[ INTERAREA TABLE OF CONTENTS ]
[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
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 gr