Various indigenous technologies have been developed in African agriculture thereby utilizing specific environment and natural resources on sustainable basis. As a matter of fact, environment, technology and society are inseparable components of a farming complex that plays a crucial role in contemporary Africa. Through quantitative estimation of productivity and environmental potentials on the one hand, and socio-cultural adaptation on the other, the future perspective of the farming complex will be drawn.

Interaction between development practices and people's own living in Africa is my main focus of research. Looking at the development projects under the concepts such as "participatory development" and "gender and development" as case studies, I have examined the process where the people act on and trans late them into their own logic and context instead of just accepting them. Being in-between development studies and practices, I have been searching for African way of endogenous development.

Anthropological studies on diverse forms of cognition and utilization of the African tropical forests by hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators, and their implications for nature conservation and sustainable use of forest resources.

The diversification of income sources is a common phenomenon of the rural households in East Africa. It is not only the responses to the　changing external political, economic and social conditions, but also　the results of endogenous "development". I intend to examine the rural　transformation in East Africa, especially in Tanzania as a dynamism of　combination of the external and internal factors. Recently, I have　conducted a research on the local organization for the dry season　irrigation farming in North Pare Mountains, Tanzania.

Through analyzing social interaction such as utterance, aggregation pattern, and attitude in face-to-face situation among African hunter-gatherers and farmers, I am trying to present "feeling of co-presence" of the people. By comparing it to conventional interaction studies conducted in Western society, I intend to show possible alternatives to the drawing of these studies.

I have researched the environmental change from viewpoint of climate, vegetation, topography, soil, water condition in high mountains and arid area of Africa. The complex effect of theses environmental factors makes the serious environmental change. The recent global warming produces the obvious vegetation succession in alpine zone and arid area. My study aims to make clear the relationship between climatic change and vegetation succession in recent years, examine the influence of them on human activity, and present the solution to serious problem.

In African dry zones, pastoral people have developed cultures and societies that are closely related to their ecological adaptation to the dry environment through livestock rearing. Today, these people are facing a difficult situation because their livelihood is threatened by the repeated droughts, insecurity caused by civil war and livestock rustling, environmental degradation and population growth, and most of development project were not successful. My research aims at (1) to describe current complex conditions in which newly introduced factors are articulated to indigenous elements, and (2) to analyze how people perceive, interpret and cope with these new situations.