Hisashi Shimojo
Hisashi Shimojo received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University's Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies on July 23, 2015. Since 2021, he has been an associate professor at Kobe University's Graduate School of Intercultural Studies. His research focuses on the historical anthropology of Vietnam and Cambodia, with a particular focus on everyday politics, the informal economy, cross-border migration, and ethnic and cultural hybridity in the Mekong River basins.
His book, Intangible Spaces: A Social History of Survival in the Mekong Delta. (Kokka no Yohaku: Mekon Deruta Ikinokori no Syakaishi, 2021, Kyoto University Press), written in Japanese, is a historical ethnography. It discusses the history of the multi-ethnic (Khmer, Chinese, Vietnamese, and countless métis/lai/kat people), hybridized society of Mekong Delta in Southern Vietnam. In this highly mobile society, where people and goods move back and forth across Cambodian border, the more the state sought to implement ideological governance, the more conflicts arose and the more upheavals spread. During the upheavals caused by the Vietnam War and socialist policies, people created “intangible spaces” where the state could not easily intervene. These spaces included draft evasion sites such as Buddhist temples, black markets, and illicit cross-border routes. He argues that these “intangible spaces emerged in response to subsistence crises in countless places in the late 20th Century. The book received ICAS Book Prize 2023 in Japanese Language Edition.
In addition to his own research, he is currently working with several translators on a Japanese translation of James C. Scott's ethnography, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Although many of Scott's works have already been translated into Japanese, this ethnography has not been translated for a long time.
Details here:
https://researchmap.jp/shimojohisashi