Shiho Satsuka was a Carson Fellow from January 2012 to May 2012 and from September 2012 to December 2012.
Shiho Satsuka is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto in Canada. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California–Santa Cruz. Among her current projects, she is preparing to publish her book, tentatively titled Nature in Translation, which examines how Japanese tour guides mediate various notions of nature in their work of interpreting Canadian nature to tourists from Japan, and how their practices of nature translation reflect the social transformations in the post-Cold War, post-industrial Japan.
While at the Center, Satsuka is working on a project that traces one especially vigorous wing of the grassroots citizens’ satoyama movement in Japan, which aims to recreate the forests that produce a highly valued wild mushroom called matsutake. Through an ethnographic examination of this movement, the project explores how modern expert science and traditional knowledge are translated, and how matsutake became simultaneously an icon of nostalgic agrarian lifestyles and a cosmopolitan, forward-looking biodiversity conservation project.