Thomas Itsuo Fujishima

Imaginaries of more-than-human resistance: Life, farming, and posthuman politics in Japan

How do alternative farmers in Japan confront the ecological upheavals driven by climate change and the biodiversity loss? My ethnographic study examines agricultural production landscapes in Japan as sites of transspecies coexistence. Central to its heuristic is ‘inochi’—a complex term charged with moral significance and evocative of the collective subjectivity of ‘that-which-is-alive.’ As our planet is heading toward biospheric collapse, the possible manifestation of inochi as posthuman communities within sustainable farming environments demands urgent attention.

Drawing on the vitalist–materialist theory of influential Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji, the methodology includes the cartography of ‘hybrid lifescapes’ to analyze the spaces, flows, and corporeality of inochi. Extended fieldwork in rural Japan will enable close observation of and collaboration with farmers. The dissertation will present results through experimental storytelling, foregrounding ‘more-than-human’ entanglements.

The project is informed by the experience of the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster when I was working in the Japanese countryside. It also relates to discussions within cultural anthropology and posthuman theory where feminist scholars such as Rosi Braidotti and Anna Tsing have pioneered the critical analyses of nature–culture assemblages, thereby destabilizing the paradigm of anthropocentrism. However, Asian scholarship is marginalized within this discourse. ‘Inochi’ as a key concept can, therefore, establish an urgently needed new ground in the Environmental Humanities.