Research Spotlight - Dr Marius Palz
Marius is an environmental anthropologist who is interested in the ecological and cultural ramifications of the current extinction crisis which is happening all over the globe. By looking at critically endangered species in Japan, he explores what extinction might mean not just for local ecosystems but also for humans who have co-existed in manifold ways with these species for centuries.
Picture 1: Marius with Serena, one of the few dugongs surviving in captivity, at Toba Aquarium, Mie Prefecture.
Following this interest, Marius has been conducting research on the critically endangered Okinawan dugongs (Lat. Dugong dugon) of the Ryukyu Archipelago and their various meanings for human culture in the region. During times of the Ryukyu Kingdom (1429-1879) these herbivorous marine mammals were quite common throughout the archipelago and played a vital role in myths and ritual practices. They were for example depicted in the origin story of humankind recorded on Kouri Island, describing how humans became aware of their own sexuality after witnessing two dugongs mating. In myths from other islands, they are depicted as human-fish, affiliated with the deity of the sea, calling tsunamis, or warning kind-hearted people of the big waves. The islanders of Aragusuku, two small islands in the kingdom’s periphery, were the only ones officially allowed to hunt dugongs and pay taxes with their meat, which developed into a delicacy and medicine at the court in the capital Shuri. With the kingdom’s downfall and its annexation by the Japanese Empire hunting restrictions were abolished and new technologies like dynamite-fishing introduced, leading to a population drop, exacerbated by poverty-driven overfishing in the post-WWII years.
Today the Okinawan dugong stands on the verge of extirpation (local extinction), also because its habitat became severely reduced due to coastal development, land fillings, and high boat traffic. As a species that holds manifold historical entanglements with humans in the Ryukyu Islands, it has become a symbol for the protest against the construction of a new military base in Henoko, showing how new cultural meaning can be ascribed to nearly-extinct species in our current day and age.
Some of Marius’ findings have been published in Cambridge Prisms: Extinction (Cambridge Unversity Press, 2024), the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2021), and in a special issue of the journal Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism (2020), focussing on agency of nonhumans. Another chapter will be published next year in an edited volume by Hawai’i University Press that came out of a conference organised by the Oslo-based Whales of Power research team, of which he used to be a member of. Besides that, he is currently working on a monograph focussing on human-dugong relations in the Ryukyu Archipelago.
Picture 2: Marius conducting a dugong feeding trail survey at the sea grass meadows of Irabu Island, Okinawa Prefecture.
In his methodology Marius tries to push his focus beyond the human, an approach usually referred to as more-than-human or multispecies ethnography. For his dugong project he combined classical methods from the field of anthropology, such as participant observation in coastal communities and in-depth interviews with environmental activists, with the analysis of historical documents and folklore. He furthermore familiarised himself with the ecology of the inshore sea and adjacent coral reefs by working together with environmental NGO’s and citizen scientist groups in conducting reef checks as well as seagrass monitoring surveys. Combining the social and hard sciences, his goal is to get closer to a holistic understanding of more-than-human relational networks, including different species such as humans, dugongs, and seagrass but also natural and anthropogenic landscape features.
Picture 3: A sculpture of kotan kor kamui above the entrance of the Ainu community centre in Shiranuka town, Ainu Moshir/Hokkaido Prefecture.
Since his arrival at the Nissan Institute in October 2024, he expanded this research approach to Japan’s far north, Ainu moshir/Hokkaido, by looking at another critically endangered animal with high significance for local human culture: the Blakiston’s fish owl (Lat. Ketupa blakistoni or Bubo blakistoni). The owl is on the brink of extirpation and is categorised as a Natural Monument by the Government of Japan. The owl’s habitat not only corresponds to the original homelands of the Ainu people (southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and Hokkaido), but the bird’s fate also interlinks with Ainu experiences under Japanese colonial rule. The annexation of Ainu lands, settler colonialism from the late 19th century onwards, and an industrialising, extractivist economy let to displacement and marginalisation of the Ainu as well as a decline in biodiversity in the region. This included overfishing of salmon which both the Ainu and the owls relied on as important food sources and the logging of large trees that the large birds needed for nesting. These historical shifts arguably also let to a disentanglement between the Ainu and the increasingly rare fish owl which is venerated as kotan kor kamui (“deity protecting the settlement”), one of the highest deities in Ainu cosmology.
By researching this history and current attempts to revitalise the fish owl population, and while reconceptualising more-than-human relations, Marius is taking the next step in his attempt to think through what extinction and its prevention might mean for different ecosystems and the humans that dwell within them.
