School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Working between the interstices of Indigenous studies and critical museology, my research is regionally focused on Japan. It concerns the politics of recognition and expressions of identity amongst the Ainu of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands—people forced to assimilate into Japan by systems of domination inscribed through colonial management.

The particular focus of my study is Dr Neil Gordon Munro (1863-1942), an Edinburgh-trained physician who lived in Japan for many years and, during that time, became an assiduous scholar of Ainu culture and collected Ainu artefacts, many of which are in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland. The Japanese regarded him as an interfering outsider who impeded Japanese anthropology. They believed his Scottish temperament and efforts to assist the Ainu in adapting—based on British social anthropology’s “genealogical” method—clashed with their ambition to transform Hokkaido into a “frontier-land” akin to America. 

These artefacts now attest to the disruptive social construction of past lives and support (re)articulation of how Ainu identities are experienced, understood, represented and remembered. My thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of the entanglement of museums with the emergence of anthropology and archaeology and the contemporary politics of recognition and revitalisation. Discussions concerning the decolonisation of museum collections in the context of histories of British Imperialism and Japanese settler colonialism underscore the project’s broader aim to energise conversations about Indigeneity.