Ainu Anthropology

The Ainu people, primarily inhabiting the country of Japan, are a key component to anthropology for the sole reason that they are just one of many indigenous peoples who anthropologists’ study and analyze in order to learn more about the diversity and variation around the world. Only being recently recognized, anthropologists study the Ainu, specifically located in both the islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin by traveling to various regions of Japan where they are primarily living and first-handedly experiencing the main aspects being, their culture, economic activities, sociopolitical organizations, outside influences, and settlement patterns (Ohnuki-Tierney 297). Many anthropologists have studied this group of individuals, specifically the physical, or biological, anthropologists, as they sought to uncover the cultural background of the Ainu and how their culture had since evolved over the thousands of years they lived and were undisclosed. In the early 20th century, the Ainu people grabbed the attention of many anthropologists when it was publicized that they shared physical and skeletal features with Caucasian individuals (Miner, 2009). This enormous detail found enthralled anthropologists, revealing that they had much similarity to those of another “race” than those in their own country. Another reason anthropologists chose to study the Ainu is because the Ainu people inhabited regions of Japan but had differences in their culture, language, customs, and physical appearance than the Japanese. As a result, anthropologists’ wanted to find out just why those differences came about and how they remained so strongly bounded by their own distinct culture while living within a country so rich in Japanese customs.

In order to cond...

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...ther JSTOR, Google, or Yahoo. Because I typed in general words such as ‘Ainu’ and ‘Culture’, I got many search results and hundreds or articles as a result, as I found myself weeding through articles and reading them partly in order to determine if they had the information I was searching for or not. My findings did in a way surprise me because of the fact that I was intending to find majority of the information I wanted and needed through the JSTOR article, as it was scholarly and more reliable than the web-sites. However, I was able to learn more about the Ainu people through the websites because they gave me information that was short and to the point and rich in detail about the many aspects of the Ainu peoples’ lives. I was able to get a look into their daily lives and learn about what they had valued as a culture and how they went about fulfilling that.