Objectives

The spread of global capitalism inspired by neoliberalism has led to “the death of homeostasis,” the lack of constancy in everyday life. The result has been the rise of “societiesof control” in which the dominant class and the underclass are clearly divided. The “underclass”peoplewho lack stable employmentand capitaland who live barely on or nearby the street in a world without guarantees are regarded as the avant-gardeof this radical social change. Even those who belong to the mainstream of the present home-oriented society arenow fearful about losing their stable positions because of the strong centrifugal force of the neo-liberalist society. Thus, everyone is now required to know the street-wisdom accumulated by the bottom people living on or nearby the street.If, then, we appliedthis schema to the understandingof localityin the present society, we couldseelocality today, that is, incidents around the marginalized regions as a broad sense of “street phenomena”. As global cities in which time is fluidand flexiblegrow to mammoth scaleand thoroughly exploit their hinterlands, localities on their peripheries are forced tostruggle to survive. Our majorobjective in this research is to explore “street phenomena” (the process of defeat and reconstructionof marginalized locus) in both narrow and broadsenses. The goal is to produce ethnographieswhich capture street-wisdom, that is, the way in which contingentflows found in the “streetized” locus under the pressure of the planned design of mainstream society become resources for survival tactics.

Research Results

Street anthropology aims to grasp street edges and locality as being continuous. Our research has clarified the following four theories.

1) Ambivalence of street This research defines the Japanese word “sutorito” (street) not as a general road but as a street in English, which refers to an avenue or boulevard in a city (a road is a long piece of hard ground that connects cities). A street is generally paved with a footpath area on both sides, fronted with buildings such as stores and houses. As opposed to home, a street has externality to which home is adjacent. Street is an introductory space to the external world, where the private order of home is not always understood, people are in tension in the indivisible “violence” between the authority of systems (law) and deviation (illegality), and sometimes violence occurs. This environment requires people to respond to a sudden situation imposed on them with quick wits and agility. Such a situation is represented by the behavior of street boys and street children who live in the vicinity of violence and misery, the homeless who do not have a home or job, and prostitutes. At the same time, however, street is also a place for freedom, relaxation, festivals, resistance and street culture, characterized by a certain degree of the out-of-the-ordinary as being excluded from the ordinary system at home. In this point, street itself is ambivalent (coexistence of contradictory emotion) and a place to lead daily lives in opposition to its ambiguous (incomprehensible) external appearance when seen by home citizens.

2) The phenomenon of street edges as a process of creative symbolization To live in such ambivalence is to practically live such lives. In this sense, street anthropology embodies the conversion of methods from fixing to creation, which proposes the conversion of viewpoints from the overlooked totality centering on the core of society (the system with “a viewpoint looked down from the upper part”) to “the true totality”, which is the totality of boundaries found in “the viewpoints looked up from the bottom part” or daily lives in edges (from two axes of inside and outside or oneself and others to the world) in a way that the setting of subjects and methods are combined. That is why street anthropology, which began as a challenge to city anthropology, poses a challenge to the entire contemporary anthropological studies. The entire society including villages and cities needs to be studied with such choice of subjects and awareness of methods.

This viewpoint of street anthropology can be applied extensively to contemporary global society, which is called a flow society. Regional towns and villages are in the side of edges in contrast to global cities. In contemporary society, called a society controlled by a mega global city, the study about the survival of towns and villages in edges is one of the subjects and methods of street anthropology. The existence of a rapidly increasing number of immigrants driven off into peripheral edges can also be seen as one of the street-edge phenomena. Here, it becomes clear why the creation of street wisdom and locality is connected with each other. Both come into existence by having the process of the symbolization that is rotating toward the outside at a threshold (the development of langue and parole, and the circulating development of icon, index and symbol).

3) From an avenue or boulevard in a city to a method for “becoming minor” The Heterotopia of a city street, which is a node with externality, refers to facing otherness, or in other words, the relationship itself expressed by decentering, boundaries, and crossbreeding (differences in the relation of oneself and others), or the situation where subjects are marginalized, oppressed and suppressed by a contemporary and self-enclosed substantializing system centered on home. This has the potential to move toward the “structure” propsed by C. Levi-Strauss, who made the relationship itself a unit of a meaning, or in monads, des groupuscules proposed by G. Deleuze & P-F. Guattari (meaning several groups that can be divided or increased, communicate with each other, and be excluded at any time), or a “community” that is not identical to others and enabled to exist by ＜fellows＞ who have faces, or the axis of “universality - solo” proposed by Makoto Oda. Even if a physical entity, or an avenue or boulevard in a city, means a starting point of directions, the true intention of a city street is, based on the above discussion, to clarify the moving process (self-differentiation) of “becoming minor”, in which oneself will ＜turn into＞ others by standing at a street, or an edge where oneself and others come into contact. “Becoming minor” in such a situation “is to continue changing to be a subject who opposes rule and obedience and to continue making oneself to be free from any obedience.” In other words, it is to convert a minor subject who is discriminated against into a creative minor. Following this viewpoint by G. Deleuze & P-F. Guattari, standing on a street is to deepen a static and substantial viewpoint (exclusion of differences) to a dynamic relational viewpoint (acceptance of differences). “Becoming minor” deepens and ＜converts＞ a major home to and ＜into＞ street, which at the same time means to ＜convert＞ street ＜into＞ a minor home of a small group open to the external world while it is still street. Here, those who used to be discriminated against can gain independence of their lives or equality by “becoming minor.”

4) Street as “reasonable others” Home is ostensibly formed based on the ruling system, but the actual living world there is supported by street. On one hand, a systemized home throws extraneous subjects into street aiming for its purification and to accomplish such a utopian aim. On the other hand, human beings need to inhale the outside air to live. Here comes the heterotopia fundamental to the lives of human beings who cannot live without accepting others into oneself. No home can exist without being adjacent to street. In this way, street has two meanings toward home: street is a place where the thrown “filthiness” remains and where the “uncleanliness” that will become a driving force to promote a new self-formation can be obtained at the same time. While accepting the existence excluded and looked down on by the system, street actually releases and develops the lives of individuals living in the system by destroying the closedness of the system through the hybridization or “becoming minor” leading to the external world. In this environment, the minor of the de-centripetal relational concept plays a leading role, focusing on dynamic small groups leading to the external world, where two equals one or one equals two, or home turns into street or street turns into home. Then, the horizon of “a place where a subject can live” is actually unfolded. I assume this is what W. Benjamin meant when he wrote “passage is a home and a street.”