フィスカーネルセン・アネメッテ

Socio-cultural Anthropology; Japanese society, culture, politics, religion, gender; Soka Gakkai, Komeito; local politics; Okinawa.

Social Anthropology; Anthropology of Religion, Politics, Gender; Anthropology of Japan; Soka Gakkai and Komeito; Okinawa; Egalitarianism and Hierarchializing Dimensions and Forces in Human Sociality; Self-Other Relations and the Bodhisattva Ideal in Actual Practice.

My PhD thesis was based on one year of fieldwork (2003-2004) in Japan that focused on political participation of Soka Gakkai youth members supporting the political party Komeito. Since then I have researched on topics in politics, religion, gender and youth in Japan including local politics in Okinawa and the national security debates in Japan of 2014-15. More recently, I have focused on changing gender norms and relations of power amidst processes of globalisation in Soka Gakkai Japan, and the bio-social reality of COVID-19, Soka Gakkai and the promotion of the SDGs. Other recent research has been a three year JSPS funded project on local politics and civil society in Okinawa (2020-2023) that looked at the role of communities, local economies and actual diversity locally over the homogenous ethnic identity promoted under 'All Okinawa'. Presently, I am looking investigating how discourses of egalitarianism (not simply Western modern imperatives) stand in tension with the 'hierarchialising' dimensions of actual social relations and practices. Notions of hierarchical relations tacitly unite certain groups, classes and genders while dividing others. Specifically, I am interested in how young people attempt to create new affective and cognitive spaces to challenge Japanese normative and institutionalised patriarchal norms through practices to remake the social for a more egalitarian society. What are the challenges for egalitarian understandings of human relations amidst deeply embodied hierarchical gender relations and masculinist national ideologies that play out, nevertheless, most powerfully at the personal, everyday symbolic level. In the context of Japan, hierarchies are maintained in specific ways; how do young people challenge the cultural sensibility of 'not causing trouble to others' (meiwaku) or keeping the 'harmony' (wa) in social situations while also challenging the social hierarchies that are maintained by such sensibilities and aesthetics? These are some of the key questions tensions I am currently investigating amidst observations of young people's desire for changing such hierarchical culture and the seeking of more egalitarian relations and sustainable futures.

My work is empirical and focused on using social anthropological methodologies and theories; my teaching includes finding ways to implement value-creating education which is based on developing and training students to be capable of demonstrating in-depth historical and social understanding in their academic analyses, showing knowledge of colonial histories and patriarchies as well as desire for egalitarianism as central to understanding our contemporary worlds. I see such capacities as essential to a global outlook and to foster new young leaders who can create more egalitarian cultures to ensure human rights and sustainable societies, and more substantial human security.

PhD, Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Since young, I have had a deep interest in furthering cultures (symbolic-systems, attitudes, outlooks) for actualising human equality; this is visible in my various research projects. Socio-cultural anthropology involves studying the many ways in which actual social practices are rooted in specific worldviews and outlooks, which in reality always hierarchialise human relations. Students with interest in investigating actual human behaviour and social practices (of any kind), will learn the significance of understanding different symbolic systems and social practices that underpin the different ways we are human; they will learn methodologies to undertake their own social research, and will learn the merits of an anthropological, comparative cultural perspective. Students will learn how to empirically investigate societies in in-depth ways with a particular focus on Japanese society; they will learn the centrality of gender relations, notions of 'religion', 'culture', 'politics' and they way human behaviour embody morality and construct societies along certain emotions and value-orientations. Please contact me on fanne@soka.ac.jp for possible supervision.