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２０１６年度学院留学 研究成果概要
種別：学院留学（長期／短期）

所属・職・氏名：社会学部・教授・関根康正
研 究 課 題 ：インド社会および英国の南アジア系移民社会の＜宗教空間＞の構築にみるス
トリート・ウィズダムに関する人類学的研究
留 学 期 間 ：２０１６年５月１日～２０１６年９月１日
留学

先 ： 国・都市研究機関

英国・ロンドン
ロンドン大学 SOAS South Asia Institute

研究成果概要（日本文（全角）の場合は3,000字（Ａ４、２ページ）程度）

Street Anthropology is a 21st century attempt to reinstate the original
purpose of 20th century anthropology: to provide a critical standpoint
against the hegemony of modern Western thought through cultural relativism.
Today, anthropology’s position as a discipline of cultural critique isunder threat from a prevalent form of hegemonic thought derived from
neo-liberalism, that is, audit culture. Audit culture preferences the output
of quantification and efficiency, the results of which are ultimately
superficial. The most significant characteristics of anthropology, adiscipline that deals in subtlety and sometimes in those aspects of unspoken
meaning, are becoming devalued and, at worst, dismissed by audit culture.
This unwelcome tendency has been institutionalised by an insistence thatanthropologists should engage in ‘practical’ or ‘public’ anthropology. Here,anthropological works are evaluated using a criterion that forces
anthropologists to show how their research theme will be useful for the public
or to society. This trend causes discouragement among scholars, many of whom
now tend to choose to avoid investigating fundamentally significant themesthat require time for thought, because the pressure to produce something of‘practical’ value is strong. This pressure is dangerous and threatens todeprive anthropology of its true force and purpose, which is ultimately to
use a subtle approach to social investigation in order to provide depth inour social critiques. The project of Street Anthropology is a direct responseto this pernicious trend.
Nowadays, it seems that researching and teaching are regarded ascommodities; the public buy research and students buy teaching. I do not
accept that my students are simply consumers. Street anthropology is a
response to this corrosive tendency in research and education and is anattempt to redefine a true and proper practical anthropological contribution
to the public people.

I have considered and reconsidered the idea of Street Anthropology
throughout my fieldwork in India and in the UK and I hope to explain, in thislecture, the process and product of that thought. In India, I studied how
people constructed homes around ‘pavement temples’ built on the footpath ofbroad street, and in the UK I observed the activities of temple constructions
to recreate locality among South Asian migrants. In my definition, this canbe regarded in a broader sense as street phenomena, whereby ‘threshold(schwellen)’ as passage in Walter Benjamin’s sense can be found. This thresholdis the locus of ‘abduction’, that is, it is where space and time combine forthe emergence of creative and artistic performance. In fact, theoretically,threshold can be found everywhere because threshold refers to the moment ofexperience of a subject in relation to its context.
What is important is a method to find a threshold (street edge, in myterminology). For beginners of Street Anthropology, the South Indian mega
city of Chennai holds a rather unique city landscape filled with plenty ofpavement temples and provides an explicit paragon of the street edge phenomena
I am referring to. In fact, I started Street Anthropology from the pavementsof Chennai. It was there that I witnessed the struggle for survival of sociallyexcluded people.
Here, I must point out that an objective use of the term ‘exclusion’ isproblematic when trying to locate thresholds because the difference between
the objective, top-down, viewpoint and the subjective sense of exclusion are
not apparent through the mainstream use of the term. The reality is that theterm ‘exclusion’ can be opened up to multiple meanings defined by subjective
contexts. Therefore, exclusion can be found everywhere according tosubjective viewpoints.
My method was to start from the easily observable, explicit Chennai cases,in which the difference between objective and subjective viewpoints wasminimal and therefore easily observable. Later, I began to study the UK case,where the situation was complex and more implicit boundaries emerged. The
street edge phenomena in the UK case are not readily apparent through a simple
observation of the marginalized situation of migrants; of course, it is insome aspects such as religion and population size but their economic position
is no longer one of marginalisation. This means that, in contemporary UKsociety, migrant thresholds are more implicit. So first you must pay strong
attention to the context of your subject in order to locate thresholds, then
you will be able to observe what is happening and going on around the threshold.
The UK case has provided a welcome challenge for deepening StreetAnthropology.
After confirming that threshold (street-edge) and exclusion arerelational conceptions, it is possible to say again that Street Anthropology

is characterized by focusing upon the locus where the socially ‘excluded’
people are living in order to discover their thresholds. By observing theiractivities at these thresholds, we can learn plenty of lessons in how not
only to survive, but to acquire a life worth living in harsh conditions. Thisis because such loci provoke the thought that your life is also developing
around a threshold in which you realize that your self-power is limited. Intime, you come to understand that the only way to survive, to truly move
forward, is through collaboration with others. This is the magical thresholdpoint of realisation, the turning point where you start to transform yourself
by going from the forward path to the backward path.
This is the semiotic process in Charles Sanders Peirce’s sense of‘synechism’, that is, the process of abduction or creation of life. Deleuze’s
concept of ‘becoming the minor’ also confronts the same matter. It is thisprocess at the threshold which includes a change of viewpoints fromself-oriented to the other-oriented, opens the black-box of bricolage, anddiscloses the secret of how to acquire an artistic life worth living. The
most important point in this process is ‘time-ness’ or ‘semiotic time’. Thisnuanced time quality is an essential component in Street Anthropology
thinking. Here a key distinction becomes apparent between a modern linear
notion of time, which is prevalent in modern Western thought, and ‘time-ness’,
which is a different dimensional notion of time, one that can be understoodas a process of folding back at the turning point from the forward path tothe backward path by passing through a threshold.
Street phenomena, then, is where the street-edge or threshold can befound, and it is here that we can observe showcases of street art as life
or life as street art. Exclusion, threshold or street-edge is your key
resource for reconstructing your original and artistic life. It is here thata sort of semiotic process will inevitably lead to collaboration with others
and it is this collaborative state of living that I define as ‘heterotopia
design’. This, I believe, may provide us with an ethnographically informed
theory to better conceptualise the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences.