Do places influence human behavior?

In everyday thinking, spaces and places are generally seen as empty vessels where human activity occurs. Digging a bit deeper, we can distinguish spaces from places: places are spaces that have meanings attached – an empty room becomes a classroom or a bedroom depending on what people do in it. Focusing on the Japanese concept ba – usually translated as ‘place’ – this study recognizes that places imbued with social meaning influence human behavior. Ba takes into account the social context, the norms that dictate behavior, the mood of a place, and the individual’s feelings about it. Conceptualized as ba, places limit and direct what we can do, and in the process, shape who we are. Drawing from a wide array of ethnographic studies, this collection illustrates various ways in which place and human agency co-emerge.

About Editors and Authors

Gaku Kajimaru (Editor)

Assistant Professor of Kyoto University. Kajimura completed a PhD in Anthropology. His research interest is reciprocal singing of Buyi (China), Lao (Laos) and Japan, and the social aspect of Japanese folk song. He was awarded the 13rd Tokugawa Munemasa Award and the 31st Tanabe Hisao Prize.

Caitlin Coker (Editor)

Associate Professor at Hokkaido University’s School of Humanities and Human Science. Coker completed a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Kyoto University in 2017. Her research focuses on physical experience and performance, specifically butoh and pole dancing, as topics and practice-based methods to develop anthropological theory and thought.

Kazuhiro Kazama (Editor)

Professor of Kyoto University. Kazama is an anthropologist who conducted long-term fieldwork on Tabiteuea Atoll in Kiribati and shorter research among the Gilbertese speakers in Fiji. His research interests include cross-cultural encounters, and an ethnographic approach to the study of historical memory and emotions in Oceania.

Table of contents

Figures
Tables
Photos
Contributors
Preface

Introduction: An Anthropology of Ba            

Part Ⅰ: Co-emergence of Ba and Actor

1. Butoh and the Cabaret: How the place of striptease fueled avant-garde performance in Japan

2. Space for Competition and Place for Participation: Two Contrasting Sides of a Japanese Folk Song Contest

3. Ritual Performance and Agency of Ba: Hierarchy and Mood at Ceremonial Feasts in Pohnpei, Micronesia 

Part Ⅱ: Performative Translocality

4. Performing Turkish Culture: The Inclusion Drive of the Largest Nomadic Festival in Contemporary Turkey

5. Creating Oceania: Place and Ba of the Festival of Pacific Arts

6. Performers' Two Bodies/ Double Consciousness: Performers and Traditional Repertoire in Tibetan Refugee Society

7. Conflicts Create Ba and Agency: How E.A.B.I.C. Rastafarians Occupy the World

8. After Fieldwork: Vestiges in/from a Fieldworker 

Bibliography
Index