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Posters
Chair: Paul Hutchcroft, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Yuan Dynasty Diet Regulation Principles in Chia Ming's Essentials of Eating and Drinking
E. Leslie Williams, Clemson University
n East Asia, for centuries the ideal of “health-maximization” (yang sheng) has defined a prominent set of practices to realize a long and productive life. Health-maximization disciplines are calculated to increase the individual’s vital energy; one means to accomplish this end is regulation of the diet. Traditional Chinese medicinal theory assigns all food items certain properties, the knowledge of which can be utilized to acquire robust health and longevity. The medicinal properties of food are classified according to the Yin-Yang Five Phase cosmology, and more specifically within the context of the four energies and the five flavors. The Yuan dynasty scholar Chia Ming (c.1268 - 1374) was assiduous in his practice of diet regulation and lived to the age of 106. In recognition of living a century, he was granted an audience with emperor Ming Tai-tsu. Interested in the secret of long life, the emperor asked for Chia Ming’s method. The aged scholar replied, “One must be careful in food and drink.” The old man sent to the Ming emperor a copy of his treatise on the subject, Essentials of Eating and Drinking. An analysis of Chia Ming’s diet theory in his Essentials , this poster clearly details 52 foods with regard to each item’s designation in terms of the four energies and five flavors. In addition, twelve groups of both energy-depleting and energy-enhancing food combinations will be presented that clearly represent discrete, orderly patterns according to Yin-Yang Five Phase cosmology principles.
Food Markets, Environmental Activists and Health: Organic Foods in Southwest China
Jakob Klein, SOAS, University of London
China is said to have more land under certified ‘organic’ cultivation than any other country in Asia. While the bulk of China’s organic produce is aimed at overseas markets, in recent years the domestic market in organic and similar chemical-free or chemical-reduced foods has grown exponentially. Despite the potentially enormous ecological, economic and political significance of this development in China and beyond, still it has received relatively little scholarly attention. In this poster I document the emerging organic food ‘scene’ in Kunming, Yunnan Province. The focus is on urban markets and activists. In the first part, I identify the key actors involved in developing Kunming’s market in organic foods, and describe the background and current factors shaping the market, drawing attention to food safety issues, regulatory regimes and labelling, agricultural policies and trade channels. In part two, I highlight the role of environmental NGOs on the organic scene. I discuss activists’ strategies for overcoming barriers to the further development of organics. Finally, I consider why activists working with urban consumers focus almost entirely on issues of human health. Is this compatible with the same activists’ commitments to environmental sustainability and farmers’ livelihoods? The poster is based on a one-month fieldtrip to Kunming in April 2006, and ongoing internet research and email interviews since October 2005. It will be illustrated with the researcher’s photographs of foodstuffs, markets and organic farms, and provide examples of food labels and advertisements, as well as quantitative data on China’s organic food trade.
The use of Topic Markers in Japanese and Korean Narrative Discourse
Fumio Watanabe, Yamagata University
Building on Chafe's(1976) research on givenness, Givón's(1984, 1990) research on topic continuity, and Clancy & Downing's(1987) research on topicalization in spoken Japanese narratives, I investigate 1) differences in use of the Japanese topic marker "wa" and the Korean topic marker "nun" in spoken and written narrative discourse and 2) the discourse functions of the topic markers in Japanese and Korean. The data for this study were spoken and written narratives elicited using a 5-minute animated film. The spoken data were collected from 15 Japanese and 9 Korean informants who viewed the film and then told the story to a friend in their respective languages, the written data were collected from the narrators and hearers of the spoken data who wrote the story down after it was told. I demonstrate that 1) both Japanese and Korean informants used twice as many topic markers in the written data as in the spoken data, 2) Japanese "wa" was used more often than Korean "nun" in both the spoken and the written data, 3) Korean "nun" showed more contrastive tendency than Japanese "wa" in the spoken data, and 4) Japanese informants used "wa" for important inanimate objects to the same degree as for the story's protagonist in the written data, but this was not the case for the Korean data. This study points out differences in topicalization in Japanese and Korean, analyzing narrative discourse describing the same story.
Who is a Part-time Worker in Japan? The Diversification of Jobs on a Non-regular Working Basis
Noriko Tada, Nagoya University
This paper will focus on the diversification of jobs on a non-regular basis in Japan and discuss the change in the composition of these workers. Generally, critics discuss the problem of non-regular workers on the assumption that the majority of employees are middle-aged married women. Statistics show that assumption is correct, but we should also look at the increasing number of non-regular employees who are not middle-aged married women. Non-regular jobs have proliferated since the 1990s, the period of deregulation of employment. According to the 2003 labor force survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 55.6 percent of all female employees are non-regular workers (part-time workers, temporary staffing workers etc.), while 20 percent of male workers are in this category. Among female part-time workers, 80 percent of them are middle-aged women aged 35 and older, while temporary workers are mainly women in their 20s and 30s. Researchers have tended to pay less attention to the minority groups of non-regular workers; younger generations (15~24), middle-aged men and elderly (65 and older) men. We see young clerks working in convenience stores and family restaurants, but not in supermarkets. By considering non-regular work in terms of its minority groups, it might be possible to gain greater insights into why non-regular jobs are increasing; who works in this category voluntarily or involuntarily. The results of such a study might also offer indications for the recent earnings disparity in Japan that was pointed out by the 2006 OECD report.
Acquisition of Aspect in toki ‘When’ Clauses in Japanese
Priya Ananth, The Ohio State University
The tense-aspect system in Japanese is difficult to acquire for non-native learners. The difficulty arises when a marker (-ru or -ta) elsewhere used with a tense value (e.g. non-past or past) is chosen for its aspectual value (e.g. imperfective or perfective). Following are some production errors that learners of Japanese make in toki ‘when’ clauses:1. *Kuruma-ga kosyoo suru toki, Taroo ni naosite morau. ‘I’ll have Taroo fix my car, when it breaks down.’2. *Nihon-e itta toki JAL-de iku. ‘When I go to Japan, I’ll go by JAL.’ In (1) the incorrect choice of the -ru marker makes the sentence unacceptable and this error has been attributed to the Language Transfer Hypothesis from the native language of the learners. However in (2), the choice of the -ta marker is inappropriate and can be explained using the Aspect Hypothesis, which states that learners’ selection of tense endings is related to the inherent aspect of the verbs, Achievement, Accomplishment, Activity and Stative (based on aspectual features that come with the verb’s meanings). This paper presents the results of the experiments that tested these two hypotheses, using a written version of the Truth Value Judgment Task, conducted with non-native and native speakers of Japanese in Japan and the US. The results show that the non-natives performed significantly worse than the natives in the Achievement verbs category but performed almost as well in the Durative verbs (Accomplishment, Activity, Stative) category. Further, detailed analyses on the learners’ performance were done based on their Nationality, Proficiency Level, Environment and Gender. This study sheds light on pinpointing the causes of errors learners make in their choice of the -ru/-ta endings in toki ‘when’ clauses
Not Farewell, Resignify it! Site-Specific Performances at Factory 798 in Globalizing China
Jiayun Zhuang, UCLA
The site that I am particularly examining is Factory 798, also called Dashanzi Art District. The factory complex, designed by the Eastern German Bauhaus architects and supported by the former Soviet Union during the 1950s, was a state-owned enterprise that served for the former planned economy of the PRC in the 1950s and 1960s. The old factory complex has faded away after the economic liberalization and privatization since the 1980s. The rebirth of Factory 798 since the late 1990s is tightly related to Beijing’s globalization and de-industrialization, and the cosmopolitan culture of the Chaoyang district. Since late 1990s, artists, arts merchants and transnational investors have begun moving into the space, transforming the factory into an exclave of groups of independent modern artists. The factory mixes both the “socialist legacy” and the New York SoHo lifestyle; it tangles the demise of the planned economy and the penetration of free flow of global capital. Factory 798 is a constellation of past and present, and even future; and the performances in it enjoy and concern all forms of double-up. Whereas the socialist sign systems functioned as a producing apparatus for the social-ideological status of the socialist PRC, the new site-specific performances launch a process of semiotic resignification of remarking and remaking signs in the “postsocialist” era. Such a process re-performs the always-already naturalized scenarios and de/reconstructs the past myths for the undefined present. The poster session that I propose will introduce the site-specific performances in each Dashanzi International Art Festival since 2004.
Match Made on Shaadi.Com: Indian Matrimonial Websites in a Globalizing World
Rima M Aranha, State University of New York at Buffalo
With the immediate impacts of the new information technologies like the internet, globalization has come to create a dominant belief that it homogenizes distinct peoples possessing unique ways of life, leading to a more equal world. What is neglected in these accounts is the cultural adoption of such technologies—technologies are appropriated differently in different places and people make different spaces in technologies. These spaces become contexts for social contestation, community, power relations, and the perception of self and others. This poster presentation will examine one such site of social contestation—the matrimonial website. It will critically look at Shaadi.com, a large Indian online matrimonial services provider, which caters mostly to Indian residents, non-resident Indians, and peoples of Indian origin. As of December 2005, it had over 5 million members and over 5,00,000 plus “success” stories. This paper seeks to understand how social processes and social relations connected to the institution of marriage in India are negotiated, (re)produced, and contested in this website space, in the background of globalization of ideas, kinship, capital, and people. It argues that the loud, gaudy visibility of social relations on the website is the reflection and (re)enforcement of the rigid and classed Indian societal structure in general and the remembering and (re)calling of the traditional notion of marriage in particular. The main contention of this paper is that such “global” technologies which advocate the homogenizing miracles of globalization are maintaining cultural fragmentation through the institution of marriage within the Indian community across the globe.
Relation between Sentence Order and Discourse Development in Japanese Opinion Essays
Mitsuko Kido, University of Tsukuba
Based on an analysis of the ordering and function of sentences used in Japanese opinion essays written by 20 Japanese university students and the order of fact and opinion sentences, I demonstrate how the ordering of sentences has a major influence on the discourse development. First, I classified the opinion essays according to the position of the sentence which unified the discourse into the following six types; 1) initial, 2) final, 3) initial and final, 4) middle, 5) various, 6) no part. Next, I analyzed the development of each discourse, and how it relates to these six discourse types. Finally, I demonstrate how sentences with similar grammar can function as an opinion or fact depending on the order of the sentences in the essay. For example, nakereba naranai 'must' in Japanese gives insistence when it is used in an opinion segment, and gives an explanation when it is used in a fact segment. This research indicates the importance of considering sentence order and discourse development for understanding the use of forms in discourse.