steps to an Ecology of Spirits

Comparing Feelings of More-than-Human, Immaterial Meshworks? by Andrea De Antoni (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto) deantoni@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp June 20, 2018 “So, do you believe in spirits?” I have been asked this question countless times, by my research p…

The Tao of Multispecies Ethnography

by Scott Simon, Ph.D. (Professor, School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, U Ottawa, Canada and Visiting Scholar, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan) ssimon@uottawa.ca July 23, 2018 It has been eight years since “multispecies ethnogr…

Human-Microbe Entanglements

Food Allergies in Japan and the UK by Emma Cook (Hokkaido University) cook@imc.hokudai.ac.jp July 4, 2018 In February 2014, as I was anticipating the start of hay fever season in Japan, I happened to turn the TV channel to a program that mentioned a pa…

Contemplating the Robotic Embrace

Introspection for Affective Anthropology by Daniel White (Free University of Berlin) daniel.white@fu-berlin.de June 20, 2018 The first time I held a robot in my arms I was overcome with a wave of sympathy. Pepper had arrived in our laboratory in a larg…

From Mad Cows to Posthumanism

Alan Smart (University of Calgary): “Posthumanism, as I use the term, means the ways in which we are entangled with non-humans, and which expand our capacities (although in other ways they may diminish them, as with disease).  Rather than being a featu…