Marius Palz got his B.A. from Tübingen University and his M.A. from the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, both in Social Anthropology and Japanese Studies. Since his early studies he tried to combine his regional focus on Japan with anthropological theory and methodology, and conducted small-scale fieldwork in Kyoto, Tokyo, and Hokkaido. Especially his M.A. research among the Ainu community of Tokyo got him interested in minority-state relations. He accomplished his PhD at the University of Oslo in 2023 conducting field-based research on the cultural meaning of the critically endangered dugongs of Okinawa. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford. His research interest lies at the intersection of more-than-human ethnography, (post-)colonialism, and indigeneity in the Anthropocene.