Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 1
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May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
43
separation of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ and renegotiates the role and power of minorities in
society through a variety of initiatives (Willis and Murphy-Shigematsu 2008, Graburn et al.
2010). This perspective is important to challenge commonplace descriptions of the issue that
are based on the historical relationship between former outcast groups and the current
problem, but that do not consider recent changes and experiences relating to the buraku
(Amos 2011, Hankins 2012). In particular, I argue that individuals and networks engaged
with the issue (e.g., activists, performers, teachers, adults and children living in a buraku
district and working in buraku occupations) re-organize popular descriptions (isolation,
marginalization) and major factors of categorization (in particular the smell and dirtiness) on
positive principles (local attachment) and interconnection with the ‘non-buraku’ (economic
and social value of the industrial areas) (Wimmer 2008;
Cangià 2012, 2013) through urban
practices (community events, activities, and local exhibitions). Museums and community
activities in this regard represent ‘strategic’ terrains that help build new meanings (Foucault
1986, De Certeau 1984) and challenge the association of buraku people with ‘its’ territory. I
interpret ‘locality’ as the relational and social contexts in which actors cooperate and exercise
their capacity to influence wider political forces and environment, by playing different roles,
producing and re-shaping spatial boundaries and identity registers.
Theoretical Background
In order to investigate the ‘buraku issue’,
I relate to the notion of ‘heterotopia’, which was
originally introduced to the social sciences by Michel Foucault (1986). Heterotopias (from
the Greek ‘hetero’ which means ‘other’ and ‘topos’ which means ‘place’) were defined as
‘places in which all the other emplacements of a culture are at the same time, represented,
contested, and reversed’, as those ‘places that are outside’ (Foucault 1998: 178); yet they are
related to representing and inverting all other places. Foucault makes the example of the
cemetery ‘as a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces that is however connected with all the
sites of the city state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has
relatives in the cemetery’ (Foucault 1986: 25). The concept has provoked many
interpretations and applications in the social sciences, and came to signify also new forms of
representation of marginal spaces. Heterotopias were described as counter-hegemonic
representations of, and forms of resistance to ‘the centre’ as ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha 1994)
with new meanings associated with marginality (Shields 1991; Hetherington 1996a, 1996b,
1997; Davis 2010). They correspond to what Jerome Krase (2012) has called ‘ethnic theme
