Global Ethnographic

Through an ethnographic investigation of school lunchboxes, this paper explores how health, gender, class and ethnicity are understood through children’s interactions. It examines the way children construct, affirm and/or challenge social distinctions and issues of inclusion/exclusion by looking at the contents, concepts, narrative and activities related to the consumption and sharing of their lunch food [...]

Class was in session. I was playing the atabaque drum—a freestanding upright leatherhead drum with a wooden body and a metal stand. To my right was a group of student musicians who, on their respective instruments, were each playing rhythms to accompany the other students performing Capoeira movement. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian form of fight-dancing [...]

This paper draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted at the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture between 2004 and 2008. It describes the formation of the Oceania Centre and discusses certain “Red Wave” artists. In illustrating how their style of art is learned and produced, the paper considers the shared stylistic repertoires thought to define such [...]

In 1968, Shintaro Ishihara (now the governor of Tokyo) stated, ‘there is no other country like Japan, people who are virtually mono-ethnic, who speak the same language which is like no other country’s and which has a unique culture’(Oguma 1995:358). 40 years later, similar statement was still repeated by Taro Aso (then the foreign minister [...]