Keywords

agency, communication, next-generation anthropology

Objectives

Many aspects of human life are rooted in communication, which is led primarily by those who possess some special and specific authority. During such communication, the following of rules and beliefs is checked and heretical interpretations are suppressed. At the same time, human and nonhuman agencies, emerge with vivid reality, and are seen as performers. In today’s world, spirits may still function as agents that cause illness, within communication centered on medicine men as authorities, but those engaged in modern medicine will deny that spirits are the cause of illness. In a similar way, for the gun control movement in the USA, guns are seen as agents that kill people, but the National Rifle Association strongly asserts a different view of their agency. This joint research project aims to develop a group of concepts related to how claims of agency are established, based on ethnographic research, while keeping in mind the equiprimordiality of agency and communication. In so doing, we will consider recent anthropological studies on things, engineering, bodies, and animals in relation to kinship, exchange, ritual, belief, healing and land tenure. We also aim to develop theoretical foundations for a next-generation anthropology encompassing a wealth of ethnographic data.

Research Results

This joint research is based on ethnographic studiesspecific research on ethnography and the area of research covers Oceania, Southeast Asia and Africa. The themes of research were diverse ranging from land and human relations to etiology, floods, documents, tattoos, magic, earthenware production, fishing methods and nursing performance. Each of these raised contemporary questions while facing their respective preceding studies. What surfaced from the entanglement of these discussions was one of the basic points, i.e., anthropologists’ ontological commitment.
Followers of a religion conduct communications premised on the existence of god. In other words, they carry out communications based on ontological commitment to god. Participant observation is to take part in these communications and identify something through conducting natural and smooth communications. Ontological commitment by anthropologists that has an affinity of that included in followers’ communications is generated in here. Anthropologists do not go and do field survey in order to criticize or educate interlocutorconversational partners. Thus, ethnographic studiesresearch on ethnography based on materials obtained from participant observation is supposed to retain the original ontological commitment in an appropriate manner.
This makes us reconfirm the fundamental importance of participant observation in anthropology. For instance, the actor-network theory, which has had a significant impact on anthropology in recent years, regardless of anthropologists’ ontological commitment, develops an argument that depends on an entity propositioned by a researcher; in this sense, it is a discipline that differs in nature from anthropology based on participant observation. Moreover, it became clear that interpretive anthropology that calls for understanding from a native’s point of view and cognitive anthropology that starts with mental information processing havepose a basic problemsignificant issue in that they make great use of meanings or concepts, such as meanings and representations, that regard the existence of mind as the self-evident premise without giving any consideration to anthropologists’ ontological commitment.
Anthropologists’ ontological commitment is one of the key points that surfaced from discussions in this joint research and further discussions to be developed from there make it possible to formulate the central significance of participant observation in anthropology and the features of the discipline, i.e., anthropology based on participant observation, in a new and solid form.