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Organizer: Hung-yok Ip, Oregon State University
Chair: David W. Chappell, Soka University
Discussant: Whalen Lai, University of California, Davis
Keywords: Buddhism, modernity, Tan Xu, Ambedkar, Sivaraksa, Asia.
Researchers have explored the complex role played by religious traditions in the formation of modernity. Not only have scholars like Bellah been interested in the question of how/whether traditional religions helped or hurt modernization in the Asian context, but they have also contemplated at a general level how religion can be mobilized as a source to deal with the moral degeneration of modern, individualistic society. As for Ashis Nandy, he centers on how, through a process of reinvention, traditional religion has in the modern age inspired Asians historical actors to offer fundamental critiques and engage with the problems of their societies.
Scholars of Buddhism have examined the ways in which the restructuring of Buddhism contributed to many individuals’ resistance to—critiques of and struggle against—various phenomena of oppression. All presenters of this panel examine reinvented Buddhism as resistance. We show how, by drawing upon and reshaping the Buddhist tradition, Asians tackled/tackle the issue of identity to oppose three major forms of oppression in the process of Asian modernity—imperialism, perennial social hierarchy, and economic inequality. Carter unravels the story of Tan Xu. Launching his project of temple building in the Republican period, this eminent Chinese monk attempted to carve out a space which allowed the Chinese to develop a national identity rooted in their culturalist and nationalist connection to Buddhism. Blumenthal concentrates on Ambedkar. In the mid-twentieth century, he re-read Buddhism radically, thereby leading the Untouchables to forsake the religious identity imposed on them by birth, and helping them to liberate themselves from their caste-based identity. Analyzing the Thai activist Sivaraksa, Ip discusses how he has, by mobilizing cultural identity to confront class-based oppression, developed a complex theory on resistance. His theories combine the struggle against Western cultural domination with the opposition to transnational capital and introduce transcendence over identity as the effective way of resistance.
Tan Xu and Cultural Nationalism in Republican China
James H. Carter, Saint Joseph’s University
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals struggled to balance the foreign and the native, seeking the modernity of the foreign without sacrificing what they considered essentially Chinese. Writing of this tension in 1923 from the Manchurian city of Harbin, the Buddhist monk Tan Xu reflected on the state of Chinese religion there: their religions flourished, but there was absolutely no Chinese Buddhism. For Harbin, as a Chinese place, not to have a single proper Chinese temple was simply too depressing to bear! Tan Xu worked to found the Paradise Temple in Harbin and in the following decades founded, expanded, or re-opened seven temples throughout east China.
The quotation above, and the locations of Tan Xu temples, illustrate the multiple motivations guiding his work and also the several identities early-twentieth-century Chinese were negotiating. Tan Xu’s clerical status and his identification of Chinese with Buddhism in the quotation suggest that he primarily considered himself a religious figure. However, all of Tan Xu’s temples were built in cities with large foreign communities, often sharply contrasting with Western architectural elements. Furthermore, he frequently worked at the invitation of nationalist Chinese political authorities. These elements imply that Chinese nationalism also motivated the monk Tan Xu.
Tan Xu’s travels and work thus demonstrate the co-existence of traditional and progressive elements within Chinese nationalism and Chinese Buddhism during the Republican period. Tan’s vision of a traditional, religious nationalism significantly diverged from the secular, progressive, often Western-looking, nationalism of many contemporaries and presents a broader model of Chinese nationalism than that of much recent scholarship.
Ambedkar’s Buddhism and Social Justice: Doctrinal Analysis of the Thought of a Buddhist Innovator
James A. Blumenthal, Oregon State University
On October 14, 1956, in the west Indian state of Maharastra, 400,000 Untouchables, following their undisputed leader Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, converted from the Hindu faith they were born into to Buddhism. More than twenty million Untouchables have since converted to Buddhism, viewing the change, in large part, as a way of getting out from under caste oppression and its byproducts and marking one of the largest conversion movements in modern history. Fully aware that the masses of his largely uneducated followers would convert after him, Ambedkar wrote a book entitled "The Buddha and His Dhamma" to explain the Buddhist belief system to them. Ambedkar saw a large component of the Buddha’s teachings as instructions for constructing a just society and thus specifically concerned with the types of problems encountered by Untouchables. In his presentation, the suffering experienced as a result of unjust social systems, malnutrition, institutional poverty, and degradation were a direct result of a society operating out of ignorance (not that suffering was merely the result of an individual’s ignorance). In this way Ambedkar anticipated much of the thrust of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought today. And while his actions and ideas have clearly benefited many people, his specific presentation of Buddhism takes several curious philosophical turns. These include the denial of the law of karma, the rejection of rebirth in the strict Buddhist sense, and the lack of any explicit presentation of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhists from other countries and traditions have drawn attention to this perhaps problematic rendering of the Buddha’s teachings and these criticisms will be central to this paper. The thrust of this investigation will be a doctrinal analysis of Ambedkar’s presentation of Buddhism, utilizing the traditional Four Seals, which signify a theory of being Buddhist as the yardstick for such analysis. I will then discuss responses Ambedkarite Buddhists have offered to such criticisms. We will conclude by reflecting on how Ambedkar’s Buddhist thought in general—and specifically these curious philosophical turns—represent both a modernist’s turn to tradition to solve contemporary problems and a traditionalist’s turn to modernity to provide the innovation needed to keep the tradition relevant.
Envisioning Resistance: The Engaged Buddhism of Sulak Sivaraksa
Hung-yok Ip, Oregon State University
Sulak Sivaraksa has, for decades, considered the struggle against Capitalism an important project. By re-inventing Buddhism, he has expanded on the value of such ideas as inter-dependence, compassion, and selflessness for the Thai people’s and Southeast Asians’ resistance to Global Capitalism. This paper is aimed at analyzing how Sivaraksa’s invocation of Buddhism as a way of resistance is based on a complex approach to the issue of identity.
Conceptualizing the incursion of post-war trans-national capital into Thailand as part of the modern history of imperialism and colonialism, Sivaraksa identifies the roots of Capitalism’s economic oppression in the West’s mental domination over Asians. But in his analysis the Asians are guilty of complicity, for, allowing themselves to be mentally colonized, they have aspired after Western-style modernity and thus failed to resist the lure of Capitalist values and practices. There-fore, although class-based identity—the consciousness of suffering in particular—is useful for resistance, what is more important is the oppressed majority’s nativist endeavor to recover their suppressed cultural identity. What Sivaraksa attempts to recover is the Buddhist identity. But in Sivaraksa’s thinking, to be selfless and compassionate the oppressed must free themselves from those intellectual-emotional traits—anger, discontent, the desire to leave the socially undesirable rank of the oppressed, etc.—which are virtually natural ingredients of their class-based or cultural identity. In his view, the freedom from these traits allows the oppressed to develop creative strategies and undertake powerful actions to challenge the Establishment. In this sense, if identity has served as a significant part of the intellectual-emotional foundation of Sivaraksa’s project of resistance, it is the transcendence over identity that defines the strength of the project.
Organizer: Jungmin Seo, University of Chicago
Chair and Discussant: Lynn T. White, III, Princeton University
In the past two decades, social scientists have witnessed contrasted examples of successful and failed political legitimacy in East and Southeast Asian countries. Some have experienced abrupt regime changes even with spectacular economic or administrative performances while others have enjoyed political stability without democratic institutions or good economic performances. To examine this conundrum, the members of this panel will re-investigate diverse state strategies to sustain public loyalty, societal challenges against state discourses of legitimacy, and outside factors that either strengthen or vitiate state governance. This panel has two principle aims. First of all, it is designed to be a genuinely border-crossing panel with a coherent theme but diverse geographic specialties. Through single case studies or small-N comparative studies, participants will compare and contrast the issue of political legitimacy in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India and Malaysia. Second, this panel aims to be an intensive interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars with different approaches: from a normative theory to an empirical test based on survey data, from interstate comparisons to ethnography of state power on the street level, and from economic and administrative performance analysis to interpretations of political discourses. This variety of approaches to a single theme, political legitimacy in Asia, makes the ultimate goal of this panel less the production of unanimous agreement than verification and clarification of differences among diverse approaches. In the process, the panel will provide a valuable chance to envision the future of political legitimacy studies in this region.
Legitimating Rhetorics and Factual Economies in a South Korean Development Dispute
Robert Oppenheim, University of Texas, Austin
In this paper I consider the legitimacy of development projects as an effect contested in debates conjoining governmental and non-governmental actors. The primary case I draw upon is the unfolding of a single phase of a larger development controversy, perennial through the 1990s: the public dispute in 1995–96 over the possible future existence and most appropriate course of a high-speed railway segment through the South Korean historic city of Kyôngju. Politicians, multiple state ministries and agencies, and national and international cultural, historical, and Buddhist advocacy networks joined the fray even as the issue also split Kyôngju political society. My examination in this paper centers on the mobilization of categories to legitimate and de-legitimate various positions and render the reality of "what was going on" on the deployment and struggle over terms such as "national (policy) undertaking" (kukch’aek saôp), "selfishness" (igijuûi), and "public promise" (kongyak). I further seek to consider ways in which such a dispute during the self-consciously democratizing South Korean 1990s was significantly structured by the memory of authoritarian development. Through this consideration, I hope to focus scholarly attention on the salience of historically-situated economies of political facticity.
Political Legitimacy and State Neutrality in India, Malaysia, and China
Bruce Gilley, Princeton University
Existing theories of political legitimacy that assume the existence of an objective (and therefore universal) source of normative legitimacy have been difficult to study for two reasons. One is difference about the appropriate normative theory. The other is the difficulty of empirical testing. In this paper, I propose a normative theory built around the notion of state neutrality. This has the advantages of being both theoretically defensible to most major schools of normative theory as well as empirically testable. I examine initial qualitative evidence of the role of this source of normative legitimacy in India, China, and Malaysia.
Dollars and Ballots: Economic Performance and Regime Legitimacy in Taiwan and Singapore
David Yang, Princeton University
This paper compares and contrasts conceptions of political legitimacy in authoritarian Taiwan and contemporary Singapore. Effective administrative performance is generally thought to be a linchpin of political legitimacy, and Singapore’s "exceptional" status as a highly developed but authoritarian state is commonly attributed to the regime’s distinguished developmental record. Yet, the KMT regime in Taiwan enjoyed an equally impressive developmental record but succumbed to pressures for liberalization at the height of the island’s economic success. Relying on historical survey data collected during the early 1980s in Taiwan as well as more recent survey results from Singapore, I seek to disaggregate the conception of legitimacy into two levels—a particularistic level derived from the administrative performance of particular leaders or administrations and an institutional level rooted in subjective normative acceptance of regime norms. Specific attention will be paid to the conception of legitimacy as promoted by the state (expressed, for instance, in civic education programs) as an instrument of regime consolidation, and its contestation by societal elements seeking broader political participation.
Nationalism and the Problem of Political Legitimacy in China
Jungmin Seo, University of Chicago
The rise of nationalistic discourses in 1990s China has been understood as the product of state propaganda since the Tiananmen Crackdown. Though I partially agree with the thesis that "since the Chinese Communist Party is no longer communist, it must be even more Chinese," I argue that most China scholars overlook the dubious nature of nationalism when it functions as "hegemonic ideology" in society. Since successful nationalism redirects the target of political loyalty from political institutions (party or state) or charismatic political leaders (Mao or Deng) to a "nation," nationalism as a hegemonic ideology constructs the image of an "agency (state/regime)-principal (nation)" relationship in popular political consciousness. When a state or a regime is perceived as an agency, newly created national subjects find an inalienable political right to directly appeal to the principal, that is, the nation. By analyzing newly emerged political discourses in 1990s Chinese society, I contend that the rise of nationalistic discourses vitiated the basis of the Chinese Communist Party’s political legitimacy in a very subtle way.
Session 4: The International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s
Organizer: Tomoko Shiroyama, Hitotsubashi University
Chair: Toru Kubo, Shinshu University
Discussant: Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
Keywords: international order, economic interdependency, British Empire and sterling area, periodical comparison of 1930s and 1950s, Japan, China, Taiwan, India.
This session investigates the nature and formation of the International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s from new perspectives on Asian economic history and international relations.
We have three research subjects closely related to one another. The first is to reconsider the metropolitan-peripheral relationship in Asia in the 1930s and 1950s. We focus in particular on the role of the British pound-sterling area that widely covered the Asian regions through 1930s to 1950s. Our goal is to explore the economic linkages between the British Empire, the sterling area, and Asian countries and to consider their economic and political implications for the development of Asia.
The second is to reveal the formation of inter-regional trade relations within Asia in the 1930s and their revival and transformation in the 1950s. The region-wide economic ties crossing borders of nation sates have attracted much academic interest. We will consider in detail the impact of intra-Asian trade on the international order of Asia, and its linkage with the capitalist world-economy.
The third is to consider continuity and discontinuity between the 1930s and 1950s. As many nation-states newly emerged in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, politically there appears to have been little continuity. However, looking at economic relations, we identify some consistent factors, such as currencies’ links to the pound-sterling. We investigate these formerly neglected aspects of continuity and transformation in order to provide critical insights into the political economy of the region from the pre-World War II period to the beginning of the cold war.
China’s Relations with the International Financial System in the Twentieth Century: Historical Analysis and Contemporary Implications
Tomoko Shiroyama, Hitotsubashi University
The first half of the 1930s, the years following the Great Depression, marked a major shift in the Chinese economy in terms of China’s position in the international system and the Chinese government’s intervention in the domestic economy. Until November 1935, China was virtually the only country in the international monetary system still adhering to the silver standard. Fluctuation in the international price of silver in the 1930s destabilized its economy. Establishing a new monetary system, the foreign exchange standard, required committed government intervention, and ultimately the process of economic recovery and monetary change politicized the entire Chinese domestic economy. Investigating China’s relationship with the international financial system and its influence on domestic political economy, this paper seeks to offer critical insights into China’s position in the East Asian economy as well as modern Chinese state-market relations.
Although there existed close economic inter-dependence between East Asian countries, political conflicts were tense over territory, naval forces, trade, and so on. Taking China’s currency reform in 1935 as a case, this paper investigates how Chinese politicians formulated economic policies under the complex international relations in the area. This paper also argues that the legacy of the currency reform remained in 1950s, pointing out that the international monetary system continued to influence policies of People’s Republic of China as well as of Taiwan.
British Economic Interests and the International Order of Asia in the 1930s
Shigeru Akita, Osaka University
This paper evaluates the role of the United Kingdom in the formation of the International Order of Asia in the 1930s. I will analyze the British economic relationship with Japan, China, and British India and also connect these countries with one another.
In the context of British imperial history, British India has been recognized as a core colony in British "formal empire," while China has been regarded as a typical example of "informal empire" in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The term "informal empire" was mainly applied to areas and regions of the non-European developing countries, while its original definition assumed the unequal political and economic status of these countries. However, the British overseas influence ranged far beyond the confines of formal and informal empires, due to the global network of the City of London and the influence of its financial and service sectors in the capitalist world economy. In the 1930s, the United Kingdom continued to exert financial influence upon Japan and the colonies of other Great Powers through the sterling area by setting "the rules of the game" for international finance in East Asia. At that time, the Chinese Nationalist Government partly manipulated the balance of power in East Asia as a newly emerging nation-state. Given these complexities, I will propose new concepts like "structural power" and "relational power" in order to perceive autonomous activities by the non-European countries as well as to illuminate the extent of British influence upon international relations.
The Business Network of Taiwan Merchants in Postwar China
Man-houng Lin, Academia Sinica
This paper deals with the relationship between the government of the Republic of China (ROC) and Taiwanese merchants in the trade between Taiwan and Japan, 1950–1961, by using primary sources obtained from Taiwan and from Japan. Even some Taiwanese merchants who had a strong Japanese identity before 1945 continued to play an active role in the postwar ROC regime in Taiwan. Different from some prewar politically-inclined elites who had been jailed or killed with the regime transition, the prewar economic elite shows much more continuity. The reason for such continuity is political. The Cold War initiated by the Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950, made the SCAP strengthen the anti-Communist line extending from Japan to Taiwan to Southeast Asia. Such a change reconnected Japan and Taiwan. The Japanese language and cultural background of the Japanized Taiwanese elite turned into an asset to boost the national economy.
Japan’s Commercial Penetration into British India and the Cotton Trade Negotiations in the 1930s
Naoto Kagotani, Kyoto University
The purpose of this paper is to analyze Anglo-Japanese commercial relations during the 1930s, focusing on the problem of the international rivalry between the cotton industries of Britain and Japan in the British Indian market. The major trade friction between Britain and Japan was over cotton textile markets, as a result of bitter commercial rivalry between the Lancashire and Osaka cotton industries. In Japanese political historiography, many studies aim to show the continuity from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 through the second Sino-Japanese War, which started in 1937, to Pearl Harbor in 1941. The historical studies on Japan’s foreign policy tried to trace these processes as the inevitable road to Anglo-Japanese confrontation. However, the emphasis on the continuity of Japanese Imperialism during fifteen years, from 1931 to 1945, tends to ignore the economic aspects and the fact that there could have been alternative courses in the first half of the 1930s, reducing hostilities among some Imperialist States. Anglo-Japanese commercial relations in the 1930s are valuable cases for inquiring into the possibilities of alternative courses. In the first half of the 1930s, Japan was able to take advantage of its proximity to the South and Southeast Asian markets, including the British and Dutch colonies, to compete successfully with European goods. The main factors behind the increase in exports of Japanese cotton textiles were their low prices, which had come about through the rationalization of the cotton industry from the mid-1920s and the drastic devaluation of the Japanese exchange rate in 1932.
Session 22: Beyond Asian Values and the New Rich? Gender and Middle Class-ness in Asia
Organizer and Chair: Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross
Discussant: Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington
Keywords: middle class, gender, Asian Values, socialism, consumption.
Despite the economic and political uncertainty of recent years, images of Asian economies continue to be dominated by terms such as "miracle," "Asian Values," and "the new rich." This panel seeks to move beyond these stereotypes by bringing together anthropologists working in Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and Korea to consider the personal, social, political, and cultural dimensions of the rising middle class in contemporary Asia. Focusing on the intersections between culture, gender, and political economy in personal life and in broader social reproduction, the panel explores three themes. First, we address the conundrum of how to read class. Rather than view middle classes as fundamentally everywhere the same or attribute similarities within Asia to supposed "Asian Values," panelists will address how gender and culture constitute middle class-ness through notions of propriety, morality, and religiosity in ways that reproduce or rework specific structural differences and collective identities. Second, we interrogate how middle-class subjectivities are experienced and interpreted on the ground, as either a fetishized life goal or as an identity shaped in dialogue with other affiliations (like gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and locale). Third, we consider how political discourse shapes class subjectivity in the late socialist regimes of China and Vietnam versus those of Indonesia and Korea. Does middle-class identity always imply "passing" as more wealthy or are there particular historical conditions that make imitating lower classes strategic and desirable? How are these class performances gendered? Exploring these questions can help us answer how and why class matters in Asia.
Middle-Class Identity and Feminist Activism in South Korea
Rebecca N. Ruhlen, University of Washington
Class identity is a contentious topic for activist subcultures in South Korea. The idea of a "middle class" or "average citizen," for activists, is both tantalizing and frustrating, for it seems that this sizable body of the population ought to be ripe for political activity, yet stubbornly resists it. More than a decade after democratization, activists commonly lament that theirs is a "citizens’ movement without any citizens." Some attribute this to the legacy of military dictatorship and its harsh repression of activism. Others note the growing wealth and consumerism of recent decades and blame the emerging middle class for squandering its new economic freedom on petty ambitions.
In the progressive women’s movement, these ideas inform activists’ views of their agenda, but with one twist: women are often seen as a single group that spans social classes, and thus class identity is given less attention than it may deserve in a society that is more stratified than ever. The "middle-class woman" as an idea is at once the most pervasive and the most invisible of all. The movement consciously targets issues that affect lower-class women (e.g., job skills training in a women’s shelter) or elite women (e.g., support for female candidates in local elections). Participants in the women’s movement, meanwhile, are almost all from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds themselves. Issues that primarily address middle-class concerns, however, are spun as universal, not as class-specific. This paper thus addresses the articulation of class, gender, and politicization in the South Korean feminist movement.
Making Class Classy: Middle-Class Respectability, Islamic Piety, and Gender in Urban Java
Carla Jones, Emory University
Forms of Islamic piety have been on the rise in urban Indonesia over the past decade, particularly among middle-class youth. Many young people describe these identities as a personal choice and individual project, often counter to their parents’ preferences. Yet these decisions might also be read as the result of both family influence and a larger class pattern among the urban middle classes. This paper will analyze one key site for the intersection of religion, generation, gender, and consumption—Javanese weddings—to suggest that performances of Islamic piety, particularly for daughters, often concur with family interests and can be read as broadly middle-class responses to popular critiques of middle-class consumer excess.
The Suharto-era trend toward expensive, neo-traditional, aristocratic style weddings among the middle and upper classes was a powerful way to display wealth as cultural rather than political or material privilege. Such displays were emblematic of a national environment in which thinking and talking about class were politically threatening. Post-Suharto, political critiques that ally middle-class privilege with a corrupt elite have made middle-class consumption more problematic. As a result, many middle-class families are proud of their daughters’ choices to marry in austere, less expensive, and seemingly more sincere Islamic ceremonies. Through allying themselves with a religious identity instead of a nationalist identity, middle-class citizens seek to recuperate respectability at a time when class differences are under closer public scrutiny.
Woman, Buddhist, Entrepreneur: Gender, Asian Values, and the Spirit of the Middle Class in Late Socialist Vietnam
Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross
Over the past fifteen years, market-oriented economic policies in Vietnam have spurred the emergence of an urban middle class. This group’s conspicuous material comfort has raised considerable moral, social, and political discomfort in a country whose Confucian heritage and socialist government both have viewed Western-style capitalism and individualism with suspicion. Throughout the 1990s, Vietnamese officials skirted this dilemma by promoting a nationalist model of development based in part on the notion of Asian Values popularized in Singapore. For entrepreneurs eager to dodge popular resentment of their success, this logic provided a loose framework for reconciling the spirit of capitalism with morality. While the vagueness of Asian Values discourse lent it an appealing aura of inclusiveness, the close association between Asian Values and male dominated Confucianism meant that female entrepreneurs were less readily able to gloss their business activities as consistent with virtuous femininity. Faced with this dilemma, what alternative ideologies of self, fate, and morality do women use to rework Asian Values and ameliorate the negative or subversive implications of their financial success?
This paper explores this question by focusing on the life narrative and self-presentation of a prosperous businesswoman: a devout Buddhist who views profit as the natural outcome of her religious quest for virtue and personal enlightenment through hard work. By exploring the links between status, gender, and essentialized cultural or religious identities, this paper demonstrates that middle class-ness should be conceptualized, not simply in material terms, but as a morally contentious, performative subjectivity mediated by gender and politics.
Cultivating Middle-Class Identities in Rural China
Sara Friedman, Washington University, St. Louis
Although class remains something of a taboo subject in late socialist China, the last two decades have witnessed a renewed diversification of the markers of social and economic status. This paper examines the emerging dimensions of middle-class identity in rural Hui’an county on China’s southeast coast. Hui’an faced decades of socialist reform campaigns that aspired to remake local residents as liberated socialist citizens through eradicating ostensibly backward and ethnically ambiguous cultural practices. Yet the generation that came of age in the mid-1990s has been concerned not with the conflict between local norms and socialist ideals, but instead with realizing the lifestyles and values of an economically comfortable class. Crucial to those aspirations has been the concept of "cultivation," itself a keyword in Maoist and post-Mao campaigns that have aimed to transform China’s masses into "high quality" socialist citizens. In Hui’an, "cultivation" is now applied to the children of this generation who benefit from more attentive parental care and improved educational opportunities. As parents aspire to send their children outside of the village for schooling, they face the need for nuclear family and extended kinship wealth, on the one hand, and physical mobility, on the other. The paper asks how a legacy of socialist campaigns that defined civility as largely unattainable within the region’s borders has made mobility beyond Hui’an a marker of middle-class identity. It explores the consequences of this vision of middle-classness for those unable to move who must instead seek alternative routes to wealth and status.
Session 23: Telling It Again: Translation as Creative Performance
Organizer and Chair: Sunyoung Park, Columbia University
Discussant: Uchang Kim, Koryo University
Keywords: cultural translation, East Asian literature
This panel provides a theoretical consideration of recent translation studies in the East Asian cultural context. The panel conceives of translation in a broad sense as an act of reproducing a text, or even a literary theory, across the boundary of languages, cultures, and media. All four panelists share the idea that translation is an interpretive, interceptive performance, in which the translator is engaged in a highly political task of representation. Among the panelists, Ann Choi will challenge the conventional notion of translation as a search for equivalence through a rendering of the relationship between sound and sorrow in Kim Sowol’s poetry. Ming Dong Gu will offer a meta-critique of the critical controversy over Ezra Pound’s translation of the anthology of Chinese poetry Book of Songs. Hsiu-Chuang Deppman will explore the significance and signification of the filmic representation of a literary text by contrasting and comparing Eileen Chang’s short story "Red Rose and White Rose" (1944) with its screen adaptation by Stanley Kwan, Red Rose White Rose (1994). And Sunyoung Park will contest the idea of cultural transplantation regarding Yom Sangsop’s early-1920s naturalist confessionals and argue that the colonial Korean writer was a self-reflective translator of the Japanese naturalist literary convention rather than its imitative practitioner. Together, these papers will demonstrate the productivity and importance of the theoretical considerations of translation as a creative act of re-presenting.
Translating Affect: Sound and Sorrow in Kim Sowol’s Poetry
Ann Y. Choi, Rutgers University
What is the English word for the Korean han? Lexical efforts to denote the term, such as "spite" and "unfulfilled longing," do not articulate the cultural, historical and literary resonances generated by the term. Nor can it be translated through its essentialist rendition as a timeless national treasure. In my paper I theorize that han is the very site where lies the difficulty of translating the poetry of Kim Sowol (1902–1934). This aestheticization of foreclosed desire, I will argue, can be located in the force of affect which accompanied the revival of folk songs in the twenties and raised feeling to a high level of value. My paper will examine how affect became both fodder for nationalism as well as solitary response to the breakdown of Confucian rationalism under the confluence of modernity and colonialism. It will trace how sorrow became a signature mood emanating from Kim Sowol’s poetry and how this historical manifestation of affect might be translated into our present, postmodern context. The task I take on as translator will follow Walter Benjamin’s idea that languages complement rather than mimic each other, as I present Kim Sowol’s poems in English.
Ezra Pound’s Rendition of the Shijing: A Translation or Something Else?
Ming Dong Gu, Rhodes College
The first anthology of Chinese poetry, the Shijing or Book of Songs, has been translated into English by numerous scholars: Bernhard Karlgren, James Legge, and Arthur Waley, just to name a few widely acclaimed translators. While these scholars’ translations are known among Sinologists, the most widely known rendition among the general English reading public is Ezra Pound’s famous or notorious translation. Pound’s rendition is undoubtedly the most controversial version of the Chinese classic. It has won highest praises from creative writers like T. S. Eliot, literary theorists like I. A. Richards, and comparatists like Hugh Kenner, but it has received a low evaluation as a translation. Sinologists do not deny the high literary quality of Pound’s translation, but they have dismissed it as a translation per se because they regard it as a free, untrammeled re-creation or re-writing. Should Pound’s rendition be viewed as a translation? In the past half century, conceptual inquires into translation have shifted from the notion of translation as a linguistic act of faithful rendition of a text from one language into another to the view of translation as an interpretive and negotiative act that privileges the target language inscription in the foreign text and emphasizes cross-cultural representation of creative values. In view of this new orientation, I wish to conduct a re-examination of his translation. By collating some of his translated poems with their original Chinese poems in the local context of his time and his own theory of translation and in the larger context of postmodern theories of translation, I suggest that Pound’s translation anticipated a contemporary theory of translation that stresses the fusion of horizons embodied in the original and target texts.
Reading the Art of Adaptation: The Politics of Love in Red Rose (and) White Rose
Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, Oberlin College
Because filmic representations of fiction are always selective reconstructions, studies of film adaptation tend to confront two major theoretical issues. First, unlike other forms of translation, film adaptation defies any clear mimetic hierarchy between cinema and literature, for the "authenticity" and "authority" (Benjamin 1968) of the original text are now compromised by a cinematic desire and freedom to reconstruct, rather than reproduce, the narrative. Second, a film’s creative appropriation of a story parallels the ways in which all art interacts with historical reality. In the specific context of modern Chinese studies, one could even argue that the potent transformative functions of cinema challenge the credibility of the way Chinese writings represent Chineseness (Chow 1995, 1998; Ang 2001).
My paper studies the art of film adaptation through a careful comparison of Eileen Chang’s "Red Rose and White Rose" (1944) and Stanley Kwan’s "translation" of the story into film bearing nearly the same title, Red Rose White Rose (1994). Chang and Kwan are each representatives of a critical aesthetic movement—Chang’s post-realism between the 1930s and 1940s in China and Kwan’s Second Wave Cinema between the 1980s and 1990s in Hong Kong. Separated by fifty years of eventful history and guided by very different aesthetic principles, these movements nonetheless converge in their critique of China’s misguided 20th-century romance with West.
Confessing the Colonial Self: Yom Sangsop’s Reactivation of the Japanese Confessional Narrative Form in Early-1920s Korea
Sunyoung Park, Columbia University
In this paper, I will challenge the notion of cultural transplantation in the case of early-1920s Korean literature by examining Yom Sangsop’s early writings, his debut story "P’yobonsil-ui ch’onggaeguri" (The green frog in a specimen lab, 1921) and the first novella Mansejon (On the eve of the uprising, 1924) in particular. Both works were written as confessional narratives, in which the first-person narrator records his inner thoughts without much of figurative disguise. This narrative form was representative of Japanese naturalism in its later development and was a dominant literary convention among early-1920s Korean writers. According to Kim Yunsik, Yom Sangsop was a passive recipient of the "transplanted" literary convention. In my discussion, I will confirm that the writer was indeed indebted to Japanese naturalism for his narrative style. Yet, my textual analysis will show how he reactivated, rather than simply transplanted, the confessional narrative form in the social and cultural context of colonial Korea, performing as a cultural translator—rather than a mere imitator—who makes interpretive application of a borrowed convention. As he tried to express his nationalist interiority that consisted of his personal memory of the March First movement, Yom Sangsop found himself struggling against the formal constraints of the naturalist confessional, since a candid revelation of his nationalist thoughts was forbidden by the colonial censorship. The writer’s effort to negotiate between his theme, the narrative form, and the publication constraints led him to deviate from the regular naturalist confessional into the, ruptured confessional of "The Green Frog" and the confessional-turned-travelogue of On the Eve.
Session 24: Cross-Currents in East Asian Buddhism and Buddhist Art, 9th–14th Centuries
Organizer and Chair: Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia
Discussant: Robert M. Gimello, Harvard University
Keywords: China, Korea, Japan, Buddhism, Buddhist art, medieval period.
It is well known that the renewed contacts among China and Korea and Japan in the medieval period gave rise to the flourishing of Zen (K. Son) Buddhism and Zen art, notably monochrome ink paintings. This panel, however, reexamines aspects of the cultural and artistic exchanges in the much-neglected domain of traditional Mahayana Buddhism and Buddhist art in East Asia. Huayan (J. Kegon, K. Hua-eom) Buddhism peaked in East Asia in the 7th and 8th centuries, but art associated with this school of Buddhism flourished for many centuries afterwards. Dorothy Wong’s paper compares Chinese paintings of Huanyan jingbian from Dunhuang (9th–12th centuries) with later Japanese examples (12th–13th centuries), proposing that their differences stem from divergent doctrinal emphases and local artistic conventions. Shih-Shan Susan Huang’s paper re-considers the printed scroll of Wenshu’s Guidance [of Sudhana]’s relocation from Southern Song Hangzhou to Kozan-ji in Kyoto in the context of Myo-e’s (1173–1232) legacy in the revival of Kegon Buddhism and Buddhist art. Mark Blum’s paper examines Shunjo’s (1166–1227) role in introducing continental Buddhist culture to Japan after his extensive stay in China, focusing on the new genre of lineage portraits that Shunjo introduced and on his friendship with the Chinese literatus Lou Yao. Seung Hye Sun’s paper investigates the light symbolism of Tejaprabha Buddha in a 14th-century Korean painting; first introduced to Tang China by Amoghavajra, belief in Tejaprabha incorporated Daoist elements to become a significant cult in East Asia.
The Huayan/Kegon Paintings in China and Japan, 9th–13th Centuries
Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia
Huayan Buddhism (Kegon in Japanese) was a major school of East Asian Buddhism based on the teachings of the Avatamsaka or Flower Garland Sutra. Huayan Buddhism has inspired many art forms, from portrayals of cult deities (Vairocana, Mañjusri and Samanta-bhadra) to popular narratives of Sudhana’s pilgrimage to visit the fifty-three sages. While these subjects are better known and have been well researched, the present paper focuses on the less familiar pictorial representations (called jingbian [Ch.], henso [J.], or transformation tableaux) intended to symbolize the teachings of the sutra. Of ninth- to twelfth-century dates, the extant examples in China are primarily found in the Dunhuang cave-chapels. In Japan, known examples are in the holdings of the Todai-ji (the center of Kegon Buddhism during the Nara period) and the Kozan-ji (the locus of the renaissance of Kegon Buddhism under the leadership of Monk Myo-e in the Kamakura period). The Dunhuang murals of Huayan jingbian portray the theme of the Seven Audiences Places and Nine Assemblies in which the Avatamsaka Sutra was preached, while the Japanese paintings feature saintly figures associated with the sutra. These two groups of paintings are drastically different in content and composition, although the Japanese ones are said to follow contemporary Song and Yuan examples from China. The paper examines the religious and artistic contexts in which these Huayan paintings were created and used, proposing that their disparities may relate to differences in doctrinal emphases and local artistic conventions.
The Relocation of the Printed Scroll Wenshu’s Guidance from Hangzhou to Kozan-ji, Kyoto
Shih-shan Susan Huang, University of Washington
Among the understudied visual materials that document Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges in the medieval period is the exquisite printed scroll entitled The Illustrations of Wenshu’s Guidance. Wenshu’s Guidance illustrates the well-known story of the Child Sudhana’s visit of fifty-three sages in search of enlightenment, based on the "Gandhavyuha" chapter of the Huayan Sutra. A colophon printed at the beginning of the scroll indicates that the scroll was the product of the Family Sutra Shop of the Official Jia, a private publisher specializing in sutra printing that was active in the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou. The narrative motifs exhibited in the scroll and the accompanying comments by Monk Foguo provide a vivid glimpse of both the Huayan (J. Kegon) teachings promoted by the lay Buddhist societies in Hangzhou and the active exchange of visual vocabulary between court art and popular religious art. Although it is not clear when the scroll was transported to Japan, several registration marks on the scroll suggest that it was once in the collection of Kozan-ji, a prestigious temple founded by Monk Myo-e in 1206. Japanese textual sources hint that Myo-e himself made sketches of Sudhana from a Chinese printed book and later even commissioned a painter to make paintings based on his sketches. This paper re-considers the relocation of Wenshu’s Guidance from Hangzhou to Kozan-ji in the contexts of Myo-e’s advocation of Kegon teachings and his legacy in Kozan-ji.
The Role of Shunjo Risshi in Bringing Song Culture to Japan
Mark Blum, State University of New York, Albany
Shunjo Risshi, or Vinaya Master Shunjo (1166–1227) was one of the first Japanese monks from the early Kamakura period to travel to China during the Southern Song dynasty but his contributions have been largely overlooked because the lineage he founded at Sennyu-ji did not grow into a major new sect of Buddhism. This paper explores his career with particular attention paid to the contributions he made to Buddhist culture in Japan after living in China from 1199 to 1211. Shunjo in fact distinguished himself in many ways and was responsible for introducing to Japan a host of new and significant cultural forms, such as ink paintings, diptych or triptych portraits, recent Buddhist writings from the Song, and even Zhu Xi’s commentaries on the Confucian classics. Given a matching set of portraits of Vinaya Masters Daoxuan and Yuanzhao to bring home, after his return a mimetic portrait of Shunjo was added by a Chinese artist in Kyoto and all three were then displayed in his temple as a set, the earliest use of this form to display lineage in Japan. The paper also examines the friendship that developed between Shunjo and Lou Yao, a Chinese aristocratic literatus who suffered in the anti-Zhu Xi persecution of that time and yet wrote the inscriptions on the two Vinaya Master portraits. Lou Yao’s dating and signing of his inscriptions are regarded today as among the earliest such examples.
The Light Symbolism of Tejaprabha Buddha in East Asian Art
Seung Hye Sun, National Museum of Korea
This paper explores the symbolic relationship between Buddhistic light and stellar light in fourteenth-century East Asian Art, focusing on Tejaprabha Buddha, who radiates light from his pores to intervene in natural disasters for the sake of humanity. Light has multiple meanings in Buddhism. Foremost, it symbolizes the spiritual enlightenment of the believers. Furthermore, it also indicates divine effulgence as holy power in Buddhism. Whereas the first type of light is based in the mind of the follower, the second type originates from the Buddha. The paper will demonstrate how the second type of light functions in a salvific mode, with light symbolizing interventions against disasters by Tejaprabha Buddha. The second interpretation of light symbolism was made possible because of a historical-geographical merger between Buddhism and Daoism in China, Korea, and Japan. Tejaprabha Buddha first appeared in the Chinese Tang Dynasty, but it was not until the Song Dynasty that the deity was introduced to Korea and Japan. It first took hold during the Korean Goryeo Dynasty and in the Japanese Kamakura period around the fourteenth century. The paper focuses on a fourteenth-century Korean painting entitled Tejaprabha Buddha in which the Buddha radiates the Great Light with Nine Planets, Twelve Stars, and Twenty-Eight Constellations in order to bring harmony to natural world, thereby saving humanity from any misfortune.
Session 42: Transmissions and Transformations: Esoteric Buddhist Traditions in East Asia
Organizer: David B. Gray, Rice University
Chair and Discussant: Brian O. Ruppert, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Keywords: Buddhism, China, Japan, Tibet, ritual.
A basic premise of this panel is that Esoteric Buddhism is a trans-regional Asian socio-religious phenomenon, and that it needs to be studied in a way that facilitates the exploration of its trans-cultural movements, its transmissions and transformations across national and cultural boundaries. While largely staying within the East Asian cultural area, this panel also seeks to explore the connections between the Esoteric Buddhisms of this area with those of Inner Asia, particularly Tibet. Two of these papers, those by David B. Gray and Hun Yeow Lye, address Chinese Esoteric Buddhism, during the Northern Song and Ming-Qing dynasties respectively, but do so in a manner that takes into account Esoteric Buddhism as a trans-regional cultural phenomenon, in these cases by investigating the connections with Tibet. Sarah Fremermen continues this trans-regional perspective, looking at the transmission of a single ritual tradition from China and Central Asia to Japan and exploring the transformations that took place as it crossed cultural boundaries. Finally, Lori Meek’s paper sheds light upon the ritual cycle that regulates the life of a distinct Buddhist community, in this case that of the Shingon-Ritsu nuns of the imperial nunnery Hokkeji during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This paper examines the development of an Esoteric Buddhist tradition in Japan three hundred years following the tradition’s transmission from China. The discussant to this panel will be Brian Ruppert, a distinguished scholar of East Asian Esoteric Buddhism.
Making Wishes Come True: Japanese Transformations of Nyoirin Kannon
Sarah Fremerman, Stanford University
Beginning in the Nara period, faithful attempts to transmit Chinese esoteric Buddhist lineages to Japan gave rise to a whole new body of esoteric teachings (mikkyo). One striking example of this phenomenon is the cult of Nyoirin Kannon (Sk. cintamanicakra avalokitesvara, Ch. Ruyilun Guanyin), a Tantric manifestation of Avalokitesvara depicted holding a wish-fulfilling jewel (cintamani) and a "wheel of dharma." In Japan, Nyoirin gained a widespread popularity that her cult had never claimed in China—she now served as a guardian of esoteric power associated with the cintamani and thus also identified with relics, as well as a beloved granter of worldly benefits. As the bodhisattva became identified with several feminine deities in Japan, particularly the "jewel woman" (J. gyokujo), her gender changed from male to female and she became a favorite object of devotion for women. Yet Nyoirin iconography retained a distinctly Central Asian flavor, particularly her posture of "royal ease" often found in paintings at Dunhuang and other sites, but less common in Japan. One rich source of information on Nyoirin’s cult in both China and Japan is Bodhiruci’s translation of the Dharani Sutra of Cintamanicakra (Ruilun tuoluoni jing), which gives a description of the bodhisattva and the esoteric ritual centered on the recitation of her dharani, identified as the cintamani. Japanese sculptures and paintings of Nyoirin, and comparison with their Chinese predecessors, provide further clues for understanding how the cult of Nyoirin Kannon developed in Japan.
Funny, You Don’t Look (Esoteric) Buddhist: Yuqie yankou, a Late Imperial Chinese Rite
Hun Yeow Lye, Warren Wilson College
In the year 1382, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) issued a decree through the Ministry of Rites formally recognizing a category of Buddhist ritual specialists known as jiao or yuqie monastics. Chief among the rites performed by these monastics is the Yuqie yankou (Yoga-Rite of Flaming-Mouth). Inspired by translations of an Indian text in the seventh century, Chinese Buddhists have weaved together a historically and culturally diverse collection of liturgies, oral traditions, meditative techniques, and operatic styles over a period of almost a millennium to construct this rite. Tibetan influences from the 13th and 17th centuries are also apparent in this rite. It is one of the most colorful and complex Chinese Buddhist rites still performed today and it is regarded as an advanced "esoteric" rite.
Interest in "esoteric Buddhism" in East Asia has increased in recent years. While most studies have centered on a re-evaluation of the history of the formative period of esoteric Buddhism in China and its later transmission and development in Japan, this paper gives a snapshot of esoteric Buddhism in late imperial China by analyzing the Huashan Yankou liturgy, an influential Yuqie yankou liturgy first compiled in 1693. This analysis will highlight what constituted esoteric Buddhism for Chinese Buddhists in late imperial China—touching on issues such as the rubrics of and relationship between "exoteric" and "esoteric" and competing discourses on liturgical orthodoxy and ritual efficacy.
Reading the Rituals of Japan’s Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Esoteric-Vinaya Nuns
Lori Meeks, University of Puget Sound
It has often been assumed that nuns living in medieval Japan did not engage in serious monastic practice. Many have suggested that while men performed difficult rituals, women simply prayed for birth in the Pure Land. The literature surviving from the thirteenth century revival of the imperial nunnery Hokkeji, however, suggests that its Shingon-Ritsu (Esoteric-Vinaya) nuns pursued an arduous ritual program that even included practices such as ajikan (meditation on the Sanskrit letter "A") and zazen samadhi. My paper will attempt to sketch the basic ritual program of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Hokkeji nuns through a careful examination of the Hokke metsuzaiji nenju gyoji ("Yearly Events of the Lotus Temple for the Eradication of Transgressions"), a calendary ritual guide compiled by Hokkeji’s nuns. This rich document not only lists numerous rituals to be performed on a regular basis, but it also provides the names of donors who contributed funds for the performance of certain rituals. It therefore indicates which texts and rituals were most central to Hokkeji practice, while simultaneously pointing to the relationship between ritual and patronage. In discussing the contents of the ritual guide, I will draw on related texts: detailed precepts ordination diagrams, tonsure diaries, documents related to relic worship, and temple origin stories (engi). I will also compare the rituals of Shingon-Ritsu nuns to those of Shingon-Ritsu monks. Through this fully contextualized study of Hokkeji ritual life, I will illustrate the degree to which Shingon-Ritsu nuns created and maintained an arduous ritual program of their own.
Ritual Power, Imperial Power, and Censorship: A Comparative Study of the Transmission of Esoteric Buddhist Traditions
David B. Gray, Rice University
Esoteric Buddhism has typically portrayed itself as a particularly efficacious form of Buddhism, one which, by virtue of its rich array of ritual arts, is potent in both spiritual and secular spheres. Esoteric Buddhist traditions have often used this portrayal to secure patronage, a notable example being Amoghavajra’s long years of service to several Tang emperors. But this same claim for power could also serve as an obstacle to securing support, particularly in an East Asian cultural context. This is because in so far as these claims are accepted Esoteric Buddhist institutions could be seen as a competing locus of power, a view encouraged by the antinomian nature of a sizable proportion of esoteric Buddhist literature. In this paper I propose to explore the reception of the newly translated Esoteric Buddhist literature during the Northern Song Dynasty, and I will argue that such transgressive elements played an important role in the ultimate failure of these scriptural and ritual traditions to gain acceptance in China. I will compare this transmission with the successful transmission to Tibet which occurred during the same period of time, one which, despite its ultimate success, did face resistance at the time. I will argue that the relative strength of imperial power in one case (with the concomitant power to enact and enforce censorship), and the relative weakness of centralized power in the other, was a decisive factor in the failure and success of these traditions in these respective cultural spheres.
Organizer: Laura D. Jenkins, University of Cincinnati
Chair and Discussant: Mayfair Yang, University of California, Santa Barbara
Keywords: religion, modernity, state, nationalism, civil society.
Featuring scholars of political science, history, religion, anthropology, and Asian studies and cases ranging from East to South Asia, this panel explores political and social tensions over religion in early-20th-century states. Each paper highlights attempts to remove, control, or reform "superstition" in favor of officially recognized, "civic," or "high" religions. Each author addresses popular resistance to such efforts, ranging from hybridization, to heterodoxy, to conversion.
Religious revival and survival shaped civic life. Nedostup observes how new religious associations and customs arose in response to Chinese Nationalist anti-superstition campaigns. Stalker complicates the idea of the civic by contrasting the ideology of State Shinto as civic duty with the Oomoto sect’s ability to institutionalize access to prohibited religious practices. Kent argues that untouchable conversion campaigns created schools, meetings, newsletters, and other building blocks of civil society. Jenkins notes that one response to these campaigns, mass conversion to Buddhism, empowered lower castes by confounding official categories and offering some ideological and institutional independence.
Rather than re-debating the line between state and society, we argue that the very idea of the "civil" in these contexts emerged from an amalgam of state policies and societal forces. Religion was a key locus of conflict and creativity. Yang’s work on indigenous civil societies encountering modern states and her attention to comparative postcolonial theory makes her an ideal border-crossing discussant. All panelists will read her forthcoming JAS article in preparation for an interactive discussion. The format will be 15-minute papers, 30-minute discussant interaction, 30-minute discussion with audience.
Reading Resistance to the Chinese Nationalist Campaigns against Superstition, 1927–1937
Rebecca Nedostup, Boston College
In their efforts to create a rational, modern society, the architects of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime in Nanjing radically misconstrued the nature of Chinese religious practice. They attempted to enumerate and classify habits that were stubbornly syncretic and eclectic, and they focused on belief as the essence of religion, to the exclusion of ritual. They risked the ill will of the very population they hoped to mobilize by launching attacks on religious customs, persons, and property. It is not surprising, therefore, that the range of response to the Kuomintang anti-superstition campaigns included both violent uprisings and quietly persistent offerings at the empty shells of confiscated temples. Yet in addition, the leaders of established Buddhist institutions and new religious societies often attempted to fit themselves into the Nationalist social and political scheme, creating long-lasting organizations in the process. Others attempted to create meaning from the new political images and ceremonies by melding them with religious rites. The goal of this paper is to analyze and problematize the matter of resistance to government projects of religious classification and repression. In the main region of KMT control, adaptation, hybridization, and negotiation resulted as often as outright opposition to the party’s programs. Kuomintang leaders faced failure on their own terms because of the inherent difficulty in distinguishing legitimate "religion" from illicit "superstition" in the Chinese context. Still, their efforts altered the political and social landscape in which religion was practiced, albeit in ways the modernizers did not foresee.
Religious Revival in Imperial Japan: Oomoto’s Heterodox Shintoism
Nancy K. Stalker, University of Texas, Austin
Unlike other late modernizing nations established under principles of secularism, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 represented the return of a divine emperor, purportedly a direct descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, to national rule. Meiji oligarchs bolstered the new state’s legitimacy with the emperor’s spiritual authority, conflating national and religious identity. Bureaucrats experimented with methods of suppression, management, and propagation through the 1940s to ensure that religious institutions supported the foundational mythology and goals of the nation-state. Simultaneously, Meiji leaders recognized that separation of church and state was desirable for nations aspiring to great power status. They declared that State Shinto was not a religion but the civic duty of all subjects. State Shinto was a sanitized, "Protestant" version stripped of "superstitious" practices deemed "backwards" under the Western gaze, such as faith healing or exorcism.
This paper describes how Oomoto, a heterodox Shinto sect with a large national following, posed a threat to state authority. Oomoto’s re-interpretation of the myths of ancient Shinto classics used a mystical philological technique to question imperial authority and champion popular religious aspiration. Oomoto advocated practices like spirit possession and programs of radical, egalitarian economic and social reform to unite religion and governance, flaunting legal restrictions and elite, rationalist mores. Despite condemnation by the authorities and the mainstream press, Oomoto attracted a wide range of urban and rural individuals who rejected the Westernized materialist identity advocated by the state in favor of a nostalgic and romantic national identity rooted in traditional religious belief and practice.
"An Unseemly Scramble for Harijans": Religious Conversion Campaigns in South India, 1936
Eliza Kent, Colgate University
In October 1935, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar stunned the world with his pledge that he would not die a Hindu. Ambedkar’s announcement set off a flurry of efforts by people across the political and religious spectrum to win the loyalties of Dalits ("untouchables"), those groups traditionally relegated to the bottom of the Indian social hierarchy. In the next few years, Protestant missionaries, leaders of the reformist Hindu Arya Samaj, and Gandhians who fought for the rights of Dalits to enter Hindu temples all initiated campaigns to improve the social conditions of Dalits by inducting them into a form of religion they regarded as superior. In this paper, I examine the rise of mass religious conversion in the 1930s as a strategy used by disenfranchised groups to gain a foothold within the Indian political arena. Many skeptics saw these campaigns as cynical efforts by religious leaders to maximize their influence within the nascent Indian nation-state, in which political representation was largely based on religious identity. And yet, such a view neglects the fact that religious revitalization campaigns did not involve only electoral politics, but also the creation of schools, meetings, newsletters, and other building blocks of civil society. While historians have often seen the mass conversion campaigns of the 1930s as a low point in Indian history, in which religious experience was cheapened by becoming intermingled with secular interests, one can also view these campaigns as instrumental in the creation of civil institutions in pre-Independence India that incorporated Dalit interests.
Buddhist Revival and Modernity in India: The Politics of Identity Change
Laura D. Jenkins, University of Cincinnati
Dalits (untouchables) in India converted to Buddhism, Islam and Christianity in large numbers over the last century to escape the Hindu caste system. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a principle author of India’s constitution, was convinced that constitutional reform of caste alone would not empower his community. He vowed in 1935 that "I will not die a Hindu." On October 14, 1956, he and between 300,000 to 600,000 other Dalits converted to Buddhism, followed by millions more in the following years. The twenty years between Dr. Ambedkar’s announcement and conversion straddled India’s independence (1947) and new constitution (1950), a period in which the emerging Indian state and civil society constructed official majority and minority communities and codified rights. The Dalits’ incipient departure from the majority Hindu community for an unspecified religion both challenged colonial policies that lumped untouchables in with Hindus and upset nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi’s hopes to maintain unity by reforming Hinduism from within. Based on my 2002 research, including interviews with Buddhist converts of 1956 and archival research in India and London, I argue that this mass conversion, disrupting both colonial rule and the anti-colonial tactics of dominant groups, also challenged premises associated with "modern" state building—the assumptions that power is secular and religion irrational. Dr. Ambedkar was simultaneously committed to rationality and civil rights and to his deeply spiritual quest for a different religion. His choice to revive Buddhism was inspired by its potential as an act of political protest and its promise of spiritual empowerment.
Session 44: International Migration and Ethnic Relations in East Asia
Organizer: Barry Sautman, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Chair and Discussant: John J. Lie, University of California, Berkeley
A recent large-scale international migration of workers and others has re-shaped ethnic relations in East Asia. Before the 1990s, Korea and Japan were perceived as mono-ethnic, Hong Kong was seen as overwhelmingly Chinese, and Taiwan’s ethnic spectrum was largely based on the time of arrival of one’s ancestors from mainland China. Today, these countries and regions have increasingly diverse populations that incorporate migrants from scores of lands, many of whom have settled or seek to settle in host countries.
The panel will examine responses to the influx of transnational migrants in East Asia. States and civil societies have used migrants to shape majority population self-representations by distinguishing "us" from "them" groups. Elites have resisted immigrant incorporation by elaborating schemes of highly differentiated citizenship rights that reflect the needs of business for low-cost labor, as well as exclusionary nationalism and ethnic animus.
Migrants have responded to their subordinate status by adopting varied patterns of accommodation and resistance. These include activism based on universal human rights principles and local socio-political contexts, stimulating support for broadened immigrant rights among sections of the majority populations and external actors. Some advances in rights have resulted, but ethnic hierarchies have also congealed. The papers gauge the ways in which new configurations of migration and ethnicity are likely to affect the evolution of national identities, social movements, and political economies in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, with implications for the developing center of East Asia, China.
Exclusionary Policy and Differential Assimilation of Immigrant Workers in Japan
Keiko Yamanaka, University of California, Berkeley
Since the late 1980s, Japan has received an influx of diverse global immigrants from Asia and Latin America, while its official policy prohibits unskilled foreigners from employment. As a result, in response to labor shortages in occupations shunned by Japanese, "back doors" have emerged through which migrant laborers have entered. Japan hosts more than half a million newcomers of various immigration statuses, nationalities, ethnicities and classes.
The Japanese government has neglected to develop policies and programs that would allow immigrants to be incorporated into national systems of social welfare, social security, public education, and local voting. Industries that depend heavily on their service treat them as a pool of temporary, inexpensive labor without acknowledging their rights, forcing immigrants to adopt varying degrees and patterns of assimilation into Japanese society, culture, and economy depending on their legal status, institutional support, and the social/cultural capital embedded in their community.
There have been spontaneous responses among Japanese citizens to immigrants’ mounting problems. Labor unions and professional and religious organizations have assisted immigrants in meeting their medical, educational, and other everyday needs while also organizing campaigns advocating their rights. In the context of a recent shift to a low-growth economy, neo-liberal politics, and an aging population, civil activism has emerged at an unprecedented and increasing level. This paper will address topics related to differential assimilation of immigrants and the social/political roles played by citizens’ groups, including: (1) theories of immigrant incorporation and "governance from below"; (2) historical contexts of immigrant incorporation and resistance; (3) recent development of the new civil society movement; (4) patterns of differential assimilation among immigrants of diverse backgrounds; and (5) policy suggestions and strategies for civil action at the local and national levels.
Hong Kong as a Semi-Ethnocracy: "Race," Migration, and Citizenship in a Globalized Region
Barry Sautman, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Hong Kong’s post-coloniality has coincided with peak migration to the Special Administrative Region from Southeast Asia and the Chinese mainland. Non-Chinese and Recent Mainland Migrants (RMM) are now more than ten percent of the population. An ethnic hierarchy in access to substantive citizenship rights and social status has emerged, with Hong Kong Chinese at its apex, and RMMs, other East Asians and Westerners at the next level, South Asians a lower stratum, and Southeast Asian women domestic workers, whose migration accounts for most of the SAR’s newfound ethnic heterogeneity, at its base.
This paper relates the concept of semi-ethnocracy to Hong Kong’s system of racial inferiorization and details how the SAR’s government by businessmen both countenances and promotes ethnic stratification linked to concomitant class and gender oppression. It argues that semi-ethnocracy arises from the inter-related hegemony of Hong Kong tycoon elites who abhor democracy and civil liberties, the fusion of their worldview with that of the PRC’s rulers, and Hong Kong’s imbrication in a globalization that generates growing gaps in the political power and living conditions of nations, ethnic groups, classes, and genders. Semi-ethnocracy in Hong Kong is shown to be part of a "global apartheid" that results from the intersection of migration, racism, and the world system and assigns places in an ethnic order based on categories of citizenship, semi-citizenship, and alienage.
Political Activism and the Expansion of Rights for Transnational Migrant Workers: South Korea and Japan in Comparative Perspective
Timothy C. Lim, California State University, Los Angeles
This paper examines, from a comparative perspective, the process of rights expansion for foreign (or transnational) migrant workers in South Korea and Japan. In both countries, the phenomenon of trans-national worker migration has increased steadily and significantly since the late 1980s (and will likely continue to grow stronger in the decades to come). In a less steady, but still significant way, the rights of transnational migrant workers in both Korean and Japanese society have also improved, but not necessarily for the same reasons, nor in exactly the same manner. The purposes of this paper are: (1) to delineate the different processes by which the rights of transnational migrant workers in South Korea and Japan have expanded, and (2) to explicate the essential reasons for these differences. It is clear, I argue, that Japan and Korea’s divergent institutional and socio-political contexts account for much of the differences in rights expansion, but less clear is the role of political activism. Indeed, my analysis will focus on the role of political activism in the process of rights expansion for transnational migrant workers, and, based on this analysis, will argue that political activism will likely play an increasingly central role in the politics of transnational worker migration, not just in South Korea and Japan, but throughout Asia.
"Importing" Foreigners: The Guest Worker Program in Taiwan
Yen-Fen Tseng, National Taiwan University
Designed as a kind of guest worker program, Taiwan’s policy of importing foreign labor was created primarily to meet the labor market demand of the late 1980s. However, this article argues that introducing and implementing a foreign workers policy also offers an opportunity for a modern state to express its very fundamental ideologies related to nationalism and the politics of difference. This paper focuses on analyzing various state interests that lie behind both the formulation and evolution of the foreign labor policy.
The main arguments are as follows: First, the introduction of guest workers was a decision initially made to keep indigenous businesses within national borders. Operating under the idea of economic nationalism, the state chose such means to respond to a "shortage" of low-skilled labor claimed by several industries that threatened plant closings and offshore production. Second, the state resists the prevalent employers’ preference for mainland Chinese laborers due to their assumed language and cultural commonness. The government’s resistance stems from a fear of having the recently consolidated national identity shaken up once again. This policy presents an opportunity to reconsolidate the sense of "who we are" and also a sense that "they are not us." Third, operating as a guest worker program, Taiwan policy has no way to incorporate these newcomers as potential citizens, thus revealing a chance for the state to define "who can be us."
Organizer: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
A Philosophical Interpretation of Taego Pou’s Odes to Enlightenment
Chan Lee, University of Hawaii, Manoa
I investigate the philosophical aspects of the Odes to Enlightenment, written by Taego Pou, one of Korea’s Chan masters as well as the patriarch of the Caoxi sect in Korea. The enlightenment of Buddhist monks is significantly related to the poetic atmosphere in the Chan tradition, which is symbolized by "special transmission outside the scriptural teachings." The enlightenment of Chan Buddhist monks is usually expressed through illogical sayings, bizarre behaviors, or inscrutable spells. The monks might have realized that it is impossible to describe the reality of Buddhist enlightenment through normal language. Therefore, the monks often express the great delight of enlightenment in poetic form.
Pou wrote three odes to enlightenment in his life. The differences among the odes can be examined chronologically, for each ode is colored by the time at which Pou wrote it. It is important to analyze Pou’s with a Taoist perspective because Chan Buddhism was established through its interaction with Chinese philosophy, especially Taoism. Thus, I entitle three odes as follows: the first ode is defined as "Overcoming Distinction and Perception," the second one as "Declaration of Wholeness," and the final one as "The Return to Ordinariness."
This critical analysis of the odes leads us not only to deepen our understanding of Buddhist enlightenment but also to exploit a new role of literature as a tool embodying the religious experience of enlightenment. Furthermore, it is the tentative conclusion of this paper that achieving enlightenment means grasping the value of experience and the recovery of ordinariness.
Forced Migration and Repatriation: The Experience of Sri Lanka’s Northern Muslim Community
Cynthia M. Caron, Cornell University
In October 1990, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.) gave the Muslim community of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province twenty-four hours to leave the area with whatever they could carry. As a result, 75,000 Muslims were displaced from their homes and were resettled into refugee camps in Puttalam district. Over the past 13 years, these internal refugees either have continued to live in camps or have tried to settle into the local community. Since the 2002 cease-fire between the L.T.T.E and Government of Sri Lanka, discussions have been held between the Government and representatives of this expelled community to make arrangements for their safe return to the North. This visual presentation uses maps, graphs, photographs, and biographical time lines to document and to examine the experience of forced migration. Maps and graphs will record demographic changes associated with war-induced migration and will situate the 1990 Muslim expulsion within larger processes of internal displacement that have been associated with Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. Biographical time lines will document important moments in refugee camps life for particular families and outline their decision making as they discuss whether or not the family should return home. Excerpts from interviews with internally-displaced persons will highlight both reasons for and conditions of return or reasons for remaining and further integrating into local communities in Puttalam district. This presentation demonstrates the importance of understanding the decision-making process to repatriate in relationship to Sri Lanka’s current peace negotiations, in general, and social reconciliation and economic reconstruction, in particular.
Changing Images of Beauty in Hindi Film: Cultural Globalization and Imaginings of Class, Gender, and Nation
Steve Derne, State University of New York, Geneseo
This poster compares Hindi film images of beauty in the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to examine how cultural globalization may shape imaginings of class, gender, and nation. In 1991, conditions attached to an IMF loan rapidly opened the Indian economy, making cable television and Hollywood films widely available for the first time. Hindi films’ depictions of male and female beauty were transformed in response to these changes. Following transnational imaginations, Hindi films increasingly celebrated feminine thinness and masculine muscularity. Gordon Matthews and others have argued that with cultural globalization, consumption-based consumer affiliations become core identities, eroding national identities. Using ethnographic research conducted in India in 2001, the poster suggests that elite Indians often now see themselves as a transnational middle class that embraces transnational standards of beauty which they pursue through cosmetics, fashion, and workout regimes. Elite Indians are proud of Indians’ ability to win beauty contests based on transnational standards. As a result, at least for the elite, transnational imaginings of class increasingly usurp national identity. These transformed images of beauty are also transforming imaginations of gender, as maleness is increasingly associated with violent masculinity and femaleness is associated with a thinness (or absence) that limits women’s active use of public space.
Linguistic Imperialism in Japan: Academic Location and Dislocation of Dialects (Hogen) from Meiji to Present
Keiko Ikeda, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Hogen, or regional dialects have been a long-enduring theme of research among national studies (kokugaku) in Japan, particularly for the widely encompassing department called kokugogaku (national language studies). Recently, a few Japanese scholars have pointed out that in kokugogaku dialectal diversity, indeed the notion of hogen itself, is portrayed in a way which readily reflects deep-rooted (and still extant) nationalism (Yasuda, 1999; Lee, 1999; Oguma, 1998). This paper adopts a similar critical view, and describes historical and contemporary phenomena that impinge Japanese dialect studies. The first half of the paper analyzes the language planning conducted in Japan under the Meiji government, the central aim being standardization and unification of the Japanese language. In the process, regional varieties underwent linguistic re-location and were brought under the umbrella taxonomy of the Japanese language as "dialects." In some cases such assimilation was politically motivated and coercive. This paper shows two most salient illustrations, one being the case of Okinawan (Ryukyu) languages, and the other enforced use of Japanese language in the colonized territories during the era of Imperial Japan. The second half of the paper focuses on the contemporary status of hogen, particularly in relation to recent activities in the Center of National Language Research (kokuritsu kokugo kenkyujo). I critically review their 1993 statement, which states their policy to preserve and promote dialectal variations (Hogen no Soncho ‘respecting dialects’), and further examine its effect on vernacular attitudes towards dialectal varieties of the Japanese people as well as their actual linguistic behaviors in everyday communication.
Contesting Peace at Yasukuni Shrine: What Happens on August 15th?
Brian J. Masshardt, University of Hawaii, Manoa
On August 15th, Yasukuni Shrine is the scene of political protests where Japan’s history and future are challenged by both right and left. While framing analysis of Yasukuni Shrine often looks through the lens of nationalism or militarism, the process and mechanisms of protest are better examined through democracy. Why are these groups at this place whose name means "peaceful country," how did they get there, and what mechanisms do they utilize?
This poster session highlights the plurality of grassroots political activity that occurred during the last three years on August 15th around Yasukuni Shrine and the greater Kudan memorial district. As such, a variety of actors converge on the Shrine in either protest or protection of the Shrine, and the messages they bring allow for an analysis of Japanese democracy.
In addition, the "Yasukuni Issues" are often not confined spatially or chronologically. However, analyzing the conduct of citizen’s groups on August 15th provides an opportunity to clearly view the reactions engendered by state sponsored political action. The purpose of this poster session is to: first, analyze the frames the three groups select in either protecting or protesting the shrine; second, highlight the mechanisms and processes utilized to express the frame; and third, examine the implications grassroots political action has for Japanese democracy.
Kanji-Kana Dichotomy: An Experimental Comparison of Kanji and Kana Processing
Mohammed Shafiullah, University of Teesside
Kana are regular moraic characters and the relationship between Kana and their pronunciation is transparent. By contrast the pronunciation of Kanji is heavily context dependent. They normally represent morphemes. Previous studies have demonstrated that access to semantic representations for words written in Kana are normally via a phonological mediation (e.g., Allport, 1979; Morton and Sasanuma, 1984). On the other hand, access to semantic representations for words written in Kanji is without any phonological mediation (e.g., Kaiho, 1976). Most previous studies have not addressed the fact that there is a part-of-speech bias in the usage of Kanji and Kana words. Kanji are mostly used for nouns and stems of verbs, whereas Hiragana are normally used for grammatical markers. Kana transcriptions of corresponding Kanji are not only familiar to the readers—they are almost always visually longer than Kanji. Any comparison of processing differences requires controls for these factors. The present study reports a series of experiments which control for visual familiarity and word length. Using a semantic classification task the present study demonstrates that words normally written in Kana can access meaning as fast as words normally written in Kanji. However, when a naming task is being used access to phonology for words written in Kana is significantly faster than for those written in Kanji. This demonstrates that native Japanese readers can switch Kana processing strategies on demand, but the semantic bias for Kanji processing makes such switching difficult.
Indexing Identities: Longitudinal Analysis of Young Japanese Women’s Speech
Makiko Takekuro, University of California, Berkeley
This study examines speeches of the same cohort of speakers at three different times, based on conversations among six Japanese women collected in their early 20s (Data Set I), mid-20s (Data Set II), and late-20s (Data Set III). The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to argue longitudinal changes in their use of sentence-final particles and honorifics; and (2) to demonstrate the dynamic interplay between these linguistic forms and interactive context.
First, I show that honorifics and feminine forms of sentence-final particles are increasingly used as these women get older and enter new social roles. I suggest that the speakers’ aging and change in social roles are influential factors that interact with their development of linguistic practices and construction of identities. Gaining new social roles over the years encourages speakers to behave differently and to use honorifics and feminine forms of sentence-final particles more naturally on a regular basis. While social norms motivate women to speak an "ideal feminine" variety, they project images of "proper woman" in their linguistic practices as part of their identities. Second, using Silverstein’s (1976) "creative" (marked) and "presupposing" (unmarked) aspects of language usage, I argue that the indexical ground of these linguistic signs changes dynamically, interacting with the interactive context and larger social norms. Data show that many of the seemingly "creative" uses of these linguistic forms in Japanese can be reinterpreted as "presupposing" in situated contexts. Through these indexes, the speakers negotiate and construct their identities in the interactive context.
The Politics of Anti-Americanism in the Age of Globalization: A Case of Japan
Yasushi Watanabe, Keio University
Anti-Americanism could now raise its head across the globe. The more globalization that promotes standardization advances, the more it stimulates localities’ longing and yearning for cultural diversity and originality. Various localities around the world are struggling, one way or another, to make sense of the predominance and ubiquity of the United States in terms of both "hard power" and "soft power."
I would like to examine this phenomenon by focusing on Japan’s neo-anti-Americanism since the late 1990s—a new combination of nationalism, resentment against what Japanese perceive to be an isolationist U.S. ignoring Japan, and fear of American domination. For example, more than 200 books of non-scholarly quality and anti-American flavor have been published in the past few years. I intend to demonstrate the way in which "America" is constructed in recent popular literature on the U.S. and how it is propagated, consumed, and appropriated in contemporary Japan, and to investigate how politico-ideological maps are (re-)configured by the shifting loci of "America" in Japan. A mixture of a brief narrative paper, intermixed with tables, graphs, pictures, and other presentation formats will be presented for this purpose.
Through this analysis, I hope to add a new theoretical insight into the scholarship on the repercussions of Americanization and globalization on the construction and practice of local identities.
Do Cultural Experiences Matter for Girls? An Examination of Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment in Japan
Yoko Yamamoto, University of California, Berkeley
In this study, I review studies on "cultural capital" (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977)—a form of cultural knowledge embodied in an individual through cultural experiences at childhood—in relation to educational attainment and social class in Japan. I seek to answer the question of why a stronger relationship between cultural capital and educational attainment is found among girls than boys by examining educational systems and women’s status attainment in Japan. In so doing, I demonstrate how unequal educational processes and employment opportunities are strongly embodied in the course of women’s lives.
Japanese researchers have demonstrated that cultural capital is one of the key factors in differentiating children’s educational experiences at school. They also found that students with high socioeconomic status tend to possess more cultural capital than students with lower socioeconomic status. However, several researchers have found that in Japan the relationships between cultural capital and educational attainment are moderated by gender. Cultural activities during childhood, such as museum visits or listening to classical music, were more strongly associated with the later school performance of girls than with boys.
In examining institutional context and women’s beliefs about female roles in Japanese society, I demonstrate how cultural capital serves to define a woman’s status and class in that society. I argue that the power of cultural capital on the educational opportunities and outcomes of young Japanese women is intertwined with the conditions of higher educational institutions and women’s life paths.
New China’s Forgotten Cinema, 1949–1966: More Than Just Politics
Greg Lewis, Weber State University
When planning a course on modern Chinese history as seen through its cinema in 1999, realization came to me of a significant void. Available subtitled films from the Mao Zedong period (1949–1976) were particularly scarce. Moreover, Chinese- and English-language historiography on this era’s cinema is limited and gives the impression of a static industry dominated by politics and Soviet-style social realism.
Two years ago I began a project, Translating New China’s Cinema for English-Speaking Audiences, to bring Maoist-era Chinese cinema to students and educators in the U.S. To date, we have subtitled twelve films made between 1949 and 1962 and created three original video prologues featuring rarely seen stills and analysis of the film’s place in cinema history.
The variety of genres and humanistic quality visible in many of the films may surprise teachers and students. We have subtitled thrillers, love stories, and a children’s film, in addition to more predictable heroic revolutionary and worker-peasant-soldier films. The films are not subtle in justifying the Communist victory and the correctness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy, to be sure. However, earnest and vigorous depictions of economic reconstruction, the common people and their lives by filmmakers of this era demonstrate a much livelier and revealing art than is depicted in the scholarship.
With this poster session I propose to display visual images from each of the twelve films, including facsimile posters, stills and publicity, and film synopses, and to test the hypotheses of the existing scholarship by discussing each film’s significance and place in PRC cinema history.
Feeding the Nation: The 1911 Revolution and Famine Relief
Jonathan Andrew Seitz, Princeton Theological Seminary
At the midway point between the famous famines of the late 1870s and the early 1920s, a 1910–1912 flood-induced famine struck large parts of central China. Foreign and Chinese national "modernizing" elites (early Chinese political and economic leaders, foreign missionaries, diplomats, etc.) formed a Famine Colonization Society (translated into Chinese as the "Sino-Foreign Relief Association": Zhongyang Yizhen Hui) and two successive Central China Famine Relief Committees. These and other international humanitarian organizations largely assumed responsibility for natural disaster relief—with the blessing of Republican leaders —during this period of economic and social transition. Missionaries organized an international letter-writing campaign, a foreign engineer was hired, overseas Chinese (including some Columbia University students) raised funds, and newly appointed officials (especially Zhang Jian) collaborated on mass mobilization plans that offered food to starving peasants in return for labor.
I first researched the 1910–1912 famines for a traditional seminar paper which I wrote at Princeton University under Ruth Rogaski (now at Vanderbilt). My poster presentation of the famine, in contrast, draws on a more visual, creative approach. Interweaving narrative, graphs, maps, speeches, letters, and photographic representations of starved bodies and relief means, I invite the viewer-reader to consider questions of reform and nationhood. Where Shih Shu-Mei has cited the failure of international colonizers to respond to famine as paradigmatic of the unique problems facing China as a semi-colony, I argue that transnational organizations (missionary and otherwise) actually served as the humanitarian arm of the semi-colonizers, incorporating ambivalent motives and methods to the service of feeding the nation. I hope to enter into a debate with scholars such as Shih Shu-Mei, Ruth Rogaski, and Andrea Janku on the relationship between the construction of the state, natural disaster relief, and foreign intervention.
Chinese Handmade Papers: Process and Product
Nancy Norton Tomasko, Princeton University
Paper had its beginnings in China, and words and images drawn, handwritten, or printed on a wide variety of thin, flexible, and remarkably durable handmade papers comprise a very large percentage of the evidence on the history of Chinese culture available today. Computer-based technologies that make Chinese documents and data available in easy-to-manipulate electronic formats may tempt some scholars in the twenty-first century to regard the paper-based originals of these records as research tools that no longer need to be consulted. Giving no thought to the original paper documents is a short-sighted decision because paying close attention to the paper stratum of these documents may reveal information important to understanding the meaning and the significance of the document itself. The kind and quality of the paper, as well as the condition of the paper and of the bound volume, can provide the researcher with valuable clues about the conditions under which the book was produced and through which it passed in its lifetime, and as well about the significance of the work.
The intent of this poster session is to call attention to the paper that carries the words we read and the images that enhance our understanding of those words so that scholars of Asian studies can begin to gain a familiarity with the traditional papers that they encounter. It introduces information about handmade papers being made in China today—what the basic fibers are, how papers are made, and what the appearance and feel of the papers are. Understanding of the techniques for making paper by hand and the papers produced today in China provides valuable clues to traditional processes used to produce paper in previous centuries, processes that in many ways have changed little.
I will display photographs of thriving hand papermaking operations in four different regions of China in which I have done field research over the past several years—Fuyang in Zhejiang, Jingxian in Anhui, Jiajiang in Sichuan, and Qi’an in Hebei. There will be many samples of different kinds of traditional handmade papers, both plain and decorated, produced in these regions. And I will have on hand examples of Chinese books and other paper documents printed on a variety of papers, all for hands-on scrutiny.
Organizer and Chair: David L. Howell, Princeton University
Discussants: Amy Borovoy, Princeton University; Patricia Maclachlan, University of Texas, Austin; Laura C. Nelson, California State University, Hayward; Sonia Ryang, Johns Hopkins University; Gi-Wook Shin, Stanford University; Lisa Yoneyama, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: social sciences, area studies, Japan, Korea, anthropology, political science, sociology.
This roundtable brings together six social scientists with expertise in Japanese and Korean studies to discuss the relationship between their disciplines and area studies as a concept and a practice. Two of the participants (Borovoy and Maclachlan) are based in area studies departments; one (Yoneyama) is an anthropologist with an appointment in a literature department; another (Shin) is based in a sociology department with a joint appointment in an area studies program; and two (Nelson and Ryang) have done research on the development of Korean and Japanese studies, respectively. The roundtable is sponsored by the Northeast Asia Council.
The participants in the session will reflect on their own place as area specialists working in disciplines that seem to be increasingly hostile to the idea of area specialization and as social scientists based in, or with close ties to, departments and programs that have little disciplinary focus. For the participants, the relationship between the social sciences and area studies is a question of everyday life as they make decisions about the venues and audiences for their research and their reference groups within the broader academic community. The session will thus address practical issues facing both social scientists of Asia and area studies departments and programs that want representation from the social sciences but cannot count on disciplinary departments to hire area specialists. In the course of the discussion broader theoretical issues will naturally arise, including critiques of area studies from both rational choice and postcolonial perspectives and responses to those critiques.
Session 64: Food, Fasting, and Famine: Culture and Crisis in Late Imperial China and Chosôn Korea
Organizer: Andrea Janku, University of Heidelberg
Chair: David G. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Mark Elvin, Australian National University
Subsistence crises are a serious threat to social order and cultural values. They can reinforce the power of those who seek to maintain the status quo; they can also serve as agents of historical change. This panel explores social and cultural responses to the threat of food shortages in nineteenth-century China and Korea. We ask how various social groups responded to subsistence crises, who or what was blamed for a disaster, what happened when conventional techniques of famine prevention and relief proved to be ineffective, and how crises related to cultural practices.
Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke examines dietary practices in state rainmaking rituals. His paper explains why these practices were perceived as being an appropriate response to drought, how they were thought to affect the efficacy of rain prayers, and how they were implemented and enforced by the state. Anders Karlsson’s paper on famine relief in Chosôn Korea focuses on the problems created for the state by economically destitute members of the ruling class. He shows that the erosion of established prestige structures threatened social order in rather unexpected ways. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley explores local-level interpretations of the unusually severe North China Famine of 1876–1879. Gleaning from local materials, both popular and official, she examines how Shanxi villagers have remembered, apportioned blame for, and identified heroes and villains of the North China Famine. Andrea Janku looks at this same famine from an official perspective. She analyzes the state’s attempt to integrate the unprecedented combined relief effort by diverse agents into the time-honored scheme of state relief.
Disciplining the Body Politic: Dietary Abstinences in State Rainmaking in Nineteenth-Century China
Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, University of Michigan
In traditional Chinese cosmology, natural calamities such as droughts were understood as the means by which Heaven communicated its displeasure with the current state of human affairs. Droughts occurred when officials were guilty of poor or dishonest administration or when the people were profligate or disrespectful of traditional social norms. In times of crisis, local officials were responsible for organizing various activities that were intended to resolve the drought and prevent it from developing into a full-fledged famine.
Special dietary regimens were one of the most prominent aspects of state-sponsored rainmaking activities in late imperial China. As an act of collective penance, local officials regularly issued proclamations prohibiting the slaughter of animals and the consumption of certain food items such as meat, alcohol, onions, and garlic in their jurisdictions. In addition, it was common for officials to undergo three days of fasting in order to help them achieve a state of sincerity before praying for rain. This paper explains why these practices were perceived as being an appropriate response to drought, how they were thought to affect the efficacy of rain prayers, and how they were implemented and enforced by the state. It also discusses how moral and political authority was contested and renegotiated through these activities, in an effort to show that issues of local control and bodily control were inextricably entwined in the late imperial period.
Destitution, Famine, and Class in Late Chosôn Korea
Anders Karlsson, SOAS, University of London
Late Chosôn Korea is today generally regarded as the period when the traditional and strictly hierarchical yangban-dominated social order of the dynasty started to crumble. New wealthy groups were able to challenge destitute segments of the ruling class, it is argued, undermining their authority in the countryside. The harsh natural conditions of the nineteenth century allegedly exacerbated this trend, as it increased destitution, and the new wealthy groups were able to obtain yangban status by contributing to state-led famine relief work.
Despite the frequent natural catastrophes of the period, and the importance attached to them and concomitant famines, not much scholarly attention has been given to famine relief work. This paper argues that a close study of this state support will show that the relationship between famine and social change in nineteenth-century Korea was more complex than commonly presented. The support given by the state to a certain extent helped to maintain yangban authority in the countryside, weakening the social effects of famine. Securing social order was always an important aspect of relief work, and in Late Chosôn that meant protecting destitute yangban. Furthermore, to finance relief work the state had to look for alternative sources of revenue, which led to increased exploitation of new wealthy groups; forced contributions to famine relief work in exchange for meaningless titles is one example. These groups were thus not "winners" of the situation, but rather often emerged as leaders of rural unrest.
Assigning Blame: Contested Heroes and Villains of the North China Famine, 1876–2001
Kathryn J. Edgerton-Tarpley, San Diego State University
China has been twice transfixed by the North-China Famine of 1876–1879: once when the scale and horrors of the famine were becoming clear to local-level, treaty-port, and foreign observers in the 1870s, and once again when officials in Shanxi province drew the unusually severe late-Qing famine back into public memory as a response to the suffering caused by the post-Great Leap Forward famine of 1959–1961. In both periods, a key component of discussion was apportioning blame and defining heroes and villains of the famine. This paper examines local-level interpretations of this prolonged drought famine that killed as many as ten million Chinese people.
Literate observers who survived the famine in southern Shanxi, the area most devastated by the disaster, generally identified Heaven’s anger at human misdeeds as the underlying cause of the famine. Famine folklore collected in the 1960s and still circulating in southern Shanxi today also highlights the heroic or villainous behavior of certain individuals and social groups. Official and local-level interpretations of culpability for the famine differed from each other in the 1870s and in the 1960s, however, as do local-level accounts from the 1870s and "famine folklore from above" collected during the Maoist period. This paper traces how Shanxi villagers remembered, assigned blame for, and identified heroes and villains of the North China Famine in the 1870s and in the late twentieth century.
Integrating the Body Politic: An Official Perspective on Relief Work during the "Great North China Famine"
Andrea Janku, University of Heidelberg
It is generally assumed that during the nineteenth century the organizational capacity of the Chinese state under Qing rule was crumbling. Yet when Zeng Guoquan assumed his post as governor of Shanxi in 1877, he launched a remarkable campaign to fight the unusually severe famine then raging in this and other provinces of North China. Recent research has focused on the crucial role of new agents acting in a private capacity, such as southern elites and foreign missionaries, in the sphere of nationwide relief work. Their work has been characterized as noble-minded and efficient, whereas these qualities have often been denied to the official relief scheme. This paper is an attempt to reread the sources from an official perspective. It is certainly true that new forces came to the fore during the successive disasters of the nineteenth century, but the nature of their interaction is by no means clear—it oscillates between competition and cooperation. The analysis of these relationships has to come to grips with sources which can often be misleading on the surface and which are susceptible to alternative readings, depending on the perspective one takes. The basic question pursued in this paper is whether or not this combined relief effort can be seen as a successful attempt to strengthen the integrity of the Chinese state.
Session 65: Technological Innovations in Asia: The Role of State, Society, and Ideology
Organizer: Prakash Kumar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Chair: Itty Abraham, Social Science Research Council
Discussant: Sharon Traweek, University of California, Los Angeles
Keywords: history, modern Asia, science and technology studies.
This panel will compare the dynamics of scientific and technological change across four important Asian countries—China, India, Japan, and Korea. The papers variously analyze the mutual shaping of techno-science and society in the realms of state structure, public administration, and political economy. The papers also consider diverse ideological contexts ranging from enlightenment to colonialism and socialism in the shaping of science and technology.
Prakash Kumar reveals the opposite perspectives of planters and the colonial government toward cheapening the natural blue dye in early-20th-century India. Kumar especially considers the effect of the government policy that forbade drastic reduction of wages in order to prevent peasant rebellions. Sigrid Schmalzer discovers the existence of two visions of science in the efforts to popularize the field of paleoanthropology in 1950s China. Schmalzer argues that these two programs emerged from contesting elitist and populist philosophies of scientific knowledge and attitudes towards popular culture. Min Suh Son studies the introduction of electricity into Seoul in the late 19th century to offer a non-deterministic interpretation of technological change. She analyzes government papers and media reports to show how electrifying Korea resulted in a seemingly modern society that was also trapped in a new form of dependence on the West. Jennifer Winther delineates the rise to prominence of statistical sciences in late 19th- and early-20th-century Japan. She focuses specifically on the enumeration system to argue that the content and methods of statistical sciences influenced the growth of modern Japan’s administrative structure.
Planters and Administrators in Colonial India: The Rural Context of Technological Innovations
Prakash Kumar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Colonial India was the preeminent producer and supplier to the West of indigo—the blue dyestuff extracted from the leaves of Indigofera arecta. The introduction of a cheaper and purer synthetic substitute by two German firms in 1897 threatened the end of India’s dominant role in the indigo trade. Reducing the price of natural indigo by cutting wages on the plantations appeared to be an obvious solution because those payments formed more than 50% of the total cost of natural blue. But the planters could not reduce wages. The remunerations to cultivators and workers were close to subsistence level and the colonial administrators were wary of permitting any downscaling of payments due to a pre-history of peasant disturbances in the region. Planters’ move to diversify into sugar production also did not work out due to problems in raising credit and capital. The planters then turned to scientific experiments in an effort to improve yield and achieve purity comparable to synthetic indigo. They conducted scientific experiments aimed at reducing the price of the natural dye and improving its purity. In that context, my presentation offers a political economic explanation of the process of technological change in the colonies. It advances familiar arguments about science and technology in the colonies being "Western" tools of empire building by pointing out how local conditions and resources ensured that the process of technological change was "hybrid" in nature.
Paleoanthropology and the Class Politics of Scientific Knowledge in 1950s China
Sigrid Schmalzer, University of California, San Diego
This paper documents two contesting visions of scientific knowledge in the efforts to popularize paleoanthropology in the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s. The first program was centered on the dissemination of scientific knowledge about human evolution, specifically Engels’ theory that "labor created humanity." The second was based on the mobilization of "the masses" to participate in the production of scientific knowledge, thus creating "mass science."
I argue that these two programs emerged from incommensurable philosophies of scientific knowledge and attitudes toward popular culture. The science dissemination approach ordained a hierarchy in the system of knowledge production: scientific and political elites cooperated to develop an orthodoxy that they sought to disseminate to the masses, understood to be "superstitious" and in need of such correction from above. Mass science, on the other hand, was a challenge to this "top-down" approach to scientific knowledge consistent with radical Maoist opposition to intellectual elitism.
I examine attitudes about science and popular culture as revealed in popular books, magazine articles, museum pamphlets, school textbooks, and documents from organizations responsible for science dissemination. In addition, I also explore memoirs of excavations written by local people in order to determine what opportunities and obstacles existed for a mass science of paleoanthropology in the field. I conclude that the contradiction between the two kinds of popularization was never fully reconciled. A state-supported conviction that popular culture was infused with "superstition" maintained science as a top-down endeavor despite repeated campaigns designed to undermine scientific authority and promote mass participation in science.
A Struggle for Autonomy: The Early Years of Korea’s Electrical Industry
Min Suh Son, University of California, Los Angeles
I focus on the introduction of electricity into Seoul in the late 19th century to contextualize key debates in the field of technological modernization and transfer of technology across nations. Radical reformers aggressively adopted electricity as a tool of Korea’s early modernization. The new technology transformed urban space, workplaces, and homes and altered attitudes regarding community, citizenry, and nation. The lighting of public spaces and certain conveniences of electricity changed the way people moved, worked, interacted and communicated. Ultimately, this transported the users from their existing time and space and allowed them to imagine a new "modern" reality. By consuming constant, uniform, and synthetic light the Koreans were also able to poignantly feel the differences between local and Western knowledge. On the one hand, I will resist an "internalist" interpretation of technological change by focusing on the process of diffusion of electricity within Korea—by showing how the building of political power and social legitimacy was intimately linked to the diffusion of this artifact. On the other hand, I will develop the idea that a particular brand of technological modernization has turned countries like Korea into a state of a forced economic and technological dependency on the West. The roots of present day social, economic, and global inequities lie in an earlier period. My research highlights those early developments in the context of Korea through consultation of enlightenment newspapers, editorials, and advertisements to examine public debates, and government documents to study the creation of institutional infrastructure for electricity.
Boundary-Making in Science and Administration
Jennifer A. Winther, University of California, Los Angeles
Drawing on frameworks from the sociology and history of science, I analyze the centrality of statistical sciences to the development of modern state administration and social sciences in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Statistical science in Japan was influential in shaping how the government and the burgeoning social science establishment collected and analyzed information, and was itself shaped in part by the well-known dynamic of tension between things Western and Japanese. Empirically, I use published debates and essays from the earliest professional statistics journals of late-19th- and early-20th-century Japan to show how the debates among scientists on the scope of statistics as a science or as a method reflected and interacted with the process of boundary making to distinguish the social sciences from medical and natural sciences. Building upon this analysis, I integrate a study of scientists and their concepts with an examination of administrative histories to show how similar debates about the nature and significance of statistical methods influenced the specialization and reorganization of state administrative units. The structure of Japan’s modern enumeration system into three branches of household registration, ministerial survey, and national census—key institutions for both state administration and social science—was institutionalized during this period and was formed by contingent developments in politics, professional expertise, and, I argue, statistical science.
Session 83: Facility Siting in Northeast Asia through the Lens of Civil Society-State Relations
Organizer: Daniel P. Aldrich, Harvard University
Chair: S. Hayden Lesbirel, James Cook University
Discussant: Miranda A. Schreurs, University of Maryland
Keywords: NIMBY, facility siting, civil society.
Why do citizen groups succeed in thwarting large infrastructural projects in some instances but not others? How do central governments interact with civil society in their attempts to build new airports, nuclear power plants, waste dumps, and other controversial facilities? Every nation in the world struggles to construct large scale projects thought necessary for infrastructural development but often unwanted by nearby citizens.
This panel will draw together political scientists focusing on Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China to present comparative research on facility siting in Northeast Asia. Papers will focus upon the strategies and approaches of governments as they interact with their citizens in attempts to further the construction of these public works projects. We intend to set these cases from Asia alongside broader Western theories of citizen-state interaction and Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)-ism to draw out lessons that can be applied to other industrial and industrializing nations.
This issue speaks to current debates about civil society and state-society relations, which often reference normative "democratic processes" and the involvement of organized citizen groups in policy-making. Nuclear power plants and other large scale projects bring out citizen participation even in times of declining interest in government. Governments have at their disposal a wide variety of approaches, whether voluntary or coercive, and can provide mitigation and compensation or utilize strong-armed land expropriation. The authorities’ choice of strategies and mix of approaches should be of interest to scholars investigating how states are affected by or attempt to affect civil society.
The Japanese Government’s Involvement in Facility Siting
Daniel P. Aldrich, Harvard University
The Japanese government has regularly attempted to penetrate civil society to alter the preferences of citizens regarding large scale projects like dams, airports, and nuclear power plants since postwar days. Using a broad spectrum of tools, ranging from coercive ones like the expropriation of land to market incentives like the provision of flexible compensation programs, the state has sought to dampen citizen resistance and encourage cooperation with the siting of these noxious facilities. Many of these tools have been hidden not only from citizens but also from politicians, creating what some political scientists have called a "submerged" policy area insulated from common political pressures. Interestingly, the Japanese government has seen much success in some areas, such as the initial siting of commercial nuclear power plants, but disastrous failures in others, such as the violence wracked Narita Airport siting case.
This paper will explore the successes and failures of the Japanese government’s involvement in facility siting. Under what conditions have facility siting procedures moved forward smoothly, and what factors have brought out conflict? Which state policy instruments have had the most impact on citizen concerns, and which tools have been discarded because of a lack of effectiveness? Do other nations have something to learn from Japan’s experiences? To gather data, I have conducted interviews with both anti-project activists and government bureaucrats, constructed a sui-generis, large N database of facility siting projects in Japan and carried out deep process tracing of siting cases using primary and secondary materials, including newspaper articles and industry notes.
The Effects of the NIMBY Syndrome upon Power Facilities Siting in Taiwan
Chang-tay Chiou, National Taiwan University
The "NIMBY" (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome has become one of the most significant issues in the process of power facilities construction in Taiwan. Policymakers face challenges in analyzing the underlying problems of the NIMBY syndrome and finding feasible solutions to it. This paper analyzes effects of the citizen resistance upon power facilities siting utilizing five case studies of power facilities siting islandwide.
In order to strengthen the relationship between potential and actual host neighborhoods and local power facilities and to increase the well-being of local residents around power plants, Taipower’s district offices have devoted themselves to public welfare activities, including education and cultural activities, environmental sanitation, medical aid, support for low-income families and the handicapped, religious celebrations, folk festivals, and recreation activities. Taipower attempts to fulfill its social responsibility and demonstrate a spirit of cooperation through these activities.
As part of the smooth implementation of its development program, Taipower established its Power Development Foundation to increase "the benefits to local residents and gain their support and cooperation." The company has since continued its efforts in this area as outlined in the Guidelines for the Custody and Application of the Revenues and Expenditures of the Subsidy Fund for the Promotion of Power Development. Research methods in this paper include participant observation and depth interviews. Interviewed samples will cover community residents, government officials, and public relationship managers in electricity companies. Survey questions focus upon the reasons, issues and concerns of citizens and participants in the construction process of electricity.
The Chinese Government’s Involvement in Dam Projects
Lawrence Sullivan, Adelphi University
Decisions by China’s central government in the area of water policy and management since 1949 to pursue construction of major dams and reservoirs have frequently pitted local, parochial concerns against central, bureaucratic power and interests. While the central government and broad national constituencies reap most of the major benefits of such projects—financial and political—it is often left to local authorities to deal with the underside of these massive construction projects: displacement of population, disruption of the social fabric, charges of corruption, and, at times, social unrest. While during the Maoist era (1949–76) the central government could rely largely on relatively "costless" measures—mainly ideological appeals—to minimize local resistance by government and populace to these projects, since China’s opening up in 1978 a more diverse set of measures—financial, political, coercive, along with remnants of Maoist/nationalist ideology—have been relied upon to insure a project’s completion.
Nowhere is this change more apparent than in the 10-year effort to construct the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River in central China where despite the government’s use of Maoist appeals to push through the project, financial, political, and coercive measures have been the hallmark of the central government’s approach to preventing major resistance to a project that has displaced nearly 2 million people and remade an entire economic and social system. This paper will examine the various financial, political, and coercive measures employed and how each side—central and local—exploited them to achieve particular goals.
Session 84: Turtles and Snakes, Melons and Mirrors: Omens in East Asian History
Organizer: Sarah Schneewind, Southern Methodist University
Chair: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
Discussant: Maggie Bickford, Brown University
Keywords: China, Japan, Vietnam, Tang, Ming, Nara, omens, politics, religion.
East Asian politics and religion have always incorporated omens. Scholars have shown, particularly for the Han period, how anomalies from comets to multi-eared grain could be reported, selected, interpreted and manipulated for immediate political purposes: to bolster a dynastic claim, cast doubt on a rival, lobby for a policy, or gain imperial favor. These papers illustrate more complex dynamics of omen-talk in different interpretive communities: the Japanese court at Nara; the Tang Daoist church; the early Ming court; and 18th century Vietnamese elite and populace.
Omens often predicted the future, as Dutton’s Vietnamese believed. Lurie also links omens with temporality: turtles provided era-names. But, as scholars have noted, many East Asian omens are not simple prognostications of the future, but responses to current events, such as imperial actions. It is events that determine the future the omens signal. But once omens are reported and interpreted, they themselves may change the future. Who contributes to that intervention and how? In Lurie’s paper, the court and its diviners and ideologues used omens to shore up the legitimacy of the state and its rulers, frequently incorporating them into the official calendar that both reflected and affected the cosmos. Fried shows Daoist clerics routinizing omen production to consolidate control by reducing the specificity of divine messages that might subvert hierarchy. Schneewind shows officials and emperor tussling over interpretation of an omen submitted by a commoner, thereby presenting differing visions of imperial, ministerial, and popular roles. Dutton shows all levels of society using talk about anomalies to debate—and affect—elite politics and popular movements. Bickford volunteered to be discussant because her work in progress, "The Shape of Good Fortune: Auspicious Visuality in China," centers on visualizations of auspicious omens in Song, Ming, and late Qing.
A Tale of Two Turtles: Animal Omens and the Inscription of Time in Early Japan
David Lurie, Columbia University
Turtles bearing legible characters or other significant patterns on their shells were among the most auspicious of the natural omens frequently cited in early Japanese texts as signs of a well-ordered state. As a late-7th-century poem, written from the perspective of laborers constructing a new palace, proclaims, "a marvelous turtle bearing a pattern foretelling the eternal prosperity of our land has sprung forth as a sign of the new age" (Man’yoshu I:50). The Engi shiki (927) codifies the official adaptation of Chinese systems of omen-reading, placing marvelous turtles at the top of a four-level ranking of auspicious signs, but their most prominent role is as the source of new era names (nengo/nianhao): more than half of those employed during the 8th century commemorate the appearance of such reptilian omens. Viewed from the perspective of contemporary diviners and ideologues, the Nara period (710–784) might well be termed the Turtle period.
It is not an accident that so many of these turtle omens bear inscriptions on their shells, thereby enacting both the natural origins and the cosmic significance of writing itself. By focusing on the nature and meaning of these spontaneously appearing texts, this paper examines the relationship between the turtle omen itself (as described in historical accounts and court proclamations) and the turtle era name as a component of the official calendrical system. A close look at these two turtles reveals interconnections among writing, political power, and temporality that were central to the construction of the early Japanese state.
Magic Mirrors and Shangqing Omenology in the Tang
Daniel Alan Fried, National Central University
The institutionalized Daoist church in the Tang is not usually thought of as the high mark for traditional Daoist omenology. There seems to be less emphasis on divinatory practices than during the more fluid religious system of the Six Dynasties, for example. However, it is best to think of this changed focus as a shift in the nature of Daoist omenology rather than as a renunciation of it: the focus of religious hermeneutics has shifted away from ad-hoc interpretations of occasional oddities and toward the regularized production of omenological objects.
Scriptures and talismans, conceived as the coagulation of primordial qi or translation of truths into lower orders of script, are themselves examples of the omenological object. A rarer example is the magic mirror, a device that seems to have been rather faddish during the high Tang. This paper will argue that the mirror, as a durable object, was able to serve as a permanent and generalizable omen of doctrinal truths, available for circulation within the religious community. By de-emphasizing the specificity of divine messages, these objects were able to serve the institutional interests of the Tang church. They moved divine semiotics from the field of occasional epiphany into the sphere of material culture and thus subjected omens to ecclesiastical preferences in circulation and distribution.
Smaller than Empire: Debating a Vegetable Omen in the Early Ming
Sarah Schneewind, Southern Methodist University
The collected works of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, include an essay and ode called "In Praise of Auspicious Melons." An official court source, the Taizu Shilu, or Veritable Records, also records this incident: a farmer presented two melons growing from a single stalk. As this paper will show, the two accounts themselves grew from a single source, whether that source was reality or court records. They share specifics but overall are quite different. The texts show how an omen could be used to shape, present, and debate the nature of the relationships between autocrat and ministers and between emperor and subjects.
The Shilu version creates two characters: a dignified and rational emperor, and a dignified and learned official. Zhu’s essay, by contrast, makes the officials a credulous, sycophantic crowd and reveals complexities and contradictions in his own thinking. Zhu truncates the Rites Minister’s utterances in order to dismiss them, while the Shilu compilers manipulate Zhu’s words to textually create an emperor who basically agrees with his minister but makes one rational, even laudable, argument against accepting fruit as a significant communication from Heaven. That argument, more detailed and differently cast in Zhu’s essay, is that kingly omens must be large phenomena. This novel claim (mushrooms, white rabbits, and other humble creatures had often reflected imperial virtue) might make sense for imperial dignity, but Zhu takes a further, even odder step: vegetative omens, he argues, demonstrate the moral authority of the farmer himself. How should we interpret this argument in relation to the reach of imperial authority?
Reading Omens in Eighteenth-Century Viet Nam
George Dutton, University of California, Los Angeles
Omens have long had a prominent place in Vietnamese society, especially during periods of political or social upheaval. In the eighteenth century, which saw major popular uprisings and changes of political fortune at the centers of power, we find extensive reporting of omens as portents of change. The many omens reported and discussed at both the elite and popular levels in this period included both meteorological and astronomical phenomena (powerful storms, earthquakes, and bright comets) and the mysterious appearance of sacred items and animals, including animal statues that came to life and snakes and turtles carrying swords. Vietnamese of the period understood these signs as they occurred, and later scholars explained them in hindsight, as portending changes of dynasty or the rise and fall of particular political figures or as divine punishment for acts of desecration or impiety.
This paper will explore the forms and meanings of omens in eighteenth-century Viet Nam and their significance for history and historiography. First, it will discuss how omens were recognized and interpreted by the elite and the populace, suggesting new ways to think about both popular and elite thought through the social and political upheaval of this era. Second, the paper will trace the historical antecedents and discuss the nineteenth-century historiography of these phenomena. Finally, the paper will consider what contemporary interpretations of omens tell us about how the Vietnamese people understood their relationship to nature generally and to the world of sacred and profane creatures more specifically.
Session 85: Governing the Social: The Politics of Numbers in Asia
Organizer: Theodore Jun Yoo, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Chair: Tani E. Barlow, University of Washington
Discussant: Takashi Fujitani, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: statistics, knowledge production, eugenics, census, colonialism, militarism, governmentality.
When defined in terms of its etymological roots, "statistics" refers to the "science of the state" or "curiosities of the state." By the nineteenth century, the field of "statistics" in Europe had developed into a science of "social facts" and an objective way of presenting knowledge. This practice of "calculative rationality" required painstaking itemizing, taxonomizing, and the tabulating of "facts" at every imaginable level. More than the collation of raw numbers, urban interlocutors could rearrange these "countable" abstractions into "knowable" social categories to gauge the "national" strength of a particular country. At a microlevel, the breaking down of all aspects of human life into "quantifiable units" through censuses, sanitary reports, maps, and the like created a new politics of representation, generating an uneven relationship between a state and its citizenry. With previously untouched domains (i.e., crime, suicide, marriage) reducible to the sleight of mathematics, new categories could now be invented so that people could conveniently fall into them in order to be counted and ultimately managed.
This panel assumes a cross-regional comparative perspective and examines the rise of statistics as an authoritative discipline in 19th- and 20th-century Asia. It explores the different uses of numerical data—the superimposition of categories, contestations over knowledge, and the manipulation and appropriation of "recalcitrant" categories—in reshuffling the population, "reproductive bodies," the military, or other social bodies to establish a controllable and comprehensive reality.
The papers will discuss specific cases in China, India, Japan, and Korea where numerical representation became the privileged site for generating useful facts and interpellating new subjectivities and how these "fictive unities" and their discursive importance (i.e., using numbers to talk about the breakdown of the family) became essential to the production of knowledge.
Quality and Quantity: Eugenics in India
Sarah Hodges, University of Warwick
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics associations began to spring up across India. In large part, the eugenics movement in India was fueled both by the publication of the all-India census reports of 1921 and 1931, as well as by the robust campaigns to reform marriage (themselves drawing ammunition from maternal and infant mortality statistics). Organizations like the Indian Eugenics Society and the Sholapur Eugenics Education Society attracted scores of urban professional Indian men and a few women with their message: only healthy parents can produce healthy children and only healthy progeny can build a healthy nation. These associations held public meetings, opened libraries, published tracts, and provided eugenic counseling and contraceptive advice. Eugenics in India was taken up with remarkable vigor.
Most social and political debates in India were informed and energized by eugenic thinking. As in other places, eugenics in India provided a template for connecting individuals’ reproductive behavior to the task of modernizing the nation as a whole. The eugenic management of reproduction figured at the center of multiple reforms promoted throughout the first half of the twentieth century by members of the Indian middle classes. In particular, discussions of maternal and infant welfare took on increased urgency after public health administration was transferred to local self-government and nationalist leaders framed healthy reproduction as a key step in national regeneration.
Reconceptualizing the Social: The Census Reform in Late-Qing China
Tong Lam, University of Richmond
Towards the end of China’s last dynasty, the Qing court initiated a series of drastic institutional and political reforms. Among them was a census reform that sought to ascertain the existing condition of the human world. Court officials, who regarded the new census as a continuation of the long-standing tradition of world-ordering, hoped to use the results of the new census as the basis for implementing a new polity.
This paper examines the rationality, effects, and ramifications of this new census. While Republican social scientists had often dismissed the significance of this census by suggesting that it was merely an extension of the late imperial census practice, this paper argues that the late Qing census was in many ways a radical departure from the indigenous statecraft practice. As an initial step of launching a novel "state science," this census provided more than just a new way to manage the social world; it also represented a new level of state intrusion, producing a new form of relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Moreover, the new census enabled a new mode of social and political imagination, altering the "traditional" understanding of the individual, gender relationships, family, and so forth. Ultimately, this census reform anticipated the emergence of a new form of disciplinary power that would have a lasting impact on China’s cultural and political landscapes in the twentieth century and beyond.
Manufacturing Militarism: Japan’s Armed Forces and Public Opinion
Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara
Japan’s military budget is roughly equivalent to that of the United Kingdom, France, or Germany. The domestic reputation of the Japanese armed forces, however, has been one of the most dubious among military establishments in the democratic world. Since the end of the cold war the Defense Agency has abandoned its efforts to keep a low profile and embraced an aggressive engagement with the public. These efforts include the publication of public relations materials that target various segments of society, including children, open house days at camps that feature a variety of events ranging from live-fire demonstrations to beauty contests, and close monitoring of service members’ behavior to ensure strict conformity with publicly acceptable standards. The Defense Agency uses public opinion surveys to convince service members that their reputation is improving and civilian opinion leaders that Japan has shed what the right calls its "military allergy." My presentation examines the use of opinion surveys and other public relations strategies by the Defense Agency and local camps for manufacturing a new kind of militarism in present-day Japan.
Discoursing in Numbers: The "Female Worker" and the Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea
Theodore Jun Yoo, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Upon the annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910, the Japanese colonial state engaged in what James Scott calls "state simplifications" or "enhancing the legibility of society." In order to govern the new territory more efficiently, the Japanese sought to reduce complex reality into schematic categories: the standardization of measurements, redrawing of maps, the compilation of census reports, cadastral surveys, annual sanitation reports, and the establishment of educational standards. This paper examines the process by which the category of "female worker" had to be invented in order for the colonial state to govern, police, define, and count Korean women workers. More specifically, it looks at how her "numerical value" became critical for policy debates. With the dramatic social transformations that took place as a result of rapid industrialization and rural impoverishment, the female worker had become as much a product of colonial experimentation as a problem to be solved. I will argue that, in many respects, the female worker’s referential status became far less important than her discursive importance. How best to represent her became a contentious matter as the state, social critics, and reformers of all persuasions (traditionalists, moralists, socialists, capitalists, and even women writers) sought to describe her and document her with "unprecedented attention." This discourse opened up an entire "field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions," which will be discussed in the paper.
Session 90: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Topics in Asian Religions
Organizer and Chair: Paula Richman, Oberlin College
Becoming Christian in Indonesia
Jennifer Connolly, New School University
During the eighty years in which the Dayaks of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, have converted to Christianity, this religious change has fostered a new pan-Dayak ethnic identity, providing a mediating culture for sub-ethnic groups previously separated by cultural differences and a weak sense of themselves as Dayaks. It has also aided in the re-negotiation of their social status vis-à-vis the dominant Muslims. In particular Dayaks argue that, as adherents to a religion of love and truth, they are morally superior to Muslims. Furthermore, given the Indonesian state’s requirement that citizens belong to one of five state-sanctioned religions, conversion helps Dayaks claim a place in the nation. Thus the conversion process, with its challenge to the state’s ability to assign identities, can be seen as cause for celebration. Yet conversion remains a risky strategy. It can be argued that this oppositional ethnic identity also perpetuates Dayak subordination, constituting them as the Other and making them targets for religious violence. Thus, while acknowledging the positive aspects of religious change, this paper will also illustrate the need to pay attention to the constraints placed by the state on ethnic identity formation, a particularly important requirement in the Indonesian context.
A Neo-Confucian Mold for Doctors: The Temples to the Three Progenitors in Yuan China (1206–1368)
Reiko Shinno, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
In the late thirteenth century, China saw an empire-wide movement to build temples dedicated to the Three Progenitors (Sanhuang), namely Fuxi, Shennong, and Huangdi. To be certain, building shrines for the Three Progenitors was not unprecedented. However, the Temples to the Three Progenitors (Sanhuang miao) in the Yuan period were different because they now came to be the sites for the government to promote medical learning.
Using Yuan and Ming local gazetteers as well as inscriptional sources commemorating construction and renovations of the temples, my paper first establishes that they were indeed built in many localities. Then based on the governmental documents, I show that this type of temple was built as an integral part of a medical temple-school complex (yixue) intended to enhance local doctors’ medical knowledge and supervise their practice. Finally, a thorough analysis of the inscriptional sources reveals that the Neo-Confucian scholars during this time considered the Three Progenitors as the originators in daotong, a fictive master-disciple lineage through which the proper Way was transmitted since ancient times. Overall, I argue that medicine, now requiring proper book learning and ritual protocols, came to be considered "learning" (xue) in the Neo-Confucian mold. Consequently, medicine became a scholarly pursuit, and therefore a culturally attractive occupation for elite men.
Is School Choice the Right Choice? Neoliberal Economic Reform and the Politics of Islamic Education in Pakistan
Matthew J. Nelson, Bates College
For more than 1,000 years, madrasas (Qur’anic schools) have been a source of cultural, educational, and political inspiration throughout the Muslim world. For a growing number of political scientists and public policymakers, however, madrasas seem to represent little more than an expanding network of terrorist training camps. Focusing on the education sector in Pakistan, my paper seeks to locate "the modern madrasa" within "the modern Muslim state," drawing special attention to the relationship between neoliberal (i.e., market-oriented) economic reform, on the one hand, and the politics of public-sector education reform, on the other.
I argue that international efforts to promote the privatization of public-sector services have not produced an increase in the demand for stronger "secular" schools, as many agencies (e.g., UNICEF) were inclined to expect. Instead, they have produced a rather dramatic increase in the demand for "religious" schools.
Paying careful attention to the documentation of local educational demands, as expressed by the parents of several hundred school-aged children living in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Lahore (2003), my project seeks to illuminate the implications of this change—this shift in the direction of school choice—for those with an interest in the relationship between education and Islam around the world.
Resituating Hindu Reform: Sawai Jai Singh II and Vaishnava Reformation in Eighteenth-Century North India
James M. Hastings, Wake Forest University
While the initial modern efforts at Hindu reform are commonly situated in the early nineteenth century, it is often overlooked that indigenous reformist efforts were undertaken a century earlier by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, the singularly innovative and influential ruler of the princely state of Amer/Jaipur. The maharaja seems to have been inspired by his own highly developed understanding of the nature of kingship and of earlier Hindu or, more specifically, Vaishnava practices to rid the Vaishnava faith of what he viewed as excesses and accretions. He was primarily concerned with reforming monastic institutions as well as with maintaining a strict separation between monastics and householders. Yet he also compelled newly developing bhakti, or devotionalist, communities to redefine themselves in the Vaishnava ideological mold. Having influence not only over religious communities in his own state, but also having substantial political control during much of his career over the sacred region of Braj surrounding Mathura, he was able to impose new standards of practice and belief that had a marked effect upon the subsequent ideologies of Vaishnava monastic communities, many of which began to spread their influence and came to prominence only in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This paper explores the role of the maharaja’s concept of orthodoxy and of the nature of Hindu kingship in his attempts to reinterpret Vaishnavism; it examines the reforms imposed by him on sadhu and householder alike and their lingering legacy among Vaishnava monastic and devotionalist communities in North India.
Secularism beyond the East/West Divide: Responses to Hindu Majoritarianism in India and Its Diasporas
Jill Didur, Concordia University
The rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India’s political and cultural life has led to questions about the viability of secularism in the postcolonial context. Despite the colonial power relations that inform secular discourse, it is assumed the state should maintain a critical distance from religious culture in the face of the increasing marginalization of minority groups in Indian society. At the same time, concerns have been raised that secular rhetoric around syncretism, the preservation of diversity, and religious tolerance often ends up laundering the cultural norms of the majority as national or universal. This paper seeks to displace the East/West divide that informs liberal commentary on secularism—a divide characterized by an opposition between tradition and modernity, irrationality and rationality. Rather than reject secular discourse on the basis of its colonial genealogy, it is possible to see it as "an enabling violation" (Spivak) of Enlightenment thought that must be renegotiated through one’s ethical relationship to the other. Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of ethics as "a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge" necessarily shifts our understanding of ethics from a "self driven political calculus as ‘doing the right thing’" to "ethics as openness toward the imagined agency of the other." To illustrate how an ethics of alterity can destabilize the East/West divide in secular thought I will examine the relationship between minority communities and the Indian nation-state in Salman Rushdie’s Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992–2002 and The Moor’s Last Sigh.
Organizer and Chair: Kent E. Calder, Johns Hopkins University
Discussant: Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego
This panel compares national economic policies toward multinational corporations in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China. The central concerns are understanding the role of foreign multinationals in their development and how that role shapes the terms of Northeast Asia’s integration into the broader global political economy. Developments since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 are given special attention in this interdisciplinary panel, whose diverse participants employ varied methodologies.
Research on this important but under-researched subject tests two important prevailing assumptions: (1) that Northeast Asian nations have a common model of economic development; and (2) that internal forces, as opposed to external interests, determine political-economic outcomes. Such research casts light on the empirical relevance of the "developmental state" model of Asian economic policy formation. It also illuminates an issue of major consequence for foreign policy: the nature of interdependence between the strategically important nations of Northeast Asia and the broader world.
The panel will consider: (1) the role of multinationals in national economic development, centering on their role as intermediaries in the globalization process; (2) how bureaucracies in Northeast Asian nations deal with multinationals, focusing on bureaucratic culture and the exercising of bureaucratic influence; (3) concrete policies toward multinationals in such areas as taxation, regulatory policy, provision of infrastructure, export policy, and standards policy; and (4) how differing policies toward multinationals, cross-nationally and across sectors, affect the roles of various Northeast Asian nations in the global political economy.
Political Economy and Alliance: Japanese and Chinese Regulation of Multinationals in Comparative Perspective
Kent E. Calder, Johns Hopkins University
Japan and the United States have been close security allies for more than fifty years, following an extended American Occupation. The People’s Republic of China has been in a delicate, largely adversarial security relationship with the United States ever since the Revolution of 1949. Yet China appears to have been significantly more open to foreign investment since its Four Modernizations program began in late 1978, including that from the United States, than has Japan. China has also attracted significantly more foreign investment, with an economy only one-fourth the size of Japan’s. This paper compares Chinese and Japanese policies toward multinationals along several dimensions, assessing the hypothesis of greater Chinese supportiveness, and then seeks to understand why the observed contrasts prevail.
The paper will examine policies toward foreign investment in the following sectors of interest to U.S. corporations: telecommunications, finance, automobiles, distribution, and agriculture. It will look at policies regarding taxation, regulatory policy, provision of infrastructure, export policy, and standards policy, examining the evolution of policies since 1978.
To understand why Chinese policies are more supportive of multinationals than Japanese, despite an adversarial security context, the paper will consider five alternate explanations: industrial strategy, local politics, state structure, private-sector organization, and geo-politics. Special consideration will be given to the corporatist character of Japanese industrial organization and to the protectionist role of industry associations, which have no precise analogue in China.
MNCs, Economic Reforms, and China’s Developmental State
Qingxin Ken Wang, University of Hong Kong
MNCs have played an important role in China’s developmental strategy and have contributed to China’s increasing integration into the global economy due to China’s adoption of an effective policy toward MNCs. The objective of this paper is to examine the evolution in China’s policy toward MNCs since China’s opening up in late 1970s and the major determinants of China’s policy toward MNCs. The paper asks the following questions. How has China’s policy toward MNCs changed over the years? What are the major determinants of China’s MNC policies? To what extent have Chinese government-business relations shaped China’s policy toward MNCs? To what extent have external pressures such as major trading partners and international institutions such as the WTO influenced China’s MNC policy? The paper identifies two sources of China’s MNC policy, bureaucratic influence and international economic institutions. It argues that the Chinese bureaucratic state had been primarily responsible for formulating an effective and autonomous policy toward MNCs to meet the needs of economic development before the mid-1990s. While the Chinese bureaucratic state during this period performed functions in the promotion of economic development such as picking winners and losers in industries, which were similar to the concept of the "developmental state," its structure was vastly different from that of the typical developmental state. The difference lay in the fact that the Chinese bureaucracy controlled economic policymaking through the monopoly of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), while the typical developmental state in other East Asian countries dominates economic policy-making through co-opting private industries. Nonetheless, after the mid-1990s, the government-business relations underwent considerable change as SOEs were restructured and even divested. The bureaucratic state’s planning functions have been curtailed and its regulatory functions have been strengthened. The Chinese bureaucratic state increasingly resembles the concept of the "developmental state." This Chinese developmental state continues to view MNCs as instrumental in promoting China’s economic development. Ironically, this developmental state finds itself increasingly constrained by external pressure (primarily GATT/WTO) in the making of MNC policy as China has become more integrated into the world economy since the mid-1990s. The impact of external influence culminated after China’s accession to WTO in 2001.
Korea’s Changing Approaches to Multinationals: The Political Economy of Policy Shift
Sook-jong Lee, Brookings Institution
The Korean state has traditionally been quite wary of multinational firms, affording them more limited access to the Korean economy than has been typical in Taiwan, Latin America, or even China. Foreign investment until 1998 was accordingly quite limited. Yet over the past five years there has been a major policy transformation, provoking a flow of more foreign investment into Korea between 1998 and the end of 2001 than in Korea’s entire previous history. This paper considers three major related questions: (1) the dimensions and profile of the Korean transition in policy toward foreign investment following the Asian financial crisis; (2) why the transition occurred; and (3) what this transition implies for both the Korean political economy itself, and Korea’s broader relations with the world.
This paper will pay particular attention to changes in corporate-governance policies under the Kim Dae-jung administration (1998–2003), the extent to which their origins were domestic as opposed to mandated by the International Monetary Fund, and how the reforms stimulated foreign investment. In its efforts to arrest the power of the chaebol, the Korean government has mandated enhanced transparency, outside directors, and other innovations that sharply shift influence within Korean firms from stakeholders to shareholders. These changes have sharply encouraged foreign investment, with major implications for Korea’s relations with the world considered in conclusion.
Bureaucracies and Development: Comparing Foreign Investment in Korea and Taiwan
Min Ye, Princeton University
This paper attempts to explain the pronounced yet puzzling differences in the presence of international capital in Korea and Taiwan. Governmental legislation regarding multinationals is more similar than different in Korea and Taiwan, the paper finds. The application of these laws to regulatory policies and practices is strikingly different, however. In Korea multinational investment is highly controlled and limited; in practice the government has a clear inclination to favor domestic capital over multinationals. Multinational investment in Taiwan is subject to similar laws, yet in practice, multinationals have open access to the local market and local investment opportunities. In many cases, the government favors multinationals over local capital in disputes between the two groups. These differences, this paper finds, are causally consistent with the different internal and external bureaucratic characteristics of the two countries. Structurally Taiwan’s economic bureaucracies have a high level of organizational and financial autonomy from political leadership due to the strong influence of U.S advisors. Furthermore, the bureaucratic culture is more liberal, and supportive of foreign investment, for most economic bureaucrats have educational backgrounds in liberal-oriented U.S institutions. Economic bureaucracies in Korea have been subordinate to political leadership, which has fostered a nationalistic and conservative bureaucratic culture. This in turn can be attributed to the social and educational backgrounds of the bureaucrats and the historical experience of Japanese colonialism.
Organizer and Chair: Keith Snodgrass, University of Washington
Discussants: Ross E. Dunn, San Diego State University; Lucien Ellington, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; Jerry Bentley, University of Hawaii
The contours of world history as a discipline at both the K–12 level and the collegiate level have been evolving over the past several years. As this topic becomes increasingly well defined within teaching institutions, the ways in which Asia is included and addressed in courses must be reviewed in light of recent scholarship. This roundtable proposes to address how Asia is included in newly-evolving frameworks and curricula on world history, including examining the scope of coverage, the integration of Asian topics in wider themes, and how recent scholarship is incorporated into these new frameworks. This panel will address both the content of these frameworks and methods of introducing this topic in the secondary and college classroom.
Session 103: Folklore, Ethnography, and Authorship in Colonial South and Southeast Asia
Organizer: Megan C. Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz
Chair: Smita Lahiri, Harvard University
Discussant: Paul Kramer, Johns Hopkins University
Keywords: folklore, anthropology, colonialism, South India, Indonesia, Philippines.
The late-nineteenth-century study of folklore—or the traditions and vernacular literature (oral and written) of ethno-linguistic groupings—furnished important materials for constructing the idea of the modern nation, not just in northern and central Europe but in colonial South and Southeast Asia as well. Although the discipline of folklore and its related technique of ethnography were initially associated with colonial rule, its subject matter and methods were in many cases adapted by nascent nationalist movements. Folkloric knowledge constructed from intimate association with its subjects was soon disseminated in a variety of formats and media for diverse audiences: for example, in official gazetteers for colonial functionaries, amateur folktale compilations for lay readers and scholars, and articles written for the metropolitan and vernacular print media. The purposes of these "proto-ethnographic" genres ranged from the administrative to the instructional, the entertaining and the polemical. Even in colonialist texts, the attempt to delineate a field of "tradition" sometimes took on paradoxical dimensions of cultural and idiosyncratic creativity, which in turn held out the promise (or threat) of reconfiguring relations of subordination and domination.
The premise of the panel is that the subject of authorship in proto-ethnographic writings offers a fruitful point of entry into this paradox. For our purposes, "authorship" encompasses both the politics of collaboration, acknowledgment and circulation entailed in the production of ethnographic works, as well as their rhetorical strategies, genre and stylistic features. And since the individuals who produce such texts often borrowed and engaged in comparison across regional and global boundaries, the panel appropriately brings together three papers on Indonesia, the Philippines, and South India.
Family Titles, National Tales: Devotions of an Indian Ethnographer in Colonial India
Leela Prasad, Duke University
Between 1865 and 1920, staggering numbers of folktale collections were made by Indian scholars, British administrators, missionaries, and wives and daughters of colonial officials. Along with their copious notes and appendixes, these collections addressed multiple audiences that ranged from administrators and anthropologists to travelers and children. My paper explores how Indian-authored collections balanced the micro-world of human relationships, imagined landscapes, and local detail against the macro-realities of nationalism, colonial power politics, and "scientific" anthropological inquiry. I focus on M. N. Venkata-swami, a librarian in the 1920s in the Nizam State of Hyderabad, who wrote prolifically and meticulously about South Indian folklore but slipped into complete obscurity over the years. Venkataswami’s folktale collections raise the question of how to "read" a well-annotated cultural text that is inevitably located in the predilections of its compiler but is unevenly self-reflective. How did the experience of borders—through fieldwork, through casteism, and through migration across the "Deccan" and different political rulerships—translate into Venkataswami’s ethnographic writing? How did Venkataswami’s ostensibly generic manuals about "Telugu culture" subtext his devotion to his family (evident in the ways he titled his books), to nationalist ideals, and to social reform? I draw on Venkataswami’s little-known biography of his father (a pioneering hotel keeper in Central India) and his own folktale collections, to discuss the hybrid predicaments that emerge from these entwined loyalties. I also explore how the stories themselves render fluid linguistic and socio-religious borders assumed fixed by other ethnographies of his time.
"Ancient Culture" as a Front Page Feature Story: Batak Reporters Write Heritage in the Vernacular Press of the Colonial Indies
Susan Rodgers, College of the Holy Cross
The southern Batak-language, Batak-managed weekly newspaper Poestaha, published fitfully from the nineteen teens through the late 1920s, embodied a series of productive tensions in the colonial Indies. For instance, its name means approximately "Old Inherited Customs" and this newspaper was created specifically to showcase Angkola and Mandailing Batak heritage (old village speech forms, seen as such; stories; communal feasting protocols), yet Poestaha editors participated enthusiastically in the self-consciously "up-to-the-minute" Indies newspaper culture of the time, a culture entranced with "progress" and "the modern age." Secondly, Poestaha was indelibly a southern Batak endeavor, with reporters often going so far as to write their Angkola Batak language and Mandailing Batak language stories in formats mimicking the ritual orations of village feasts of merit. Yet, Poestaha, qua newspaper, was forthrightly part of the process of imagining Indonesia as a nation for some of its rural and urban diaspora Batak readership (who were clearly assumed to also know Malay/Indonesian and some Dutch). This present paper examines a selection of page-one stories from Poestaha to ask: How did the rhetorical strategies of international newspaper journalism of the era shape southern Batak reporters’ attempts to "write tradition" in a time of early Indonesian nationalism and promotion of "the modern" in Sumatra? How did those Poestaha reporters and editors in turn domesticate newspaper literacy, perhaps to cagey and even seditious ethnic self-fashioning effect? The conjunction of a creative, exploratory vernacular press; a population of writers and readers influenced by colonial European ethnological projects; and a conflicted early nationalism is a triad deserving more Southeast Asia-wide attention. This paper, offering specifically anthropological readings of newspaper texts, is a case study toward that larger effort.
Authorial Subjects and Native Voices in the Late Spanish Colonial Philippines
Megan C. Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz; Smita Lahiri, Harvard University
This paper explores how issues of "voice" speak to complexities of colonial power, resistance, appropriation and subversion by exploring two sets of contrasting proto-ethnographic texts from the late-19th-century Philippines.
The first texts were written by Spanish authors but disguise themselves as Tagalog works. These texts—one a novel and the other an essay—purport to teach Tagalogs about their own culture, customs, duties, and loyalties. Thus they share a common rhetorical strategy: ventriloquization and imitation of native "voices" by Spanish subjects in the service of native edification, i.e., colonial containment and indoctrination. The texts in the second set, written by educated, creolized "natives" of the Philippines (some of whom were central figures in the nationalist movement), are folkloristic and ethnographic accounts of different ethno-linguistic groups in the Philippines. These native authors self-consciously adopted the European sciences of folklore and ethnography and yet claim an authority as experts precisely because of their status as "natives"—even when writing about a group of which they were not a member.
Bringing together these two sets of texts, we investigate issues of narrative voice, "native" voice, authority, and authenticity in this colonial context. The texts are all products of the tensions of colonial authority and the promises and threats of trans-culturation and cultural impurity. While Spanish authors literally mimic a native Tagalog voice while the native folklorists imitate European science, all of the narratives derive at least some of their authority from the (supposedly) authentic native voice.
Session 121: Labor and Desire in East Asia
Organizer: Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Chicago
Chair: Ruth Barraclough, Australian National University
Discussant: Shigemi Nakagawa, Ritsumeikan University
When Paula Rabinowitz writes that U.S. women’s revolutionary narratives frequently dramatize the conflicts and contradictions between labor and desire, she is trying to create terms to think outside the axes conventionally drawn by the juxtaposition of feminist and socialist thought. "Labor and desire" shifts attention from the sometimes static "class and gender" back into bodies that register these relations in multiple and conflicting ways.
This panel will consider theories of labor and desire, romance, class politics, sexuality, and gender in the context of creative works by East Asian male and female proletarian writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Bergstrom’s paper looks at literary pieces by Nakamoto Takako that seem to compromise the category of proletarian literature by their obsessive attention to sexuality. Barraclough’s paper invites us to think about the relationship between different kinds of systemic exploitation—labor and sexual—in her investigation of Korean factory girl literature. Bowen-Struyk’s paper investigates the development of intimacy between comrades in Japanese proletarian literature, arguing that it may play the role of "romance" in the fiction. All three papers address the limits and possibilities of proletarian literature dealing with issues of sexuality, leading us to ask, how does proletarian literature in Japan and Korea engage the question of laboring bodies that are also sexual bodies?
Femininity, Flux, and the Messy Formation of Modernity: Nakamoto Takako in 1929
Brian Bergstrom, University of Chicago
This paper proposes that Nakamoto Takako’s works and their contribution to the formation of both modernist and proletarian fiction cannot be reduced to the sum of her influences, significant as they may seem coming from the likes of Yokomitsu Riichi, Kikuchi Kan, and her eventual husband, Kurahara Korehito. Focusing on the works she published in Nyonin Geijutsu (Women and the Arts) during 1929, the paper will show how her contributions to Japanese literary modernism, proletarian literature, and "women’s writing" provide a prismatic view of these discourses as they were negotiated during this tempestuous year.
One of the few consistent elements running through Nakamoto’s writing in this period is a preoccupation with the body as a site across which such negotiation takes place. From the first story she published in 1929, "Aka" ("Red"), in which the protagonist intentionally induces a miscarriage through manual labor, to the later "Suzumushi no mesu" ("The Female Bell-Cricket"), the story of a woman who despises her husband for starving himself in order to feed her, Nakamoto explores in her early fiction and criticism a messy physicality that portrays the intersection of systems of labor and capitalism as a space where bodies malfunction, rebel, or otherwise seethe with intractable desires. Generically, her stories show how such a view unites the concerns of the normally adversarial modernist and proletarian camps, producing stories that show the mutually constitutive nature of both genres and have now been largely forgotten, perhaps because of their slippery inability to fit comfortably into either category.
Sexual Violence in Korean Proletarian Literature
Ruth Barraclough, Australian National University
In the 1920s, when proletarian literature was becoming one of Korea’s leading literary formations, people working in factories, ports, and mines were mounting campaigns to alleviate some of the worst abuses of colonial industrialization. Women as well as men formed unions, called strikes, and wrote in to newspapers and magazines to draw public attention to conditions in the new industries. Two of the most prominent strike demands by blue collar women in the 1920s and early 1930s were for higher wages and to end the sexual violence in the factories. Their concerns were taken up by authors of proletarian literature who wrote sexual violence in the factories at the center of the experience of their working-class heroines.
This paper examines the "lived experience" of working-class women in their fight to end sexual assault and harassment in the rubber and textile factories and the continuation of the campaign in the works of proletarian literature by three authors, Kang Kyong-ae, Yu Jin-o, and Yi Puk-myong.
I argue that the flowering of a factory girl literature was a historical and economic moment as well as a literary one. Written at a time when social realism was as much a political intervention as an aesthetic choice, these works of proletarian literature enable us to read poverty and sexuality minutely into Korea’s industrial revolution and trace the relations between working people and the writers and intellectuals who had "gone out to meet them."
Romancing Comrades
Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Chicago
Most works of Japanese proletarian literature evacuate romantic interest from the plot, as if to suggest that a good romance might distract the reader from becoming impassioned with the revolutionary struggle. In narratives focused on working men, women surface as distractions, obstacles, or muses. When women share the proletarian literary stage, they must somehow share it as equals, comrades, but this is an uneasy balance. However, my argument above deals with conventional heterosexual romance.
In this piece, I will argue that proletarian literature makes use of an alternative romantic logic: the romance of comraderie. Instead of having narratives that focus on the uniting of a heterosexual couple, proletarian literature often highlights the development of a bond between men fighting for the same cause. By looking at Kobayashi Takiji’s novella "The Factory Cell" (Kojo saibo, 1930) and Kishi Sanji’s "Go, Stop" (Go-, sutoppu, 1928–29), I will argue that in contrast to the heterosexual romantic storylines, which are forgettable, the development of intimacy and comraderie between men follows the logic of romance and constitutes the most important emotional bond of the works.
Organizer: Tracy Johnson-Messinger, Columbia University
Chair: Thomas A. Borchert, University of Chicago
Discussant: Louisa Schein, Rutgers University
Keywords: state, China, Thailand, Southeast Asia, ethnicity, religion, education.
The last fifteen years has seen an increasing amount of scholarship addressing how multiethnic Asian states seek to manage minority and non-elite populaces found within their boundaries. Prior regimes of physical force and surveillance have been blended with regimes of knowledge which seek to naturalize the subaltern position of these populaces. The representations, which are at the heart of these regimes of knowledge, attempt to fix internal borders and distinctions, demarcating these populaces as both integral to and inferior within the national hierarchy.
In this panel, we will explore the extent to which these discursive technologies serve to police the internal boundaries of nationhood within two Asian states: China and Thailand. Drawing on ethnographic research into educational regimes, religious institutions, and "local" rituals, this panel seeks to do three things: first, we will examine how the Chinese and Thai states have sought to represent and situate subaltern groups as both integral and inferior; second, we will show how "Han-ness" and "Thai-ness" come to be understood against these representations of non-elites; and third, we will show how some marginalized groups are involved in articulating their own representations of nation and other.
Representing the Hmong in Thailand: The Laksut Thongthin and Thailand’s Public Schools
Tracy Johnson-Messinger, Columbia University
In 1999, the Hill Tribe Development Foundation (HTDF), a nongovernmental organization devoted to hill tribe issues, began developing the laksut thongthin, a "local" or "indigenous" curriculum intended for use in Thai public schools operating in hill tribe villages. The state supported curriculum development project appeared to substantiate the idea that Thailand was a plural society and that this ought to be reflected in the curriculum of the public schools in the highlands. However, as these schools had originally been established to support the government’s goal of assimilating indigenous communities into national social life, the social, economic and political difficulties attendant to hill tribe life remain immediately apparent in the education system.
This paper will argue, based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Hmong of Ban Rongrian, Thailand, that this new curriculum project can be seen as a technology of control. Although written by the Hmong staff of HTDF, the curriculum acts as a guide for Hmong students to come to a better understanding of their culture in terms of the place that it holds in the national hierarchy. Through an analysis of the discursive content of the curriculum in light of HTDF’s objectives and the problems of implementing the curriculum in the Ban Rongrian school, I will show how the curriculum engages with the discourse of eternal Thailand, and of the "dangerous" and "uncivilized" chao khao (hill tribes), ultimately serving to reinscribe the notion of the Hmong as being the integral and yet inferior "other" who must always be relegated to the borders of the Thai national imaginary.
Surveillance and Suzhi: Seeing Quality and Producing Distinctions among Schoolchildren in Beijing
Terry Woronov, University of California, Berkeley
In recent years, efforts by China’s population planners to reduce the quantity of the population have increasingly been matched by attempts to raise the "quality" (suzhi) of the Chinese people. Indeed, as the discourse of suzhi has gained popular currency, the concept of "quality" is now used both to explain and justify differences within the Chinese population; for example, distinctions between Han and minority peoples, between urban and rural dwellers, and between members of different social classes are increasingly attributed to innate differences in "quality." This paper looks at how the Chinese state uses "quality" to define and produce differences within the Han population, specifically among children in Beijing. Based on fieldwork conducted among schoolchildren in the Chinese capital, this paper discusses some of the surveillance regimes the state uses to examine children’s quality, rank children of different classes according to differential "quality" scales, and represent some children as models of "quality" for the rest of the nation.
State Rituals of Local Revivalism: Encompassing the Khmer Other within the Thai National Imaginary
Alexandra Denes, Cornell University
Who are Thailand’s 1.3 million ethnic Khmer, and how has their identity been constituted in relation to the Thai nation-state? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Surin province, this paper aims to demonstrate that state-led policies of local cultural revival are a means of encompassing ethnic Khmer difference within the Thai national imaginary. Although framed in the language of localism, the province’s cultural performances and its official historical narrative are unmistakable assertions of ethnic Khmer allegiance to the Thai nation. Focusing on Surin’s Elephant Fair, this paper will show how this annual state-sponsored ritual became the crucible through which ethnic Khmer identity was constructed as "the other within" (Thongchai 2000).
Given that the official sponsorship of this ritual presupposes a rationalized episteme, how might we explain the spectral appearance of the dead through spirit mediumship? Do these possessions under the official gaze of the state represent a form of local resistance to the state’s civilizing mission? Or are they symptoms of the state’s nostalgia for the lost past?
Religion, Feudal Superstition, and Evil Cults: Discourse on Religion and Ethnicity in Southwest China
Thomas A. Borchert, University of Chicago
Religion has had a fraught history in the People’s Republic of China. Yet while the violent repression of both established and new religious groups has resulted in a general impression of state violence against religion in China, in point of fact, Chinese policy and discourse is much more nuanced. By clearly distinguishing between legitimate religion, feudal survivals (i.e., superstition), and "evil cults," the Chinese state has sought to control religious practices and beliefs. In this sense, the discourse on religion might be understood to be technology of power for the Chinese state.
Although there are important differences, the evolutionary paradigm embedded in the Chinese discourse on religion maps onto the evolutionary paradigm used in the control of China’s ethnic minorities in interesting ways. While, theoretically at least, they should correspond neatly (the most "backward" minorities believing in "evil cults" and the highest ethnic group, the Han, being only atheist), the situation is much more complicated than this. Indeed, contradictions between these two different technologies can open up opportunities for social action on the part of certain minority groups.
This paper is a discussion of how one Chinese minority, the Dai-lue of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province, has been able to exploit this contradiction. While ethnicity-oriented internal orientalist representations of the Dai-lue as exotic and passive seek to domesticate this ethnic minority to the Chinese national order, discourse on the free practice of legitimate religion provides the Dai-lue with resources to avoid straightforward incorporation into this order.
Session 123: An East Asian Century?
Organizer: Ganesh K. Trichur, St. Lawrence University
Chair and Discussant: James Lee, Harvard University
This panel presents conflicting perspectives, critical interpretations, and different methodologies on the controversies surrounding East Asian dynamism. How do economy, society, community, and politics interact to permit different interpretations of the historical contradictions of the region? In what sense(s) is "East Asia" a central "space-of-flows," arrests, and emergences? Ganesh K. Trichur argues that the 21st century will be an East Asian century, in spite of the financial "crises" of the 1990s. He argues that both the East Asian "miracle" and the later "crisis" need to be situated within a more general global "financial expansion" of the 1970s, the re-birth of powerful city-states in the region, and the informal business and trading networks of the South China Sea. The other panelists are against "economistic" perspectives. Jitendra Uttam points out that it is primarily socio-political forces at work in the region that explain both "miracle" and "meltdown"—the development miracle only served to strengthen perdurable authoritarian social structures that continue to effectively limit future economic growth in the region. Vera Zambonelli situates East Asian dynamism in the productive tension between the discriminatory and economistic representations of the region by the Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) networks, on the one hand, and multiple communities of resistance to APEC on the other. She argues that the historical geographies of the Pacific are being reshaped by these global nongovernmental networks of resistance.
East Asia beyond Miracle and Meltdown: A Political Economy Perspective
Jitendra Uttam, Jawaharlal Nehru University
This paper argues that the 20th century economic rise and decline of East Asia may be conceptualized in terms other than its polar representations of "miracle" or "meltdown." It seeks to present an alternative portrait of East Asian realities by arguing that economic variables do not work independently of socio-political variables. In particular, the working of socio-political variables have autonomous effects at different levels that negate the simplistic pictures conjured in the concepts of "miracle" or "meltdown." The experience of economic development in the region refutes the modernization perspective, which argues that economic modernization leads to the modernization of socio-political traditions as well. I argue that East Asia’s socio-political and intellectual realities did not change with the economic transformations in the region. Economic development in the region reinforced the traditional-authoritarian social culture, which in turn acted as a social limit to the region’s growth. This paper will consider some of the lessons to be drawn for South Asia.
The overly enthusiastic or depressingly pessimistic tones of contemporary debates on East Asia originate in the bias towards the economic. A consideration of historical socio-political and intellectual dimensions, would balance the weight of economistic thinking on the region.
APEC, Alter-APEC, and the Building of the Asia-Pacific Community
Vera Zambonelli, Johns Hopkins University
The Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) founded in 1989, is a heterogeneous entity that now encompasses twenty-one member countries with different levels of socioeconomic and political development. Their interdependent networks have worked to produce problematic representations of a contemporary Pacific Rim community. I argue that while APEC directly substantiates the idea of an Asia Pacific community—though predominantly discriminatory because exclusively economic in its form—indirectly it has prompted the creative emergence of informal alter-APEC communities, whose existence is framed in opposition to APEC, yet whose wider framework of reference remains the Pacific regions as a whole. Taking some of their inspiration from contemporary global and transnational movements, these international nongovernmental networks of resistant communities are reshaping the Asia-Pacific region. Politically active against the discriminatory APEC economic community, they embody a vision of an Asia-Pacific community that cuts across national boundaries and contributes in complex ways to the ongoing East Asian dynamism. This paper draws upon my summer dissertation research in Thailand (which hosts the APEC 2003 meeting) to clarify the effects of these dynamic interactive processes on the political economy of East Asian dynamism in the 21st century.
East Asian Resurgence in World Historical Perspective
Ganesh K. Trichur, St. Lawrence University
This paper conceptualizes the world-historical resurgence of East Asia in the 21st century global political economy. I argue that the trajectory of the East Asian legion as a center of capital accumulation has weathered the crisis of the post-1945 Bretton Woods international order. East Asian developments will be determinant of the emerging contours of the world economy in the transitional epochs of the 21st century. The late 1990s "East Asian financial crisis" has in fact been wrongly interpreted as a sign of the crisis of the region. What then did it symbolize? I claim that there are clear signs of continuity in "the rise of East Asia" if we situate the region within the dynamic of informal networks of capital accumulation, the rebirth of city-states, and transnational entrepreneurial diaspora. I use a global political economy perspective to argue that the late-20th-century "financial expansion" is creating durable grounds for a sustained world systemic dynamic centered in the East Asian region. What prospects does this raise for South Asia? How is the East Asian trajectory incorporating South Asia into its networks of accumulation? What socio-political contradictions arise in such a process? This paper will also explore questions arising out of the effects of East Asian resurgence on debates surrounding social movements, "North versus South"; human rights interventions, and the prospects for global peace in the 21st century.
Session 141: The Futures of Matriliny in South and Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Dennis B. McGilvray, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussants: Robin Jeffrey, La Trobe University; Jeffrey Hadler, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, matriliny, matriarchy, gender, culture, Hindu, Muslim.
Once regarded as an early stage in 19th-century theories of cultural evolution, then transformed into a 20th-century anthropological "puzzle" to be solved by kinship analysis, matrilineal systems of descent, succession, and inheritance have generally been regarded as rare, exotic, and doomed to disintegrate under the corrosive influences of modern life. Matrilineal societies—in which access to property, political office, ritual status, and domestic authority are (to varying degrees) transmitted through the female line—have indeed been affected by changes in economic, legal, and cultural patterns under colonial and postcolonial regimes. However, their demise has sometimes been exaggerated, and the current directions of matrilineal adaptation in the 21st century still need to be mapped. This panel offers a comparison of three contemporary groups—the Nayars of Kerala (Shanti Menon), the Tamils and Moors of Sri Lanka (Dennis McGilvray), and the Minangkabau of Sumatra (Peggy Reeves Sanday)—in which matrilineal cultural values and social roles persist in different ways. The cases permit intriguing controlled comparisons: a historical linkage between Kerala and Sri Lanka, and the phenomenon of the coexistence of Islam and matriliny in both Sri Lanka and Sumatra. Discussants for this panel are balanced regionally: Robin Jeffrey is a political scientist who has documented the "decline of Nayar dominance," and Jeffrey Hadler will provide a historian’s perspective on the Minangkabau. By projecting the discussions of matriliny begun at the 2003 AAS Session on "Politics and Matriliny" into the realm of cultural values and symbolic systems this panel will bring South Asianists into dialogue with Southeast Asianists on a topic of renewed interest in anthropology and gender studies.
Mothers and Daughters: Continuity and Change among the Matrilineal Nayars of Kerala
Shanti Menon, Wayne State University
The Nayars of Kerala, on the southwest coast of India, describe themselves and are perceived by the other caste and religious communities around them as a matrilineal group. However, as researchers have pointed out, matrilineal practices among the Nayars have been in decline since the beginning of the twentieth century. This has been a result of a series of legislative changes combined with the slow erosion of an agrarian economy. As Nayar men moved away from the land and left home in search of white collar jobs, the old taravads fell apart. This has led, in the last fifty years, to a slow shift in cultural traditions as the Nayars adopt what seems on the surface to be the patrilineal practices of the groups around them. However, matrilineal values and social patterns still persist in the lived practices of certain Nayar families. This paper explores the meanings and causes of these continuities and changes in the lives and experiences of two generations of Nayar women. Drawing on my fieldwork in Alanthara village in central Kerala, I examine how living in a taravad during a time of transition has shaped their identities as women. The voices of the women are presented against a backdrop of historical and social transformations taking place in the world outside their taravad. The discussion also raises the question of what a decline in matriliny is likely to mean for future generations of Nayar women.
Persistence of Matriliny in the Sri Lankan War Zone
Dennis B. McGilvray, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Tamil-speaking districts of eastern Sri Lanka first drew the attention of anthropologists in the 1960s because of a distinctive matrilineal social system found among both the Hindus and the Muslims ("Moors"). Subsequent research established the existence of matrilineal clans, a matrilineally-inflected caste system, matrilineal temple/mosque honors, matrilocal households, and even the historical memory of matrilineal chiefdoms despite 400 years of colonial rule. Comparative studies of the Nayars and other matrilineal castes in neighboring Kerala would have predicted the steady decline of matrilineal institutions in Sri Lanka as a result of 20th century modernization. Furthermore, the devastating Eelam Wars for Tamil independence since 1983 should have undermined any remaining social and economic basis for matrilineal traditions. However, fieldwork between 1993 and 2003 reveals that matrilineal patterns are still maintained despite the massive effects of the ethnic violence. At the domestic level, de-facto matriliny continues to function through matrilocal marriage and the pre-mortem transfer of family houses, lands, and wealth to daughters (but not sons) in the form of dowry. Unlike Kerala, Sri Lankan matriliny does not depend upon legal codes of post-mortem inheritance. At the civic level, boards of matrilineal clan elders still administer Hindu temples and Muslim mosques. Ironically, this tradition may have been revitalized by the Eelam War. Many religious shrines have experienced increased participation and heightened ritual observance out of anxiety that earlier unfulfilled vows and lax devotional practices led to the violence as a form of divine retribution.
Rethinking Matriarchy: The Minangkabau of Indonesia
Peggy Reeves Sanday, University of Pennsylvania
This paper presents a conceptual framework for rethinking matriarchy based on my long-term ethnography of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra (see my Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, Cornell University Press, 2002). The Minangkabau are known to anthropologists as the largest matrilineal society in the world today. They are unique in that they self-identify as a matriarchy. However, they do not define matriarchy as female rule. This paper argues that defining matriarchy as female rule, the mirror image of patriarchy, could only have come from a patriarchal worldview. It proposes a new definition based on an analysis of customs in Minangkabau village life referred to as adat matriarchaat. The definition I propose based on observing these customs is compared with the meaning of arche in Greek. I suggest that had Western thought adopted the Greek meaning of arche in defining matriarchy, we would have developed a scholarly tradition of understanding women-centered cultures along with the male-dominance tradition of the 20th century.
Organizer: Yong-Cheol Kim, Chonnam National University
Discussants: Salim Said, University of Indonesia; R. William Liddle, Ohio State University
Though many countries have made successful transitions to democracy in recent decades, not all have established civilian supremacy. South Korea is an example of a country in which the 1980s democratic transition was accompanied by the full achievement of civilian supremacy. The Korean armed forces are not involved in internal security, nonmilitary public policy issues, or the selection of state leaders, all key measures in the theoretical literature. The Indonesian armed forces, on the other hand, are not clearly separated from governmental decision making four years after the 1999 democratic election. They are closely involved in decisions on internal security and non-military public policies, particularly regarding regional government. Early signs indicate that they may back parties and/or candidates in the 2004 election.
What accounts for these differences? The three discussants have written a joint paper which will be presented at the roundtable. The paper, based on extensive interviews as well as newspaper, documentary, and secondary sources, compares the two countries on a wide range of independent variables. The paper is still in progress, so we have not reached firm conclusions, but we believe that our comparative advantage (over larger N studies) is in our ability to examine closely the actions of key civilian political and military leaders in both countries at crucial moments of decision during the transition process. This method enables us to evaluate their own calculations of the factors facilitating and inhibiting movement toward civilian supremacy.
In addition to the paper presentation, which will be made by Professor Liddle, Professors Kim and Said will make separate presentations of the current state of civil-military relations in Korea and Indonesia respectively.
Session 143: The Politics of "the Political": Cross-Cultural Practices of Appropriation
Organizer and Chair: Atsuko Ueda, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Discussant: Henry Em, University of Michigan
Keywords: cross-cultural appropriation, politics, nationalism, literature.
This panel examines the broad terrain of the "political" that manifests in cross-cultural practices of appropriation. We seek to highlight how these practices engage with global concerns that cannot be contained within one cultural or spatial locale. Simultaneously, with the understanding that what constitutes the "political" is historically and culturally bound, we problematize the "localized" practices of appropriation and the subsequent production of "political meanings" within the respective temporal and spatial contexts. Taking advantage of the cross-cultural make-up of our panel, we seek to highlight both the potential and limitations of our own cultural and political framework within which we inevitably operate.
All four papers deal with refiguring of an earlier text at critical moments in history. Specifically, Ueda examines how the images of the French Revolution and Russian Nihilist Movement were appropriated and then domesticated within the discourse of Japanese political novels at the onset of Japanese modernity. Sawhney inquires into the works of fourth-century Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, with a particular emphasis on his resurrection during the nationalist period, ultimately to propose a reading that adheres to neither the nationalist nor the purely aesthetic reading. Hughes’ paper considers how Ch’oe In-hun’s 1970 rewriting of a colonial text censored by the anticommunist Park Chung Hee regime contests the Cold War division of the Korean peninsula. Finally, Sakakibara’s paper discusses two cases of appropriation of a postwar Japanese writer, Dazai Osamu—in the 60s and in the 90s—showing that the processes of reinterpretation generate political values for seemingly apolitical texts that describe the minute details of characters’ mundane lives.
The Politics of Poetry: Kalidasa in the World of Sanskrit Drama
Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota
This paper asks, once again, how we might gauge the political impact or potential of a literary work. If literature often appears enigmatic in this regard, it is because it presents us with the curious phenomenon of a linguistic utterance that survives its own particular context and becomes recurrently "meaningful" in widely diverse circumstances. This ability of literature to speak across space and time has intrigued generations of readers, eliciting in modern times reactions as divergent as those of the "reception" theorists (Iser, Jauss, Fish) who privilege the reader’s position in the act of reading on the one hand, and on the other, Walter Benjamin’s categorical assertion that "no poem is addressed to a reader" ("Task of the Translator"). With reference to this broad terrain of questions, I examine the work of a canonical Sanskrit poet and dramatist and discuss the representation of kingship, love, and gender in his oeuvre. Kalidasa, who wrote in the 4th century, is easily the most celebrated Sanskrit poet in modern India, having been resurrected as a foundational figure during the nationalist period. Examining Kalidasa’s works in the context of the larger world of Sanskrit drama, this paper first attempts to account for Kalidasa’s particular appeal for nationalist writers and then proposes how his work might be read today by those of us who are interested neither in the search for a "golden period" of Sanskrit drama nor simply in cultivating aesthetic appreciation.
"Translated" Images: The French Revolution and Russian Nihilism in Japanese Political Novels
Atsuko Ueda, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Images of momentous political events travel across historical and cultural boundaries, undergoing varying processes of appropriation. This paper examines one such moment in the history of modern Japan: the writers of political novels mobilized the images of the French Revolution and Russian Nihilist Movement in the early to mid-1880s in search of the "origin" of their struggle toward "freedom." I inquire into the political and literary impacts of such images in the context of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, which was both a political and a literary movement.
Specifically, the paper examines the works of Miyazaki Muryû, an activist and writer for the Jiyûtô party, whose works, such as Jiyû no kachidoki (1881–82), an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Taking of the Bastille, and Mujitsu no shimoto (1881), a work that thematizes the Nihilists’ attack against Alexander II in Russia, were extremely popular among the politically-minded youth of Japan. The point of interest is the language Muryû employs. In Muryû’s hand, the "heroes" of the French Revolution and Nihilist Movements in Russia are endowed with Confucian virtues, and the figures curiously become reminiscent of heroes of Edo yomihon and the Chinese baihua-xiaoshuo. Incidentally, this was the same language that the Japanese political youths used to discursively frame their struggle for liberty. As this paper attempts to reveal what constitutes the "political" in early to mid-1880s Japan, it inevitably raises the question of "translingual practice" (to borrow Lydia Liu’s term) that prefigures the "political" values attached to these modes of representation.
Return to the Colonial Present: A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist in Park Chung Hee’s Seoul
Ted Hughes, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In 1970, the South Korean economy was beginning to feel the effects of rapid economic growth, South Korean soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, and the Park Chung Hee regime was attempting to solidify its hold on power. Ch’oe In-hun’s A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (1970) rewrites Pak T’ae-wôn’s 1934 Joycean short story, which bears the same title, a text banned in South Korea until 1988 because of Pak’s status as a "writer who went North" (wôlbuk chakka) following the 1945 liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. This paper explores the ways in which Ch’oe’s reintroduction of Kubo—the modernist writer-flaneur who wanders the streets of the mid-1930s colonial capital—in contemporary Seoul represents an attempt both to mediate North/South national division and to delegitimize the developmental-authoritarian state.
Kubo’s reappearance not only reveals how the Park regime enforces national division through an institutional disciplining of anticommunist subjects, but also the ways in which daily life in the South depends upon a radical forgetting of the North. At the same time, Ch’oe’s text questions the developmental assumptions of progress and a colonial/postcolonial break. The mid-1930s repressive, colonial past reemerges in contemporary Seoul, privileged by Park as a sign of South Korea’s prosperous, modern future by way of the return of the colonized intellectual who can move through public space but cannot participate meaningfully in a public sphere.
Producing the "Political": Re-evaluating Dazai Osamu’s Fiction
Richi Sakakibara, Waseda University
Contrary to general belief, the political value of a literary text is not inherent in the text itself. Rather, it is created, at least partially, through the practice of reading. This paper examines the processes through which political values are attached to the works of a Japanese postwar writer Dazai Osamu (1906–48), who is generally considered to be an apolitical writer given that his works focus on the characters’ mundane life and their inner thoughts. I inquire into two specific moments in modern Japanese history where his seemingly "apolitical" works were used to represent a political position. The first is the publication of Yoshimoto Takaaki’s What Is Beauty for Language? in 1965 (the serialization of which started earlier, in 1961, immediately after the U.S. security treaty upheaval). In this voluminous book, Yoshimoto, a charismatic cultural and political critic, attempts to reevaluate Dazai’s works while arguing against the orthodox Marxist literary criticism that was still prevalent in the late 50s and early 60s. Clearly, his reading was politically motivated and had a tremendous impact on the zenkyôtô new left generation. The second is the more recent debate in the 90s on Historical Revisionism between a Deconstructionist philosopher, Takahashi Tetsuya, and a renowned literary critic, Kato Norihiro. Kato in his argument used Dazai’s texts to represent his political position for Historical Revisionism. By examining these two different historical contexts within which Dazai’s texts were appropriated, I hope to shed a new light on the age-old paradigm of literary studies, "politics versus literature."
Session 161: Impacts of Asian Values on Democratization in East and Southeast Asia
Organizer: Robert B. Albritton, University of Mississippi
Chair and Discussant: Russell Dalton, University of California, Irvine
These papers represent a collaborative survey on "Democratization and Value Change in East Asia." The project administered the same questionnaire in eight East Asian countries; this panel represents four of them, including Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. It is border-crossing in representing both East and Southeast Asia. The papers offered here focus on the dimension of Asian Values and the relationship of these values to development of political cultures in these nations. One of the papers approaches the issue of Asian values, across the nations represented in the study.
The papers provide rare national probability samples of the nations for a critical examination of the Asian Values debate. Responses to questions tapping traditional values indicate that Asians are not as committed to the stereotypes of Asian Values, as is often assumed, but the level of commitment is examined by attributes such as gender, age, education, urban-rural characteristics, and socio-economic attributes. The role these values play in support for or opposition to democracy is examined with a view to describing political cultures that evolve from these values and their impacts on the course of democratization. The papers cover issues of regime transition, democratic legitimacy, and the way citizens evaluate political systems and processes. In addition, the papers will address the influence of Asian Values on the creation of social capital, specifically in how citizens trust their government and people in their society. Although all of the studies indicate low levels of support for "Asian Values," the level of that support varies across nations. The overall objective of the study is to estimate the stability of the "ideology" of democracy in mass opinion. In this case, the panel focuses on the role of Asian Values in the process of democratization.
East Asian Political Culture versus Democratic Development
Hsin-chi Kuan, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper examines the causal thesis embedded in the Asian Values debate that characteristics of traditional East Asian culture will not assist the development of democracy in the region. In the discourse of Asian Values debate some have claimed that East Asia is still characterized by vivid paternalistic power and superior-inferior relations, which will never disappear with the modernization of society and economy. In addition, the emerging democracies in the region are superficial and illiberal. The cultural foundation for rule-of-law and constitutionalism is simply lacking. This paper explores whether the combined experience of our seven cases could challenge this thesis. The paper will combine macro-level contextual variables (capturing the impact of the trajectory and stage of regime transition as well as the stage of socio-economic development at the aggregate level) with the micro-level socio-economic background variables (age of generation cohorts, education, gender, media exposure, urban vs. rural setting, etc.) to analyze the pooled cross-sectional data set.
Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy? The Case of South Korea
Chong-Min Park, Korea University; Don Shin, University of Missouri
What constitutes Asian Values? Are they compatible or incompatible with democratic politics? For the past two decades, these questions have been vigorously debated in the scholarly community and policy circles. Defenders of Asian Values, for example, have claimed that Western-style liberal democracy is not suitable in Confucian East Asia, where collective welfare, a sense of duty, and other principles of Confucian moral philosophy are deeply rooted. As a viable alternative to liberal democracy rooted in the principles of individual rights and social contract theory, they have advocated the "Asian Way," a benevolent paternalistic form of governance, which has been rejected as anachronistic and oppressive rule by supporters of liberal democracy. Despite decades of intense debate, no systematic effort to date has been made to determine empirically whether Asian Values actually deter the development of Western-style liberal democracy in Confucian East Asia. This paper examines the prevalence of Asian Values and tests their compatibility or incompatibility with pro-democratic and antiauthoritarian political orientations among the Korean mass public.
What are the specific components of Asian Values that have been regarded as incompatible with liberal democracy? How broadly and deeply are these components prevalent among the Korean populace? What does democracy mean to Koreans who remain attached to Asian Values? Does their notion of democracy differ significantly from what is known among those who are not attached to these same values? Do adherents of Asian Values tend to reject the institutions and norms of liberal democracy, while embracing those of authoritarian rule, as opponents of this thesis claim? These questions are explored in the context of a national sample survey of the Korean electorate conducted during the months of November 2001 and March 2002. A preliminary analysis of the survey data reveals that the Korean people as a whole still remain attached to the values and codes of Confucianism. Yet, their attachment to those values and codes does not deter them from endorsing the democratization of authoritarian rule.
Sources for the Uneven Development of Democratic Culture in East Asia
Alfred Hu and You-Tsung Chang, National Taiwan University
This paper will cross-examine three paradigms in comparative politics for the explanatory sources of value change in general and the acquisition of democratic values in particular. Modernizationists believe that the bias between Eastern and Western cultures will eventually disappear through the processes of global modernization and democratization. They also believe that liberal democratic regimes will replace other forms of political regimes and in turn become the best and only option. The culturalist perspective emphasizes cultural relativism and treats cultural endowment as a force of inertia. In particular, they contend that Confucian thought encourages social harmony and cooperation, prevents conflict, values the attainment of social order, and maintains hierarchical social structures. These characteristics of traditional culture would not assist the development of democracy in the region. Alternatively, institutionalists emphasize the learning-by-doing process under specific institutional arrangements. The opportunities and incentives available under different political regimes will over time induce the acquisition of new values, beliefs and a sense of legitimacy. Underscoring the malleability of values and beliefs, they argue that the political learning through participating in the democratic process tends to attenuate the influence of traditional values. Our cross-national data set puts us in a privileged position to examine the validity of the three contrasting theoretical claims. In particular, we examine how variation in the trajectory of regime transition, macro-level properties of the political system, and the lingering impact of traditional cultural attributes qualify the impact of forces of modernization as well as globalization on value changes, affect the acquisition of democratic value-orientation and democratic legitimacy, and shape the way citizens evaluate political system and process.
Impacts of Asian Values on Democratization in Thailand
Robert B. Albritton, University of Mississippi; Thawilwadee Bureekul
This paper examines the common assumption that specifically "Asian values" produce differing attitudes toward democracy and other political orientations than European or American approaches to political life. The analysis is based on data from a probability sample of the Thai voting age population that sheds light on this assumption. Results indicate that Asians do not differ fundamentally in their understandings of democracy or political orientations as a result of regional values, specifically traditionalism. Support for democracy and political activity are, rather, largely a product of differing cultures in a rural-urban cleavage.
Organizer and Chair: Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University
Keywords: GIS (Geographic Information Systems), geography, historical geography, geo-spatial analysis, cartographic analysis.
History and geography have had a long and close relationship, and while it can be argued that this relationship lapsed during the 1960s to 1980s, once again scholars from both fields are showing a robust interest in each other’s work. Rapid movement in this direction may be dated from the late 1980s with the increased interest in historical maps, developments reflected in the early work of David Woodward (for the field of cartography), Hugh Cortazzi (for Japan), and others. At the same time, new computer-based techniques for sampling the earth’s qualities—topography, natural resources, etc.—and even subterranean forms laid a foundation for Geographical Information Systems software and related technologies.
Although initially stimulated by interests of military defense concerns, Earth Sciences, and Architectural Landscape specialists, geographers and historians alike (along with anthropologists, archeologists, economists) now actively explore the potential for GIS to help us understand our world. The papers in this session are all linked by efforts to apply this social science/natural science approach to issues of historical-geographic and historical interest. They are case studies of the ways in which GIS can be employed for a variety of useful purposes.
While a number of applications of GIS may well fall into the category of "eye candy," the papers assembled here involve attempts to use this new technology as an analytical tool. Loren Siebert (Geography, University of Akron) has been developing a digital cartographic history of the Tokyo region (mid-nineteenth century to the present) and spent the past two years in Tokyo at the National Institute of Historical Literature, Division of Manuscripts, working with archivist Koichi Watanabe (NIJL) to extend that work ("Mapping Settlement Patterns and Characteristics around Edo in the 1800s Using a Geographic Information System [GIS]"). Philip Brown, History, Ohio State University, found that many explanations for the rise of corporate forms of village landholding in early modern Japan relied explicitly on assumptions about the frequency and severity of floods and/or landslides; he has begun to use GIS as a means of investigating the relationship between the natural environment and the presence of village control over who farms what piece of land ("Arable as Commons: Land Reallocation and the Natural Environment in Early Modern Japan"). Brian Zottoli, UNESCO Consultant and Ph.D. candidate in History, University of Michigan, began to employ GIS to map and analyze cadastral rolls in pre-colonial Vietnam for his dissertation on state-local relations ("Equal Fields, Different Charters: Vietnam’s Communal Farmers before the French"). Brian Ostrowski (Ph.D. candidate in History, Cornell University) examines spatial influences on the development of early Christian missionary efforts in the seventeenth century ("GIS Approaches to the Early History of Christianity in Vietnam").
Mapping Settlement Patterns and Characteristics around Edo in the 1800s Using a Geographic Information System (GIS)
Loren Siebert, University of Akron; Koichi Watanabe, National Institute of Japanese Literature
Historical geographic patterns around Edo in the 1800s are mapped using a geographic information system (GIS) as a temporal expansion of a larger GIS spatial history of Tokyo project. Two historical data sources are used: (1) Shinpen Musashi Fudoki-ko, an 1830s annotated and illustrated gazetteer; and (2) Kyobuseihyo, an 1870s survey of conscriptable resources for military use. Kuniezu, province maps showing towns, villages, and major rivers, are used for reference.
Shinpen Musashi Fudoki-ko lists all settlements in Musashi province, arranged by county (gun) and by district or territory (ryo) within counties. Each has a description of main geographic features, history, famous places, people, and events in the settlement. For most settlements, various facts are also given, making it possible to use the GIS to map and interpret such geographic patterns as distance from Edo, position in county, east-west dimensions, north-south dimensions, number of households, male and female population, number of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and rice production capacity (koku). The GIS-based mapping currently covers the southern portion of Musashi province.
Kyobuseihyo is a nationwide survey of various resources that might be used for military purposes. Resources and related statistics included in the survey were: male and female population, number of households, government offices, temples, schools, slaughterhouses, waterwheels, oxen, horses (riding, pack, breeding), freight carts, rickshaws, oxcarts, horse carts, boats, post offices, telegraph offices, and length of electric power lines. The GIS-based mapping currently covers the entire area of Musashi and Sagami provinces.
Arable as Commons: Land Reallocation and the Natural Environment in Early Modern Japan
Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University
Scholars and policymakers typically treat the commons and resources potentially amenable to management of commons as an economic regime subsidiary to production of basic foodstuffs on fields that either lie totally outside the commons or are subject to essentially private management during the part of the year when they are fallow and used for a common purpose such as grazing. Extensive regions of early modern Japan present a sharp exception to this view of the commons. Up to one-third of the arable land in Japan was, in effect, directly subject to the control of the village community. Access to specific fields by an individual cultivator was not guaranteed and often one could not count on being associated with a specific plot for more than a brief span of years. Implementation of such a tenure regime required many, many man-hours of labor—to measure and assess the quality of land, divide it into sections which were themselves measured, and to go through the process of actual distribution of cultivation rights. Even if climate in some regions limited off-season economic activities and these tasks could be undertaken in winter, the labor expense was substantial and raises the question of why communities would put themselves to this trouble. Japanese scholars, after debating a variety of explanations in the early twentieth century, now generally agree that environmental conditions, notably the susceptibility of a region to flood and landslide, played a critical role. GIS is employed to assess the reliability of that interpretation.
King’s Law: State and Village in Precolonial Vietnam
Brian Zottoli, University of Michigan
"The king’s law stops at the village gate." This proverb echoes through Vietnamese society and has helped create the sense of the Vietnamese village as a unit unto itself, even one that has preserved the essence of being Vietnamese (against the ever changing superstructure). Beginning in the fifteenth century, Dai Viet transformed and centralized its government, for the first time seeking to establish a direct contact between capital and village. The unification of Dai Nam over a much larger territory and the shift of the capital from the north to Hue in the center during the early nineteenth century brought a new effort by the central state to control the Vietnamese countryside. This process, taking place mainly in the 1830s as Minh-mang sought to integrate his entire land using the Qing model, came to be a form of central/local negotiation over the state’s access. The villages acted to meet the government efforts partway and to maintain a degree of their autonomy. The result was a set of documents usually seen as local in origin—land records, village charters, and other such. We should interpret these as the results of the village/state negotiation—reflecting the tensions of the attempted political, economic, and cultural integration.
Drawing on GIS analysis of village and dynastic records, I investigate the social and political structures of the localities and their relationship to the Neo-Confucian bureaucracy. The resulting negotiations are reflected in patterns of public and private landholding and in the makeup of village and district elites. In particular, I examine the situations before and after the centralizing reforms of Minh-mang. During these years, village charters and other mechanisms served as means for the centralizing state to bring localities into a greater degree of conformity with the set of overarching normative patterns while allowing for localized cultural variation. How did the village/state negotiation play itself out?
GIS Approaches to the Early History of Christianity in Vietnam
Brian Ostrowski, Cornell University
GIS technology offers several tools for historians of religion and of the history of missions in particular. This presentation uses the example of Christianity in seventeenth-century Vietnam as a basis for exploring some of the uses of GIS technology in writing and teaching about the history of religion.
Christianity took root in Vietnam during the first half of the seventeenth century, a time of diversity and experimentation in forms of religious devotion in Vietnam generally that also saw the rise of new or previously obscure forms of Buddhist and Taoist devotion. It was the Jesuits who took the lead in Christian missionary work in Vietnam at this time, establishing the first sustained missions in both Cochinchina and Tonkin.
This presentation discusses how GIS technology can provide an understanding of the geospatial orientation of the early Vietnamese Christian communities and certain factors that influenced the development of these communities. First, it probes why the Jesuits succeeded or failed in certain geographical areas, suggesting how variables such as war and economic conditions affected rates of conversion. Second, the presentation addresses the relative roles played by the Jesuit missionaries and indigenous Christian spiritual leaders, showing how the work of these two groups of individuals affected the growth of Christian communities. Third, the uses of GIS technology in understanding both the causes and the impacts of official support and repression of Christianity are considered.
The presentation concludes by assessing the types of problems that historians of religion can expect GIS technology to help solve, and by noting certain limitations of GIS technology in the study of the history of religion.
Session 163: ROUNDTABLE: Piracy and Robbery in the Asian Seas
Organizer and Chair: W. A. L. Stokhof, International Institute for Asian Studies
Discussants: Gerald Ong, Institute for Southeast Asian Studies; Greg Chaikin, Shimonoseki City University; Alfred Soons, University of Utrecht; Mihir Roy, National Defense College; Mark Valencia, East-West Center
Considerable attention has been directed to maritime piracy in recent years reflecting the perception that piracy is again a growing concern for coastal nations of the world. Indeed, according to the International Maritime Bureau, during the 1990s reported attacks against commercial vessels rose 450% (2001). Since then, reported attacks have continued to climb (International Maritime Bureau 2002). In the post-September 11 world the general concern with safety at sea has taken on an even greater importance with the threat of terrorist attacks on ocean shipping and ports.
Acts of piracy loom particularly large in Asian waters, with the bulk of all officially reported incidents of maritime piracy occurring in Southeast Asia during the 1990s (Abhyankar 1999). Southeast Asian waters are particularly risky, a factor which is of serious concern for international shipping, as the sea lanes between East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe pass through Southeast Asia.
Piracy and maritime robbery are old phenomena. Various academics have looked into the problem without having found effective means to combat the offenses so far, mainly as they—the scattered researchers working on this topic—do not have access to the necessary information that will arise from systematic research by the different research fields. Therefore this roundtable aims to catalyze research on the topic of piracy and robbery in the Asian seas. The roundtable will bring together experts to identify the key challenges for research and action in the area.
Session 181: Whose Museum? The Collection and Consumption of History, Nation, and Community
Organizer and Chair: Kristy Phillips, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum
Keywords: museum, museums, South Asia Iran, Sikhism, religious identity, nationalism, national identity, exile, display, visual culture, contemporary art, colonialism, museology.
Scenes of looting in the Baghdad National Museum and library have recently evoked important questions about the role of so-called heritage institutions around the world. Where do we locate voice and power in the museum? How do museums foster connections, or disconnections, with their respective communities? This panel takes these issues as its starting point and approaches the museum as a legacy of colonial and nationalist epistemologies, shaping contemporary public narratives in Asia and abroad.
"Whose Museum?" asks how display, exhibition, and classification function to produce a language of authority and "official" accounts of nation, religion, and community in the public arena. The trajectories of nationhood in the museum are addressed in the Tibet Museum and in the National Museum of India—one institution lending shape to the identity of a population in exile, the other a product of colonial museologies with the task of defining a national aesthetic. The distinctions of religious and social communities are explored in one study of exhibitions in Asia and Diaspora, revealing how transnational and national relations dictate current narratives of Sikhism, and in another which presents the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a source of agency for its youthful public, eager to alter the future’s artistic and political conditions.
Museums are places of categorical analysis, aesthetic knowledges, and historical authority. This panel will illuminate the museum as a site that is neither natural nor static but which constructs identities of community, nation, and religion with implications that resonate far beyond its institutional structures.
Representing Exilic Nationhood: Tibet Museum and Its Politics of Identity
Susan T. Chen, Emory University
"Tibet Museum," inaugurated in 2000 in Dharam-sala, north India, is the first historical museum directly dedicated to the Tibetan cause since the exile of 1959. The close involvement of the Tibetan government-in-exile during the planning and construction stages of the museum and its current operation confers an "official" status on the museum’s representation of Tibet’s struggle against Chinese occupation. While the museum’s didactic mission seems straightforward, the multiple genres, including photography, film, and plastic arts, deployed to compose this relatively small museum appear complex—and sometimes discordant from the perspective of even Tibetan cultural workers involved. This paper examines the museum’s politics of representation from two aspects. Firstly, it investigates each of these genres’ function in serving the politically correct history and emotion that the museum intends to convey to its diverse audience of Tibetans and other nationalities. This section largely reflects the curatorial positions garnered from interviews with directors, curators, and historical consultants of the museum and from various publications designed for its publicity. Secondly, by exploring the ways in which each of these genres represents sectors of Tibetan people who are the assumed agents of the modern Tibetan history that the museum is designed to document, it discusses the agency that the museum has indeed granted to or deprived from the represented population. On the whole, my analysis of Tibet Museum contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the politics of identity that characterizes the complex relationship between Tibet as a nation in exile and its citizens.
From Pollack to Parvati: Grace McCann Morley and the National Museum of India
Kristy Phillips, University of Minnesota
This paper explores the seeming contradictory intersection of an American museum director, steeped in the traditions of Western museology and modern art, and her Indian museum, an instrument of nation building in a post-colonial state eager to outlive its colonial pasts. This exploration of the National Museum of India under the leadership of its first director, Grace McCann Morley, offers insight into the residual ideals of the American "modern museum" outside of the West and their interaction with a burgeoning Indian state, urgent for national narratives.
Morley is prominent as an inadvertent, yet powerful, player in the nationalist project of the National Museum and the development of museology in India. The National Museum was born in the shadow of independence and heralded by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a symbol for the new nation. As the first thirty years of Morley’s career were spent as head of the San Francisco Museum of Art and as a leading proponent of the American modern museum movement, her role in presenting visual heritage in India at a time of national fervor demands exploration. An investigation of her guiding hand through exhibitions, art purchases, and campaigns for museum reforms, with important cues from UNESCO, unravels the fictionalized heart of India’s museum movement. Ultimately, this inquiry illuminates the tensions between a lingering colonial heritage, a local urgency for nationalist histories, international pressures to standardize the "modern museum," and Morley’s personal conceptions of Indian culture and its place in the world.
Place, Purpose, and Participation at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Alisa Eimen, University of Minnesota
In recent years there has been a rising interest in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s youth culture—from covert clubbing to political protest. Anti-establishment action in Iran often captures the attention of international media. Yet the day-to-day activities that challenge the government’s conservative strictures are rarely discussed, especially those that take place within the cultural sphere of the capital city.
For the most part, museums and the fine arts help to maintain the country’s history and cultural traditions under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Thus museums can be seen as part of the government’s attempts to rewrite the nation’s historical narrative through strategies of collection, display, and education. Indeed, the majority of Tehran’s museums take their visitors on a journey through Iran’s past, focusing in particular on manuscript and Qur’an illumination, tapestries, and other objects that often have liturgical functions or religious references. Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, however, does not fit comfortably into this model—and interestingly, if not surprisingly, it is highly popular among Tehran’s youth.
Through a discussion of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s physical architecture, exhibition history, and special events programming, this paper will argue that this museum holds a unique place in both the cultural and socio-political environment of the city. An institution that is popular with segments of the city’s youth, the museum provides a discursive space for an increasingly disenfranchised population. Thus, contemporary art becomes the medium through which new ideas and identities are communicated as the city’s youth grapple with place, purpose, and participation on the cusp of a new century.
Museums and the Making of Sikh History
Anne Murphy, Columbia University
My paper will explore alternative modes of contemporary Sikh museological construction and consider the divergent agendas served within widely divergent contexts for representing Sikh pasts and how these agendas shape representation. The last five years have seen a flurry of activity in Sikh museological representation in India and Diaspora; recent exhibitions include a permanent installation of Sikh art objects at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, a planned exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, a major traveling exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and a parallel exhibition at the National Museum in Delhi. In addition, museological representation has become relatively common at major Sikh shrines in India, and a museum associated with a Gurdwara (Sikh community religious site) in Leicester, England, has been officially registered as a public museum and has been declared England’s "first Sikh museum." Through such exhibitions, Sikh pasts are represented and made public to both Sikh and non-Sikh, through material forms of representation—the "art" object, the Gurdwara model, and painting, alike—in relation to transnational constructions of Diasporic pasts, national aspirations, and various forms of negotiation with state interests (in both India and Diaspora).
Session 182: Representing Traumatic Captivity in Modern Vietnamese and Chinese Literature
Organizer: Yenna Wu, University of California, Riverside
Chair: Ginger C. Hsu, University of California, Riverside
Discussants: Chia-lin Pao Tao, University of Arizona; Michael S. Duke, University of British Columbia
Keywords: prison, trauma, modern, Vietnam, China.
This panel explores prison writings from Vietnam and China about traumatic events and features memoirs, fictional works, and poetry. These works offer points of comparison with memories of traumatic events in other cultures, such as those of the Soviet Gulag and the Holocaust. Prof. Lam examines the cultural politics surrounding the publication of prison writing following the Vietnam War, and the impact on American readerships, as well as the role of a politics of democratic amnesty in literary production and distribution. Critiquing Foucault’s claim that modern-day bureaucracies have long since discarded the dimension of public spectacle in the punishment of criminality in favor of the surveillance and regimentation of convicts in isolation from society, Prof. Williams argues that public ritual may well continue to play a significant role in even a highly bureaucratized criminal justice system, especially when its rules of criminal procedure are underdeveloped, as in the PRC. Critically utilizing Western theories on trauma, Prof. Wu analyzes various forms of literary representation of traumatic experience, psychological pathology, and "post-laogai syndrome" in some Chinese prison camp fiction and memoirs. All three papers in this border-crossing panel examine representations of the contemporary prison in China and Vietnam as an often overlooked barometer of state-society relations.
Trauma and Memory: The Three Sides of the Vietnam War
Mariam Beevi Lam, University of California, Riverside
This paper offers an introduction to the published forms of prison writing following the Vietnam War under various authorships and competing political stances. It begins with a brief perusal of U.S. veteran literary history and moves quickly to the more recent poetry by Vietnamese writers, both those of Southern Vietnamese officers and civilians imprisoned in the re-education camps of the Socialist Republic following the war and those of the Viet Cong soldiers held by the U.S. and the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam throughout the war. Three questions are answered. Why have so many of these works appeared in recent years? Why have mainstream U.S. presses stepped up publication of works by former "enemies" of the U.S.? In contrast, why has there been very limited publication of the Southern Vietnamese (compatriot) prison writing in the U.S., except by smaller community presses? The second goal of the paper is to unpack the cultural politics surrounding the publication of these texts to describe what crucial social and political suturing they accomplish for their American audiences and to examine the role of a politics of democratic amnesty in literary production. Finally, the paper wishes to call attention to the dependence of these discourses upon a gender-coded rhetoric of internationalism, which affects the domestic political agency of ethnic minorities within particular nation-states as well as the global political efficacy of developing nation-states.
Representing the Persistence of Spectacle in PRC Modes of Punishing Criminality and Deviance
Philip F. C. Williams, Arizona State University
The PRC criminal justice system provides an important counterexample to Foucault’s claim in Surveiller el Punir that modern-day rationalized bureaucracies have long since discarded the dimension of public spectacle in the punishment of criminality in favor of the surveillance and regimentation of convicts in isolation from society. Ritualistic dramatizations of society’s retributive wrath over criminality persisted until the end of the 20th century in PRC mass sentencing rallies at stadiums, as well as the parading of death-row convicts by truck through the marketplace on their way to the execution ground. Though less common and violent than during the Mao Era, struggle sessions have continued to take place in the Reform Era PRC, particularly within prisons and prison camps. This paper explores the representation of spectacle in the PRC criminal justice system by novelists as well as writers of reportage and memoirs—most of whom have first-hand experience as one-time objects of orchestrated public denunciation. The presenter will argue that public ritual should be expected to play a significant role in even a highly bureaucratized criminal justice system, especially when its rules of criminal procedure are underdeveloped or spottily enforced, as has been a continuing problem in the PRC.
The Representation of Hunger and Trauma in Chinese Prison Camp Fiction and Memoir
Yenna Wu, University of California, Riverside
The paper examines the representation of Chinese laogai and laojiao prisoners’ traumatic experiences in prison camp fiction and memoirs published since the 1980s. Of the various factors contributing to traumatic captivity, acute hunger stands out as the most unbearable. The party-state wields its power to withhold food from the prisoners in order to win their total submission and reduce them to unthinking brutes who fight amongst themselves over subsistence instead of forming their own inmate subculture. Numerous inmates not only developed symptoms of "psychological pathology" as a result, but continued to suffer from a sort of "post-laogai syndrome" even after their release. Like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), this syndrome is often characterized by intense anxiety, paranoid suspiciousness, recurring memories of painful or frightening experiences, insomnia, and impotence. The paper critically examines Western theories on trauma, while applying some of them to its analysis of the traumatic experiences represented in the works of such well-known writers as Wumingshi, Cong Weixi, and Zhang Xianliang. The presenter suggests that the various literary representations of inmates’ pathological symptoms and PTSD in these works constitute a searing critique of the party-state’s lofty claim of "remolding" deviant prisoners into socialist "new men."
Session 183: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Nature and the State in Asia
Organizer and Chair: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
Nature and the Nation: The Uses of Nature as an Alternative Metaphor to Science in Early 20th-Century Indian Nationalism
Sarah H. Green, Mount Holyoke College
In a seminal postmodernist text Adorno and Horkheimer expose Western science’s intent towards power: "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men" (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972). But, beyond physical instrumentality, science commands perhaps even greater authority in its role as a social and psychological symbol. It has been convincingly argued that science was the primary metaphor through which colonial rule in India was implemented and justified (Gyan Prakash, 2000). Used first as a conceptual tool by Western colonizers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science was valorized in a Hindu form by Indian nationalists who used it to vindicate the idea of the nation. But was science the only metaphor through which the Indian nation was conceived? This paper discloses how nature, symbiotically linked with science, served as an alternative metaphor for the nation. A sketch of Western empirical thought, which underpins both colonial dominance and nationalist resistance, positions the paper critically. Gandhi’s complex uses of science and nature to conceptualize the nation are contrasted with Rabindranath Tagore’s organic model in the context of their dispute over nationalism. Finally, the outcome of Tagore’s romantic and humanist influence on nationalism is considered in the Hindi poetry of the Chayavad ("Shadowism") poet, Sumitranandan Pant. This paper argues a unique function for nature as a metaphor in the Indian nationalist context: that it advocated a style of nationalism counter to the mind-set of dominance set up by Western science.
The Three Gorges Dam: Resettlement and Environmental Policymaking
Goerild M. Heggelund, The Fridtjof Nansen Institute
The paper discusses resettlement and environmental policymaking for the Three Gorges project (Sanxia gongcheng) that is currently being constructed on the Yangtze River in China. The project was approved by the National People’s Congress in 1992 after decades of controversy among bureaucrats, scientists, and intellectuals. Construction of the dam began in 1994, and its completion is scheduled in 2009. One major reason for the controversy is the displacement of 1.2 million people (official figures). A second reason is the environmental capacity in the Three Gorges reservoir area and the potential negative impact of the dam and the resettled population on the area.
The paper takes as its starting point the resettlement policy change that was introduced in May 1999, announced by the then Premier Zhu Rongji. The resettlement policy change involves moving one-third of the rural population completely out of the reservoir area who originally were intended to be resettled within the reservoir area. Since Chinese authorities have stated that they prefer to resettle people within the reservoir area, why and how did the resettlement policy change take place? By studying the decision-making process for the resettlement policy, this paper attempts to describe and explain the causes for policy change. Factors to be discussed include: increased understanding of the linkage between the environmental capacity in the reservoir area and the resettlement of the large population; resettlement implementation problems; the changing shape of decision making in China; and the change of Premier and project leadership in 1998.
Ecology and Social Organization in a Chinese Fishery
Micah Muscolino, Harvard University
This paper examines the social organizations that the fishing population of the Zhoushan Archipelago, located off the northeastern coast of Zhejiang province, developed to regulate access to the region’s marine resources as they came under heightened pressure due to increased fishing effort during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process began during the late Qing, when fishers migrated to Zhoushan from other regions of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces. In addition to increasing fishery output, this migration intensified competition for limited marine resources, giving rise to frequent disputes among fishers and forcing some to move further offshore in search of untapped fishing grounds. In order to protect their own interests, fishers from different native places formed "fishing groups" (yu bang), and eventually these informal groups evolved into collective associations called "fishing lodges" (yumin gongsuo). These associations staked proprietary claims to specific fishing grounds, and encroachments by outsiders escalated into violent feuds. Fishmongers from similar native-place backgrounds also organized their own lodges to ensure access to a steady supply of fish and secure their position in the market. This study analyzes the structure of these organizations, describes their patterns of change over time, and gauges their ecological effectiveness as marine resource management strategies. By examining these processes, it provides insight into how the maritime environment shapes—and is shaped by—social and cultural practices.
"Forests Are Gold": A History of Nature Conservation in Vietnam
Pam McElwee, Yale University
State-dictated nature conservation has a relatively short history in Vietnam. In French Indochina the colonial government created no official "national parks" within Vietnam, in contrast to the British in other parts of Asia and Africa. French administrators concentrated instead on regulations for managing "sustainable" yields from forest and game reserves, and limiting "native" harvesting of wildlife and timber. Some colonial hill stations also served functional roles as sites of managed and conserved nature during this period. State interest in a more ecologically-centered view of nature conservation increased only in post-colonial Vietnam. President Ho Chi Minh himself personally dedicated Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam’s first national park, in 1962. He said then, "Forests are gold. If we know how to conserve and use them well, they will be very precious." Since then, his phrase Rung La Vang (forests are gold) has become a slogan for various state conservation plans, and more than 100 state-managed national parks and nature reserves have been demarcated. Yet these plans have not stopped the trends of deforestation and a reduction in wildlife levels throughout the country, and the transition to a market economy in the last fifteen years seems only to have increased them. Based on both colonial archival records and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper will explore the checkered history of nature conservation in Vietnam and look particularly at how management of national parks and nature reserves remains fraught with controversy in post-colonial states, even in areas with few vestiges of colonial nature making.
Organizer: Vincent K. Pollard, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Chair and Discussant: Paul Midford, Kwansei Gakuin University
Keywords: state capitalism, revolution, economic development, public sphere, civil society, democratization, social movements, mass media, China, India, Philippines.
Emerging from the post-Cold War closet is a renewed cross-national debate over the inner meanings of political and economic development in Asia. State capitalism usefully frames that debate. This controversial concept suggests a highly centralized variant of capitalism not envisioned by Smith, although its dynamics are prefigured in Marx’s discussions of the accumulation of capital. In a contestable reading of diverse state capitalist perspectives, three streams of this literature may be delineated, namely, statist-Marxist-Leninist (identifying with existing or historical communist regimes), antimonopoly-reformist (less prominent in Asia), and libertarian-Marxian. Our papers draw out implications of state-capitalist analysis for the organization and leadership of communist ("state socialist" or state capitalist) and noncommunist capitalist societies.
Does state capitalism pave the way for other authoritarian forms of capitalism in China or Vietnam? Does a state capitalist perspective help ruling and nonruling communist parties navigate pressures towards more open economies and representative democratic political systems? How much do circumstances of revolutionary parties, social movements, governments, and their leaders account for different pathways taken in these societies? How does civil society evolve? Our qualitative historical and sociological case studies show how governmental and nongovernmental institutions collaborate with and subvert state capital in China (restructuring of coastal regions, media control and civil society during the SARS crisis), India (from the Bombay Plan to the new Bombay Club), and the Philippines (astonishing abstentionism during regime change).
We welcome discussion of these issues for understanding the past, present, and possible futures of politics, economics and society in Asia.
Restructuring of Chinese State Capitalism in Coastal Regions
Rumy Husan, University of Leeds
Over the past two decades, the market-led coastal regions of China have witnessed a boom the likes of which have rarely been seen. Why have these regions—especially the Special Enterprise Zones—grown so quickly? What are the contradictions of this boom—both within the coastal regions and in the rest of the country?
This paper examines the implications of this for the Chinese state and how it is becoming restructured. An obvious question to address is whether this is likely to mark the end of bureaucratic planning in the rest of China or whether a "dual track" system of plan and market will continue. If the former, then China will see the abandonment of the state capitalism of the command economy that characterized the post-1949 period in favor of market capitalism. By so doing, albeit with a rather different route, it will follow the path of the former Eastern bloc countries.
Inevitably, this will see a significant reduction in the role of the state, which, in turn, will put great strains on the Communist Party. Concomitantly, such a restructuring will also have implications for workers’ struggles and issues of democracy in general.
Planning, Economic Liberalization, and the Fate of Democracy: State, Capital, and Governance in India
D. Parthasarathy, Institute of Technology, Bombay
Capitalist elites significantly influenced processes of economic change in India both during the planning period beginning in the 1950s and the transition to economic liberalization since the early 1990s. Capitalist elites and industry associations had a critical influence on state policies for changing their political and economic fortunes. The Bombay Plan of 1944 (prepared by a group of leading capitalists-industrialists) provided an outline of the planning process that India was to adopt later and influenced the Nehru-Mahalnobis model of "socialist" development and "democratic planning." Floated by a loose coalition of capitalists in the early 1990s, a new Bombay Club asked for government "protection" and a level playing field in the face of liberalization and globalization.
Faced with historical and social structural obstacles in an indigenous thrust towards capitalism, Indian merchant and capitalist classes use the state in overcoming these barriers. Economic transformation in the post-independence period involved shifts in the language and rhetoric on "development" from "socialist" to "liberal-capitalist" ideology, but assaults on the poor and socially marginalized represent a continuation with earlier policies and models of planning, which largely benefited propertied groups even while systematically eroding the rights of citizens and excluding large masses of people from "development."
Illustrations are drawn with specific reference to: (a) urban planning and restructuring processes, where elite/liberal discourses—contra market and neo-liberal thrusts—clearly echo "planning" approaches; and (b) the role of federal and state-level policy in facilitating capitalist transformation while violently suppressing rights and freedoms of the population.
Mass Media and Public Life: The SARS Crisis and the Public Sphere in Urban China
Chunxia Shao, Fudan University
Having come to power leading a vibrant nationalist movement, the ruling Communist Party of China survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, state capitalist attempts at centralized planning in the reform era have not always succeeded in mass communications. The mass media provide clues to exploring the public sphere in urban China during the recent SARS ("Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome") crisis. The paper describes what the public sphere looks like, summarizing how mass media influence its gestation through an interplay with the party-state and public. The paper focuses on following key aspects of this process: the party-state’s control of information, the mass media’s performance, and the public’s activities and reactions.
This paper asks and answers two central questions. First, how did the public sphere in urban China manifest itself in the SARS crisis? On the one hand, the paper illuminates China’s urban public sphere in public life and social criticism. On the other hand, it explores the activities and strategies of mass media, individuals, and social organizations.
Secondly, how does one usefully characterize institutional circumstances, participant relations, and functions of the public sphere in urban China today?
The paper evaluates the situation of Chinese urban public sphere by raising the following additional questions. How does the urban public sphere interact with party-state control? What relationships do participants have with the public sphere and party-state? Is the urban public sphere pushing democratization in China? And what is the future of the urban public sphere and political reform in China?
State Capitalism and the Debacle of the Communist Party of the Philippines
Vincent K. Pollard, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The privateness of private property in traditional capitalism and state capitalist variants, in one reading of Marx, lies in that it is private from the working classes. Rejecting that view, communist parties vying for leadership in nationalist movements in Asia have typically advocated a two-stage revolution. Working class control of society and government thereby became an ever-receding goal. Founded in 1968 and once controlling 20% of the country, and despite other unique characteristics, the nonruling Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has never deviated from that historical trend and looked first to Mao’s China and then to Moscow.
Despite leading martial law era democratic struggles on behalf of impoverished agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, women, and employed urban workers, the CPP was blindsided when, to the astonishment of supporters and outside observers, the Communist Party of the Philippines failed to join the winning military-church-human rights coalition that forced an end to the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. Thus, in a culture where the moral force of utang na loob (literally, "a debt which is within [oneself]" and, more idiomatically, "debt of gratitude") is strong, the CPP arguably missed an opportunity to join the first post-dictatorship government of the Philippines. My paper explains how, at the crucial moment, state-capitalist ideology, organization, and leadership restrained the Party. Indeed, the CPP has been most reluctant to participate in movements beyond its control.
Qualitative data from radio transcripts, interviews, Party documents, journalistic materials, and secondary sources support claims of fact and logical inferences.
Session 202: China and Vietnam in an Era of Normalcy
Organizer: Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
Chair: Katherine Kaup, Furman University
Discussants: Shuxian Wei, Center for Economic and Political Study of Southeast Asia; William S. Turley, Southern Illinois University
Keywords: interarea, political science, international relations, economics, China, Vietnam, ASEAN.
In February 1999, the secretaries of the communist parties of China and Vietnam, Jiang Zemin and Le Kha Phieu, met in Beijing and formulated a "16 Word Statement" to be the general line of their bilateral relationship. China and Vietnam should enjoy "long-term stable, future-oriented, good-neighborly and all-round cooperative relations." Since 1999 the "16 Word Statement" has been repeated and elaborated by the new leadership in both countries. The new era of normalcy has been marked by treaties regarding the land border and the Tonkin Gulf as well as vast increases in trade and tourism. Moreover, the agreement in November 2002 to establish an ASEAN-China Free Trade Area situates the Sino-Vietnamese relationship in a regional context of increasingly active cooperation.
This panel will address the transformation of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship since 1990 and the implications of normalcy for domestic politics, bilateral relations and regional relations. Brantly Womack addresses the progress of the relationship from normalization in 1990–1999 to normalcy, highlighting the challenges of managing an asymmetric relationship. Xiaosong Gu describes the concrete changes in the contemporary relationship. Alice Ba analyzes the shift in China’s interactions with ASEAN and consequent impacts on Sino-Vietnamese relations. Together, these papers present a comprehensive overview of the origins, effects, and prospects of the new era in Sino-Vietnamese relations. William Turley and Shuxian Wei will pull them together in their commentaries.
Normalization, Normalcy, and Asymmetry in Sino-Vietnamese Relations
Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
The process of normalizing Sino-Vietnamese relations was begun at a secret summit meeting in Chengdu in September 1990 and formalized in Beijing in November 1991. Normalization ended thirteen years of hostility and was a prerequisite to the completion of regional integration in Southeast Asia. But the agreement to end conflict and to avoid it in the future also marked the beginning of an evolution in Sino-Vietnamese relations, and by 1999 the expectation of peace and economic integration became embedded in the relationship. From 1998 to 2001 Sino-Vietnamese trade tripled, and almost one-third of foreign tourists in Vietnam are Chinese. Nevertheless, the structural asymmetries between China and Vietnam are not overcome by normalcy. Rather, the management of disagreements has become institutionalized.
This paper is part of a comprehensive research project on Sino-Vietnamese relations and the problems posed by asymmetry. It presents an analysis of the course of developments in the political and economic relations from 1991 to 2004. It also pays particular attention to the effects of the vulnerability of Vietnam to China’s greater capacities in the framework of a peaceful relationship. In contrast to theories of international relations that assume that larger countries dominate smaller countries unless the smaller countries balance against them, this research emphasizes the importance of negotiation in normal asymmetric relations and the role of regional relations in buffering asymmetry.
Vietnam’s Relations with China: The ASEAN Factor
Alice D. Ba, University of Delaware
In 1995 Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On both their parts, interest in Vietnamese membership in ASEAN reflected important concerns about Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. Concerns during the first half of the 1990s focused especially on China’s military modernization program and increased activities in the Spratly Islands. China, meanwhile, was wary that Vietnam’s membership—and the expansion of ASEAN membership and processes in general—were directed at containing China. Since then, however, China’s relations with both Vietnam and ASEAN as a whole have undergone significant changes and improvement. While important concerns about Chinese power and influence remain, the intensification of political, economic, and institutional linkages between China and the others has also led to a stability of expectations about their regional roles and relations.
This paper traces developments and trends in Sino-Vietnamese relations in the context of Sino-ASEAN relations. It pays special attention to China’s efforts to engage and improve relations with ASEAN, especially since the latter half of the 1990s, and how such efforts have affected and shaped Vietnam’s particular relations with China. In this context of improving Sino-ASEAN relations, this paper also offers a discussion of the evolving role of ASEAN in Vietnam’s ongoing negotiation of relations with China.
Building Bridges: Reform and Openness in China and Vietnam
Xiaosong Gu, Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences
Both China and Vietnam are underdeveloped socialist countries. The command economies pursued by both during the 1950s and 1960s encountered increasing difficulties by the early 1980s. The leadership in both nations recognized the need for reform and openness and began major reforms in the 1980s. At the beginning of the reforms, Sino-Vietnamese relations were still antagonistic and Vietnam leaned toward the Soviet Union for support. Vietnam’s reforms gradually deviated from the Soviet model. As the global communist movement slumped into a low tide in the late 1980s, it became of the utmost importance for Vietnam to develop friendly ties with China in order to strengthen the socialist road and communist leadership. Great achievements have been reached in Sino-Vietnamese relations over the past twenty years. In order to maintain these strides in the development of economic and state power, both countries need to continue the reform and openness policy and foster friendly relations.
This paper builds on and refines my research, which has produced more than four books and several articles on Vietnamese politics. It traces the primary factors involved in the renormalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations as well as the key opportunities and challenges this era of normalcy poses to each nation.
Session 203: New Perspectives on Ôbaku (Huangbo) Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China and Japan
Organizer: Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
Chair and Discussant: Helen J. Baroni, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Keywords: Ôbaku, Huangbo, Miyun Yuanwu, Yinyuan Longqi, Menzan Zuiho, Zeng Jing.
This is a border-crossing panel devoted to a new effort to reassess the impact of the so-called Ôbaku school in seventeenth-century Chinese and Japanese cultures and societies. The official history of the Ôbaku school in Japan starts in 1654 when the Chinese Chan master Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673) traveled to Nagasaki. Since then, Ôbaku has become the third largest Zen school in Japan and exerted tremendous influences on Edo culture. The four panelists in this proposed panel, two China scholars and two Japan scholars, represent different approaches, ranging from history of religion, to gender studies, and to art history. The focus of the panel is to decipher the meaning of this border-crossing phenomenon, which has been neglected in Western scholarship and historiography: Jiang Wu investigates the rise of Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China, which facilitated the arrival of Yinyuan Longqi in Japan; Beata Grant examines the female disciples of Miyun Yuanwu, who is generally acknowledged as the first patriarch of the Huangbo (Ôbaku) monastery in China; David Riggs, extending his dissertation research on Japanese Zen master Menzan, reviews Ôbaku’s impact on Japan Sôtô Zen; and finally, Elizabeth Horton Sharf’s paper brings us to the arena of art history, exploring the remarkable Ôbaku legacy of portrait painting, which might have combined both Western and Chinese styles.
The Origins of the Japanese Ôbaku School in Seventeenth-Century China
Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
Founded by Chinese Chan master Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673) in the late seventeenth century, the Japanese Ôbaku school stands as an independent Zen sect in contemporary Japan. Although its history in Japan has been carefully documented in Japanese sources, its origins in China are still a myth. On the basis of my dissertation research, this paper reveals that the migration of a group of Chinese monks to Japan in 1654 was deeply rooted in the religious and social milieu of seventeenth-century China. I will first investigate how the revival of Buddhism in the late sixteenth century gave rise to Chan Buddhism, which spread quickly through dharma transmission and controlled a significant number of monasteries. I will then focus on the religious teaching and practice of Chan Buddhism, suggesting that there existed a conscious effort among Chan monks to restore Chan’s past in the Tang and Song dynasties. The characteristic of this restoration is the revival of the use of beating and shouting as legitimate training methods. Finally, I will shift my attention to Huangbo monastery in Fujian, where Yinyuan Longqi embarked on the journey to Japan, to examine the local revival of Buddhism there. In conclusion, my paper shows that Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China was a systematic reinvention of Chan’s past, and the origins of the Japanese Ôbaku school must have been rooted in this new movement.
Miyun Yuanwu (1566–1642) and His Female Lineage of Chan Masters
Beata Grant, Washington University, St. Louis
Miyun Yuanwu and several of his twelve Dharma-heirs had a number of official female Dharma-heirs who played relatively significant roles as teachers and abbesses during the mid-seventeenth century. In this paper I look closely at the extant writings (including Dharma-talks, biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters, and poetry) of several of these women lineage-holders, and particularly those from two of the major "factions" engaged in the polemical battles that engaged the energies of the Linji school during this period: those of Yuanwu and those of his controversial Dharma-heir, Hanyue Fazang (1573–1635). I explore the nature of these women’s teachings, such as the emphasis on huatou investigation, the concern for the "orthodoxy" of the Linji line, the use—if only rhetorical—of the "shouts and beatings" so strongly advocated by Yuanwu, and attitudes towards others sorts of practices, including those of Pure Land and the Three Teachings. I also look at the various ways in which the writings of these nuns reflect, if only indirectly and often very gently, the doctrinal and polemical battles between these two men and their respective Dharma-heirs. And, finally, I discuss the various ways in which these women deplored these factional disputes and, in practice, transcended them (or simply ignored them) in order to establish networks of solidarity among themselves as abbesses struggling to maintain their own religious establishments and female lineages during a time of considerable social and political chaos and turmoil.
The Reaction against Ôbaku: Menzan Zuihô and the Purification of Sôtô Zen
David E. Riggs, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
The influence of Ôbaku monks on the Sôtô school of Japanese Zen includes an initial attraction and even a wide-ranging adoption of many Ôbaku ideas and practices. This initial enthusiasm was followed by acrimonious struggles that continued into the nineteenth century and were an all important part of the emergence of Dôgen as the source of Sôtô orthodoxy. The focus of this paper is this struggle and the central role played by Menzan Zuihô (1683–1769), a scholar-monk whose writings were and continue to be extremely influential in the school that has come to be called Dôgen Zen. Menzan certainly presented his position as a return to the ways of Dôgen, but a closer examination reveals that he was often as much anti-Ôbaku as he was pro-Dôgen.
This paper begins with a description of how Menzan was influenced by Ôbaku in his early days, and also surveys the depth of influence of these Chinese monks on several famous Sôtô monks. I then discuss how Menzan later turned entirely against Ôbaku and examine how his work on monastic rules and ordinations expressed his attempt to root out every remnant of the Ôbaku influence. Menzan’s work on monastic rules was eventually accepted, but his equally fundamental work on precept ordinations quickly lost out to the more radical interpretation popular in Japanese Zen. This part of Menzan’s work has been largely forgotten, but in this area Menzan’s conclusions put him much closer to the strict and traditional understanding of precepts emphasized in Ôbaku. The influence of Ôbaku is much more pervasive and also more qualified than it at first appears. As influential as the Ôbaku monks were, the reaction against them was perhaps even more important to the eventual shape of Japanese Buddhism.
The Portraitist Zeng Jing and Ôbaku Portrait Painting
Elizabeth Horton Sharf, Independent Scholar
Modern scholars struggling to explain the foreign ("Chinese-Western") look of Ôbaku portrait paintings came to focus on Zeng Jing, a well-connected professional artist in late Ming China who was often commissioned to paint portraits of the learned men among his friends and acquaintances. A native of Fujian, Zeng Jing’s career brought him to Zhejiang and Nanjing where he died in 1647. By the 1940s, scholars had introduced Zeng Jing as the single most important figure in the prehistory of Ôbaku portrait paintings. Zeng Jing, whose work was believed to incorporate European painting techniques, was identified as the grandfather of portrait painters working for the Ôbaku community in Japan.
Yet no actual portrait (or record of a portrait) of an Ôbaku abbot by Zeng Jing had ever been uncovered. In 1993, Nishigami Minoru introduced a startling discovery by Ôtsuki Mikio of several entries in the recorded sayings of the Chan master Muchen Daomin (1596–1674) relating how a portrait of the grand prelate Miyun Yuanwu (1566–1642) painted by Zeng Jing came to be presented to the Qing emperor Shunzhi (1638–1661) in 1659.
The link between Zeng Jing and Chan abbot portraiture, suspected since the 1940s, was now confirmed; indeed, for most modern scholars of Ôbaku art and culture, this textual proof of an actual abbot portrait by the celebrated master was perhaps the most exciting aspect of the find. Yet, this paper will focus rather on the fact that this discovery is felicitous precisely because it provides rich details concerning the immediate predecessors in China of the Japanese Ôbaku community and their consumption of the abbot portrait. In this regard, the mention of Zeng Jing is noteworthy less for any intrinsic interest in the artist’s career but because we have a famed portraitist at work on an eminent abbot portrait that came to be coveted by an emperor—reflecting both the status of abbots in general and Miyun’s national stature at the time.