I am a graduate student from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
I am interested in how trance, as an embodied experience of social relations, is translated into social action in Japan. I am specifically interested in the cultural process by which frames are created and how social relations are imagined through them. My interest derives from a personal question of hanging around friends who like to party: why do many people often find themselves transformed by their experience of raves, or large-scale electronic dance music parties, and why did some of them even decide to translate that experience into establishing nonprofit groups to work on environmental and/or consumer issues?
I am also academically interested as well as personally enjoy trance or ecstatic dance. Many "occult" trance rituals from West Africa emerged after colonial encounters and "spontaneous" ecstatic dances among women in Europe and the Middle East often occurred under pressures of patriarchal oppression. I find it interesting how ecstatic dance can spark our creativity, which in turn can be used (and has been used) as a political, social, cultural, and therapeutic tool among many oppressed or marginalized groups and people around the world.
ABOUT MYSELF
Outside of academia, I like to dance, read, travel, and listen to a lot of electronica, bossa nova, jazz, and classical music. I also practice Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka.
I have a BA in International Studies from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, and I worked as a translator/interpreter for various firms in Tokyo such as NTT Soft, Booz Allen and Hamilton, and AXA Life Insurance prior to my arrival in Honolulu, Hawai'i, in 2003.
RELATED LINKS
Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai'i
PERSONAL LINKS