Chikako Ozawa-de Silva graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo before heading to Oxford University for a PhD in social and cultural anthropology. Research fellowships took her to Harvard and the University of Chicago before she joined Emory in 2003.
Her research focuses on the impacts of culture on well-being, including how people experience and respond to suffering. Ozawa-de Silva’s most recent book is titled “The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan.”
Published by the University of California Press, the book won the Society for East Asian Anthropology’s 2022 Francis Hsu Book Prize. The prize committee called the work “poignant, richly ethnographic and an exemplary instance of a book that really speaks beyond our field…Ozawa-de Silva writes about suicide and loneliness in Japan in ways that speak to wider global trends while giving us some hint at potentially better ways to live.”
“The Anatomy of Loneliness” also received the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing honorable mention, presented by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. “This book is a jarring, empathic, and even paradoxical diagnosis of emerging collective social structures that make people feel alone,” the prize committee wrote. “Along the way, readers are introduced to a brave and novel vision for what an inclusive society might mean.”
The Francis L. K. Hsu Prize is given to the book that was judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field of Anthropology of East Asia and is awarded by the American Anthropological Association’s Society for East Asian Anthropology. In The Anatomy of Loneliness, Ozawa-de Silva gracefully threads the needle of writing for a non-specialist audience while adding to conversations about loneliness, suicide, and social connection in the anthropology of East Asia. Moreover, she writes about the particularities of a social phenomenon in Japan in ways that speak to global experiences of loneliness as a part of the human condition, but one exacerbated by the structures of modern life and neoliberal policies. To do so, the book draws together current research in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience/developmental biology, to theorize the anatomy of loneliness as both individual and social. The chapters chart Ozawa-de Silva’s research journey from a study of the dramatic increase in suicides in Japan beginning in 1998, to her discovery that a lack of social connection, loneliness, and a sense of meaning in life better reflected the stories she encountered than the assumed economic or mental health causes. In order to study suicide ethnographically, the book analyses first, second, and third person accounts seen through the phenomenon of suicide websites, the commodification of intimacy, the perceptions of college students, and the 2011 natural and nuclear disasters. The book ends with a timely focus on the communal loneliness of areas forgotten in post-Fukushima recovery initiatives and emerging examples of their resilience through community. Thus, Ozawa-de Silva writes about suicide and loneliness in Japan in ways that speak to wider global trends while giving us some hint at potentially better ways to live today. The committee also found Chikako’s book to be “poignant, richly ethnographic, and an exemplary instance of a book that really speaks beyond our field.”
The Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing is an annual juried book award by the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA). The prize committee “seeks graceful, accessible ethnographic writing which deeply explores its subject and contributes in innovative and engaging ways to the genre(s) of ethnography and the field of humanistic (and/or post-humanistic) anthropology.” Chikako Ozawa-de Silva’s The Anatomy of Loneliness humanistically explores issues of human biology, and it analytically transforms loneliness from an individual state of being into a societal predicament. This book is a jarring, empathetic, and even paradoxical diagnosis of emerging collective social structures that make people feel alone. Along the way, readers are introduced to a brave and novel vision for what an inclusive society might mean. The book’s subject matter, from mental health to suicide, is challenging — but Ozawa-de Silva shows us how to rigorously write these topics in ways that cultivate inclusive engagement rather than reproduce the senses of alienation the book explores. The committee also felt that The Anatomy of Loneliness offers a truly unique, distinguished, and even experimental model of accessibility. This book is lucidly written. it is also a text that creatively and transparently brings the reader alongside the author in all her intellectual premises, all her conceptual inspirations, and every one of her turns of thought.
Watch Professor Ozawa-de Silva read the first 5-minutes of her book here.
The Association for Africanist Anthropology has awarded Dr. Isabella Alexander the 2022 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award for her book Burning at Europe’s Borders.
This prize is awarded to the book that “best furthers both the global community of Africanist scholars and the wider interests of the African continent, with special consideration given to works drawing upon extensive research in Africa and advancing new methodologies for anthropological fieldwork in Africa.”
“It’s phenomenal that Denisovan ancestry made it all the way to South America,” says John Lindo, a co-corresponding author of the paper and an anthropologist at Emory who specializes in ancient DNA analysis, “The admixture must have occurred a long time before, perhaps 40,000 years ago.”
Lindo also states the fact that the Denisovan lineage persisted and its genetic signal made it into an ancient individual from Uruguay that is only 1,500 years old suggests that it was a large admixture event between a population of humans and Denisovans.
Lori Jahnke, the Department of Anthropology librarian, and her colleagues at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Iowa, and researchers at Fiocruz will share a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at responsible management of scientific collections created under unequal power dynamics. Jahnke and her colleagues plan to establish and test a methodology for collaborative, community-based work to document and understand subjects’ experience of scientific research and the afterlives of scientific objects that are produced. The project will help researchers reevaluate assumptions about data collection, their methodologies, intellectual property and knowledge production.
This week, the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsights Blog won the 2021 New Directions Award, presented by the General Anthropological Division, a sub-section of the American Anthropological Association. Scott Schnur, a doctoral candidate in the Emory Anthropology Department, is a member of the graduate student collective who helps edit and write for the blog as part of SCA’s Contributing Editors program. Schnur has been a contributing editor since 2018, and in 2021 became the section editor for Member Voices, a section of Fieldsights.”I became interested in working with Fieldsights because of their commitment to open-access publication and the public-facing nature of the work. The site is a great forum for experimental writing and multi-media pieces which are engaging with important issues in the discipline and pushing it new directions,” he said. “Congratulations to everyone in the program and the editorial board!” Fieldsights has been published since 2012 and has a global readership.
Focusing on pastoralism, this article reflects on five diverse cases across Africa, Asia and Europe and asks: how have COVID-19 disease control measures affected mobility and production practices, marketing opportunities, land control, labour relations, local community support and socio-political relations with the state and other settled agrarian or urban populations? In response to the lockdown measures, the article explores what innovations have emerged to secure livelihoods, through new forms of social solidarity and ‘moral economy’. The cases examine how impacts and responses have been differentiated by class, age, wealth and ethnicity, and explore the implications for socio-economic processes and political change in pastoral settings.
The article is availabe online, full list of the authors and publication details: Simula, Giulia, Bum, Tsering,Farinella, Domenica, Maru, Natasha, Mohamed, Tahira S., Taye, Masresha, Tsering, Palden. 2020. COVID-19 and Pastoralism: Reflections from Three Continents. The Journal of Peasant Studies 48(1): 48-72.
Projects of the Ancient DNA Lab include the analysis of the DNA of indigenous people, which have historically received less attention than people of European ancestry. Dr. Lindo does this work in cooperation with local indigenous people, a departure from traditional archaeological procedures.
Rosseirys “Ro” De La Rosa, an undergraduate student and member of the lab, is working on a project involving the remains of indigenous people from Uruguay, the Charrúa. “Culture matters,” De La Rosa says. “Leaning about your own culture gives you a sense of unity and connection that you can pass down to others.”
President Fenves of Emory University recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ Day:
Dear members of the Emory community,
On October 12, we will join communities throughout the nation to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day and honor the resilience, history, traditions, and cultures of Indigenous and Native American peoples.
Emory’s recognition includes consideration of the first inhabitants of the land that our campus now calls home — a land whose history can be traced to the Muscogee Creek Nation. As the Muscogee Creek community continues to confront systemic racism, and as our university acknowledges its own difficult histories, we believe it is important to honor those faculty, staff, and students who create vibrant spaces of inclusion on our campus for Native and Indigenous voices. Their work is defining a new legacy at Emory — one that empowers those whose talents and gifts were overlooked and marginalized for generations.
We are proud that, for the first time at Emory, we are formally recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day and acknowledging its significance within our community and beyond.
We encourage our community to spend time reflecting on our history and to consider ways to advance human rights and social justice at Emory and in the world.
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 