NatureCulture (online journal)

NatureCulture (https://www.natcult.net) is an English-language, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal based in Japan. Founded in 2012 by a small group of anthropologists at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and Osaka University, the journal has since established itself as an international platform for a dialogue across anthropology, science and technology studies and other related fields. The editorial board is composed of scholars from four continents and five disciplinary areas.

The journal is intended to be a medium that on the one hand brings young Japanese researchers into closer contact with related debates elsewhere, and on the other hand exhibits novel and challenging results of Japanese anthropology and science studies to a non-Japanese audience. It publishes invited individual research articles and guest edited special issues and interviews to promote a better understanding of the multiple entanglements of natures and cultures, biologies and societies, infrastructures and environments, humans and nonhumans in the contemporary world. NatureCulture has also been dedicated to the task of facilitating novel methodological inquiries that go beyond the conceptual and imaginary limits of most, if not all, Euro-American scholarship. It takes an interest in particular kinds of novel theorization including themes that range from multispecies ethnographies, to multinaturalism, ontological politics, and post-structural-relational approaches more broadly.  

All the issues published so far have grown out of international workshops held in Japan on “The Human and the Social” (Tokyo, 2011), “Translational Movements” (Osaka, 2012) and “Acting with Non-Human Entities” (Osaka, 2013). The fourth and newest issue, “Life under Influence,” was published in November 2017. It has its origin in a multidisciplinary symposium that was organized by Dominique Lestel (Ecole normale supérieure de Paris) at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo in 2014. "Its starting point,” the editors in their Introduction write ”was to grasp the challenge of the question of the ‘living’ and of ‘life’ in contemporary culture. This challenge has two main components, which are intertwined but never exactly merge with the other. The first one deals in a privileged fashion with explanatory principles that cultures, both Western and non-Western ones, elaborate in order to make sense of such a complex phenomenon as life. The second component is the one that is linked to contemporary technological and scientific innovations, which markedly reshape what one thinks it means to be ‘alive’ and offers the opportunity to consider particular phenomena and practices in non-Western cultures.” (Lestel and Pitrou 2017:ii). In the near future, NatureCulture aims to expand beyond research articles to offer more experimental contents on its central areas of focus and create a community of contributing editors.