Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
121
Dr Francine Barone holds a PhD and BA Hons 1st in Social Anthropology from the
University of Kent, where she is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Dr Barone’s
work is primarily aimed at understanding people's everyday computing practices, interactions
and activities on the Internet, through social media and via mobile devices. As an urban
ethnographer, she emphasizes place and locality in her studies of technological change and
the socio-cultural impacts of the digital age. Dr Barone’s doctoral fieldwork (2007-9)
explored the everyday use of new technologies in a Catalan city and provides the basis for her
forthcoming book, Urban Firewalls. She is a founding member of the Open Anthropology
Cooperative and blogs at Analog/Digital
.
Flavia Cangià
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies ISTC, National Research Council, Italy
Defended November 2010
Performing the Buraku: Narratives on Culture and Everyday Life in Contemporary
Japan
The research on which this Doctoral Thesis was based drew on ethnographic fieldwork
conducted in Japan in the leather towns of Kinegawa (Tokyo) and Naniwa (Osaka) and with
the Monkey Dance Company. The thesis examines representations of the ‘buraku minority’
issue by buraku networks and individuals. People labeled as ‘burakumin’ (hamlet people) are
usually described as Japan’s outcasts of the Edo period (1603-1868). They are engaged in
special occupations (for example, leather industry, meat-packing, street entertainment and
drum-making) and are compelled to live in separate areas, known as ‘buraku’. Despite the
abolition of the status system (1871) and the implementation of Dowa (assimilation) Special
Measures (1969), the burakumin still experience forms of discrimination in terms of access to
education and housing, discriminatory messages circulating on the web, as well as
background investigations conducted by private agencies at times of employment and
marriage. Through community and local grassroots initiatives, the buraku activists and people
engaged with the issue negotiate their ‘minority identity’, appropriately nation-based, and
common everyday language and images, and try to reposition the buraku in society. The
research focus was on the leather industry and the monkey performance, comparing different
social fields in which the issue is represented and exploring the resulting processes of
transformation of social categorization and boundary-blurring.
Dr Flavia Cangià obtained her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of
Fribourg, Switzerland, having previously obtained a Master in Sociology from the University
of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of
Cognitive Sciences and Technologies ISTC (‘Migration’ Project). Dr Cangià Research
