Fabio Gygi

Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Lecturer in Anthropology

Centre for Ethnographic Theory

Deputy Chair

SOAS Japan Research Centre (JRC)

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

Office Hours:

By email appointment

On Sabbatical:

On research leave, 2016-17

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.

Courses Taught

• Comparative Media Studies
• Social Theory

PhD Students supervised

• Emma Horsley-Heather, NHK's children's broadcasting and its effect on Japanese identity and homogeneity
• Kanji Kitamura, Toward a theory of cultural untranslatability with application to Japanese, UK and USA cross-cultural business management and beyond (working title)
• Marcello Francioni, Onee-kotoba. Language, Masculinities and Sexuality in contemporary Japan

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.