Lecturer in Anthropology
Academic Staff, Japan Research Centre
- Name:
- Dr Fabio Gygi
- Email address:
- fg5@soas.ac.uk
- Telephone:
- +44 (0)20 7898 4417
- Address:
- SOAS University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
- Building:
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Office No:
- 562
- Academic Support Hours:
- Tuesdays 16.00-18.00/By Email Appointment
Biography
I was born and raised in Switzerland, but spent my formative years in Japan, Germany and England. After receiving an MA in European Ethnology and Japanese Studies from the University of Tübingen, I was awarded a PhD in social anthropology by UCL. Before joining SOAS I spent three years as an assistant professor of sociology at the Doshisha University in Kyoto.
I started out in historical anthropology by looking at the material culture of war and how `unspeakable` war experiences were embodied in artefacts called trench art, made predominately in the First World War, and how these influenced the post-war avant-garde in France and Germany.
This primed my interest in materiality and the relationships people entertain with their possessions, an interest I followed when I started working on hoarding and the different forms it takes in different cultural settings. The brunt of my fieldwork was done in Tokyo, where I helped people clean up their apartments and houses as a form of participant observation and conducted interviews with hoarders, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.
My research focuses on three aspects: 1) how people deal with their possessions and the everyday cosmologies they engender 2) the way hoarding has become an officially recognized pathology (the DSM-V 2013 classifies it as an independent disorder within the larger category of obsessive-compulsive disorders) and the way gender is materialized through things and the practices associated with them in the Japanese context.
Gygi, Fabio R. (2018) 'THINGS THAT BELIEVE AND HOW TO GET RID OF THEM:Towards a Material Ecology of the Numinous in Japan'. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. [Forthcoming]
Gygi, Fabio (2011) '行為者としての「モノ」ー エージェンジーの概念の拡張に関する一考察 [The Thing as Actor: Some Reflections on the Extension of the Concept of Agency]'. 同志社社会学研究 15, pp 1-12.
Gygi, Fabio (2008) 'Mnemonic Monsters: Memory, Oblivion and Continuity in Japanese Popular Culture'. MINIKOMI, (75), pp 5-12.
Gygi, Fabio (2018) 'The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan'. In: Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. and Machotka, Ewa, (eds.), Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp 129-151.
Gygi, Fabio (2009) 'Shaping Matter, Memories and Mentalities: The German Steel Helmet from Artefact to Afterlife'. In: Cornish, Paul and Saunders, Nicholas J, (eds.), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War. London: Routledge, pp 27-44.
Gygi, Fabio (2006) 'Fassungen des Unfassbaren: Über Reliquien, Relikte und Repräsentation in Zeiten des Krieges'. In: Korff, Gottfried, (ed.), Alliierte im Himmel. Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung. Tübingen: TVV.
Gygi, Fabio (2004) 'Shattered Experiences – Recycled Relics: Strategies of Representation and the Legacy of the Great War'. In: Saunders, Nicholas J, (ed.), Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory, and the First World War.. London: Routledge, pp 72-89.
Gygi, Fabio (2002) 'L'objet ne parle pas de lui-même, il faut qu`il soit interrogé: Entretien avec Freddy Raphaël de `Université Marc Bloch à Strasbourg'. Kleines aus dem Großen Krieg: Metamorphosen militärischen Mülls. Tübingen: TVV, pp 164-170.
Gygi, Fabio (2017) 'Mnemonic Monsters Redux: Traumatic Signature and the Afterlife of Image-Objects in Japanese Popular Culture' In: 26th Japanese Anthropology Workshop, 01 Sep 2015 - 04 Sep 2015, Istanbul, Turkey.
This list was last generated on Thursday, 20th September 2018, 17:52 Europe/London.