Welcome to the website of the18th Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) conference. Under the general theme of Japan and Materiality in a Broader Perspective, a Call for Papers elicited contributions on topics of popular culture, place and landscape, materiality of display, significant objects, nature/body/sexuality, and the social use of the body. Topics now listed in the conference program fully reflect this wide variety of approaches conducive to an understanding of the physical, tangible, and sensual nature of life in Japanese society. 

Joy Hendry has been invited to give the Keynote Speech at the Oslo conference. Her topic is Rewrapping the Message: Museums, Healing and Communicative Power. A Special Lecture will be given by Brian Moeran under the title Making Scents of Smell: Incense in Japan. A conference exhibition will be prepared by Arne Røkkum. Its theme is Signs of Society: Masks and Festival Banner Poles from Okinawa, Japan. Naomi Magnussen of the Oslo University Library will arrange a workshop for anthropology students interested in accessing Japanese databases. On the final day of the conference, Nelson Graburn will rekindle the highlight of the Keynote Speech with a plenary presentation focusing on a museum exhibition at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Taminzoku Nihon: Multiculturalism and Minpaku.The author of the exhibition, Hiroshi Shoji, will be among the discussants.

The Oslo University Museum of Cultural History hosts the 2007 JAWS conference. The Ethnographic Department (formerly, the Ethnographic Museum) was established in 1857. A substantial part of the Japan Collection dates from the latter part of the 19th century. Its entry into this Oslo museum locale is reflective of a broader European craving at the time for Japanese exotica. A major contributor to the establishment of the Japan Collection, Captain Johan Adrian Jacobsen, was himself one of the foremost agents for opening up ethnographic museums to what is, in fact, something physical, tangible, and sensual. With his expeditions to various parts of the world, he helped realize a genre of ethnographic live show --  Völkerschau in German --  to be played out in fairs and other arenas of open air display. His theme park ideas were not welcomed in Norway, though, so he remained a life-long resident of Germany. Nevertheless, his instrumental approach to materializing ethnographic contexts may have left some impact on anthropology in general. Franz Boas held Jacobsen in high regard. A brother of Jacobsen worked as his field assistant. A methodic attitude of situating material objects in experienced reality may have been brought about by this collaboration.

The management of the Japan Collection is still today coupled with ethnographic fieldwork. A Conference Exhibition centering on festival objects in the southern Ryukyu Islands of Japan will serve as an illustration.

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