Exploring an alternative notion of community in uncertain times:　contingent arrangement of material, institutional, and body settings

Keywords

biopolitics,human-nonhuman relations,care　

Objectives

How are things and the others mediated in today’s ever-globalizing world? This research project will depict how institutions and materials such as facilities and buildings are intertwined and contingently arranged with human bodies based on an ethnographic research approach. For example, when institutions and facilities that accept and accommodate the bodies of immigrants, refugees, elderly, and the sick are created, the institutions and facilities force changes in human body-mediated interactions, and impact the surrounding people and other institutions and facilities. If there are bodies that attempt to deviate from an institution, further rearrangement of the institution occurs or new ones are created. In this way, the contingent arrangement and restructuring of settings formed by materials, institutions, and bodies are repeated based on interactions via the immediate other and living bodies. Here we will view the relatedness that accompanies physicality from the perspective of place. We will attempt to gain insight into the social modalities that have begun to appear in the 21st century through examining the settings of places that are contingently arranged depending on the situation.

Research Results

When the global enters a new place, what actually happens there, what encounters take place, and what emerges from these encounters? This research project focuses on and sheds light on what happens at the intersections of such systems. We then examined the depiction of these systemic intersections as a method of anthropological research dealing with globalizing phenomena.
We examined the above by first looking at the problem from the perspective of place/space. This perspective is a way of visualizing the mediations that occur there. In our discussions, we used the concepts of geographer D. Massey’s “throwntogetherness” and architect A. Hirata’s “tangling” as reference points. We examined these concepts in combination with anthropological concepts related to globalizing phenomena such as “assemblage” (A. Tsing, A. Ong, et al.), “actor–network theory” (B. Latour, A. Mol, J. Law, et al.), and “meshwork” (T. Ingold).
The areas covered by the project members are diverse, but they shared the following commonalities: A variety of mediations occur. Materials and non-humans are also involved in said mediations. Said involvement also emerges in the adjustment and restructuring of institutions. And such encounters are accidental and their relationships are not maintained. Our overall argument can be divided into two groups based on defining the problem. The first group is based on the view that places are the loci of phenomena. A place is not a homogeneous space but rather a world coated in complex time. The theme of this group is depicting co-existence with the other in such a world. The theme of the other group is depicting co-existence with the other including non-human things such as diseases and technology, with a focus on how the world is created by the entanglement between people/materials and the environment. The project depicts the modalities of a world that includes things embedded in the realm of the in-between and things whose existence results from mediating and being mediated by the in-between, which falls outside the framework of the dichotomies.