Motomitsu UCHIBORI
Professor of South East Asian Anthropology, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA). Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

This project aims at developing a new integrative perspective of anthropological research through focusing upon feedback processes between formations of 'symbolic resources' and of 'ecological resources'. These two categories of resources jointly constitute the very basis that any human society works on. Our theoretical attempts are directed at establishing the thesis that modes of their allocation, distribution and common sharing, reveal the most fundamental aspect of social mechanisms. This theoretical perspective enables us to analyse total current dynamic social processes at various global as well as local levels ranging from micro-scale societies to supranational regions. The validity of the theory in its turn is to depend on its applicability to such probematic issues as the humankind faces in the contemporary world.

The project has around fifty anthropologists and ten scholars of related disciplines as core members, belonging to diverse academic institutes throughout Japan. Under the head research office at ILCAA, they are further grouped into 8 research teams. These groups deal with specific categories of resources: (1) Cultural resources, (2) Distribution of knowledge , (3) Subsistence and commodities, (4) Money in gift economies, (5) Things in nature, (6) Symbolisation of artifacts, (7) Territorial space and (8) Human body.

Term of Project: September 2002-March 2007