Jin Feng, Indiana University
In a case study that analyzes a poem from Shi-jing (The Book of Songs), this paper argues for a new approach in the study of the Chinese architectural tradition by exploring the Chinese poetic tradition in the dimensions of perceived meaning and experience. This case study seeks to convey an understanding of the selected poem "Zhu" (The space between the gate and the gate-screen) in its paleographical, literal, and historical contexts. In doing so, the architectural terminology used in the poem is carefully studied; conceptual themes of building inherited in the ancient Chinese characters and terms employed in the poem are extracted and analyzed. The ensuing analysis probes the underlying meaning of the poem and presents the intended and implied experiences discussed therein regarding the meanings of architectural space as place. History of the Zhou period is referred to explain the observed themes. The findings of the case study reveal some essential themes of the Chinese architectural tradition. In this tradition, building is inseparable from living. The primary themes of experiencing the built environment as revealed by the poem are spatial and sequential with varying and contrasting characteristics that are composed in accordance with the rituals of the time. The experiential themes of the ancient time also resonates with our experiences of today’s environment. It is hoped that our remaining link to the ancient poetic tradition could enrich our architectural experience of today.
Da’an Pan, Muhlenberg College
This paper explores the semiotics of the "verse eye" in classical Chinese poetry. As one of the major devices in versification peculiar to Chinese poetry, the "verse eye" refers to a key word or words in a poem that are used figuratively as semiotic catalyzers to generate expressive meaning in descriptive imagery. It evokes a special mood, conjures up a synaesthetic illusion or a scene of metareality, or triggers open-ended signification. It creates an aesthetic paradox underlying a scene which is seemingly painterly and yet unpaintable and is thus associated with the traditional Chinese critical notion of "‘painting’ in poetry." The "verse eye" holds a strategic position in a poem, serving as a semiotic bridge between the surface text and the subtext in the signifying economy. Idiomatically speaking, putting the "verse eye" in a poem is "dotting the dragon’s eyes (i.e., pupils)." A poetic translation is semiotically "blind" without transplanting the "verse eye" into the target text.
A genuine understanding of the semiotic function of the "verse eye" is essential for the appreciation, criticism, and translation of classical Chinese poetry. It also contributes toward the study of the interartistic relationship between Chinese poetry and painting. Traditional Chinese modes of criticism such as shi-hua often tend to be too subjective and impressionistic to facilitate this understanding. It therefore behooves us to rethink and redefine the function of the "verse eye" in new terms befitting contemporary critical discourse.
Jian Tang, The Institute of Oriental Studies
The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Chinese writing system denotes the important natural phenomenon in quantitative differences among objects, and dimensions of degree changes of things in gradual continuum. The research indicates:
(1) Patterned paradigms with large inventory Chinese scripts (ca 1750 b.c.–a.d. 220) formed by process of gradate reduplication of semantic radicals within categorical domains are found. It is the first time in academic history that these paradigms indicate Chinese scripts denote changes of numbers, changes of comparative degrees, and changes of frequency levels by reduplicating the equal initial footing through morphological inflection. Although partial operation, the process is rule-governed.
(2) The motivation for the process of gradate reduplication of semantic radicals can only be found through detailed search from patterned behaviors structured by cognitive capacity. Relevant archaeological evidences from Neolithic Chinese pottery paintings and bronze artifacts are found for interpretation of the motivation. Both linguistic and archaeological evidences reflect the identical concept and patterned consistencies reduplicating initial footings for abstract dimensions.
(3) The process of gradate reduplication of semantic radicals is important cognitive process. This process reveals highly regulated predictability along certain continuum, and highly productive capability to form paradigms. The invisible conceptual mapping of human exploitation of the environment therefore can be scientifically reconstructed through patterned cognitive behaviors of well-documented written symbols.
Edward S. Krebs, Duke University
During residences in China over the past five years, I have taken many photographs of the mannequins used to display clothing in shop windows and along streets. These mannequins are overwhelmingly presented as white Westerners, although one occasionally sees exceptions—that is, Chinese faces and black hair. Any observant Westerner who spends time in China surely notices both the mannequins and this preference for foreign-style models. Many Chinese people notice these things too: I have seen similar photographs in the English-language China Daily and in other newspapers.
At first, my interest in this visual part of contemporary Chinese culture was piqued simply by its existence, by this choice made somewhere in the world of commerce. There seems to be an obvious message that foreign ways are to be preferred in modern dress, with many deeper implications about the level of cultural confidence. As I have continued to ponder this, however, I think it partly reflects a matter-of-fact choice: the styles come from the larger world, and so should the "dress" for their display. There are other levels of meaning as well, one of which is humor. When I first began to see mannequins used in humorous ways, I supposed I was seeing anti-authoritarian statements. Perhaps that was true at that time, several years ago. By today, it seems to me, humorous statements made with mannequins reflect a broadening openness in the public realm and a growing sense of imagination that seems very positive.
Marilyn Levine, Lewis-Clark State College
This poster will report on the results of a pilot project on the creation of a Chinese Biographical Database Website. Supported by an Idaho Board of Education major research grant this website will include at least 2,000 Chinese biographical figures with the ability to create searches and reports for individual inquiries by interested scholars. The Chinese Biographical Database Website will include at least five database tables per individual with an expandable design that include the following:
Biographical Database—This database will contain basic personal information such as gender and birthplace, educational background, general career choice(s), general political orientation(s) and a memo field for comments.
Youth Groups and Activities Database—This database will include youth group participation, demonstrations or other political activities.
Career Activities Database—This database will give multiple options on career choices, such as political party participation or group participation or historical events.
Locator Database—Much information about relationships, orientations, and historical realities might be obtained in a broad based database by entering in spatial information such as regional affiliations, addresses linked with dates.
Documents and Sources Database—This table will include the information sources and will serve as a guide to research about the biographical figure.
The database will be open to all and there will be the possibility of scholar-moderated sharing of missing variables. The poster will report on issues of design, implementation, and implications of a web-shared database.
Wenfang Tang, University of Pittsburgh
This paper examines one aspect of human life—work. It pays special attention to work-related consequences of differing socio-economic and political institutions under a common traditional culture in Taiwan and mainland China. Work-related behavior includes occupational distribution, job mobility, impact of education and family in one’s occupation, and work relations with co-workers and superiors. Work-related attitude includes one’s perceived key to success, purpose of work, and the criteria for justice and equality. Taiwan and mainland China have a common culture but different recent experiences in their political and economic institutions. This study will show how these cultural and institutional similarities and differences are reflected in individual values and behavior in the two societies.
Data will be drawn from two surveys, the 1992 Chinese Urban Social Survey in 45 cities, and the 1990 Taiwan Social Change Survey. Both are based on probability samples. They contain parallel questions on attitude and behavior related to the above issues and individual background information. Since both surveys were also designed to provide comparison with the annual General Social Survey (GSS) in the United States, I will use data from the GSS survey to make further comparisons
Harry J. Williams, Minnesota Humanities Commission
Since 1989, strikes in China have occurred with great frequency and over a variety of issues. This session seeks to present a graphic and analytical summary of strikes in China since the Tiananmen protests in 1989. In three sets of graphs, I will examine strike activity by sector (state-owned, joint-venture, foreign-owned, township and village enterprise), geographical area, and main grievance (back pay, managerial abuse, pay increase, benefit increase, or political). In the narrative sections I will discuss some of the dynamics within factories that cause strikes. I will focus on worker-management relations and the variation in these relations among different types of factories. I will also discuss management and government strategies toward strikes. I will explore how the moderate response most strikes provoke has prevented labor activity from hurting the regime’s legitimacy.
The poster session will be based on the research for my dissertation. This research included interviews in China with factory managers, workers, and academics, as well as interviews with Hong Kong labor activists and human rights activists. It is also based on Chinese, Hong Kong, and foreign newspaper reports, and government statistics.
Dyron Dabney, University of Michigan
Candidates running for the 300 single-member district seats in Japan’s 1996 Lower House election did not mistake the passage of election reform in 1994 for a watershed in election campaigning, or Japanese politics. To be sure, election reform and the new election system increased uncertainty among 1996 Lower House candidates, but it did not change their ways of thinking about election campaigning, namely campaign strategies and styles, very much.
Arguably, uncertainty should have invited candidates to explore new campaign strategies that could offer comparative electoral advantage. The simple fact, however, was that Lower House candidates—even so-called progressive candidates—were unwilling, or unable to part with the established "repertoire of campaign strategies" for public, elected office. There were some exceptions: some who modified, or challenged the repertoire, but overall, election campaigning styles and strategies remained unchanged. This is not to say however, that candidates were not noticeably more reflective of the limits of the current set of strategies, or perceptive of the need to step up their activities to remain in contention for a single-member seat.
This paper examines the "robustness" of tried-and-approved Japanese election campaign strategies, tactics, and activities across urban, middling (suburban), and rural districts for the 1993 and 1996 Lower House elections in Japan. We present interview, survey, and case-study data of a group of progressive-minded politicians who are alumni of an elite political training academy unique to Japan, Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, as evidence of the continuity of campaign strategies and Japanese-style election campaigning despite institutional change.
Noriko Fujioka, University of Cincinnati
The number of Japanese children overseas has increased since the late 1980s to a total of 49,703 in 1995. Because these children will return to Japan in the future, more than 70% of the Japanese children in North America go to local schools Monday through Friday, and they enroll in Saturday Japanese Language Supplementary Schools (SJLSS).
The purpose of this study is to show the future returnees’ attitudes toward a "Home Study Record Card." A survey was administered anonymously to 47 subjects who had been assigned to keep a weekly study schedule and a short daily journal entry on the card in two different SJLSSs. One sample consisted of 21 first-grader parents; and 13 fifth-grade children and their parents were also included in the stratified sampling. The responses of the survey were analyzed with the Likert scale by using a computer software ("Facets") designed for the purpose of analyzing qualitative observations on the basis of "many-facet Rasch measurement analysis" (Linacre, 1989).
The results of this study show a positive attitude toward the card by the parents of both the first and fifth graders and the continued usefulness of the card from the first to the fifth grade. These results indicate that the card is helpful for the lower grades to practice encoding the Japanese language and that the card is a means to providing enjoyment of communication in Japanese for the higher grades.
Akiko Takai, University of Tokyo, and Thomas Hardy, Tamagawa University
Most social research on PWA (People With AIDS) in Japan focuses on epidemiology, on the social constructions of the meanings of AIDS in Japan, and on the responses of PWA to them. Our work with volunteers working with PWA complements this work.
Our ongoing research includes participant observation, in-depth and structured interviews, and questionnaires at major AIDS social service centers in Tokyo. It indicates that volunteer responses to working with PWA break down in unexpected ways along the expected lines of age, sex, sexuality, and class. We suggest this is, in part, due to the specific history of AIDS in Japan and the history of governmental and institutional responses and non-responses.
The significance of this study rests first on its practical import in shaping programs for PWA that might make better use of the volunteers and their interests and skills. This includes more explicit consideration of the composition of the volunteer force and their motives for doing volunteer work. A second consideration is to encourage AIDS volunteer organizations toward a more reflective consideration of their position in the competing and changing constructions of gender relations and the family in Japanese society.
Martha A. Adler, University of Michigan
For the over nine million students enrolled in 33,000 elementary schools, Filipino national goals intended to promote productivity, citizenry, literacy, and national unity (Sutaria et al., 1989) present a formidable task. In order to fully understand the difficulties in attaining such goals, an examination of how they are perceived and implemented at the local level is essential. Such examinations have been rare (see Foley, 1976, and Manalang, 1977).
This paper presents findings from an ethnography of one Philippine public central elementary school during the 1988–1989 school year in a Cebuano-speaking community. While functioning to serve the national educational goals, educators at the local level formed a tightly organized system reflective of local ideology and traditional values that ultimately functioned to sustain itself in spite of national directives. Consequently, as educational theory and practice was reinterpreted at the local level it was reshaped in ways that more closely resembled local understandings and tradition. In spite of a renewed hope for the future, there was no dramatic difference in who completed school, gained literacy, or developed educational competencies from previous generations. Thus, when the local school was viewed within the context of national goals, it revealed an educational community in conflict with itself.
This paper argues for the need to recognize and take into account these local understandings as critical if the intention is to develop a nation of Filipinos who "will develop . . . [their] full potential for self-actualization and productivity and consequently, national unity and progress" (Quisumbing, 1989).
Laurie Beth Kalb, New England Folklife Center
This poster session has three aims. The first is to display pictures of visually compelling hand-painted Cambodian shop signs to be exhibited in a large Cambodian diaspora community. The second is to outline the variety of transnational influences apparent in these signs, including popular culture and the mass media, technology, Western dress, and multiple languages. The point is to examine the signs’ aesthetics, from Western and non-Western points of view, and to identify painting styles and iconographic repertoires that convey certain attitudes and possibilities. The third is to explore Cambodian diaspora members’ receptions to these signs and the ways the signs invoke community members, memories and imaginations about the homeland. The signs, advertising a range of medical, wedding, beauty, and other services and some consumer products, provide a window to the quotidian aspects of life in Cambodian urban centers. For young Cambodians that have no lived experience in Cambodia, these signs are tangible learning tools about their heritage. For older immigrants from the cities, the signs function as mnemonics. But young and old Cambodian responses and attitudes to the signs are emotional and inventive as well as informative. To study the diaspora community’s reaction to the signs is to observe what Appadurai, discussing transnationalism (1991:196), considers the "negotiation of imagined lives and deterritorialized worlds." For Cambodians living in America, their lives are unfolding. The signs’ meanings, like the Cambodians’ localities, are constantly shifting.
Hye-sil Choi, Harvard University
This article analyses how writer Yi, Mun-yeol’s worldview is represented in his novels. The historical view that human being’s life has progressed, has been suggested by G. W. F. Hegel or Karl Marx in Western Europe. This view is reasonable from the point of material development.
On the other hand, the circular view of history that regularly at every terms, an event or a characteristic repeats itself, is insisted mainly by Confucionists in the Orient. For example, a Confucianist sets up the theory that after a country has a peaceful region, it has necessarily an anarchy.
And then the point that history repeats itself is represented in the structure of Korean literature. The typical example is Yong-Bi-Eo-Cheon-Ga. Most chapters in this epic are composed of parallelism. I analyze the structure and make clear that the parallelism is homologous to the historical view of circulation.
And then this structure of parallelism is represented in Yi, Mun-yeol’s fictions: For the Emperor, The Son of Man, The Poet, An Age of Hero, The Border, and Keum-Shi-Jo.
In chapter two, I insist that the writer’s homesickness in You Will Not Be Able To Go Home is homologous to his consciousness to wish to return to Confucianism. So this is clear evidence that Yi has the tendency of Confucianism.
In chapter three, I make clear that Yi interprets Marxism by Confucianism in An Age of Hero. Namely, he explains the periods of 1945–1963 by the circular view of history—Toinby’s conception of an age of hero. This is also the other evidence of Yi’s Confucianism.
In chapter four, I insist that For the Emperor, The Son of Man, and The Poet are composed of the parallel structure between past and present. The structure is similar to Yong-Bi-Eo-Cheon-Ga.
Finally, in chapter four, I analyse that Yi writes Keum-Shi-Jo by the aesthetics of Worringer—abstraction and empathy.
Kylie Hsu, California State University, Los Angeles
This study analyzes how the parents of a two-year-old child help her to acquire the Chinese and American languages and cultures. It examines the participants’ background, their residence, their interactions during mundane activities, and the discourse involved in the acquisition process.
The participants in this study are members of a Chinese-American family consisting of a father, a mother, and a daughter. The family lives in a university family student apartment. Father-child-mother triadic interactions in the form of common activities such as playing games, coloring pictures, telling stories, and the like were videotaped. In the activities, it is observed that the following factors contribute to language and culture acquisition:
(1) The constructed environment, i.e., the arrangement of artifacts and spaces specifically to foster participant interactions; (2) Syncretism of cultures, i.e., the blending of artifacts of Chinese culture and western culture; (3) Division of labor between the parents, i.e., the complementary roles of the parents with respect to the input they provide to the child; (4) The use of affective particles in discourse to convey intersubjectivity and shared knowledge; (5) The use of non-vocal linguistic cues such as gestures and eye gaze to facilitate language acquisition.
The above factors are mutually influential and interdependent in the activities. They interactively contribute to the Chinese-American child’s language development, social cognition, and cultural learning.
The analysis presented in the poster will include video frames and photographs of the participants’ setting and activities, and transcription of their spoken discourse.
David Rosenberg, Middlebury College
The demand for energy is growing faster in the countries around the South China Sea than anywhere else in the world, driven by the region’s rapid economic growth and increasing population. Given: (1) a booming demand for energy; (2) the region’s growing dependence on imported oil; and (3) the increasing trade and transport of raw materials, fossil fuels, and commodities across the region’s shipping lanes, the South China Sea may become a sink for regional environmental pollution. The staking of territorial claims in disputed areas of the South China Sea—thought to be rich in oil and natural gas—has also made this region an arena for competing security concerns.
This study seeks to determine the cumulative and aggregate environmental impact of this economic activity on the South China Sea. Through text, tables, graphs and maps, the study presents basic data on economic growth, industrial output, energy supply and demand, and environmental pollution in the countries bordering the South China Sea. It examines how each country on the South China Sea coastline may contribute to regional environmental problems, in particular, local waste dumping by maritime traffic, regional transboundary air pollution due to the downwind dispersal of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from proliferating smokestacks, and global climate change due to the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. It analyzes the responses of countries around the South China Sea to the problems of regional environmental pollution through a comparative analysis of policy formation and implementation.