Minamata: Notes & Musings from the Field

My name is Michelle Daigle, and I am a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in the Department of Anthropology. You've just stumbled across my blog, in which I reflect, muse, and comment on developments and events that occur while I conduct field research on Minamata disease in Minamata and Niigata, Japan from October 2011 to September 2013.

As an anthropologist by trade, I am interested in the intimate relationships between local socio-cultural contexts and larger national and global processes to understand humanity in its many forms. Choosing to focus on medicine and law within the context of environmental pollution and disaster, I am interested in how medicine and law intersect in industrialized societies (particularly Japan), how this intersection affects socio-cultural perceptions and attitudes of risk, environmental and bodily contamination, and reconciliation, and how this intersection reverberates and permeates into people's intimate social spaces--the most intimate being the body itself. Thus, I am also interested in the reverse effect--how the body and bodily experience of pollution related disasters affect law and medicine, the influence of the body and bodily experience in national and global political economies, and, finally, the discursive construction of the intimate in the public sphere.

I hope that this blog will serve as a tool in the anthropological discovery process, and that you will enjoy being a part of this endeavor. Comments are always welcome!