Research

Most of my research is dedicated to an ethnographic experiment of mapping differences and similarities on the move. This starts from the simple (but mostly overlooked) fact, that distinguishing between different things, bodies, cultures, persons or values is an ever changing engagement with those very elements. It is this fluid and partial mode of knowing which I mean to highlight by the notion of ‘metabologies,’ a concept that tries to establish permeability between embodied experiences, technoscientific practices and environmental coexistences. Mind that the way I use it here, “metabologies” is a biological concept only as far as its place of origin is concerned. The consequences go far beyond biology and medicine.

cropped-hpresearch3.jpg

.

Fields of Interest

  • ethnographic theory
  • medical anthropology
  • science and technology studies (sts)
  • anthropology of pharmaceuticals
  • planetary health
  • comparative methods

Areas of Interest

Medicinal Plants. Currently, I am developing a project to investigate the co-constitution of things and values in the development and use of herbal medications in Japan and Southeast Asia. The alterity of Vietnamese, Japanese and/or Chinese medical traditions, and scientific explanations depends on the scale—global, local, regional, biological etc.—in which they deploy themselves: the industrial production of extracts that target global health problems; the micropropagation of engendered species in a laboratory; or the cultivation and naming of plants in a garden. By highlighting the entanglement of different medical traditions in the process of producing and metabolising new medications, my aim is to explore the possibilities and challenges of “ethnographic comparisons.”

Diabetes. Diabetes is a disease in which different realities are linked together in the daily quest of understanding them. Patients, their doctors and the many researchers I worked with in different parts of Japan during the past decade see and live their bodies as a metabolic system (taisha) that keeps transforming disparate properties into each other: food and disease, sugar and life, outside and inside, Japanese and Caucasian. The point here is to show that it is through various acts of eating, calculating glucose  levels, or studying the genetic basis of diabetes that such heterogenous qualities come to be appreciated and embodied in their intensive relations.

Japonisme. In the past half century, diabetes has transformed from an obscure and acute condition to one of the paradigmatic issues of biomedicine in Japan, involving the interaction between state-of-the-art science and public health intervention on a massive scale. Different facts and experiences that structure the knowledge about this chronic condition emerge within particular interferences between scientific and cultural attributions. Some repertoires invoke “Japanese genes,” while others inscribe a stereotypical male diabetes patient, the sarariman, or company employee. The puzzle is this: how do these different subjects of molecular biology, epidemiology, endocrinology, etc. come to stand for the same disease, if they do at all?

Method. The anthropological challenge then is how to reinvent the conceptual tool of difference; how to move from static notions of identity and distinction to the recognition of transformation and connection. What is emerging from this ‘metabolizing of anthropology’  is a method of following the movement of difference through existential and disciplinary boundaries.

Recent (and selected) publications

for a more complete list click here

2025 How to Survive Medicine in the Anthropocene?” In Southern Anthropocenes, edited by Casper Bruun Jensen, 320–333. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003655107

2025「廃墟を耕す——どん底における植物と人間の係り合い」西真如・有井晴香・森明子編『心配と係り合いの人類学――この世界を繕い直すためのケアの理論と実践』ナカニシヤ出版、 269–284, 2025. ISBN: 9784779518805 (Cultivating Ruins: Plant–Human Entanglements on the Brink; An Anthropology of Concern and Involvement: Theories and Practices of Care for Mending Our Worlds)

2025「地球への薬効――薬用植物から考える公共空間の生態学」内藤直樹・森明子編『寄食という生き方――埒外の政治-経済の人類学』昭和堂、347–361, 2025. ISBN: 9784812224168 (Planetary Effects:

2023 (with Grant Jun Otsuki and Émile St. Pierre) Locating Naturecultures. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 9(1): 125–147. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1085

2023「プラネタリー・ヘルスの挑戦」（第７章）大村敬一編『文化人類学の最前線——「人新世」時代を生き抜く』以文社、pp. 225−249, 2023. ISBN: 9784753103812

2023 （久保明教と共著） 「 人類の可変性——非人間とのもつれ合いのなかで」（第９章）大村敬一編『文化人類学の最前線——「人新世」時代を生き抜く』以文社、pp. 285−311, 2023. ISBN: 9784753103812

Recent (and selected) academic papers

for a more complete list click here

2025 June 8 （森田敦郎、原山都和丹、サンピエール・エミールと共著）「Open Ethnography――協働的エスノグラフィとデータ共有のためのプラットフォーム」『第59回日本文化人類学会研究大会』筑波大学、 2025年6月8日 (Open Ethnography: A Platform for Collaborative Ethnography and Data Sharing―Paper presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology) https://doi.org/10.18910/101954

2025 May 24 「薬剤耐性から臨床と惑星のつながりを問う」『第51回日本保健医療社会学会大会』長崎大学 (Antimicrobial Resistance as a Lens on Clinical–Planetary Connections—Paper presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Health and Medical Sociology)

2025 April 6 Decomposition and Reparation, or the More-than-Human Arts of Kyōsei”―Paper presented at JAWS-AJJ 2025, University of Hyogo.

2025 December 4 「ヒト・代謝・ケア——人類学から「共生」を問い直す第一歩」芸術と社会の交差領域におけるメディエーター育成事業『共有と分有のトポス』文部科学省・京都市立芸術大学.

2024 November 13 Medical heritage and citizen science in Western Japan―Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the World Anthropological Union Congress (WAU), Johannesburg, South Africa.

2024 November 10 Drugged Ecologies: Anthropological insights on pharmaceutical pollution—Paper presented at the Osaka University/VASS Joint Seminar, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (VASS), Institute of Regional Sustainable Development, Hanoi, Vietnam.

2023 December 10「人新世を実験する——多種共生のための予備検討」『実験性の生態学——人新世における多種共生（人文研アカデミー）』京都大学人文科学研究所。

2023 November 10 Parasite Care: Medicinal plants and drugged ecologies in Western Japan―Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, 4S, Honolulu, USA.

2023 March 2 Entangled Effects: Thinking with pharmaceutical pollution―Paper presented at the International Symposium Entangling Objects: New Perspectives on Material Culture, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan.