Yasushi Uchiyamada

Bio: Yasushi Uchiyamada is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Perception & Livelihood. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1092 citations.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Readings and responses 2. Preface to the 1st edition 3. Introduction to the 1st edition 4. Interactive artifacts 5. Plans 6. Situated actions 7. Communicative resources 8. Case and methods 9. Human-machine communication 10. Conclusion to the 1st edition 11. Plans, scripts and other ordering devices 12. Agencies at the interface 13. Figuring the human in AI and robotics 14. Demystifications and re-enchantments of the human-like machine 15. Reconfigurations Notes References.

The origin of modern human behavior.

Abstract: Archaeology’s main contribution to the debate over the origins of modern humans has been investigating where and when modern human behavior is first recognized in the archaeological record. Most of this debate has been over the empirical record for the appearance and distribution of a set of traits that have come to be accepted as indicators of behavioral modernity. This debate has resulted in a series of competing models that we explicate here, and the traits are typically used as the test implications for these models. However, adequate tests of hypotheses and models rest on robust test implications, and we argue here that the current set of test implications suffers from three main problems: (1) Many are empirically derived from and context‐specific to the richer European record, rendering them problematic for use in the primarily tropical and subtropical African continent. (2) They are ambiguous because other processes can be invoked, often with greater parsimony, to explain their character. (3) Many ...

Beyond Nature and Culture

Abstract: Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

Abstract: This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings of...