ISHIKAWA, Noboru

Noboru Ishikawa (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Graduate Center、City University of New York) is Professor of cultural anthropology with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He has conducted fieldwork in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, over the past two decades and explored issues such as the construction of national space in the borderland, transnationalism, highland-lowland relations, and commodification of natural resources. More recently, he headed a large-scale transdisciplinary project on the development of oil palm plantations in northern Sarawak with a team of social and natural scientists, so as to examine the resilience of local communities, both human and nonhuman, and changing relations between nature and non-nature. His publication includes Dislocating Nation-States: Globalization in Asia and Africa (2005 Kyoto University Press), Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland (2010 Ohio University Press / NIAS Press / NUS Press), Transborder Governance of Forests, Rivers and Seas (2010 Routledge), and Flows and Movements in Southeast Asia: New Approaches to Transnationalism (2011 Kyoto University Press). He has a forthcoming book Human-Nature Interactions on the Plantation Frontier: An Ethnography of Anthropogenic Tropical Forests (Springer Nature) concerning the transformation of a high biomass society in Sarawak.