Regenerative medicine is enthusiastically celebrated in Japan. Cutting edge stem cell research and new translatable treatments are closely followed and championed: by individuals, the government, and media alike. This thesis will demonstrate how process occurs in Japan, and then explain why. Two critical reasons are posited for regenerative medicine’s extensive public endorsement. The first reason is regenerative medicine’s role in combating the effects of Japan’s demographic shift: an ongoing crisis in which the national population is both aging and shrinking at distressing rates. The demographic shift puts immense strains on healthcare infrastructure, the economy, and family dynamics, while also precipitating a rise in the prevalence of degenerative diseases. Regenerative medicine is perceived as a multivalent antidote for these demographic concerns. The second reason is regenerative medicine’s many points of continuity and symbiotic overlaps with the philosophies and methodological applications of kampo (traditional Japanese medicine). Within both regenerative medicine and kampo treatment contexts, healing is reflexive and internally oriented: medicine does not heal the body so much as small medical catalysts influence the body to heal itself – to regenerate. Participants viewed regenerative medicine and kampo as analogous, and in some cases, interchangeable. With data gathered over two consecutive years of multi-sited participant observation fieldwork in Japan, the story of regenerative medicine is deliberately told here through personal narratives, ethnography, and individual perceptions: the words and insights of participants. As a series of subjective biovalues, potentials, and imaginaries, regenerative medicine has become a malleable concept that extends far beyond just cellular therapies. In Japan, regenerative medicine manifests as hope for the immediate future, and as individuals project their optimism onto it, regenerative medicine can and does become whatever they want it to be.

The thesis draws on a year-long field study of morungs and megaliths as important components of Naga heritage, and on written sources documenting Naga ethnography and other relevant literature. It examines the ways in which these objects of material culture are used at two levels: the state and the village, in terms of projecting Naga identity. The phenomenological approach to the study of the stated theme brings out the process of embodiment, materialization and memorialisation of the Naga past in the present through megalithic building, interactions of the people with and within the morung, and festivals involving participation of individuals as members of the community at different levels, Khonoma being a case in point. The study has addressed itself to the dynamics of heritage politics, thereby filling in the gap area that had remained in the extant works on the Naga due to various factors, not least Nagaland’s volatile political climate and inaccessibility till recently. It reveals the extent and nature of state involvement in negotiating heritage to sell its idea of constructing a composite Naga identity with particular reference to the state-sponsored Hornbill Festival. The study also works at the level of village-centric identity formation through the process of socialization, a carry-over from their traditional past. Importantly the use of the phenomenological approach complemented by insights drawn from heritage studies on especially non-Western societies has opened up new lines of inquiry into the ways in which identity is built up, reworked and sustained. In this respect the study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of heritage in contemporary Nagaland and in the broader picture of material culture studies.

This thesis explores how a mobile population living in Margate, UK, who were mostly born in working-class communities across different areas of the UK and have recently retired to the town, forge a sense of belonging and connections with people, places, objects and the past in a novel historical context of national de-industrialisation, local economic regeneration and class struggle. By differentiating between objects with “character” – a native idiom to describe objects that contain in their materiality physical remnants of the past – and “modern” goods, which have been produced recently and therefore “have not lived”, my informants differentiate between continuity and rupture. In contrast to modern objects, character enables continuity. By forging connections with objects with character, my informants produce new connections with the past and a sense of belonging to Margate, despite having only recently moved there. The thesis follows associations between people, places, objects and the past produced inside the local charity shop, my informants’ homes, around public events in town and in political practices. The relevance of the ethnography of character is that it shows that although my informants are involved in consumption practices that rearrange things, people, places and the past, allowing novel identifications to emerge, this is always done while taking into consideration the materiality of objects, houses and public buildings. My informants do not simply freely construct who they are, they do so through the mediation of character. They are particularly cautious to maintain the character of places, objects and the past. As a consequence, this thesis shows that there is a (material) criterion for my informants’ social constructionism that is the “character of things”.

The survival of wild orangutans, our close relatives and members of the great ape family, is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic activities, such as clearcutting for oil palm. In this context, orangutan mothers are often killed, and their infants turned into pets. If lucky, traumatised and sick orphans may be rescued by conservationists, who help the infant recover and gain survival skills (known as rehabilitation) before released back into the wild (reintroduction: together, R&R). Drawing on in-depth interviews with orangutan conservation and welfare workers, and visits to the majority of R&R projects in Indonesia and Malaysia, this thesis examines how ethical views shape how and why R&R is conducted. I propose that in a context of scarcity (of resources, time, space, and energy), efforts to “save” orangutans inevitably involve sacrifice: giving up something valuable, be it another orangutan or animal, an area of forest, or a value, such as orangutans’ welfare, wildness, or autonomy. Because practitioners do not always agree on what to prioritise, R&R remains controversial. For example, what if the orphan fails to learn how to be an orangutan again, after years in the company of humans? What if she is sent into the forest only to slowly starve? Would she have been better off in a cage, or is it better to give her “death with dignity” in the wild? Could the huge cost of sending a rescued ape back to the wild be better spent on stopping deforestation in the first place, thereby saving wild orangutans at the expense of the displaced? Or do we have a moral obligation to rescue the orphan regardless of cost? My research shows that ethical dilemmas lie at the heart of debates about whether it is better to release orphans into the wild, or keep them in captivity. Ethical conundrums are also at the heart of the often-heated debates about how R&R should be conducted. For example, while some allow released orangutans to “choose” whether to live alongside humans in a “semi-wild” state, others believe that true freedom can only be achieved by eliminating human contact. Further ethical dilemmas arise from decisions around whether to publicly criticise other groups’ methods, and how to secure funding without “greenwashing” or using images that portray orangutan orphans as “cute” rather than tragic. Deconstructing ethical positions is crucial for understanding the ongoing disagreements about how to help our endangered great ape kin. The current research is an effort to synthesise this discourse for conservation and R&R of the charismatic red ape.

The thesis explores Traveller sites, seasonal camps, funerary monuments and gifthorses as 'post-nomadic architectures': modes of dwelling and sites of personification that make visible the social force of relations between Irish Travellers, and mediate between Travellers and the state, in Ireland and the UK. The metaphoric resources of post-nomadic architectures arise within the recursive variations of movement and camping, which emulate and elicit flows and intensities, divisions and comings-together of the names and embodied substance of Irish Traveller 'breeds'. In camps, performative speech and symbolic action disclose nuanced dis/continuities of 'breed' and 'back-breed', directing actors' understandings of symmetry, continuity and openendedness. When translated into official sites, this field of fractal personhood and relation impels the need for additional architectures as well as regular returns to camping. Funerary monuments, gift cycles of mares and foals, sites and camps form old and new 'resources for interiority and contexts for self-elaboration' (Warner 2002: 31), through which Travellers negotiate asymmetries between the public agency of 'the name' and the private debts and affections of 'blood'. Post-nomadic architectures and the body form a distributed field of analogy and metaphor, and are reciprocally constituted as social capacities and sites of personhood and relation. Post-nomadic architectures disclose the interagency of 'public'-'private' worlds that bring each other into being with transformative potential. In 2004, the European Court ruled that the UK's 'G/gypsy' sites were 'homes', recognizing their status in the field of the house. The UK site's material relations of permanent temporariness, contingent on post-nomadic subjectivities, are upheld by psychiatric diagnosis of the 'Gypsy's' 'aversion to bricks and mortar'. Synecdochal relations between the UK site and the house contrast with Ireland, where 'permanent Traveller-specific' architectures encode non-negotiable difference. The house, a legitimate instrument of violence in reserve, enacts a structural fracture in the Irish state which the state is at pains to concede.

This thesis examines the everyday experiences of colorectal cancer treatments in London (UK) through an analysis of the caregiving practices that both structure the treatment pathway and afford research participants the possibility of 'getting on with life'. Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside and outside a publicly funded gastro-intestinal cancer clinic, this thesis mobilises the perspectives of patients, caregivers and health professionals to complicate what patient experience consists of. In parallel to national efforts that gather standardised metrics to measure patient experience as something that is the exclusive responsibility of the cancer clinic, this thesis offers a detailed and context-specific analysis of the ways in which 10 cancer patients and their support networks deal with and make sense of the requirements, side effects and consequences of colorectal cancer treatments. The chapters unpack the relentless but fragile everyday work that is done by research participants to continue living, foregrounding the ethical, material and affective dimensions at stake in navigating the interruption that bowel cancer treatments pose to their lives. Developing the concept of caregiving as a world-making project, this thesis unpacks the potential of care practices to create different possibilities of experience by improvising, crafting and staging environments for comfortable living. In contrast to ethnographic work that conceives of caregiving through its ritual dimensions and performative effects, this thesis makes an argument for the usefulness of exploring caregiving as moral projects that are organised by the values that participants seek to realise. As such, caregiving understood as world-making not only offers a challenging perspective about the ways in which we cope and make sense of the suffering, frustration and anxiety of being confronted with death, but it also foregrounds the practices through which cancer patients and their support networks strive to reconfigure bodies, selves and relationships for an ongoing life.

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