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ArchivesAbout Staff： FY2005ISHIKAWA, Noboru (Associate Professor) Social Anthropology
Research InterestsAs a social anthropologist, I have maintained a strong interest in political economy and human-environment relationships in insular Southeast Asia, exploring particularly locally specific histories for better understanding of social forces shaping the region. I have focused mu research on the material bases of socio-cultural configurations in maritime Southeast Asia, analyzing them in both their local and global contexts and exploring the interaction between the two. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, I have been working toward a synthesis of political-economic perspectives with insights provided by interdisciplinary research on the Malay world and on present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, with special focus on the role of cultural interpretations in the reproduction and maintenance of power, and on identity politics, including nation- and state-making, ethnogenesis, socio-cultural dislocation, and the mobilization of social labor. Current research topics: (1) Social Change of the Malay maritime world
(2) Historical ethnography 1. Formation of National Space in Maritime Southeast Asia
The objective of this study is to examine the evolution and construction
of national space on a jungle frontier in western Borneo where the present Malaysia
and Indonesia meet. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Malay communities
adjacent to the national boundary, augmented by archival research into
more than 140 years of regional history, my study looks at state-society
relations in the Malay world -- the riverine-maritime complex of Southeast
Asia -- where people engage in local transnationalism in their quotidian
life on the border.
The borderland is a strategically chosen social field, where the dynamics of socio-cultural, economic, and political incorporation and exclusion manifest themselves in fundamental relational processes across human groupings, institutions, and locations. Specifically focusing on the productivity of borders under colonial and postcolonial nation-states, this study attends to the genesis of nationality, ethnicity, and village communalism at the periphery of the nation-state. Attention to boundary making enables us to examine links between the organizational power of the state, the structural power of the modern world system, and the agency of local people in a single analytical arena of the borderlands. At issue are national order of things and response of borderland locals -- the state’s inscription of territoriality and mobilization of social labor, the formation of an ethnically segmented national society, the singularizing of national affiliation of people and commodities through immigration and custom regulations, and the formation of social identity grounded in the spatial demarcation of administrative village, ethnic community, and national territory. While policy implementations by the state are the important locus of examination, social agency and strategic responses to the state’s policies figure prominently in my analysis; the use and deliberate infiltration of the international boundary through kin networks, contraband commodity trade, flight from indentured labor, transborder shifting cultivation, and dual identity formation are discussed in detail with historical as well as ethnographic sources. By closely examining such state-society dialectics, we see how the case of a Bornean borderland provides a window to enhance our understanding of the general process of nation-state making in Asia and elsewhere. While this study offers a comparative perspective on borders, nations, and states, it is also intended as a specific contribution to the sociology of the Malay maritime world, where the non-sedentary, non-territorial, and transnational character of Malay traders, Dayak shifting cultivators, and Chinese entrepreneurs and immigrants has been the norm rather than the exception. Theory generated from a thinly populated, primary jungle-girded ecological niche with an extremely porous border will present a view of state-society resonance that differs from the theoretical construction of the nation-state in the West. 2. Socio-Ecological Study on the Riverine Society in Northern Sarawak, Malaysia
This study aims to recount the socio-ecological history of local communities
in the Kemena river basin and its environs in northern Sarawak, with special
attention to the exploitation of natural resources as well as the movements
of people observed in a single eco-historical complex connecting Bintulu
and Belaga region. It locates a single riverine society in a time frame
of more than one hundred years and depicts the historical change of the
micro-region in the larger matrix of national development as well as international
industrial expansion.
The unit of analysis of this study is a basin society, which encompasses various ecological settings from uppermost reaches to downriver estuaries all the way down to the coast. A river system connecting the sea with the interior inherently incorporates a set of interfaces between sea and river as well as river and mountain along its way. Such interfaces are further divided and sub-divided into varied smaller eco-tones creating multifarious socio-economic environs, on which local inhabitants, for generations, have worked for their subsistence. The basic undertaking of this study is to look into the Kemena basin society as a unitary social field, which formulates an organic whole penetrated, connected, and structured by a major stream axis as well as a number of tributaries. Such riverine space is an important unit of analysis to understand the essential nature of Bornean society. Scant attention, however, has been given to it in the ethnography of Borneo, in which researchers have been much concerned with the study of a single village community, ethnic group, and individual ecological niche. This study is thus an attempt to reformulate unit of analysis to better comprehend the dynamics of Bornean society by shifting its analytical reference away from these closed units and expanding a new field of inquiry in time and space. Research Activities in 2005 Fiscal YearPublication | Database | Field Research | Joint Research Project | Seminar/Symposium | Outside Activities | Academic Association | Award
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