Jun.-Prof. Dr. Fynn Holm

Research Projects

 

Transnational Environmental History of the Japanese Alps

DFG-Emmy-Noether-Programme (2024-2030)

The goal of this second book project is to write an environmental history of the region now known as the Japanese Alps and to examine how anthropogenic and environmental changes have shaped the economic, cultural, and social development of the region. The renaming of the central Japanese mountain range as Nihon Arupusu (Japanese Alps) in 1905 not only changed perceptions of mountains and their use in Japan, but also had material impacts on mountain ecology, such as the construction of livestock farms, dams, and ski resorts, as Japanese stakeholders sought to emulate Western industrial and tourism uses of the mountains.

For more information, see here. 

 

Human-Whale Relationship in Historical Japan

In contemporary discourse, Japan is commonly portrayed as a "whaling nation" with a supposedly centuries-old, homogeneous "whaling culture." In my doctoral dissertation, I showed that not all coastal communities were part of this whaling culture. Fishing communities in northeastern Japan often protected whales from whalers from other regions because whales were believed to be the gods of the sea, bringing fish to shore. To date, human interactions with whales in the early modern period have been considered exclusively in terms of (proto-)industrial whaling. However, by focusing on Japanese communities that did not engage in whaling, I have been able to show that people benefited from the presence of whales in a variety of ways, even when they were not actively hunted. I argue that human interactions with whales were more diverse than the simple hunter-prey relationship described in current whaling historiography. My research has revealed that peaceful forms of coexistence between humans and whales occurred in Japan that were not based on whale hunting.

  

Discourses on Japan's current whaling policy

This project explores the reasons for Japan's withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in June 2019 and the implications that the resumption of commercial whaling has for Japanese coastal whaling communities. My research revealed that the Japanese government intentionally left the IWC one year before the next U.S. presidential election in 2020, assuming that the Trump administration at the time was not interested in sanctioning a withdrawal from an international organization. My research was able to reveal that many of the Japanese whaling villages had linked the survival of their community to the resumption of commercial whaling. At the same time, it remains unclear whether such an industry is economically viable in the long term.

 

Conceptualization of Non-Human Agency

The goal of this interdisciplinary research project was to analyze how "Non-Human Agency" is conceptualized in current academic literature. Together with anthropologist Dr. Anne Aronsson and Japanologist Melissa Kaul, M.A., I organized two workshops at the University of Zurich, the results of which were published as a Special Issue in the journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism. For the Special Issue, Dr. Anne Aronsson and I wrote an essay on the possible "non-human agency" of social robots in Japanese nursing homes. Further, we published on the cross-species entanglements of SARS-CoV outbreaks in Chinese animal markets in The Anthropocene Review. In our articles, we argued that three different types of "non-human agency" are often confused in the academic literature: linguistic agency, attributed agency, and inherent agency.