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Herbalographies (2015~)

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 herbal gardens. 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 comparison” in and through the emerging dialogue between multispecies ethnographies and kyōsei studies. .

Diabetes (PhD, 2012)

In my doctoral work (Technologies of Difference: A Post-plural Anthropology of Diabetes in Japan), I was looking at the daily trial and error struggles of diabetes patients in Japan. Building my analysis around the anthropological concepts of embodiment and postplural relationality, I describe how daily encounters with medical technologies and practices of care introduce new ways of attending bodies (of self and other)..

Hokkaido (MA, 2002)

The ethnographic research for my MA in anthropology (A study of rural depopulation on Hokkaido Island, Japan) was based on a fieldwork in three rural towns of Hokkaido. Investigating the politics of gender in the process of the depopulation of the Japanese countryside enabled me to ask and challenge some anthropological notions of inequality, power and resistance.

Bodies (MA, 1999)

My MA thesis in history (The Biopolitics of Public Bathing in Budapest in the First Half of the 20th Century) centered around the transformation of the human body that prevailed Hungarian society after the 1st World War on several levels. Through archival work, I explored the rise of open-air pools in Budapest, which provided me with an insight into new modes of physical existence and modern biopolitics.

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