It is impossible to thank one by one all the people who in all sorts of ways have contributed to this dissertation. Special thanks to my sister Núria for her drawings, my brother Francesc for his sense of humour, my grandparents, uncles and aunts. In Catalunya, thanks to Elena Esmoris, Luis Vaca, Esther Aliaga, and Ita Oliva for their friendship. All my friends in Belfast and to Ana y Saturnino for our time together in Japan.

At Queen’s, I owe thanks to all my friends during the Ph.D process, especially, Ingvill Kristiansen, David O’Kane, Hildi Mitchell, Callie Persic and Ruth Bayles. I also owe thanks to Dr. Kay Milton for her challenging postgraduate seminars. My thanks to Dr. Graham MacFarlane and Dr. Declan Quigley for their help before fieldwork; and to the secretaries, staff of the School of Anthropology. My deepest thanks are for Dr. Lisette Josephides who started supervision when this work was at its most delicate stage. She gave me invaluable help towards the preparation of this dissertation and extensive editing. I would not have finished this work without her interest and her honest remarks.

My deepest thanks to Dr. Ishii at the Institute for Foreign languages and Cultures of Africa and Asia, who granted me the status of research affiliated. The Institute welcomed me to their facilities and libraries, and helped me out with many permits and bureaucratic nightmares. To have been affiliated to the Institute and the University of Tokyo for the period of the research is a great honour for me. Thanks to the Helena Wallace fellowship for their grant to cover flight costs to Japan, the only institutional funding that I ever received.

My debts are to the villagers of Kamikatsu. Many appear throughout the dissertation in name or implicitly. My grateful thanks go especially to the families of: Oue, Hiraoka, Mima, Azuma, Nakano, Satomi, Takaishi, Nii, and Fujihara for their help and kindness; and all the people whom I met through eikaiwa lessons. My thanks also for their tolerance to the municipal office, school, and post office. I would also like to thank the following families and individuals: Abe, Shibata, Nakagawa, Hirano, Horibuchi, Nakagawa, Morinishi sensei, Yokota sensei, Yukata sensei, Tomizaki, Diana and Katsuya for their trust and friendship; the people at TOPIA in Tokushima city for their letters and library. I particularly owe thanks to my neighbours in Yokomine and to the villagers of other districts that let me into their festivals and lives. I owe my deepest thanks to Oue for their honne generosity, teaching, and kindness in taking me into their family. My debt to all of them is great indeed. Finally, my most important debt is to the Watanabe family which was my permanent host family in Japan. Fieldwork would have been never possible without them. I owe them the emotional support that made fieldwork possible. My deepest thanks to them for their sense of generosity, tolerance, and kindness.

My research owes everything to the love and financial support of my parents Francesc and Maria Carme, who over many years have said ‘arribarem fins allà on tu arribis’ (we will help you all the way), and they still do. I can not begin to thank them for their immense trust in me, their acceptance of the many prolonged absences abroad, their personal sacrifice and their true generosity and intelligence. This thesis is dedicated to them.

I declare that the work in this thesis and the composition are my own original work and has not been presented to any other institution, nor has a degree been conferred by this or any other University on it. I thereby sign to certify,