Overview of the research
Miho Ishii specializes in Cultural anthropology, African and South Asian studies. She holds a degree in Behavioral Science from Hokkaido University. She completed her PhD at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, in 2002. As part of her PhD coursework, she conducted extensive fieldwork on spirit possession, witchcraft, and magic in the cocoa-producing migrant societies of Southern Ghana. She served as a visiting fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research from October 2003 to August 2004. Thereafter, she joined the faculty at the Graduate School of Social Science, Hitotsubashi University, as an associate professor of Anthropology. Since April 2010, she has held the position of associate professor of the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. Her present research focuses on the inter-relation between būta (spirit) worship and developmental projects in Karnataka, South India. Since 2008, she has conducted anthropological fieldwork in rural societies in South Kanara, a coastal area of Karnataka, India.
Her major works include: Frontier of spirits: ethnography of ‘supernatural phenomena’ in migrant societies of Southern Ghana (Sekaishisosha, 2007, in Japanese);Anthropology of Religion (ed. Shumpusha, 2010, in Japanese); ‘From wombs to farmland: the transformation of suman shrines in southern Ghana’ (Journal of Religion in Africa, 2005); ‘Acting with things: self-poiesis, actuality, and contingency in the formation of divine worlds’ (HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2012); ‘Playing with perspectives: spirit possession, mimesis, and permeability in the buuta ritual in South India’ (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013).