Fabio Gygi
Biographic Data
| ID | 329486 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fabio Gygi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fabio |
| FAMILY NAME | Gygi |
| SIGNATURE | GYGI F |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9328-4281 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Beyond the contemporary: Crafting practices and visions of the future in Japan
How can we capture the future as an ethnographic category in Japan? This special issue brings together ethnographic explorations of how the future is imagined, anticipated and coaxed into being at different levels of society by a broad range of actors: from governments and policy makers, to local heritage groups, to individuals with food allergies. The contributions highlight the ways in which concerns and hopes for the future form the temporal h…
Mnemonic Monsters Redux: Traumatic Signatures and the Afterlife of Image-Objects in Japanese Popular Culture
This paper explores the ways in which traumatic memories are shaped and transmitted by looking at two popular Japanese post-war media phenomena, Godzilla and Space Battleship Yamato. In opposition to the definition of trauma as that which escapes representation, I will argue with reference to the work of Aby Warburg that traces of trauma can energize certain forms of representation and provide them with a sometimes uncanny afterlife. Central to W…
The Animation of Nature and the Nature of Animation—The Life of Made Objects from the “Record of Tool Specters” to the “Night Parade of Hundred Demons”
This article argues that animism in the Japanese context is more fruitfully understood as animation, a technique that imbues man-made things with life. Two forms of animation are at work in so-called animist beliefs: one is the docile animation of instruments when skillfully used by humans, in which case the instrument becomes part of the human body; the other is the sense of aliveness that one experiences when an object resists human use and int…
Dahl, Shayne (prod.) & SatoshiWatanabe (dir.). The Buddha mummies of North Japan. 20 mins. DVD / PAL, colour. Watertown, Mass: DER, 2017. $29.95 (home use)
(home use
Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World
The Afterlives of Dolls: On the Productive Death of Terminal Commodities
Can dolls die? This paper examines memorial services for dolls (ningyō kuyō) in Japan as conduits to disposal. Dolls, once bought, are widely understood to be terminal commodities: they can only be passed down to a narrow group of relatives and often end up stuck in time and place. The ritual reanimates the "stuck" dolls by providing a symbolic death, after which disposal becomes possible. The ritual also enables-on a small scale-processes of rep…
Falling in and Out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan
The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the ‘affective affordances’ of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection …
Hôtes et otages: Entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain
Fabio Gygi, Hôtes et otages : entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain.— Les études portant sur la culture matérielle se placent souvent dans le cadre théorique de l'appropriation, selon lequel les êtres humains peuvent faire des objets leurs choses, en les investissant d'un sens. Mais que se passe-t-il quand un objet offert ne peut pas vraiment devenir le nôtre ? Cet article s'intéresse aux relations entre objets et humains du poi…
Materiality
The term “materiality” has been used since the 1980s in the humanities and social sciences as a critical concept to address what was perceived as an excessive emphasis on meaning, discourse, and human agency. Materiality points to the ways in which matter can be conceived of as more than just a passive surface into which cultural meanings are inscribed. It illuminates how humans are both enabled and constrained by their material environments and …
The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan
This chapter looks at the ways in which the 'rubbish house' (gomi yashiki) emerged in Japan as a socially recognized phenomenon in the years after the collapse of the bubble economy.Rather than understanding it as a local variation of hoarding, the aim is to locate the gomi yashiki as a phenomenon related to consumption at the intersection of two distinct regimes of value: the bubble years of overconsumption in the 1980s and the years of economic…
Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality
Contemporary Japan is often described in utopian terms as a place where humans and nonhumans live and work together in harmony. This acceptance of nonhuman others is explained by some anthropologists as stemming from an “animist unconscious” (Allison 2006) that allows people to attribute “life” to robots and other artefacts, a notion that is explicitly linked to the “Shinto universe” of “native animist beliefs” (Robertson 2010). Contrary to the d…
Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them
Introduction: Object(s) of BeliefWhat is the relationship between religious objects and beliefs, between the materiality of things and the immaterial idea?There are, broadly speaking, two ways of approaching this question in the anthropology of religion.Either religious objects are understood as expressions of cognitively held beliefsor, conversely, belief emerges as the result of practices involving religious objects.For the former to work, seve…
Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective
This multidisciplinary book analyses the contradictory coexistence of consumerism and environmentalism in contemporary Japan. It focuses on the dilemma that the diffusion of the concepts of sustainability and recycling has posed for everyday consumption practices, and on how these concepts have affected, and were affected by, the production and consumption of art. Special attention is paid to the changes in consumption practices and environmental…
The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home by Inge Daniels
(2011). The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home by Inge Daniels. Home Cultures: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 351-353
Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality
Contemporary Japan is often described in utopian terms as a place where humans and nonhumans live and work together in harmony. This acceptance of nonhuman others is explained by some anthropologists as stemming from an “animist unconscious” (Allison 2006) that allows people to attribute “life” to robots and other artefacts, a notion that is explicitly linked to the “Shinto universe” of “native animist beliefs” (Robertson 2010). Contrary to the d…
Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them
Introduction: Object(s) of BeliefWhat is the relationship between religious objects and beliefs, between the materiality of things and the immaterial idea?There are, broadly speaking, two ways of approaching this question in the anthropology of religion.Either religious objects are understood as expressions of cognitively held beliefsor, conversely, belief emerges as the result of practices involving religious objects.For the former to work, seve…
Falling in and Out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan
The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the ‘affective affordances’ of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection …
Hôtes et otages: Entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain
Fabio Gygi, Hôtes et otages : entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain.— Les études portant sur la culture matérielle se placent souvent dans le cadre théorique de l'appropriation, selon lequel les êtres humains peuvent faire des objets leurs choses, en les investissant d'un sens. Mais que se passe-t-il quand un objet offert ne peut pas vraiment devenir le nôtre ? Cet article s'intéresse aux relations entre objets et humains du poi…
The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home by Inge Daniels
(2011). The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home by Inge Daniels. Home Cultures: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 351-353
Materiality
The term “materiality” has been used since the 1980s in the humanities and social sciences as a critical concept to address what was perceived as an excessive emphasis on meaning, discourse, and human agency. Materiality points to the ways in which matter can be conceived of as more than just a passive surface into which cultural meanings are inscribed. It illuminates how humans are both enabled and constrained by their material environments and …
The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan
This chapter looks at the ways in which the 'rubbish house' (gomi yashiki) emerged in Japan as a socially recognized phenomenon in the years after the collapse of the bubble economy.Rather than understanding it as a local variation of hoarding, the aim is to locate the gomi yashiki as a phenomenon related to consumption at the intersection of two distinct regimes of value: the bubble years of overconsumption in the 1980s and the years of economic…
Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality
Contemporary Japan is often described in utopian terms as a place where humans and nonhumans live and work together in harmony. This acceptance of nonhuman others is explained by some anthropologists as stemming from an “animist unconscious” (Allison 2006) that allows people to attribute “life” to robots and other artefacts, a notion that is explicitly linked to the “Shinto universe” of “native animist beliefs” (Robertson 2010). Contrary to the d…
Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them
Introduction: Object(s) of BeliefWhat is the relationship between religious objects and beliefs, between the materiality of things and the immaterial idea?There are, broadly speaking, two ways of approaching this question in the anthropology of religion.Either religious objects are understood as expressions of cognitively held beliefsor, conversely, belief emerges as the result of practices involving religious objects.For the former to work, seve…
Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective
This multidisciplinary book analyses the contradictory coexistence of consumerism and environmentalism in contemporary Japan. It focuses on the dilemma that the diffusion of the concepts of sustainability and recycling has posed for everyday consumption practices, and on how these concepts have affected, and were affected by, the production and consumption of art. Special attention is paid to the changes in consumption practices and environmental…
Hôtes et otages: Entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain
Fabio Gygi, Hôtes et otages : entasser des objets chez soi dans le Japon contemporain.— Les études portant sur la culture matérielle se placent souvent dans le cadre théorique de l'appropriation, selon lequel les êtres humains peuvent faire des objets leurs choses, en les investissant d'un sens. Mais que se passe-t-il quand un objet offert ne peut pas vraiment devenir le nôtre ? Cet article s'intéresse aux relations entre objets et humains du poi…
Falling in and Out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan
The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the ‘affective affordances’ of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection …
Dahl, Shayne (prod.) & SatoshiWatanabe (dir.). The Buddha mummies of North Japan. 20 mins. DVD / PAL, colour. Watertown, Mass: DER, 2017. $29.95 (home use)
(home use
Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World
The Afterlives of Dolls: On the Productive Death of Terminal Commodities
Can dolls die? This paper examines memorial services for dolls (ningyō kuyō) in Japan as conduits to disposal. Dolls, once bought, are widely understood to be terminal commodities: they can only be passed down to a narrow group of relatives and often end up stuck in time and place. The ritual reanimates the "stuck" dolls by providing a symbolic death, after which disposal becomes possible. The ritual also enables-on a small scale-processes of rep…
Mnemonic Monsters Redux: Traumatic Signatures and the Afterlife of Image-Objects in Japanese Popular Culture
This paper explores the ways in which traumatic memories are shaped and transmitted by looking at two popular Japanese post-war media phenomena, Godzilla and Space Battleship Yamato. In opposition to the definition of trauma as that which escapes representation, I will argue with reference to the work of Aby Warburg that traces of trauma can energize certain forms of representation and provide them with a sometimes uncanny afterlife. Central to W…
The Animation of Nature and the Nature of Animation—The Life of Made Objects from the “Record of Tool Specters” to the “Night Parade of Hundred Demons”
This article argues that animism in the Japanese context is more fruitfully understood as animation, a technique that imbues man-made things with life. Two forms of animation are at work in so-called animist beliefs: one is the docile animation of instruments when skillfully used by humans, in which case the instrument becomes part of the human body; the other is the sense of aliveness that one experiences when an object resists human use and int…
Beyond the contemporary: Crafting practices and visions of the future in Japan
How can we capture the future as an ethnographic category in Japan? This special issue brings together ethnographic explorations of how the future is imagined, anticipated and coaxed into being at different levels of society by a broad range of actors: from governments and policy makers, to local heritage groups, to individuals with food allergies. The contributions highlight the ways in which concerns and hopes for the future form the temporal h…
Art (8 works) · Japanese History and Culture (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · History (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Everyday life (3 works)