Dr Inge Daniels
Teaching Award
Oxford University Teaching Excellence Award 2007-2008
Teaching and research interests
Consumption, gift exchange, materiality, religion; East Asia especially Japan.
Inge Daniels is a social anthropologist, who specialises in material and visual culture. Her research interests include gift exchange, the commodification of religious forms, the material culture of travel, vernacular photography, processes of divestment and disposal, and the anthropology of domestic space.
Daniels’ main fieldwork site is Japan where she lived and worked for six years.
For her PhD at the University College London (2001) she conducted a multi-sited ethnography about a famous souvenir/charm – the Miyajima rice scoop - as it moved through time and space (Munn 1979). She followed the trajectories of the rice scoop from its production in factories and craft shops, via sales in souvenir shops and temples on Miyajima island (south of Hiroshima) to its consumption in urban homes in the Kansai region (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto). Her work reaches important conclusions about the relationship between the gift and the souvenir and the role of every day, functional goods in the creation of spiritual and social value. One of the main outcomes of this research project was an exhibition called ‘Souvenirs in Contemporary Japan’ at the British Museum (2001) that explored the various ramifications of souvenirs for producers, distributors and consumers in Japan. A subsequent article published in the JRAI focuses on the material properties of things and questions the supposed opposition between the religious and the commercial, and the functional and the aesthetic (2003).
In 2003 the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science funded a one-year ethnography of the material culture of contemporary urban Japanese homes. This research uses ethnography to confront widespread, a-historical stereotypes that depict Japan as the quintessential “other”. The complexities and contradictions of real lived in Japanese homes are contrasted with the essentialist depictions of the minimalist Japanese house. The research will result in a number of journal publications (2007 under review) as well as a book entitled the Japanese House: An Ethnography (Berg 2008). This publication will be richly illustrated with photographs resulting from a 2006 follow-up research project with professional photographer Sue Andrews (funded by the British Academy). The book, thereby, also aims to challenge the relationship between image and text in conventional anthropological monographs.
Finally, Daniels also has an ongoing interest in the inter-disciplinary uses of ethnography, and has conducted fieldwork (2001- 2002) about the appropriation and innovation of ethnographic techniques in a new technology company in London. A second fieldwork in London (2005-2006), funded by the AHRC, which she is in the process of writing up, explores ephemeral, social and material practices in urban homes.
Areas of expertise
Anthropology of East Asia, especially Japan, material and visual culture, gift exchange, anthropology of space, religious practice, consumption.
Editorial Board
Home Cultures - The journal of architecture, design and domestic space.
Teaching
- Msc. Visual Anthropology / Msc. Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
- Lecture Series: Cultural Representations
- Option: Objects in Motion – Anthropological approaches to comodification, consumption and the cross-cultural circulation of people and things.
Exhibitions
2001: Souvenirs in Contemporary Japan, BP Ethnographic Showcase at the British Museum
2011: At Home in Japan - Beyond the Minimal House, Geffrye Museum, London (March-August 2011)
DPhil Students
- Wedding photograph at a shrine in Kyoto, 2006 (Inge Daniels)