KAJIMARU, Gaku Assistant Professor
Graduate School Department /Course /Field | Cultural Coexistence/Cultural, Regional and Historic Studies on Environment/Cultural Anthropology |
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Undergraduate School | Division of Cultural Environment Studies |
Other Affiliation | |
kajimaru.gaku.6n "at" kyoto-u.ac.jp | |
Personal Page | Website |

Research areas | Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology |
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Keywords | Reciprocal Singing, Interaction, China, Buyi, Laos, Japan (Akita) |
Themes | Performing arts are minor topic in Cultural Anthropology, though they are very interesting practice where sociocultural and historical contexts are densely interconnected. I have done fieldwork in Guizhou (China), Huaphan (Laos) and Akita (Japan) for researching local reciprocal singing. Reciprocal singing is a kind of performing arts that singers sing reciprocally each other with fixed melody and improvised (to some extent) words. This art seems characterized by the fact that singers of this song seems being evaluated more on poetic (linguistic) skill than on musical technique. It is requiered mutidisciplinary approach to understand reciprocal singing, so I have done my research based on Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnomusicology. In my research, I am especially interested in human interaction. Cultural Anthropologists always meet events including interaction. I am planning to consider how to describe the "event" theoretically and practically. |
Major publications | 2013 Ethnography of the Mountain Song: How to do Conversation with Song. Kyoto University Press. (in Japanese) 2013 "Codeswitching in the Reciprocal Singing Called "Mountain Song" in Guizhou, China : Between Language Shift and Cultural Revival." The JapaneseJournalof Language in Society. 15(2):58-65. (in Japanese) 2015 (co-ed.) Texture of the World: Introduciton to the Field Philosophy. Nakanishiya-Shuppan. (in Japanese) 2015 (co-ed.) Looking into the field: from the view of various disciplines. Kokon-Shoin Publisher. (in Japanese) 2016 (co-ed.) Fieldnotes: from multidisciplinary perspective. Kokon-Shoin Publisher. (in Japanese) |
Professional societies/Research and synergic activities | The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA) The Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences (JASS) The Society for Research in Asiatic Music (Tôyô Ongaku Gakkai, TOG) Association of Asian Folk Culture Studies Society for Japanese Folk Music International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) American Anthropological Association(AAA) The International Council for Traditional Music(ICTM) |
Teaching Areas |
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Background | 1999 Graduate from Faculty of Integrated Human Studies of Kyoto University 2003 Admitted to the master's course of the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies (Field of Cultural Anthropology) 2005 Got a Master's degree in Human and Environmental Studies 2005 Admitted to the doctoral course of the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies (Field of Cultural Anthropology) 2009 JSPS Research Fellow (DC2, PD from October 2009) 2011 JSPS Research Fellow (PD) 2012 Got a Doctoral degree in Human and Environmental Studies (Kyoto University) 2014 Part-time Lecturer (Research Fellow) at Kyoto City University of Arts 2017 Assistant Professor at Kyoto University (Graduate school of Human and Environmnetal Studies) |