Organizer and Chair: Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Cultural Influence Upon Women’s Ways of Knowing: An Analysis of Short Stories from Taiwan, India and African-America
Kathleen Seaton, Tunghai University, Taiwan
Feminist psychologist Mary Field Belenky has suggested that Women’s Ways of Knowing and the construction of knowledge is a maturation process that may be different from that of males. Belenky offers us a five-stage scheme that may be used as an analytical tool in the literary representations of women. The paper I would like to propose is to use Belenky’s five-stage scheme to analyze a body of short stories written by female writers from diverse cultural backgrounds to find whether feminine knowledge is constructed by female protagonists (sheroes) similarly despite diversity of cultural backgrounds. I am proposing to use Belenky’s five-stage scheme to analyze and compare a body of short stories from contemporary stories by women writers in Taiwan, a few short stories of Chitra Banerjee Divakauni (India) and Shay Youngblood’s, Big Mama Stories.
This paper will use Mary Field Belenky’s five-stage scheme of Women’s Ways of Knowing (Belenky, et al, 1986) to analyze women’s writing from diverse cultural backgrounds. This five-stage scheme of knowing may be used to articulate the ways in which knowledge is constructed by literary protagonists created by writers from diverse cultural backgrounds to determine whether ‘ways of knowing’ are comparable from culture to culture. Are women’s ways of knowing universal? Does cultural context of females have an influence on ways of knowing?
A body of short stories by contemporary female writers from Bamboo Shoots after the Rain, (Eds. Carver & Chang, 1990), Chitra Banerjee Divakauni’s Arranged Marriage, and Shay Youngblood’s, Big Mama Stories (Younpblood, 1989) will be analyzed using Belenky’s five-stage scheme. This begins with silence where the knower feels herself as "mindless, voiceless and subject to the whims of external authority." (Belenky, 15) Belenky’s second stage is received knowledge: the knower can receive and reproduce knowledge from external authorities. The third stage is subjective knowledge, where "truth and knowledge are conceived of as personal, private and subjectively known." The fourth stage, procedural knowledge, the knower searches for knowledge and is "invested in learning and applying objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge." (Ibid.) Belenky’s fifth stage is constructed knowledge where all knowledge is viewed as contextual and experiential; both objective and subjective approaches to learning are valued.
Such an analysis may yield insight to the question of culture as an influence upon the feminine construction of knowledge.
Creating a Japanese-Korean Intercultural Space: The Asia Mime Festivals of Tobu, Japan, and Chunchon, Korea
Adam Lebowitz, Nihon University
The idea of the "festival" is an important one in Japanese and Korean traditional culture. It is an opportunity for celebration; it is also a time when bad spirits are propitiated or dispelled and a sense of community is solidified.
Festivals can take modern shapes, and at the same time not lose their meaning. The Asia Mime Festivals are a week-long series of mime performance, seminars, and master classes held every summer in Tobu, Nagano, Japan, and Chunchun, Korea. With the support of the municipal authorities and the local community, the events are organized jointly by the mime theater communities of Tokyo and Seoul. Performers and staff share accommodation and are in close communication with each other for the entire week. There are performers invited from Western countries and the Middle East, but the majority are from Japan and Korea.
I would like to analyze from an anthropological viewpoint the theater festivals as "festivals" in their traditional function; that is, as opportunities to settle conflict and create unity. The purpose of the festivals as announced in the brochures—"cross-cultural understanding"—is the modern equivalent of the ridding of bad spirits, pacifying for a moment the historical bogeyman that exists between these two countries. The two most important events of the festivals—the final performance of Tobu and the opening ceremony of Chunchon—are a crystallization of this function in particular because folk culture is centralized. For the duration of the festivals an all-encompassing "intercultural space" exists.
Ethnogenesis in Amdo Qinghai: Historical Questions on the Development of Salar Identity
Arienne M. Dwyer, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz
One of China’s national minorities, the Salars, are a Turkic people in origin who likely migrated eastward from the Samarkand area to the northeastern edge of Tibet as a contingent of the invading Chinggisid army in the thirteenth century. Although we lack historical material to prove a direct link between the Salars of China and the modern Salir-Turkmen, historical, ethnographic, and linguistic evidence suggests that the modern-day Salars of China, like the Salir-Turkmen, originally stemmed from the Salghur Oghuz clan.
This paper examines Salar sociopolitical structures during the Ming and Qing dynasties to both provide evidence for the preservation of Central Asian practices and to show how local Tibetan and (Muslim- and non-) Chinese structures were incorporated to form the basis for a modern Salar identity. I show how the Salar society evolves from a nomadic kinship system to a sedentary sociopolitical one, and how it was incorporated into the local-ruler Tusi system. I examine political divisions and naming practices (toponyms, personal names, and even the ethnonym Salar itself) to demonstrate both the ready incorporation of Tibetan and Muslim-Chinese into the premodern Salar social structure, and the surprising resilience of Oghuz-Turkic organizational features. As such, Salar society during Ming-Qing times demonstrates an extreme form of hybridity: the incorporation of Central Asian Turkic and Tibetan structures into a local Chinese sociopolitical system. This adaptation was crucial to the coalescence of a premodern Salar society.
Ethno-Revolution: National and International Determinants of Ethnic Challenges to State
Kailash Mohapatra, Yale University
The moot question in the dissertation is: why, when and how an ethnic group becomes revolutionary (politically assertive) and continues to simmer in an on and off mode while another group with equal ethnic propensity in similar ‘state’ and inter-state settings does not become revolutionary or it ends its revolutionary quest in accommodative arrangements (institutions) with the center or federal government. At the internal (national) domain—delving into state-ethnic equations from within the state—I assess and explore some lacunae in the established pedagogy in the politicization of ethnicity in different strands of thoughts like Primordialism, modernization theory, Relative Deprivation, Internal Colonialism, and recent, Minorities at Risk’s Historical Discrimination, etc. At the external (international) domain, theoretically, Waltzian neo-realist paradigm has virtually pushed state-ethnic equations out of the agenda of structural (systemic) international theory into the black-box of unit-level deductive research. Lately, some scholars like Barry Posen and James Fearon have tried to resuscitate interests in ethnic wars through rational choice mode from realist podium. The problem here is the lack of ‘transformation’ logic—that is, such analysis comes in after the ethnic groups inhabit the Hobbesian world of anarchy and state of war, not before. I offer in turn an account that emphatically blurs the national/international divide. Two interrelated independent variables—state monopoly of fossilized inter-state boundary and level of state capacity to sustain state-centered nationalism combine to produce four different outcomes: (a) antagonized inter-state relations + state incapacity secession; (b) antagonized inter-state relations + state capacity = autonomy; (c) non-antagonized inter-state relations + state incapacity = status quo; (d) non-antagonized inter-state relations + state capacity = non-politicized ethnicity. In the rest of the paper, I set out to test the propositions in the empirical study of several sets of ethnic groups in turmoil vs. relative peace in South Asia.
Politics, Security and Regional Conflicts: The San Francisco System and the Cold War in the Asia-Pacific Region
Kimie Hara, University of Calgary
The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and associated arrangements legitimately laid the grounds of the Cold War confrontation system in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper examines the San Francisco System not as a past history, but as a foundation of current political and security relations in the region. Despite recognized differences between how the Cold War took shape in Asia and in Europe, once the Euro-Atlantic Cold War ended, "post-" Cold War discourse started dominating in the Asia-Pacific context as well, but without fundamental justification. The paper first reviews post-WWII regional political dynamics, and argues that the relaxation of tensions seen since the late-1980s actually resembles the 1970s detente in the Euro-Atlantic region, i.e., the recognition of a Cold War political status quo. Whereas the Yalta System collapsed and the Cold War ended in the Euro-Atlantic context, the basic structure of the Cold War confrontation still remains in the Asia-Pacific region. Along with political and ideological conflicts, significant elements with the Cold War structure in Asia-Pacific are regional conflicts among its major players. Following this, the paper examines various regional conflicts such as the Kuriles, Spratlys, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. These problems tend to be treated separately due to differences in their development, but they all share the common foundation of the San Francisco System, particularly the peace treaty with Japan in 1951. Supplementing existing materials with the author’s recent findings at the archives of the U.S., U.K., and Australia, it discusses origins of the present regional complexities.