Speaker: 

Daniel White (University College London)

Marié Abe (University of California, Berkeley)

Emma Cook (Hokkaido University)

Andrea DE Antoni (Kyoto University)

What if the most productive response to moments of ethnographic puzzlement and uncertainty were not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of a feeling? And where academic professional practices discourage the experience of possible worlds, what if anthropology could leverage somatic rather than semiotic exercises to connect and cultivate collaboration with interlocutors in the field?

Anthropologists have offered ample analytical responses to the problematization of feeling, but they have not always engaged with affect as a phenomenon operating beyond Western philosophical traditions, nor fully explored its potential to challenge anthropology’s modernist explanatory drive and generate new ethnographic possibilities.

Developed through years of shared conversations and workshops among the presenters and published as Affect as Cultural Critique (Toronto 2026), this roundtable explores how affective encounters can shape research trajectories, orient fieldwork decisions, and open forms of understanding that exceed conventional analytic language. Moving beyond the treatment of feelings as data to be interpreted, the discussion approaches affective practices as techniques of knowing, attending, collaborating, guiding fieldwork choices, and experimenting when discursive accounts alone prove insufficient.

Drawing on ethnographic and artist-activist engagements involving meditation, encounters with spirits, experiences of illness, music, play, and other embodied exercises, the conversation will consider how affective methods can highlight the force of discourse, reconfigure how discourse operates by working through embodied forms, and unsettle disciplinary interpretive norms. The session invites participants to engage affect as a form of critique that not only diagnoses worlds but also contributes collaboratively to remaking them.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site and via Zoom. 

Registration required in advance from here by July 20.

Japanese feel-good literature has enjoyed considerable success in Europe, particularly in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, the category of “healing fiction” or “feel-good fiction” is neither as self-evident nor as widespread in Japan. What does this say about the reception of “Japanese feel-good fiction” in Europe? Is this label blurry and irrelevant in and of itself? Should we distinguish different trends within “Japanese feel-good” literature? By addressing these questions, this lecture aims to provide a better understanding of the perceptions and realities underlying the “Japanese feel-good” phenomenon.

Thomas Garcin is an associate professor at Paris Cité University and currently serves as director of the French Research Institute on Japan (IFRJ-MFJ), Tokyo. He edited Mishima, Écrits sur le théâtre (2023) and co-edited Mishima revisité (2025). His current research focuses on Japanese healing fiction and its commodification.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82771534635

Meeting ID: 827 7153 4635

Yakushiji temple constitutes an interesting laboratory to explore the intersection between cultural heritage and religion. Using the concept of karmic connections (en 縁), Yakushiji clergy has tied the lay community to the preservation of the material and immaterial culture of the temple, also building on the broader Japanese imaginary of Silk Road. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, this lecture will analyze Yakushiji through the lens of “living heritage,” shifting focus from nation-centered and secularization narratives to the role of Buddhist communities.

Paride Stortini is an FWO research fellow at Ghent University. His work explores Buddhism in the modern and contemporary cultural imaginary of Japan as a way to question imperialism, orientalism, and national identity. His current project investigates the idea of Silk Road in postwar Japan, at the intersection between religion and cultural heritage.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82644934790

Meeting ID: 826 4493 4790

Secrets and mysteries play a fundamental role in religions worldwide. Japanese Shinto is no exception, as devotees commonly pray before closed shrines, carry palanquins, and purchase amulets, the contents of which are (and must remain) partially unknown to them. But what do secrets and mysteries do? And how do secrets and mysteries work? To address these questions, I draw on the notion of ‘advertised secrecy’ (Levy 1990) and look at the two most important ritual festivals (matsuri 祭) of the shrine where I conducted fieldwork, analysing the specific moments when their sacred protagonists ‘appear’—Tenjin 天神 (the enshrined divinity) and the oni 鬼 (a demon-like figure). Although these entities are opposites in many ways, they both share the quality of being made present by being hidden, of being revealed through concealment. I argue that their power partly derives from their secrecy, for all relationships (not least those between humans and gods) are marked by varying degrees to which units reveal themselves to each other. Moreover, the meaning of each entity relies precisely on concealment and shapelessness, for in being mysterious, they are indeterminate and therefore have the power to adapt and correspond to changing issues and concerns. A careful analysis of the ritual performance of secrecy reveals that explicit forms of concealment have several interlinked effects: secrecy presents the sacred, produces authority and social asymmetries, reinforces trust, and generates hermeneutic fertility through indeterminacy. Ultimately, I propose that conspicuous forms of concealment and secrecy are also forms of revelation, insofar as they always present and signal something beyond themselves.

Guilherme Figueiredo is a doctoral research student at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. His current doctoral research focuses on various aspects of Japanese Shinto and ritual practice in contemporary Japan. He is also exploring broader ideas of religiosity, secularism, and how traditional religious institutions and practices are changing and adapting in modernity. He has conducted fieldwork in Dazaifu Tenmangū (Fukuoka Prefecture), one of the biggest shrines in Japan and one of the head shrines of Tenjin worship. In the past, Guilherme has worked on philosophical and theoretical aspects of anthropology and the social sciences. Drawing mainly on three philosophical traditions (pragmatism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology), he has written about issues surrounding intercultural interpretation, the role of ‘ethnocentrism’ in anthropological practice, objectivity, and relativism.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site and via Zoom. 

Registration required in advance from here by May 8.

Sake (nihonshu) occupies a singular place among fermented beverages, both in its nature and in its social uses, making it, paradoxically, a “Japanese exception.” As an identity-bearing drink, it is inseparable from the territory of Japan, its rice-growing landscapes, and the cultural representations associated with them. The recent application of foreign concepts such as terroir to sake highlights its contemporary paradoxes and reveals the complex relationship between place, identity, and production within its cultural and territorial framework.

Nicolas Baumert is Professor at Dokkyo University and an affiliated researcher at the Institut français de recherche sur le Japon (UMIFRE 19, MFJ). His research focuses on cultural geography, gastronomy, Geographical Indications, and the cultures of wine and sake, from a comparative European–Japanese perspective. He is the author of Le saké, une exception japonaise, translated into Japanese in 2022.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89157200438

Meeting ID: 891 5720 0438