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Organizer and Chair: Kim Korinek, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Discussant: Jonathan Unger, Australian National University
Keywords: China, Vietnam, class relations, inequalities.
This panel highlights recent theoretical contributions and empirical findings on social class formation, processes of socioeconomic stratification and modes of economic organization in China and Vietnam as each country undergoes a unique, though parallel, process of transition from socialism to state-initiated, marketizing economy. Incorporating research from the cities and villages they have visited in recent years, each presenter brings a geographically and culturally unique set of findings to bear upon a joint exploration of the roots of social inequalities and structures of power relations in post-socialist economic life. The origins of new entrepreneurial classes, of hired workers in private firms, of collective enterprise workers and managers, and of corporate village leaders, all are topics of study, as are changing labor standards, strategies of elites to preserve privileges, and emergent class relations.
By exploring common themes in neighboring societies that share parallel courses of socialist revolution and market-oriented reform the panelists transcend not only geographic boundaries, but also methodological (quantitative and qualitative) and disciplinary (political science and sociology). The findings of the four papers presented here are integrated into a broader set of market transition and social inequality theories formulated to understand changes in reforming socialist countries. Discussion of the papers will represent an attempt synthesize experiences in the Chinese and Vietnamese contexts, and to comment upon the strengths and challenges of conducting comparative work and cross-national study on social inequalities in post-socialist contexts.
From Privilege to Competition: The Rise of New State Business Interests in Ho Chi Minh City
Martin Gainsborough, University of Warwick, England
It is tempting to suggest that only those with close connections to the party-state in Vietnam have achieved business success in the reform era. However, this would be an oversimplification. Although the evidence is rather patchy, data from Ho Chi Minh City suggests that people from seemingly unpromising class backgrounds are making it in business, especially since the end of the 1990s. Furthermore, it is not the case that having roots in the party-state means automatic access to key business inputs. The 1990s saw a gradual hardening of budget and credit constraints while institutional rivalries within the party-state are such that seemingly well-connected state business players can sometimes lose out. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the reform years have seen the rise of new state business interests in Ho Chi Minh City notwithstanding the city’s popular association with the private sector. Presenting data gathered in Ho Chi Minh City between 1996 and 1999, the paper will document who lies behind these new state business interests, the sectors they have operated in, and the roots of their success. It will argue that while political status, the existence of various forms of protection, and privileged access to resources have played an important part in business success, declining state support and increasing competition is such that survival increasingly depends on genuine entrepren-eurialism and business prowess.
Robbers, Slackers, Drones, and Model Entrepreneurs: Inequalities in Development Opportunities in Rural China
Michelle S. Mood, Kenyon College, OH
Based on extensive interviews, this paper addresses the inequalities in rural development opportunities in China’s reform era. I explore individual/family-level and village-level inequalities to better understand the socioeconomic changes wrought by two decades of development and diversification in rural China. Specifically, I examine the work history, education, "class" background and party connections of selected villagers in four Shanxi counties and four counties/suburbs near Tianjin Municipality in order to see to what degree merit (experience, ability, education, etc.) influences their opportunities in the job "market." This micro-level analysis is based on extensive family and factory-level interviews in communities ranging from one of China’s richest villages to a village with an average per capita income of just US$100.00 per year, and in villages with varying average income inequality. Analysis of the cases by age, sex, education levels and wealth reveals typical trajectories of employment. Robbers (some current and former cadres who get rich through illegal means), slackers (young uneducated men), drones (young uneducated women) and model entrepreneurs (successful money-makers using legal means) are some employment trajectories I identify. In order to give a macro-context for individual opportunities, I also compare across villages to weigh the relative importance of economic and political factors, such as fixed and human capital, infrastructure, administrative involvement and policy and institutions. I conclude that employment opportunities remain highly constrained by gendered expectations and local power relations, such that the degree of merit-based upward mobility does not yet correlate with the degree of development.
Earnings Inequalities in Post–Doi Moi Viet Nam: Returns to Education and Political Capital in the Nascent Market Economy
Lynne Taguchi, University of Washington (co-authored with Lan Phuong Nguyen and Kim Korinek)
Heightened socioeconomic inequalities have been widely observed in China and former Soviet bloc societies during the course of transition from a redistributive, socialist economy to state-led market systems. While Vietnamese researchers have documented an increasing gap between the rich and poor during the 1990s, few have undertaken theoretically informed approaches to analyze emergent. disparities in wages and other earnings. In an effort to understand which social groups are experiencing gains and losses in Vietnam’s post–doi moi marketizing economy, the authors explore the contours of inequality in wages and other job-related payments among Vietnamese wage-earners. Limiting our analyses to state and private sector employees, we use data from the 1997–98 Vietnam Living Standards Survey to examine workers’ earnings in private, joint venture, and state sector offices and enterprises. By comparing the differential returns to education and political capital (a measure of cadre status) across employment sectors, the current research documents the extent to which earned income inequalities represent returns to human capital versus returns to status and privilege obtained through ties to state and redistributive apparatuses. This work also attempts to assess whether there are systematic differ-ences in earnings that derive from workers’ gender and social class origins. We derive an analytical and interpretive framework from previous works that address market transition theory. Analyzing data on the Vietnamese case we aim to enrich this active field of debate by examining the relative earnings of "cadres," and by exploring whether earnings inequalities vary systematically across employment sectors and regions.
Industrial Labor Standards in China and Vietnam Compared
Anita Chan, Australian National University (co-authored with Hongzen Wang)
This paper is based on documentary and field research carried out in Vietnam and China, and compares and contrasts labor standards in the two countries’ export-oriented industrial sectors, using Taiwanese owned and managed enterprises as case studies. One surprising discovery is that when comparing two important labor standards, wages and work hours, Taiwanese investors are more apt to violate the standards in China than in Vietnam. The paper explores the reasons behind this difference in behavior by the same set of corporate actors, and identifies the role of the state as a critically important factor that is often ignored in studies of global production chains. By "state," the authors refer not only to the states of the host countries of the site of production, Vietnam and China, but also that of Taiwan, where the investors originate. The attitudes of these three states and the actions taken by them toward violations of labor standards in Vietnam and China, it is argued, are preconditions to the improvement of labor conditions.
Chair: Patricia J. Wetzel, Portland State University
Discussants: Phyllis Hyland Larson, St. Olaf College; Dan P. Dewey, University of Pittsburgh; Stephen P. Nussbaum, Waseda University; Richard J. Wood, United Board for Christian Higher Education
Innovative new programs and new sources of financial assistance have made Asian countries increasingly possible—and popular—destinations for students studying abroad. An intensive in-country experience is often seen not only as the capstone of a program of language study but also as an important period of exposure to the culture being studied or researched.
How do students abroad acquire cultural knowledge and language expertise? What factors characterize the experience of being "in situ" and make it different from intensive study at home? What type of study program yields the best language and culture learning? How can students and their teachers maximize the study abroad experience?
This roundtable will address study abroad in Asia—principally Japan—through the prism of these questions. The participants will examine the study abroad experience from the interrelated perspectives of teaching, research, and program development. Topics to be raised include:
• guiding students through the complex environments they encounter in Asian societies;
• training students in self-managed language and culture learning while overseas;
• developing courses and programs that allow optimal interaction between classroom and "street" learning;
• using research on language and culture acquisition to evaluate existing study abroad programs and plan new ones.
Organizer: Eriberto P. Lozada, Jr., Davidson College
Chair: Montgomery Broaded, Butler University
Discussant: William Kelly, Yale University
Keywords: Sports, popular culture, identity, globalization, China, Japan, diaspora communities.
Recent events such as the 2002 World Cup co-hosted by Japan and Korea and the increased visibility of East Asian athletes in American professional sports illustrate the impact of globalization on sports and popular culture in East Asia. This panel will explore the interconnections between sports, globalization, and identity, examining the wider impact of such interconnections on social life in China, Japan, and Chinese and Japanese diaspora communities throughout the world. Sports, a set of highly commodified and globalized cultural practices, has been understood to be a central element in popular culture, youth socialization, community identity, and the construction of gender. But how are sports changing the social and cultural practices of East Asian communities embedded in a transnational, increasingly deterritor-ialized world? How has Chinese and Japanese youth popular culture changed with the global commodification and border crossing of sports, teams, and athletes? How does sports fit into what Arjun Appadurai has called the "works of the imagination" and cultural shifts in Chinese and Japanese visions of the future? These are the questions that the papers in this panel will address through specific case studies located in different communities: basketball culture in China, school sports in Japan, "gateball" among Japanese Brazilians in Sao Paulo, and taijiquan and martial arts popular culture in Chinese American communities.
Hoop Dreams without Borders: Playing and Imagining Basketball in China
Eriberto P. Lozada, Jr., Davidson College
In a youth survey from the early 1990s that asked the question "who is your hero?" Michael Jordan ranked second only to Zhou Enlai. While soccer may be the most popular sport in China, basketball has captured the global imaginings of postsocialist Chinese youth popular culture. Chinese basketball courts are full of young adult males who want to be like Mike, but also like Chinese basketball stars in the NBA such as the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming or the Dallas Mavericks’ Wang Zhizhi. In this exploration of basketball in China, I will argue how basketball serves as an ideal lens from which to understand globalization and popular culture in China. Based on fieldwork conducted in a rural northern Guangdong university and in urban Shanghai, I will illustrate how basketball lies at the intersection of transnational cultural flows, an increased commodification of everyday social life, and the aspirations of a postsocialist Chinese nationalism. Although basketball in China is not unique in embodying such disjunctive cultural processes, the popularity of the game and related products illustrates how these cultural processes become localized and coherent for the young men who consume and create their versions of Chinese modernity. Examining Chinese hoop dreams is particularly relevant, I will argue, in understanding the impact of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. This paper will also explore the connections between Chinese basketball and the internationalization of professional sports in the United States, and how such connections are shaping visions of Chinese identity in a global future.
Bukatsudoo: What Do Students Learn in Japanese Extra-curricular School Clubs?
Peter Cave, University of Hong Kong
Most Japanese children take part in extra-curricular club activities (bukatsudoo) while at junior high or high school or both. Despite this, such activities have been little studied. This paper describes what happens at bukatsudoo and tries to explain why it happens. It outlines the various ways teachers and students see bukatsudoo and elucidate the role of bukatsudoo within the school, as a mechanism for (among other things) learning, socialization, diversification and control. It argues that bukatsudoo embodies philosophies and practices that are important and pervasive in modern Japanese society, and that a study of bukatsudoo sheds light on one way through which these philosophies and practices are transmitted and maintained. Finally, it looks at how bukatsudoo may be changing and how it may continue to change. The paper is based on intermittent intensive fieldwork (interviews, observation, and participation) in six Kansai schools from 1987 to the present.
A Mean Spirited Sport: The Meanings of Gateball among Nikkei in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Joshua Roth, Mount Holyoke College
"Gateball gives rise to fights."
"It is a mean spirited sport."
Such comments were frequent among Nikkei in Sao Paulo who did not play gateball, recalling descriptions of croquet in early twentieth century Boston, where the game was associated with drunkenness and other vices. Suzuki Eiji invented gateball in 1947 in Hokkaido, Japan, inspired by the croquet play of American occupation forces. Since then, it has spread all over Japan and other parts of East Asia, as well as among overseas Japanese communities in Latin America and Hawaii. Practitioners of the game today say there is no better pastime for the elderly. It keeps them fit both in body and mind. Fights occasionally break out on the courts, but the tension of the game may be an integral part of its attraction. "Gateball is like life—more challenging than work—these are serious consequences resulting from mistakes." In this paper, I explore the meanings of gateball specifically among Japanese Brazilians in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Chinatown in Space: The Construction of "Chineseness" through Martial Arts
Adam Frank, University of Texas, Austin
The paper approaches the idea of "Chinatown" and the practice of martial arts as intertwined case studies in the construction of Chinese identity from the standpoint of race. I am concerned, in other words, with the specific ways in which history, space, and practice coalesce to form notions of race. I begin with the premise that "Chinatown" has shifted from a designation for an urban, geographical congregation of Diaspora Chinese to an ill-defined "sense" of China and Chineseness that is felt through the sensual experience of place, food, film, fiction, music, etc. and is by no means limited to those who identify themselves as "Chinese." Based on recent fieldwork on taijiquan in China and the U.S., I discuss how martial arts serve as one such conduit for the collusive construction of identity. How, for example, do non-Chinese students consider race in their assessment of a taiji teacher’s skills and how, conversely, do Chinese teachers in China and the United States "play the race card" in order to legitimize practice? How did the late Qing and early Republican folk martial arts hero Wang Feihung become a focal point for stories of Chinese immigration and resistance? And how did a new, martial arts inspired image of Chineseness emerge through the ABC series Kung Fu, the films of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, and through the new Shanghai-based television series Flatland? Throughout the paper, I draw heavily from the stories of martial artists in both the U.S. and China.
Organizer: Justin McDaniel, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington
Keywords: Buddhism, Southeast Asia, education, religion, Theravada.
While it is well known that village temples served as central educational institutions in Buddhist Southeast Asia, this micro understanding of monastic education has obscured the degree to which monastic schools and educational practices have been important sites of contestation for control of Southeast Asian societies. Not simply places where timeless knowledge has been passed down, the development of Theravada monastic education, both in pre-modern and contemporary periods and across Southeast Asia, reflects the efforts of states, communities and individual monks to enact specific visions of society. This panel, which moves across disciplinary, ideological, historical and geographic boundaries, is united by the effort to understand the roles that monastic educational institutions and pedagogical methods have played in Southeast Asia.
Despite the conservative reputation of Theravada Buddhism, the papers in this panel display the evolving nature of Theravada Buddhist societies through the changes in monastic education. Thomas Borchert’s paper on the movement of Dai-Lue novices from Yunnan to schools in China and Thailand develops the relationship between educational projects and Dai-Lue identity. Justin McDaniel demonstrates that a linguistic and historical scrutinization of Buddhist philosophical palm-leaf manuscripts from 16th–19th century Thailand and Laos reveals the contours of the Buddhist canon and modern Buddhist pedagogical methods. Ven. Dhammasami examines a diverse set of both Western and Burmese sources to investigate the ecclesiastical exam systems in Burma. Anne Blackburn exposes the degree to which European models changed the nature of monastic curricula in 19th-century Sri Lanka and the indigenous reaction of the local Buddhist hierarchy with the rise of the Vidyodaya Pirivena in 1873.
Buddhist Education under High Colonialism: The Case of Sri Lanka’s Vidyodaya Pirivena
Anne M. Blackburn, Cornell University
As the British imperial presence in Sri Lanka intensified during the nineteenth century, members of the island’s Buddhist community experienced a significantly altered social world. In this world political patronage, economic advancement, devotional practice and intellectual reflection occurred in the context of new relationships with Christian missionaries, British colonial administrators, and European scholars of philology and comparative religions. The result, according to conventional scholarship on the subject, was "Buddhist Modernism" or "Protestant Buddhism," a strikingly new form of Buddhism both influenced by and reactive against colonial, and Protestant, presence in Sri Lanka.
While standard historical narratives about 19th century Sri Lanka are dominated by such arguments about the modernization and Protestantization of Buddhism, we know remarkably little about the Buddhist practices and institutions characteristic of the island during this period. Thus it is difficult to evaluate claims for the modernization and Protestantization of Buddhism with any confidence, or to identify the arenas in which new forms of Buddhist practice or interpretation developed. Educational practice is one arena in which shifting Buddhist intellectual and devotional perspectives are often evident. Institutional structure, patterns of patronage, curriculum and textual production all offer clues to Buddhist concerns, and to Buddhist intellectual and political relationships. Strikingly, we know almost nothing about Sri Lankan Buddhist educational practices during the 19th century, whether for lay or monastic Buddhists.
This paper attempts to redress this absence in a preliminary way, and thus to provide some substantive evidence that might be used to evaluate claims for the rapid alteration of Sri Lankan Buddhism in the 19th century. The paper discusses an innovative 19th century Buddhist educational institution for laymen and monastics founded in 1873. As a starting point, the paper identifies the social and political context in which the establishment of this institution, the Vidyodaya Pirivena, appeared desirable to its founding patrons. The primary focus of the paper is the nature of the curriculum and examination system developed at Vidyodaya. The paper examines the subjects studied, texts used and produced by students, and the institution’s approach to examination and prize-giving. In addition, it attempts to trace the influences likely to have shaped educational practices at Vidyodaya. Such influences included educational trends articulated by the colonial Department of Public Instruction, the vision of "Oriental Literature" characteristic of the island’s Governor Gregory, debates within the local Buddhist community, and visions of ideal Buddhist education formulated from within Thailand and Burma.
Curricula and Canon in Thailand and Laos: The Abhidhamma Nissaya and the Teaching of Buddhist Philosophy
Justin McDaniel, Harvard University
Recently Collins, Blackburn and Keyes have explored the constructive and constitutive relationship between canon and commentary in religious studies in Asia. This work calls for a different approach to the way we understand how Buddhist Canonical texts are divided, manipulated, re-assembled and anthologized through the commentarial process. Taking their cue, this study seeks to explore new ways to document this historical and ideological relationship in Southeast Asia. By focusing on the explicative and expository translation methods and commentarial services of nissaya palm-leaf manuscripts from Northern Thailand and Laos the pre-modern and modern instruction of the Abhidhamma (philosophical and psychological compendium of the Theravada Buddhist canon) will be illuminated.
Abhidhamma Nissaya manuscripts were used as bi-lingual textbooks for instructing nuns, monks and lay devotees in philosophy, grammar and psychology between the 16th and 19th centuries. While abundant in monastic libraries throughout the region, they have been not been the subject of any scholarly scrutiny. This is largely because they are seen as incomplete translations and commentaries of canonical texts and perceived as locally corrupt witnesses to the Pali canon. They do not offer a literal, systematic or complete translation or commentary on any known canonical source text. However, these seemingly haphazard translations/ commentaries cast light on the way the canon, especially the Abhidhamma, is understood and taught in modern Thailand and Laos. It also explains the particular manner in which it is conveyed through sermons and at monastic schools in the 20th and 21st centuries. The translation, commentarial and pedagogical methods of these manuscripts will reveal a creative engagement with (rather than a passive reception of) the Buddhist Canon by its Northern Thai and Lao consumers and further advance the study of the Southeast Asian contribution to Buddhist intellectual and educational history.
Ecclesiastical Examinations: Their Origin and Impact on the Sangha in Burma and Thailand
Venerable Khammai Dhammasami, Oxford University
Education was one of the most important factors in the life of the monastic community even before the introduction of Buddhism to Burma and Thailand. Education was an individual responsibility of each monastery until formal examinations were introduced by the state in both countries in the 17th century.
This paper focuses on two elements. First, we will re-examine the historical circumstances in Burma and Thailand when ecclesiastical examinations came into existence. Simone De La Laubère, who visited Siam in 1687, and the royal orders of Rama I in Thailand (1782–1809), echo the words of King Thalun (1629–1648), Bodawpaya (1778–1819) and Mindon (1853–1878) in Burma in giving us the royal version of the reasons behind the creation of ecclesiastical examinations. Scholars have accepted their perspective as a given, maintaining that the introduction was solely due to a decline in monastic learning and discipline. We will attempt to reinterpret these circumstances by looking at the history of the two countries at the time.
Second, we will make a brief survey of the impact of examinations on the life of the Sangha in general, and monastic education in particular. We will analyze some of the challenges faced by the Sangha through education in the twentieth century.
Making Novices: Dai-Lue Novices in Shanghai, Thailand, and Chinese Public Schools of Sipsong Panna
Thomas A. Borchert, University of Chicago
In a study of monastic education in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, Anne Blackburn described two types of modalities for the education of novices: apprentice and curricular. These modalities principally describe the relationship of teachers, students and knowledge. In Sipsong Panna, an ethnic autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, the post-Mao reconstitution of the Sangha has seen the (re)development of both of these modes of education. Within the last five years, however, a third modality of education, which we might call outsider/public has developed. In this mode, novices and young monks have received educations outside of the Theravada Buddhist temples of Sipsong Panna. They have instead been able to attend Chinese public schools, Thai monastic high schools and Mahayana monastic schools in the major cities of China’s east coast. Not surprisingly, the educational goal of each modality, and the diverse institutions within them has been different. Thus, for example, while the Buddhist Institutes of Sipsong Panna have sought to create monks with a strong Dai-lue identity, the Thai monastic high schools have implicitly deemphasized this ethnic identity by stressing their Theravada monkness. Similarly, Chinese public schools have emphasized the fact that all students are Chinese citizens, despite being monks as well. This paper, relying on extensive interviews with the monks of Sipsong Panna, is a discussion of this third modality of monastic education, and in particular how the diverse educational projects embedded within it have affected the monastic practices and the ethnic identity of the novices of Sipsong Panna.
Organizer: Jing Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chair: Tani E. Barlow, University of Washington
Discussants: Chua Beng Huat, National University of Singapore; Tejaswini Niranjana, Center for the Study of Culture and Society; Tani E. Barlow, University of Washington; Kuan-hsin Chen, National Tsing Hua University; Haejoang Cho, Yonsei University; Arvind Rajagopal, New York University
Asian studies is an established academic discipline in the U.S., whereas Asian studies in Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon. Within the field of study of contemporary Asian cultures, practitioners have begun to realize that, in this area of globalization, cultural practices in different places can no longer be analyzed within the local, national, sub-regional, or regional enclosures. Therefore, there is an increasing recognition that the dialogues across borders, sub-regional, national, disciplinary, among other coordinates, are necessary. These dialogues might be able to open up new possibilities to facilitate cooperative and innovative intellectual work. With this assumption, this roundtable brings together scholars of Asian studies in Asia and the U.S. to discuss an emerging epistem-ological awareness that "Asia" is not merely an object of study, but a "method." "Asia as method" multiplies our intellectual frames of reference, so that the living places within which scholars of cultural analysis work are understood in different ways. In this sense, Asian studies is and has never been simply the study of "Asia" as geographical and historical places. In fact, Asian studies has always actively implied a "comparative" study of the "self." Asian studies must also be about the "culture" in which a researcher lives and works, as much as it is about the places she or he studies. Thus, the intellectual concerns and research agenda emerging out of the different places of Asia could become a set of powerful reference points for each other. The existence of many points of reference enables the asking of new questions.
This roundtable invites scholars, with diverse backgrounds in sociology, history, literature and cultural studies, communication, and women’s studies, who have been conducting research in different places across sub-regions in Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia, to reflect on their own research in relation to the question of "Asia as method." Participants will address a variety of topics as follows.
Kuan-hsin Chen: "Asia as Method: Thoughts on Inter-Asia Comparative Studies." Drawing on Takeuchi Yoshimi and Mizoguchi Youzo’s propositions of "Asia as method," this presentation intends to take up once again the same proposition in the contemporary inter-Asia context. Drawing on the panelist’s preliminary research on the formation of society of consumption in Northeast Asia Capital Cities, the presentation intends to pinpoint critical implications of "Asia as method" for an inter-Asia comparative studies.
Tejaswini Niranjana: "Practicing Cultural Studies in India." There is a ten year history of the field in India in relation to different disciplines, new and old: the critique of English Studies, the new historiography (e.g., Subaltern Studies), women’s studies, film studies. What is the renewed relevance of studying culture at a time of political and social ferment and the breakdown of some of the traditional disciplines? Does the conventional story of the emergence of cultural studies—Birmingham, the influence of the New Left, critique of the primacy of the economic, the impact of Althusser’s work and Gramsci’s; does this also account for the trajectories of cultural studies in other societies? In the Third World context, questions of culture were discussed as part of the anti-colonial struggle. What sort of consensus was sought to be forged in relation to the role of culture in the new nation? What do I mean by the national-modern in the case of India? What consequences does the current interrogation of the connection between culture and nationalism have for cultural studies?
Chua Beng Huat: "The Southeast Asian and Multi-culturalism in Practice." Current scholarship on "multiculturalism" tends to emphasize the porosity of group boundaries and the possibility of cultural hybridity and multiculturalism of individual subjects while suppressing the tendency for the hardening of group boundaries. In the context of postcolonial Southeast Asia, this presentation addresses the historical continuity of multiculturalism as an official discourse that emphasizes the difference among the constitutive ethnic groups, the better to discipline the population along the fault lines within the nation.
Arvind Rajagopal: "Proliferating Muslims and Contemporary Hindu Nationalism: Old and New Visions of Globalization in Modern South Asia." The present-day categories of national and regional divisions are starkly unequal to the challenge of understanding the permeability of geographical and political boundaries. This presentation will address this problem in relation to Asia as market and the growth of the consumer middle class. It will also examine the world Muslim communities of sentiment such as the Ummah, the transfiguration of their communal memories under the regime of globalization and new expressions of solidarity such as contemporary Hindu nationalism.
Kyeong-Hee Choi: "Japanese Colonial Censorship and Modern Korean Literature." The birth of modern Korean literature coincides with the advent of a regime of colonial censorship under which no manuscript was allowed to be published without the censor’s permission. Given that the physical body and at times even the integrity of a literary piece are already violated or excessively negotiated before taking its final shape, how do we do justice to the creative struggles and negotiations embodied in it, especially when one cannot fully separate the writer’s work from the censor? The role of internal and external censorship in colonial Korea forces us to radically rethink what modern literature was in those Asian countries ruled under colonial regimes.
Organizer and Chair: Micheline Lessard, University of Ottawa
Discussant: John L. Hill, Concordia University, Montreal
The papers presented in this panel offer new insights into the complexities of social and political relations between Asians and Westerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They not only examine the interplay between Asians and Westerners, but they also suggest that simple categorizations of social groups in Late-Qing China, and in India and Vietnam are inadequate means to understand East-West contacts within colonial and quasi-colonial contexts. Specifically, they redefine and re-formulate the concept of colonial "collaborators," pointing out that those classified as collaborators were often members of social groups "liminal," within the context of Asian and Western contacts. These groups, the Christian converts of Sichuan in Late-Qing China, the Hindi abolitionists, the moderate Vietnamese nationalists, and the Irish Catholic "colonials" in India, through their aims, their positions, and their impact, defy the facile classification of "collaborator." They illustrate the ways in which they were perceived as threats by one group and another, and they illustrate also the complexities and the contradictions inherent in colonial and quasi-colonial contexts. They provide useful insight into the traditional historical definitions of "enemies." "nationalists," and "collaborators." In addition, each of these papers, through the use of a variety of original sources (missionary archives, nationalists’ writings, political flyers and jatras) closely examines groups that have been heretofore largely ignored, thereby providing important contributions to the study of India, China and Vietnam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Challenging the Imperial Order: The Precarious Status of Christian Converts in Late-Qing China
Jean-Guy Daigle, University of Ottawa
The Christian missionary presence in post-1860 China has been analyzed extensively by both Chinese and Western scholars. Obviously associated with Western powers, missionaries have been viewed as serious threats to the existing authority system between the imperial bureaucrats, who had to abide by the treaties signed with foreign powers, and the Christian converts, who claimed to be protected by the Christian churches. This was especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church in Sichuan, a region frequently plagued by anti-Christian incidents. Although the judicial, political, and financial dimensions of these incidents have been extensively documented in bureaucratic and diplomatic sources, missionary sources may also be used to examine more closely the actual status of converts in everyday life and in their local context. For Eastern Sichuan and Chonqing prefecture, the archives of the Société des missions étrangères in Paris provide a wealth of materials concerning anti-Christian persecutions and destructions. They also deliver, candidly and confidentially, unique details on: the ways in which conversions took place, the rituals of baptism, the patterns of religious observance, the implications of conversion on marriage, occupation, and social life, the relationships between relatives, neighbors, community leaders, and magistrates, and between the converts and the Roman Catholic bishopric. Finally, by repeatedly stressing that their principal enemy was the educated gentry class, the Christian missionaries help us understand to what extent their aim to recruit new converts was interpreted as a serious threat, in terms of status and hierarchy, by the local elite and imperial agents.
Trans-colonial Collaborators: Agents of Change or Comforters of Imperialism?
John L. Hill, Concordia University, Montreal
Despite the British success in defeating the leaders of the great uprising of 1857–58 ("the Mutiny"), the next half-century was a period of constant crisis within the Raj featuring the economic and social destruction brought on by repeated and widespread famine throughout the Indian Empire and at the same time the political restiveness of the English-educated profess-ional and clerical elements of Indian society, on whom the functioning of the great imperial edifice depended. There were other "collaborators" of the Raj even more highly placed than barristers-at-law or deputy collectors, collaborators who were less obvious because their complexions were white instead of brown and they were part of the apex structures of the Raj, some as members of the "heaven-born" Indian Civil Service itself. Of all those who were themselves colonials but helped keep the half of the empire which was India under "control," none were so invidiously placed as those from England’s oldest colony—the Roman Catholic Irish. Yet some of these collaborators" rose to the top layer of imperial institutions and played a pivotal role in sensitive issues like the evolution of Indian famine relief policies and the legislative beginnings of elected Indian government. This paper explores the often contradictory aspects of collabor-ation and resistance within groups simultaneously intensely conscious of their subservient colonial status yet determined to achieve equality among the imperial elite while espousing controversial political opinions and fighting for major changes in imperial policy.
Collaborators, Nationalists, or Revolutionaries: The Convenient Categorization of Vietnamese Nationalists
Micheline Lessard, University of Ottawa
The challenges posed by French colonial rule in Vietnam have been analyzed in detail by many Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese scholars. Particular attention has been paid to the historical continuity of Vietnamese resistance to foreign domination, and to the historical legacy of Vietnamese patriotism. This paper examines specific expressions of Vietnamese resistance to French rule heretofore largely ignored by scholars, those of Vietnamese intellectuals proclaiming them-selves nationalists while also wishing to establish an independent Vietnamese nation based on the French republican ideals of constitutionalism and legalism. These nationalists were also vocal proponents of the Vietnamese national language, women’s rights, and universal education and suffrage. With the formation of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1931 and with the radicalization of Vietnamese resistance to French rule, the term nationalist was increasingly associated with the term revolutionary. More often than not, those nationalists who did not share the "revolutionary" vision of an independent Vietnam, were seen as collaborators. This paper analyzes the liminal status and the complexity of the ideals of these nationalists. Intellectuals such as Bui Quang Chieu, for example, were considered collaborators by Vietnamese radicals, and anti-French by French colonial authorities. The writings of these intellectuals illustrate the ways in which French colonial policies in Vietnam inevitably led to a radicalization of the resistance movement, leaving little room for political alternatives, and thereby silencing a significant number of Vietnamese nationalists.
Protest and Satire in Hindi Abolitionist Literature: 1910–1918
Karen Ray, Marianopolis College
From the first decade of the twentieth century there were attempts at village-level mobilization in India, not only against specific grievances of village people, but also against the Raj and those who collaborated with it. Particularly in the abolitionist movement aimed at the system of indentured emigration to overseas European colonies, there were posters, speeches, flyers, plays, and jatras directed at a village audience not only warning them against the "system of slavery," but also excoriating the Indian elite who participated in the British administration, particularly those who ostensibly represented Indian interests. These collabor-ators are portrayed as worse than the imperialists themselves, and the natural enemies of village India. As the construction of political identity in India changed two issues arose: Was to be "British-like" antithetical to being "Indian"? and, how to take account of the 80 percent of India that is villages and villagers. The Hindi abolitionist literature addresses these issues of reconstruction, confirming them as distinctly pre-Gandhian and in fact forming the Gandhian tactic. This paper examines several examples of the flyers and jatras in the context of the abolition movement and postulates how the abolition protest and its resolution affected the first years of post-WWI political developments in India.
Organizer and Chair: Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
Discussant: Sabine Fruhstuck, University of California, Santa Barbara
Keywords: history, anthropology, East Asia (China/Tibet, Japan) genealogies.
History is both a transient and intransient process. It is also a product of conscious or unconscious agencies. Simply put, the Janusian nature of history means that it can happen or be made to happen in a variety of ways. The panel’s four anthropologists of East Asia explore and analyze, in four different ethnographic, temporal, and geographical sites, the ways in which history is interpreted, appealed to, created and recreated, selectively or strategically remembered, imbued with or divested of agency, and so forth. As Robertson elaborates, the de-historicization of eugenics by present-day geneticists in Japan represents a biopolitics diametrically opposed to the efforts of early 20th-century specialists to historicize eugenics as a centuries-old Japanese science. The efficacious deployment of autobiography as an ambivalent form of an alternative history by Tibetans otherwise silenced under PRC rule is explored by Makley. Edwards exposes the genealogical fictions spun by sports historians today who have "discovered" soccer’s origins in the Heian Court. Venturing an interpretation of the ubiquity of timelines in Japanese history books, Yamaguchi examines the rationale for their use by feminist activists cum historians. In addition to opening up new sites of anthropological inquiry, the panelists seek both to redress the tendency toward "presentism" in contemporary ethnographies and to draw attention to the consequences of either ignoring or underacknowledging history in anthropological analysis.
Claiming the Game: The "Ancient" Game of Kemari and Japanese Claims to Modern Soccer
Elise Marie Edwards, University of Michigan
Efforts by the Japan Football Association (JFA) to secure and ensure the success of the 2002 World Cup co-hosted with South Korea occasioned a new role for kemari, an ancient ball game played with the feet and most commonly remembered as a favorite pastime of Heian court nobles. In the years leading up to the World Cup, government authorities, JFA officials, and various other actors aggressively positioned kemari as the oldest precursor to the modern game of association football, or soccer. In this paper, I will explore the various political motivations that have led to this renewed interest and celebration of kemari, some of which involve international battles of representation and legitimacy between soccer governing bodies, and more localized interests in imbuing a sport often portrayed as a recent "foreign" import with an image of Japanese authenticity and native roots. By looking at the often carefully choreographed museum exhibitions, media releases, and public stagings of kemari produced around and during the World Cup, I will contemplate the ways that history is used to claim legitimacy and authenticity in the present. I will also consider the folk theories about relationships between past and present reflected in the appropriation of an ancient game in efforts to claim Japanese (as well as, at times, Asian) rights to the modern game of soccer. Lastly, I will reflect on the methods and motivations of scholars from Japan and elsewhere, who have contributed to contemporary narratives of continuity and connection between kemari and modern soccer.
"Speaking Bitterness": Autobiography as Alternative History in Tibet (PRC)
Charlene Makley, Reed College
The category of "history" has played an eminently constitutive and contested role in Sino-Tibetan relations since the incorporation of Tibetan regions into the People’s Republic of China in the early 1950s. In the ensuing debates over the national status of Tibet, forms of autobiography have been particularly important as historiographic genres in which truth claims about the experiences of (sometimes grossly) embodied narrators could be powerfully asserted to nationalist ends. In the light of this fraught historical context, I draw on fieldwork (1992–2002) in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in SW Gansu Province to examine a corpus of autobiographies I elicited in interviews and conversations with over fifty Tibetan residents of Labrang born prior to the Chinese Communist Party’s "socialist transformation" of the region (1958–1979). During the political meetings and struggle sessions of the Maoist era, the discourse genre of "speaking bitterness" (suku) was the means by which Tibetans were encouraged to define themselves publicly as (modern) individuals in opposition to their oppressive pasts. Such first-person narratives can powerfully mask mediations of other agents and discourses, thus creating the appearance of an unsullied window into the past through the eyes of an (ahistorically) individual self. I argue that privately related first-person accounts appropriate the narrative farms of "speaking bitterness" genres to construct competing arrangements of selves, agencies and moralities in space and time.
Eugenical Phantasms: Embellishments and Erasures in Japanese Science History
Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
In a 1968 paper on the history of birth control policy in Japan, Matsunaga Ei, a geneticist, made the preposterous claim that "no eugenic movement has ever existed in this country (i.e. Japan)." Matsunaga’s claim was simply not true. There certainly was a eugenics movement in Japan—actually several, all of which had their own journal, symposia, and public relations agenda that helped to make eugenics (yûseigaku, also yujenikkusu) a household word by the turn of the century. Whereas some scientists today may exhibit a willful amnesia about eugenics and its deployment in the early 20th century as a form of social welfare policy, ironically, in the 1920s, some Japanese scientists were committed to fabricating a genealogy of a "uniquely" Japanese eugenics. Although most of these early eugenicists were European trained, they devised ingenious ways in which to naturalize and historicize "the science of superior birth" as an inherent feature of Japanese everyday practices. Their efforts to make culturally relative the notion of "racial betterment" included a revisionist history of eugenics, which they traced back beyond Francis Galton, who coined the term in 1883, to the Kamakura period. I will explore the rationale for and ramifications today of the embellishment and erasure of the history of eugenics—as everyday practice and social policy—by two different generations of Japanese scientists.
Feminism as Chronology: The Place of Timelines (Nenpyô) in Women’s History
Tomomi Yamaguchi, University of Michigan
In the mid-1990s, notable numbers of books on the history of the women’s liberation movement from the 1970s were published in Japan. I will examine one such history-book-writing project undertaken by Kôdô-suru Kai (The Women’s Action Group), a Tokyo-based women’s group founded in 1975. Based on my three-year participant observation of the history-book-writing process following the group’s dissolution in 1996, I will specifically focus on how and why they invested so much effort in making a timeline (nenpyô). By "timeline" I mean a chronological list of events, a style commonly used in Japanese history writing. The notion that the timeline has important archival value was shared among the writers, who perceived it as an indispensable device through which to make a political statement about, and to produce an alternative version to existing writings on, the history of the women’s movement. The timeline demonstrates how Kôdô-suru Kai situated itself within Japanese and global feminisms, and in relation to dominant society. I will discuss how the Group selected the events and vocabulary for the timeline, and, more generally, will review both the philosophy of time reflected in genre of timelines and the contested politics of history-writing in contemporary Japan.
Organizer: Danke Li, Fairfield University
Chair: R. Keith Schoppa, Loyola College in Maryland
Discussant: Robert Benewick, University of Sussex, England
Keywords: Political cartoons, political posters, nationalism, worldview, self-image, the "Other."
Visual print culture—cartoons and posters as weapons of political propaganda and popular expression—has had a long tradition in many countries. However, it is only since the 1990s that political cartoons and posters regarding East Asia have been considered as subjects of serious scholarly attention. Moving beyond their visual, artistic, and satirical values and in the spirit of the "border-crossing" approach, this panel explores the power of political cartoons and posters in the construction of nationalism, worldview, self-image, and the "Other" in China, Japan, and Austro-Hungary, thereby crossing time and space from the point view of social, political and art history, sociology, and East Asian/international relations.
Stefan Landsberger analyzes the formation and evolution of the Chinese worldview and China’s international relations from the Korean War to the late 1970s, as reflected in Chinese political posters. Danke Li examines the power of political cartoons in the formation of Chinese public opinion and multi-nationalism during the Sichuan Railway-Rights Recovery movement (1911). Monika Lehner explores the representation and construction of the image of East Asians in Austro-Hungarian political cartoons and how these images contributed to and reflected public opinion regarding East Asia and international relations from 1890 to 1918. Wieslaw Rzadek investigates the power of Japanese popular prints in the creation of a new national myth of Japan, the Meiji worldview, and nationalism in general during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).
Elite Political Propaganda and Popular Expression: Cartoon Power in the Sichuan Railway-Rights Recovery Movement
Danke Li, Fairfield University
In May 1911, when news of the Qing government’s railway nationalization decision reached Sichuan, a mass movement quickly developed, as well as anti-Qing military uprisings in many parts of the province. Mary Backus Rankin’s most recent article on practices and rhetoric of this movement in Zhejiang and Sichuan sheds new light on our understanding of why this movement, which gradually died out elsewhere, happened in Sichuan.l
Rankin’s study recognizes that in Sichuan ordinary people’s participation in the movement was more visible and ultimately more violent. In addition to the unique method of railway taxation that involved many Sichuan people in the railway venture, popular participation was attributed to elite political propaganda in publicizing nationalist protest. However, Rankin analyzes only documentary materials to demonstrate these propaganda efforts. By examining local elite political propaganda in the form of cartoons published during the peak of the movement, my research shows that these also played an effective role in driving home the nature, goals, and targets of the Railway-Rights Recovery movement in a simple, clear, and understandable way for millions of local people. Cartoons thus contributed to and reflected the open politics, representation, and multi-nationalism of the early 20th century, as Rankin suggests. This study shows that cartoons had already become a legitimate and popular medium for political propaganda during the Railway-Rights Recovery movement in Sichuan.
1. Mary Backus Rankin, "Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics: Practice and Rhetoric of Railway-Rights Recovery at the End of the Qing." Modern China, 28:3 (July 2002): 315–61.
Encountering the "Other" in Chinese Propaganda Posters
Stefan Landsberger, Leiden University
After the People’s Republic opened its doors to the outside world in the late 1970s, living conditions improved and ownership of radios and televisions became widespread. As a result, images of events and peoples outside China started flooding in. This had a great impact on the way in which "foreigners" had been depicted and their images had been presented until then, and on how Chinese interpreted the world. In the decades following 1949, the appearance of the "Other" in the media had been carefully crafted and determined largely by China’s identification of friends and foes. Propaganda posters played an important role in the construction of the image of the "Other" supplementing newsreels and press photographs.
Korean War posters showed demonic American soldiers, Korean suffering and Chinese bravery. During the period of reconstruction in the 1950s, Soviet experts were represented as elder brothers. Images of foreigners almost disappeared until the mid-1960s, when China gave its support—mostly verbal—to revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The struggle of North Vietnam against America inspired many Chinese poster artists. By the early 1970s, China had only a few friends left in the world, and that is echoed in posters. As the leader of the Third World, China played host to representatives from African nations; these guests duly appear on posters.
These propaganda posters may not have strongly influenced popular political consciousness, but by analyzing them, I will show how the depiction of friend and foe helped construct the Chinese worldview.
Changing the Images of Asia: Austro-Hungarian Political Cartoons, 1890–1918
Monika Lehner, University of Vienna
At the end of the 19th century, the Sino-Japanese War brought East Asia into the focus of Foreign politics. Over centuries, China had been the dominating nation in East Asia—now the Chinese defeat marked the entrance of a new East Asian power: Japan. But unlike the other European Powers, Austria-Hungary did not take an active role in East Asia—with one exception: the participation in the international intervention to suppress the "Boxer" Uprising. But it was clear, that Austria-Hungary had no plans to challenge the others by claiming an own sphere of influence. During the 25 years from the Sino-Japanese War until the end of World War I, Asian affairs were frequently picked out as a central theme in political cartoons. So-called "satirical periodicals" had a long tradition in Austria-Hungary—and they played a key role in constructing the image of "foreigners" in public opinion. The image of Chinese and Japanese changed dramatically during a relatively short period, e.g., Chinese changed from foes threatening foreigners during the "Boxer" War to subdued losers in its aftermath. At this time, Japanese are depicted as friends of the Europeans. From 1903 on, Japanese are often referred to as enemies challenging the European powers, while China changes to the position of a victim and so on. In my paper I will show how political cartoons influenced the shaping of the image of "foreigners" and I will show that they are an important indicator for the perception of foreign politics by the public.
Subduing the Triumph of Rangaku: Japanese Popular Prints of the Russo-Japanese War
Wieslaw Rzadek, Adam Mickiewicz University
The two wars Japan fought in 1894–95 and 1904–05 formed doorsteps leading to the elite club of world superpowers. These undisputable military successes utilized Western science and technology, originally recognized as rangaku ("Dutch science"), and officially incorporated this into the new strategy. Surprisingly, the decision makers made use of rather old-fashioned forms of popular propaganda to publicize these "modern-looking victories" to the Japanese. Woodblock prints, at that time already considered outdated by modern Japanese advertising, remained the main means for informing society about the Imperial Army’s progress. The large group of war prints consisted mostly of two kinds—cartoons that referred to the former genre of the illustrated popular novel and "regular" prints of ukiyoe tradition.
The nationalistic tendency in politics of the early Meiji era that resulted in the Sino-Japanese war, found its social and cultural repercussions in the creation of a new, unique national myth. This creation, mostly conscious, would be far more difficult if not impossible to spread without strong pictorial persuasion, represented by both the form and content of semi-traditional printed visualizations of propaganda-facts rather than actual war incidents.
A close examination of the prints reveals the most important aspects of Meiji visual propaganda. It also shows how—and why—traditional artists and printmakers collaborating with newspapers became the most suitable, almost perfect group for transferring the official concepts into the more general and intuitive forms of a social myth easily acceptable to urbanites and the rural population.
Organizers and Chairs: Sheila Onuska, International Education Consortium, St. Louis; Namji Steinemann, East-West Center
Discussants: Anand A. Yang, University of Washington; Kevin Reilly, Raritan Valley Community College; Hazel Sara Greenberg, American Forum for Global Education; Jean Johnson, world history teacher (retired).
Keywords: Asian studies, world history, pedagogy.
In light of the growing importance of world history as a discipline and course of study in the university and of the introduction of the Advanced Placement world history course at the secondary level, the Committee on Teaching about Asia (CTA) will present a discussion that examines the impact of world history teaching on Asian studies and, conversely, the implications for Asian studies because of the growth of world history. The CTA is interested in opening a dialogue that will inform what we teach (the curriculum), how we teach (the pedagogy) and what we use to teach (the resources).
What can the latest thinking in Asian studies and world history contribute? Are there overlaps? What are the best ways to characterize the relationship that will inform both fields? How are educators to make appropriate choices about what and how to teach? Discussants will concentrate on how best to present Asia in the classroom at every level.
As director of the Jackson School of International Studies and a major contributor to the development of both Asian studies and world history, Anand A. Yang is well placed to point out challenges and opportunities for Asian studies and world history in the core curriculum. Kevin Reilly, a scholar of world history and author of widely respected resources, will address how he chooses Asian material to illuminate similarities and differences for the themes in world history. From her background of developing materials and training teachers, Hazel Sara Greenberg will discuss issues related to creating quality materials for teaching and designing opportunities for teachers. Jean Johnson will address the challenge of moving the world history standards into the curriculum and helping teachers organize their teaching about Asia in the context of world history.
Members of the audience will be encouraged to participate in the discussion of the issues presented and to raise additional concerns for future dialogue about the topic.
Organizer and Chair: Helena Kolenda, Henry Luce Foundation
Discussants: Barbara Ashbrook, National Endowment for the Humanities; Lewis R. Lancaster, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: information technology, digital resources, multimedia, Internet, Asian history and culture.
Information technology is enabling access to a wealth of resources, both audio-visual and text-based, and changing the use of materials for teaching and research in Asian studies. Yet visual media pose new challenges to an academic community that is traditionally print oriented. How can scholars extend themselves beyond books to do effective computer-based work in the humanities and social sciences?
Digital media have generated excitement and experimentation, but also present new difficulties for scholars. Projects falter or even fail because of misconceptions and unrealistic expectations, rapidly changing technology, and the relative lack of research on how learning is done with these new tools. Problems range from program infrastructure to organizational structure and include design challenges, difficulties of integrating content and technology, underestimation of time commitment and cost, copyright issues, relation-ship with institutional host, field testing and dissemination, and sustainability. There is need for ongoing dialogue to share best practices and avoid reinventing the wheel, repeating mistakes.
Through case studies from three ongoing projects, panelists Michele Ferrier-Heryford, Philip West and Carma Hinton will demonstrate different approaches to creating CD-ROM and web-based resources for Asian studies. They will discuss challenges encountered in the production process and how these have been addressed. Discussants Barbara Ashbrook and Lewis Lancaster, with respective expertise in funding and coordinating new technology initiatives, will respond to ideas, issues and approaches.
The China Module Project: Follow-Up and Sustainability
Michele Ferrier-Heryford, University of Pittsburgh
In July of 2001, the CD-ROM Contemporary Chinese Societies: Continuity and Change was published and distributed by Columbia University Press. Created and developed by 12 China studies faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh, the CD-ROM was conceived as a means to bring interactive, interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum on contemporary China to institutions that had small Asian studies programs or wished to integrate Chinese studies into an already established curriculum.
This discussion will address the ongoing pedagogical research around this project based on feedback from classes and institutions that have integrated the CD into their programs. This research has been invaluable in helping us to determine how students learn using this technology and points out the specific issues that need to be addressed for re-mastering the second edition of the CD. Also, this discussion will touch on the creation of an interactive companion website to the CD that has a "users’ chat room" and selected versions of the material online. The web site serves many purposes: informs us how students are using the material; provides a forum for interactive dialogue between students and our faculty; creates an opportunity to guide or suggest other research venues for exploration; and creates a kind of "distance learning" environment.
While there is no arguing that technological projects of this nature are laden with their own special challenges, the overall success of Contemporary Chinese Societies has inspired another group of scholars at Pitt to begin a similar project on Japan.
A Digital Teaching Library for the "America’s Wars in Asia" Project
Philip West, University of Montana
Creating the Digital Teaching Library for the project "America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach" joins the worlds of scholarship and public education. Two confessions. First, the impact of television and the media arts on how our students think and see the world may be shocking. Yielding however slightly to this flow makes it easier to admit our own preference for pictures, poetry, film and art in getting our message across. Second, however much we hate war—I was a conscientious objector in the early 1960s—we find that war, working as a lens, taps into the enduring human fascination for conflict. The study of war with Japan, in Korea and Vietnam, and with China (the larger Asian Cold War), illuminates in exciting ways the underlying patterns of thinking and perceptions of the other on both sides of the Pacific.
We began with a CD-ROM but then moved three years ago to a digital library, persuaded by its promise for archiving, searching, refinement, expansion, and standardization (Dublin Core). But building a library is unwieldy and diverges in purpose from teaching. We have now incorporated the more manageable museum model that fits nicely with the design of websites—discrete collections, guidebooks, annotations, site maps, etc.
Challenges: the staff and funding requirements for production; close coordination between content and technology, with vigilance that medium serves the message; exploring ways around the huge obstacle of copyright; and the elusive search for a sustainable funding formula.
Multimedia Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century China
Carma Hinton, Long Bow Group, Inc.
The Long Bow Group’s Multimedia Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century China is an audio-visual and text-based digital research and teaching tool that gives students, instructors, and researchers access to one of the largest audio-visual collections on modern Chinese history, society and culture. For the past two decades, we have been gathering, evaluating and cataloguing a wide range of material. Our holdings include over 700 hours of film and video, 100 hours of period popular and political music, more than 1,000 large-scale posters depicting major historical events, and tens of thousands of photographs and artwork.
One of our goals in creating an encyclopedia of this scale is to make China-related digital content freely available to universities, museums, libraries and the public, while also ensuring its long-term preservation. In addition to providing such accessibility, this web encyclopedia will give users opportunities to investig-ate or to construct innovative ways of juxtaposing moving and still images, sounds and written texts.
Technology does not necessarily improve education or understanding. However, with good design, digital media can help make sense of primary source material (such as diaries, self-confessions or police reports), sensitize students to the radically different perspectives of both observers and participants, and provide ways to explore the relationship of traditional texts to historical documentaries or feature films. In our web project we have been pursuing different approaches related to scholarship, design and interface that I will demonstrate during the presentation.
Organizer: Smriti Srinivas, University of California, Davis
Chair: Mary Hancock, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Owen M. Lynch, New York University
This panel examines the cultural and spatial logics of old and new urban religious sites and constituencies through the framework of the different spatial practices that connect and create them. This panel is attentive to a wide range of circuits, including city streets, metropolitan highways, urban arcades and passageways, mnemonic pathways, and informational highways. Such circuits create links among and within urban centers, groups, ideas, and technologies and they mediate larger processes of urbanization, colonialism and post-colonialism, diaspora, and economic globalization. The papers that make up our panel explore the sacred spaces that emerge on and, at times, define these networks in cultural terms and provide new spaces of collective life and identity that may exceed or cross-cut national, ethnic, class and gender boundaries. The panel thus takes up issues of religious practice—long matters of central concern in anthropology—but addresses modes of cultural belonging that have challenged and are redefining the theoretical and methodological parameters of the discipline. The questions to be explored concern the ways that religious practices and images create and occupy these various kinds of circuits, how religious practice mediates mobility, how deterritorialized communities may be constituted and mobilized in urban spaces through such activity, how sacred sites operate as nodes within these ramifying circuits, and how globalized forms of consumption and production beget new kinds of sacred sites.
Bodied Spaces of Ritual: Re-encoding and Re-embodying Space and Temporality in Southeast China
Mayfair Yang, University of California, Santa Barbara
For Henri Lefebvre, whereas modernist capitalist abstract space treats the body as object, to be positioned and manipulated, "bodied space," or spatial embodiments, allow the body itself to produce and encode space. Amidst the rapid expansion of commodified and urbanizing spaces of rural Wenzhou in southeast China, there is a popular movement in recent years to revive (or re-invent) ritual based on the memories and textual records of pre-revolutionary times. This paper will examine two rituals, an elaborate Daoist funeral and a lineage ancestral sacrifice, to understand the politics of the ritual re-encoding of space, time, and body in the context of the twentieth century’s de-ritualization of life.
It can be said that in imperial China, power primarily expressed itself in ritual form, and the imperial state relied on the standardization of ritual orthodoxy more than on juridical power and punishment. What can be called a Chinese "ritual governmentality," with its highly self-conscious Confucian discourse, always sought to penetrate, appropriate, and redirect the popular rituals of local communities. It was not until twentieth century upheavals that the modern state abandoned the exercise of power through ritual, and adopted the novel stance of banning traditional rituals outright. Given the administrative, ideological, and state-capitalist transformation of space and body, what is the significance of local ritual movements? If, according to Roy Rappaport, rituals convey messages from a liturgical past regardless of the belief of its participants, what are bodies in funerary procession and ancestor sacrifice imprinting onto space today?
Sacred Geographies, Urban Boundaries: The Spatial Mnemonics of the Sai Baba Movement in Bangalore City
Smriti Srinivas, University of California, Davis
The new wave of urban sprawl in the cities of Asia is an emerging concern for urban theorists. Simultaneously, sociologists and anthropologists have registered the expansion of new ritual forms and religious movements in Asian cities. A major methodological challenge lies in the interweaving of these two regimes of spatial and ideological production. The Sai Baba movement, perhaps the most widespread new religious movement in South Asia, owes its origin to a nineteenth-century saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, who lived in rural Maharashtra. After the saint passed away, the transmission of his charisma took innovative routes through several religious leaders for whom urban centers have become the most important field for ritual expression. One such location is Bangalore City. With the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1980s, the microcomputer revolution swept over Bangalore, the "Silicon Valley" of India with about six million people. New middle classes pushed the limits of previous urban boundaries including private industries, new residential colonies, and the Information Technology Corridor. This urban sprawl is girded by a number of older settlements such as farming communities from the sixteenth century, Anglo-Indian exurbs from the nineteenth century, and open lands which are linked to the new urban terrain in novel sacred geographies. Three such sites in Bangalore, lying south and east of the old city on major highways, and sites for the growth of the Sai Baba movement are the focus of this paper. By examining these ritual and spatial complexes, this paper will make an empirical and methodological contribution to the understanding of the new urban and ritual restructuring.
The Beckoning Lady, The Buddha, and the King in the Market Shrines of Bangkok
Ara Wilson, Ohio State University
This paper examines shrines and objects of worship that appear in market stalls and shops that pervade every corner of Bangkok. These images include a female figure with a bag of money by her side, beckoning; the Theravada Buddha; the semi-deified King Rama V (King Chulalongkorn); lingum; and the Chinese goddess Kuan Yin (Kuan Im in Thai). Most objects have been sacralized by monks or shamans (ajarns), and daily receive offerings of incense, candles, fruit, and liquid (ranging from water to Johnny Walker Black whiskey), but their incorporation into the business routine and the space of the stall is routine and unremarked upon. In this paper, I explore the cultural geography of these vernacular shrines, considering their symbolic and material functions at the intersection of the market economy and spiritual exchange. Using data from nearly two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok, and revisiting Stanley Tambiah’s 1984 landmark work on "the cult of the amulets" in the 1980s economic boom in Thailand, I consider how domestic, national, and regional circuits of spiritual power are connected with transformations in Thailand’s political economy from globalization and transnational flows.
Hanoi Palimpsest
May Joseph, Pratt Institute
This paper is a ficto-critical exploration of cities transformed by Marxist urban planning. The paper considers the historic implications of such cities as eroding material commodities in a transnational network of mutating socialist cities in the age of delirious consumption.
I examine the relationship between forms of secular religiosity embedded in Marxist urban planning and its relationship to sacred, feudal, colonial and trading logics that shape the social geography of the city of Hanoi. Through site specific readings of the Old Quarter, Hoan Kiem Lake and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, the essay examines the changing networks of the transforming city through the space of trade, the space of health and the space of the nation. I am interested in the kinds of corporeal embodiment that unfold within the layered sites of the city space such as streets, sidewalks, official sites and public lake parks. These very different sites raise questions about the interconnections between gesture, space and historic memory in relation to the built form.
The paper outlines the multiple circuits of somatic affect that structure this city’s dense physicality. Narrated as a self-ethnography that is also a travelogue, the essay takes the listener on a fragmented journey through the city’s heterogeneous veneer, at once socialist and sacred, pragmatic and surreal. The traveling ethnographer is enveloped by the historic, the colonial, the post-revolutionary, the capitalist and the sacred contingently interwoven into the eclectic machinations of this city of the senses.
Organizer and Chair, Marie Thorsten, Macalester College
Discussant: Ming-Bao Yue, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Keywords: universalism, transnationalism, Asia, diaspora, India, China, Japan, foundational myth, memorial, Silk Road.
It is nearly axiomatic to recognize the "origins" of universalism as coterminous with "the West." This was especially true a decade ago when international policy discourse frequently pitted particular "Asian values" ideas against hegemonic "Western" universalism. This panel will consider a range of universalizing impulses and ideas originating from Asia. The privileging of particular geographic origins, of course, is ironic to the basic intent of universalism to deterritorialize, and universalisms in any variation also convey an inherent irony between egalitarianism and hegemony: the impulse to include all without exception necessitates the questions, "whose all?" and "toward what purpose?" Keeping the many dilemmas of universalism in mind, we nevertheless recognize the new interest in universalisms via Asia-centric philosophies, religions, art and other cultural artifacts as significant. The four papers in this panel bring together a range of tactical convergences of cultures through exhibits, aesthetics, memorials and policy discourses which all represent attempts to elevate Asia in universalist imaginaries, and more generally, to articulate a distinctive ethics of border-crossing—an expressed, purposeful "univers-alism" that contrasts with the more typically inarticulate and random happening of "globalization."
"Bollyworld": Communicating Globalization through Popular Narrative
Lakshmi Srinivas, Wellesley College
Is Bollywood universalizing? This paper examines the phenomenology of globalization conveyed in recent "Bollywood" films. Commonly thought of as nonsense narratives, commercial Indian films are frequently dismissed as low fare for the distinctively Indian masses. The films are typically criticized for superficial plots, lavish spectacle and general failure to take on and deliver "serious" themes. Their continued popularity and widespread appeal has been attributed to the audiences’ (poor) taste and to the films’ ability to provide an escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. Yet films made in the 1990s, with an increasing number of locations outside India, portray the consumerist lifestyles of transnational urban middle classes and have conversely been charged as being un-Indian.
Based on analysis of hit films of the 1990s and drawing on ethnographic field observations, this paper examines Bombay films as sense-making devices in an era of rapid social change brought about by India’s economic liberalization policies, globalization and the growth of the transnational and urban middle class. While explanations have been put forward that the films provide audiences with tools and resources to deal with societal change, it is not clear how the films work to bring this about. Textual or content analysis of the films which ignore the indigenous dialogue which filmmakers and audiences collectively construct have not made much headway in furthering such an understanding. To get at this dialogue, I suggest that analysis must address the phenomenological and experiential level, the level at which films communicate with audiences.
Place of Metamorphosis? Transnationalizing Memory at Pearl Harbor
Yujin Yaguchi, University of Tokyo
Is it possible to universalize war memory? This paper investigates "morphing pains" of transnation-alism at one of America’s most important sites of national memory, the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. By focusing on the growing Japanese presence, it asks how the significance of a war memorial, constructed to celebrate a national past, becomes reconfigured within an international context. In particular, I explore how Japanese people view and understand the memorial and how their perception conditions the possibility of different understandings of national memorials.
Hawaii is the most popular foreign tourist destination for the Japanese. Almost two million people visit annually and their presence has become integral to the economy of the islands. The Arizona Memorial, which commemorates the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, receives a significant number of Japanese visitors every day. Their presence expands the significance of this national war memorial by reconfiguring it in a more international context. The memorial comes to stand not simply for the suffering of those who died but also for the "enemy" or "attackers" who caused the suffering. By using the questionnaires and interviews of the Japanese visitors, this paper attempts to remap the meaning of one of the nation’s most popular national memorials. It asks whether the foundational narrative of a war memorial, which seems firmly grounded in the context of nationalism, can be deterritorialized when viewed within a more internationalist context.
The Next Big Idea: Great Harmony
William A. Callahan, University of Durham
The PRC is not merely trying to use its new economic power to transform its political status from a third world country into a Great Power. Many elite intellectuals have been doing ideological work to develop an authentic Chinese model of universal world order: the Great Harmony. Whereas the PRC’s economic development has been the result of reform and opening to the West, Great Harmony looks to ancient Chinese resources. The paper will trace the development of the idea of Great Harmony-Datong from the classical texts (the Book of Rites), through Kang Youwei’s 1898 reformist reinterpretation (Datongshu), up to post-Cold War rediscoveries of a traditional imperialist world order. Whereas Fairbank saw such ideas as defining a Chinese world order, recent texts now promote Datong as a viable universal world order, which is morally superior to the violent model of Western Christianity and capitalism. The paper will examine the utopic politics of Datong in relation to both traditional Chinese ideas of order and modern ideas of universal order.
Cosmos in a Caravan: Silk Road Nostalgia and Universalism via Asia
Marie Thorsten, Macalester College
This paper opens an exploration of Silk Road nostalgia, especially as it elevates fusions of diverse Asian cultures as an alternative founding narrative of universalism. The global traveling exhibition, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, offers a performative and richly pedagogical project revitalizing awareness of the vast Silk Road networks dating back to the first millennium B.C.E. Besides art exhibitions and musical concerts, the project makes available public lectures, newsletters, educational websites and detailed school curricula for all ages to learn about the history of vast cultural exchanges along the Silk Road. Such extensive pedagogy has the potential to radically relocate the putative spatial and temporal origins of universalism, from grand theories of European philosophers to ordinary practices of Eurasian merchants and missionaries, who exchanged goods, religions, music, scientific knowledge and other ideas centuries before the birth of either Christianity or Islam. Of what significance then, is the new recognition of fusions of mercantile, musical and other premodern border crossings between East and West? In part, Silk Road nostalgia offers a legitimizing narrative for greater regionalism: among Central Asian countries, as well as in China and Japan, "Silk Road" images had already become popular attachments to trade, tourism, policy discourse and new European-Asian political exchanges even before Yo-Yo Ma’s project. On a global level, the Silk Road Project attempts to articulate through its empiricism an ethics of cross-cultural encounter, a remarkable endeavor especially since it premiered in the months before what many would see as a civilizational clash on 9/11, 2002.
Organizer: Meena Khandelwal, University of Iowa
Chair and Discussant: Rita Smith Kipp, Kenyon College
Keywords: orientalism, colonialism, diaspora.
This panel asks the question: In an era of high mobility and migration, when the other is a virtual neighbor, why do people continue to embrace orientalist ideologies? The notion of the western gaze and the divide between colonizer and colonized has been central to the project of orientalism. However, orientalism can be a strategy of self-representation even as it constrains scholarly analysis.
Sociolinguist Cindi Sturtz Sreetharan examines the ways in which native speakers of Japanese orientalize their own ("emotional" and "irrational") language and linguistic practices across contexts within Japan. Sturtz Sreetharan draws attention to the agency of this self-orientalizing discourse. Anthropologist Meena Khandel-wal examines the reasons why orientalist assumptions remain central to diaspora Hinduism. One reason, she suggests, is that transnational Hindu gurus use orientalist notions as a strategy for constructing a neo-Hinduism that can incorporate both diasporic Indians and non-Indians. Historian Wendy Singer explores the complex meanings of the interactions among Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, their Indian hosts, visiting Western tourists, and colonizing China. Cultural interaction in Dharamsala questions the oppositions of colonizer/colonized and western/oriental imbedded in postcolonial theory. Rita Kipp, an anthropologist who writes about Indonesia, will discuss these papers and invite audience response.
By bringing together scholars with expertise in Japan, Tibetan diaspora, Hindu diaspora, and Indonesia, these papers explore how orientalizing selves and others in national and transnational contexts can be a strategic move. They also raise questions about what orientalism means outside a colonial context or when power is ambiguously dispersed.
Patient:Agent::Indirect:Direct: Orientalism, Language, and Japan
Cindi Sturtz Sreetharan, California State University, Sacramento
Much of the recent scholarly work on Japan, at least within disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies, underscores the diversity and complexity of Japanese society and people. However, (re)present-ations of the Japanese language and/or linguistic practices of real people continue to reside in the realm of the exotic, oriental "Other." This phenomenon is not restricted to scholarly literature about Japan (from a Western perspective or otherwise) but is also reflex-ively and metalinguistically reproduced by everyday Japanese people.
Historically, all Western languages emerged from formal linguistic analyses as somehow better, more evolved, and more rational than "Other" (i.e., non-Western) languages. In particular, these "Other" languages, including Japanese, were commonly described as emotional, irrational (and thus impossible to master), indirect, and powerless vis-à-vis Western languages. These descriptors, which have come to represent Japanese speech styles in general, are juxtaposed to "Western" speech styles which are considered to be direct, logical, and powerful. This is particularly the case for English (American, British, and/or Australian and New Zealand forms).
This paper has two aims: (1) to examine the ways in which native speakers of Japanese orientalize their own language and linguistic practices across various contexts, and, (2) to draw attention to the agency that self-orientalizing discourse expresses.
Transnational Saints, Diaspora Hinduism, and Orientalism
Meena Khandelwal, University of Iowa
This paper explores the role of transnational Hindu saints and orientalist representations in constructing not only a diasporic Hindu identity but also a global Hinduism capable of incorporating non-Indians. Historically, Hinduism has not been a proselytizing religion. Nor has it incorporated different ethnicities, languages and nationalities to the extent that Islam and Christianity have. This is beginning to change.
Since 1893 when Swami Vivekananda spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Hindu ascetics have promoted their version of truth transnationally to audiences that include both diasporic Indians and non-Indians. Many ascetics based in India today have traveled abroad or have aspirations of doing so. Orientalist visions of the mystical East have been heavily analyzed, but what happens when the mystics look outward to the rest of the world? This paper examines how Hindu saints orientalize themselves in the United States and other transnational contexts. It also asks how this enables them to address what have become transnational discourses about gender equality, sexual liberalism, companionate marriage and social justice.
Orientalist assumptions are central to diasporic Hinduism. One reason is that colonial-era Hindu reformers adopted orientalist oppositions between the mystical east and materialist west. Another reason, this paper suggests, is that transnational gurus co-opt orientalist assumptions for their own purposes: to transform Hinduism into a world religion that can appeal to both diasporic Indians and non-Indians. Does it make sense to analyze this process primarily in terms of the divides between colonized and colonizer, East and West?
"Tibet" in Postcolonial Dharamsala
Wendy Singer, Kenyon College
Tibetan refugees in India consider themselves a colonized people. They arrive, often through harrowing journeys, seeking freedom from, among other things, Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture. In India they create or discover a new Tibetan identity.
Most vividly in Dharamsala, the north Indian town that is the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and home of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan culture is constantly being imagined, invented, and preserved. The lure of Bollywood films and Hindi language represent new challenges. Dharamsala also draws Western spiritual seekers who provide critical economic support to Tibetans, but impress their own—sometimes orientalist—images of what Tibetans should be. Meanwhile, institutions promoting language, religion, and art re-invent other versions of Tibetanness.
This paper examines the complex meanings of Tibetan\Chinese\Indian\Western interactions in Dharamsala that do not fit the accustomed postcolonial model. Tibetans and Indians define each other as "other." And surely there are some hierarchical relationships between them—particularly between the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and its Indian host. But the definitions we usually impose on the "other" as opposite—superordinate/subaltern, colonizer/colonized, western/oriental—do not quite fit.
As Indian merchants in Dharamsala market tourist sites and restaurants for Westerners seeking the supposedly highly spiritualized Tibetans, they both reinforce and resist orientalist categories. Therefore, this paper, by addressing cultural interaction in Dharamsala, demonstrates experiences that push against the limits of postcolonial theory. Especially, it questions models that are embedded in the ideology of colonial relationships, which may, in fact, recall orientalist paradigms.
Organizer: Megan Thomas, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: James Rush, Arizona State University
Keywords: colonialism, modernity, state policy, opium, prostitution, midwifery, cartography, education.
Recent discussions of colonial modernity across Asia highlight tensions between an understanding of modernity as a singular modular project and a conception of alternative modernities as irreducible to a single model. Most critics acknowledge the ambiguous nature of colonial and imperial legacies in social-cultural life; we reconsider the coherence of the state in its efforts to "modernize" from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Drawing from different colonial systems with contrasting theories of empire, our divergent cases demonstrate the way state policies converge in the aspiration to refashion themselves and their subjects along the lines of a new project of modernity. To what degree can we identify the haunting of these modernizing projects by particular lineages of different colonial regimes and to what extent do they subscribe to a singular model of a modern state? Chandra and Abalahin examine the shift to self-consciously "ethical" colonial policies. Chandra analyzes British efforts in India to manipulate patterns of drug consumption through taxation policies while Abalahin studies how in Indonesia the Dutch went from treating prostitution as an issue of public health to one of public morality. Thomas and Lee consider the central role of education in creating modern subjects. Thomas takes up the question of how the Spanish in the Philippines attempted to change indigenous practices surrounding childbirth by establishing new schools and professions; Lee addresses the contradictory efforts taken by the moribund Choson state to modernize their cartographic practices as part of an "enlightened" educational policy.
Opium and Ganja Consumption and British Drug Policy: Assam, 1878–1911
Siddharth Chandra, University of Pittsburgh
This paper is a case study of British drug policy in Assam, India, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the sale of opium and ganja (marijuana) were legal and taxed by the colonial government. As part of the transition to a more "ethical" colonial policy, the government sought to determine whether, in response to suggested increases in taxes on opium, opium consumers would substitute ganja for opium, undermining the opium tax policy. Counterbalancing the "ethical" motive was a monetary motive—the government benefited substantially from tax revenues levied on the sale of these and other addictive substances.
Using perhaps the only existing statistical data set on consumption of two widely used "hard" substances for five regions of Assam over a period of 34 years, the cross-price elasticities (or the degree to which the consumption of one drug increases [or decreases] in response to an increase in the price of the other) of opium and ganja consumption are estimated to evaluate the basis for the government’s concern. The results have implications for the efficacy of the proposed policy, for the "profit vs. principle" debate, including an estimate of how much the government would have lost in terms of revenue, and for our knowledge of the consumption of hard drugs in general.
A "Debt of Honor" to "Dishonorable Women": Reforming Prostitution Policy in the Netherlands East Indies, 1890–1915
Andrew Abalahin, University of New England
Unlike other types of deviance against which 19th century European bourgeois society defined itself, the figure of the prostitute was unique in that the safety of that society was thought to depend not upon her removal from the community but rather on her continued participation, however circumscribed, in its life. This paradox exposes itself most dramatically in the context of a colonial regime striving for an "ethical" policy towards its subject population. This paper will examine one case where a shift in the ideological foundations of the colonial state helped transform its policies towards prostitution. Before 1890, the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia had seen the prostitute both as a type of labor indispensable to the colonial economy and as a disease vector, a threat to such labor (from soldiers and coolies to businessmen and bureaucrats). Only with the dawn of the so-called Ethical policy after 1900 did the government come to focus its concern on the welfare of the prostitutes themselves. It went from handling prostitution as a health problem to seeing it as a social problem: now the prostitute was understood to be the victim both of a backward indigenous social system and of colonial modernization itself. In this paper, I will trace how the prostitute figured in the unfolding debates over "uplifting the Native woman" and "caring for the Native population." I will analyze prostitution policy in order to assess the extent to which a new understanding of modernity did—or did not—transform colonial practice.
Delivering for God and Country: Midwifery Training in the Late Spanish Colonial Philippines
Megan Thomas, Columbia University
In 1879, Asia’s first Western-style university (est. 1611) opened an auxiliary school to train and license a new class of "native" professional women. The School for Midwives at Manila’s University of Santo Tomas was established as part of a series of "modernizing" reforms during the late 19th century to the institutions of education in the Philippines. One of the objectives of the School for Midwives was to "modernize" the practice of medicine in the Philippines and to make hygienic and safe childbirth widely available to women across the archipelago. But in addition, by initiating this program to train and license midwives, and so to outlaw the practice of traditional midwifery, the state attempted to control not just the alternative medical tradition practiced by these "native quacks," but also the challenge that they represented to the Catholic faith and the colonial state. Drawn from a public report on the state of education in the Philippines written by a Spanish friar in 1883, the paper examines the opening of the School of Midwifery as a rare example of a "progressive" reform of the Philippine civil colonial administration that had the full support of the Catholic Church, and suggests why this was the case.
Belated Seduction: Cartographic Production and the Great Han Empire
Jee Sun E. Lee, Cornell University
This paper will explore the historically constructed nature of the geographical entity of "Korea" through an analysis of the contradictory attempts put forth by the Choson state, before the onset of formal Japanese colonialism, to modernize their mapping practices and spatial knowledge. With the objective of de-rigidifying the geographical solidity, epistemological coherency of the modern territorial national state, the first part of the paper will provide an overview of previously existing conceptions of space and indigenous, heterogeneous forms of cartographic knowledge and practices while attempting to avoid the trap of presenting a historicist account of the transition from the "traditional" to the "modern." Predominantly through the media of maps, other visual representations, and cartographic texts, I will examine the three types of maps commonly produced throughout the Choson Dynasty (1392–1910) and the kinds of geographical knowledge and ways of viewing and comprehending the world these spatial representations exemplified. Focusing on the educational textbooks put out by the state at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the second part of this paper will critically consider the ways in which efforts to adopt and propagate a distinctly new form of spatial knowledge and cartographic representation simultaneously succeed and fail to realize the desire for modernity.
Organizer and Chair: Sarah E. Thompson, University of Oregon
Keywords: art history, Korea, Japan, animals.
The premodern visual cultures of Korea and Japan are especially rich in depictions of animals. In both countries, local traditions of animals as gods or divine messengers were combined with such imported concepts as Chinese animal lore and the Buddhist belief in the Animal Road as one of the six paths of reincarnation. Animals could be depicted either in realistic, natural forms or in imaginative, semi-human forms that foreshadow modern cartoon animals. The displacement of human qualities onto animals, whether explicit or implicit, created opportunities for subtle social and political commentary. This panel addresses particular ways in which nonhumans have been used in Korean and Japanese art to express human concerns such as power, status, and desire.
The papers introduce a wide range of works, dating from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries and including sculpture, hanging scroll court paintings, and narrative handscrolls. Following presentation of the papers, the second half of the panel will consist of general discussion of the issues raised. In lieu of formal discussants, audience members working on animal-related topics in various academic fields and geographical areas will be invited to introduce themselves and their work, and to join the panelists in responding to questions. We hope to generate a broad exchange of ideas on the subject of Asian animal symbolism and promote interaction between scholars who may not have been previously aware of each other’s work.
Yi Am’s Dog Paintings: A New Interpretation of Their Style
Saehyang P. Chung, Pohang University of Science and Technology
This paper examines a group of animal paintings by Yi Am (born 1499) the Korean literati artist, whose distinctly idiosyncratic canine images influenced not only later animal painters working in the native tradition but also celebrated Japanese artists such as Sotatsu (ca. 1576–1643). In spite of the importance of Yi Am’s oeuvre, recent scholarship has not conducted an in-depth study of his dog paintings; therefore, some of his innovative stylistic features remain largely unknown. Although his animal pictures are generally viewed as having been sketched from life, an entry in the Honcho gashi of Kano Eino (1631–97) claims that Yi Am (known in Japan as Kanzan) studied the work of the Chinese court painter Mao I (active ca. 1165–73). In exploring possible artistic sources for Yi Am’s images, this paper will suggest that his canine paintings were created according to a certain meaningful order, with background floral elements designed to enhance the viewer’s understanding of the artist’s intentions. Although none of these works are dated, it appears that they were executed over a period of several months, portraying a group of dogs in the royal palace gardens whose behavior patterns sometimes parallel those of human beings. By examining Yi Am’s images in relation to Chinese compositional precedents, this paper will attempt to shed new light on the artist’s transformation of foreign styles into his own highly original mode of painting.
The Twelve Animals in Unified Silla, Tang China, and Nara Japan
Sarah E. Thompson, University of Oregon
A number of the royal tombs of the Unified Silla dynasty (668–935) are decorated externally with relief sculptures of the Twelve Animals of the East Asian calendar cycle, often called a zodiac. Some additional examples of sculptures of the Twelve Animals are found in Korean Buddhist monuments of the same period. The figures are in therianthropic form, with human bodies and animal heads, usually carrying weapons and dressed in armor.
This paper examines similarities and differences between the Silla animal sculptures and contemporary representations of the same theme in Tang-dynasty China and Nara-period Japan. In Chinese documents, the animal list can be traced back to the Qin dynasty and is mentioned in both Buddhist and Taoist texts. The Twelve Animals are frequently depicted in Tang mortuary arts. However, the Chinese examples are inevitably found inside the tombs and, when the animals are in therianthropic form, show them as civilian officials.
In Japan, a unique example of an eighth-century tomb with sculptures of the Twelve Animals suggests an experiment with Korean-style burial customs. Furthermore, the animals appear as guardians in esoteric Buddhist iconographic drawings that date from the twelfth century but are alleged to have been based on secret teachings brought from China during the Tang. Some of the drawings are very similar to the Korean sculptures, which may therefore also be linked to Tang esoteric Buddhist iconography that did not survive in China.
The Monkeys of Mt. Hiei
Rosina Buckland, Institute of Fine Arts, New York
The sixteenth-century handscroll in the British Museum known as Saru no soshi (Tale of the Monkeys) presents the story of the marriage of the daughter of the head priest of Hiyoshi Shrine on Mt. Hiei and the celebrations surrounding the subsequent birth of a son. The twist in this apparently conventional tale is that all the characters are monkeys. The animals behave almost as if they were humans as they accompany processions, attend a banquet, and participate in a renga linked-verse gathering.
Saru no soshi, unlike many examples of the atogi-zoshi or Nara ehon genre, exists in only this one known version. Scholars have put forth varying interpretations of the story, involving its potential religious significance, its relationship to the turmoil on Mt. Hiei during this period and the destruction of the Enryakuji temple complex in the autumn of 1571, as well as the anthropomorphization employed.
My paper focuses on the last of these, considering what purpose it served to depict the tale using monkeys. I will examine how successfully the animals imitate humans and especially the crucial points when they let this act slip. Through comparisons with other illustrated anthropomorphized tales I hope to highlight some of the possible implications of such portrayals. By taking all elements of Saru no soshi into consideration—pictures, text passages, and in-picture dialogue (gachushi)—we can arrive at a fuller understanding of the work, the circumstances of its production and its patron.
A Painting of Sea Life at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Midori Oka, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Prominent within Kyoto art circles of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Kono Bairei (1844–95) is known for his proficiency in painting through his many works. As a child not even ten, he began his training under the Maruyama school painter Nakajima Raisho (1796–1871). In Raisho’s final year, Bairei became pupil to the Shijo school painter Shiokawa Bunrin (1801–77), and upon his death became leader of the school. Throughout the following years, he was instrumental in establishing various art schools and associations, such as the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyoto-fu Gagakko) and the Kyoto Art Association (Kyoto Bijutsu Kyokai).
A painting by Bairei depicting varied farms of sea life in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is a testament to his competency as a painter. Various creatures of the sea—such as the pinecone fish, horn shark, and sea turtle—seem to hover and swim about the ocean. The creatures depicted in the work seem to follow in the Maruyama-Shijo tradition of depicting them naturalistically and as lifelike as possible. At the same time the work is fantastic in that this grouping of sea life can never actually be seen in such a confined area. Bairei has also taken liberty with the scale and detailing of some of the creatures. This paper will examine the painting both as continuing in the Maruyama-Shijo vein from the later Edo period, and within its own art historical context. In addition, a brief history of zukushi-zu, the phenomenon in which multiple images of one creature or numerous species are depicted in a single painting, will be presented.
Organizer and Chair: James A. Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Discussant: Merrick Lex Berman, Harvard Yenching Institute
Keywords: Zhuang, Sino-Vietnamese relations, ethnic minorities, Guangxi, Confucianization.
Official relations between China and Viet Nam have long shaped the local political, economic and social conditions of the border region between these two nation-states. Sino-Vietnamese relations were necess-arily a complicated affair. For the historically minded Chinese officialdom, northernmost Viet Nam had once been an integral part of the Chinese political and cultural empire for nearly one thousand years. Policies and practices issued from either northern or southern capitals found application on the shared frontier, although local conditions have always exerted a strong influence on the interpretation of these directives. The papers in this panel will explore the effects Sino-Vietnamese state-to-state relations have had on ethnic identity and trade relations among local communities in the border region from the imperial period through the modern era. James Anderson’s paper examines the important shift in the 11th century away from treating the frontier region as a site of tributary exchange toward the development of the region as a center for trade. Jeffrey Barlow explores the Qing period trend toward the Confucianization of the region and the process of assimilating the Zhuang into mainstream Confucian culture. Katherine Kaup’s paper discusses how three periods in post-1949 Sino-Vietnamese relations influenced local ethnic politics among Miao and Zhuang communities. The task we all plan to undertake in this panel involves the reconstruction of the series of negotiations between border communities and the representatives of the distant imperial courts during several crucial periods of change in the history of the Sino-Vietnamese relations.
From Tribute to Trade: A Period of Transform-ation in Middle Period Sino-Vietnamese Relations
James A. Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
At the founding of the Song Dynasty (968–1279), tribute relations served as a focal point around which Sino-Vietnamese political, economic and cultural exchange revolved. However, trade issues, and not tributary protocol, would define the Sino-Viet exchanges by the late 11th century. The bonds of the imperial tribute system would remain strong, but both sides eventually regarded the material benefits of close ties to be more important than the quest to iron out political differences. An important factor in this transformation in China’s relations with its southern neighbor would be the continuing development of trade networks in the South China Sea.
By the early 10th century Silk Road trade conducted along China’s long western frontier faced greater military obstacles than did South Sea trade, and both Nanhai (modern-day Guangzhou) and the coastal region near Thang Long (modern-day Ha Noi) had developed as ports of entry for valued southern products. Moreover, the Vietnamese rulership that emerged in the 10th century considered the control of trade contacts to be an aspect of their political authority. In any case, both rulers and high officials at the Chinese court preferred trade in this region of the world, where vassal kingdoms demonstrated much less belligerence than did their northern counterparts, and rare commodities could be obtained in the course of observing tributary protocol. This trend toward trade-centered ties had a dramatic impact on Sino-Viet relations and frontier management, and it is this trend that I will explore in this paper.
Ethnic Brothers? The Impact of Sino-Vietnamese Relations on China’s Ethnic Minorities
Katherine P. Kaup, Furman University
The nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations has radically influenced the course of political and economic development within China’s minority regions in Guangxi and Yunnan Provinces since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Bilateral relations have at times severely restricted the Chinese national minorities’ political mobilization while at other times providing new opportunities for articulating minority interests to the state. The normalization of relations in 1991 together with the economic and political reforms occurring within both countries over the last decade have led to greater political activism, particularly among the Miao and Zhuang nationalities, as well as a reexamination of the boundaries of ethnic identity. This paper will examine how differences in three periods of Sino-Vietnamese relations have influenced ethnic politics among the Miao and Zhuang: the period of close cooperation in the early 1950s, the tense relations of the 1970s, and the normalization of relations after 1991. This topic has until recently received very little attention in the existing literature.
This paper is based on archival materials and interviews collected during three extended research trips to Yunnan and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region between 1995 and 2001 as well as more recent data collected in online and telephone interviews with government officials and members of the Yunnan and Guangxi Zhuang Studies Associations and the Miao Studies Association. Within each of the three periods examined, I will address economic development patterns, shifts in political discourse, and academic and cultural exchanges sponsored by the Chinese government and by recently created non-governmental organizations such as the Miao and Zhuang Studies Associations.
The Zhuang Literati and Ethnic Identity in the Early Qing Era in Guangxi
Jeffrey G. B