Author: alphabex

Philosophy East and West, vol. 63, no. 1 (2013)

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Special Issue: 2010 International Conference on East-West Comparative Philosophy at Seoul National University

Guest Editor Introduction: Determinism, Responsibility, and Asian Philosophy
Mark Siderits, 1

ARTICLES

Moral Luck, Self-Cultivation, and Responsibility: The Confucian Conception of Free Will and Determinism
Kyung-Sig Hwang, 4

In this essay it is argued that the conception of free will and determinism implied by Confucianism (of Confucius and Mencius) takes a compatibilist form. On one hand, it is argued that it is difficult to see libertarian free will in Confucianism. Confucianism’s virtue ethics, with its emphasis on human character formation, cannot avoid the influence of internal factors and external circumstances on one’s character that are beyond one’s control. On the other hand, Confucianism espouses voluntary character formation and self-cultivation through human choice. This attitude likewise renders a hard determinist view untenable. With hard determinism and absolute free will both difficult to accept, the Confucian ethicists, beginning with Confucius and Mencius, seem to have been unable to avoid swinging between two extremes. However, as ethicists who exhort voluntary moral effort, they place autonomous action in the forefront of their compatibilism over inborn luck or fated events. Although this compatibilism may be valid from the standpoint of a practical philosophy that supports existing moral practices and responsibility, I examine whether it is truly tenable from a theoretical perspective.
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Pacific Science, vol. 67, no. 1 (2013)

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Pacific Science 67-1 Consuming Diversity: Analysis of Seasonal Catch Patterns in Multispecies Artisanal Reef Fisheries in North Sulawesi, Eastern Indonesia
M. Tokeshi, S. Arakaki, and J. R. P. Daud, 1–13

Despite the socioeconomic as well as ecological importance of smallscale fisheries in developing countries, there is a dearth of information on the state of artisanal fisheries in different regions of the tropical Indo-Pacific. Continue reading “Pacific Science, vol. 67, no. 1 (2013)”

Language Documentation & Conservation, Special Publication No. 5

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LDC SP5 coverMelanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century
Edited by Nicholas Evans & Marian Klamer

The Journal of Language Documentation & Conservation announces its fifth Special Publication, now available for free download. As can be seen from the fact that almost every paper in this collection is an early step in a new research path, the study of Melanesia’s languages offers abundant opportunities to make new discoveries. We hope that in the collection of papers gathered here you will find material that invites you into an engaged and diverse international community of scholars dedicated to advancing our understanding of a linguistic territory that is arguably the least charted on earth.

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (2012)

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Mediating Chineseness in Cambodia

ARTICLES

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Co-Editors Lorraine Paterson (Cornell University) and Penny Edwards (University of California, Berkeley), 267

In 1981, social anthropologist William Willmott declared, “Today, no-one identifies themselves as Chinese in Kampuchea [Cambodia]” (1981:45). He certainly had the authority to publish such a statement. Having conducted sustained fieldwork on Chinese community formation in Cambodia from 1962 to 1963, Willmott offered an unprecedented examination of social structures, political organization, and patterns of identification among urban Chinese in his monographs, The Chinese in Cambodia (1967) and The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia (1970). However, subsequent to his research, Chinese communities suffered terribly during the repression of the Lon Nol government between 1970 and 1975 and the atrocities of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Willmott thus declared Chinese communities—and a willingness to identify as Chinese—destroyed. This understandably pessimistic vision turned out to be unfounded; the next extensive research done on Chinese in Cambodia by Penny Edwards and Chan Sambath in 1995 showed Chinese communities rebuilding. However, the descriptions of these communities showed a complexity of identity formation—from recent immigrants, “the raw Chinese,” to the five “traditional” Chinese dialect groups—that differed markedly from the indexes of identity applied by Willmott in his initial analysis. Academic ideas of how Chineseness should be configured had shifted and complicated; ascribing identity had become increasingly problematic….
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Biography, vol. 35, no. 3 (2012)

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Biography vol. 35, no. 3 coverEDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Undocumented Immigrants
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, 449

This essay argues that Underground America, a collection of first-person narratives of undocumented immigrants, advances the premise that the immigrants it represents are already part of the US “nation,” and that their claim to human rights ought therefore to be recognized on the grounds of national belonging.
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Oceanic Linguistics, vol. 51, no. 2 (2012)

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ARTICLES

Whence the East Polynesians? Further Linguistic Evidence for a Northern Outlier Source
William H. Wilson, 289

Anthropologists and linguists have long assumed that East Polynesia was first settled from Central Western Polynesia, most likely from Samoa. Presented here is a very different history, one involving a northern settlement pathway from atolls off the east coast of the Solomon Islands some 2,000 miles (3,200 km) northwest of Samoa. Evidence includes 73 lexical and grammatical innovations reconstructible in the development of several nested Northern Outlier subgroups. East Polynesian is shown to share all of those innovations and thus subgroup with the Northern Outliers. The 73 reconstructions also provide evidence against an “Ellicean” subgroup and associated theories that East Polynesia was settled from Tuvalu, Tokelau, and/or Pukapuka. (See news reports in the Hawaii Tribune Herald, the New Zealand Herald, and on the blog Raising Islands.)
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Language Documentation & Conservation, Special Publication No. 4

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Language Documentation Special Publication no. 4
Electronic Grammaticography
Edited by Sebastian Nordhoff

The Journal of Language Documentation & Conservation announces its fifth Special Publication, available for free download. This book is the result of a workshop on Electronic Grammaticography held in conjunction with the 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation at the University of Hawai’i in February 2011.

Language Documentation & Conservation, vol. 6 (2012)

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Contributions to LD&C are now published upon acceptance. Below are all the contributions accepted for volume 6 (2012).

Articles

Subcontracting Native Speakers in Linguistic Fieldwork: A Case Study of the Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) Research Community from the Peruvian Amazon
Elena I. Mihas, pp. 1–21

In light of a growing need to develop best practices for collaboration between the linguist and community researchers, this study provides orientation points on how to engage native speakers in linguistic fieldwork. Subcontracting native speaker-insiders is a variety of empowering collaborative field research, in which trained collaborators independently make audio and video recordings of fellow speakers in the research community, with subsequent transcription and translation of the collected texts. Using fieldwork in the Peruvian high jungle communities of Ashéninka Perené (Kampan, Arawak) as a case study, this paper examines practicalities of subcontracting such as identifying potential subcontractors, negotiating and signing an agreement, training to use practical orthography and equipment, and evaluation of the end-product.
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Biography, vol. 35, no. 2 (2012): Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives

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Biography, vol. 35, no. 2EDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

“Dust to Cleanse Themselves,” A Survivor’s Ethos: Diasporic Disidentifications in Zeitoun
Valorie Thomas, 271

Extending Jose Muñoz’s analysis of disidentification, this essay argues that Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun reflects a particular ethos of survival that is both decolonized and disidentified. By revising the master media narrative of Hurricane Katrina as an unfortunate act of God and FEMA’s bad timing, Eggers critiques dominant practices of race, class, gender, nation, and crisis processing to address silences at the core of the narrative.
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Journal of Korean Religions, vol. 3, no. 2 (2012): Korean Shamans in the Present Tense

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Editor’s Introduction
Laurel Kendall, 5

I agreed to comment on the three contributions to this symposium in a desire to see how the study of shamans in contemporary Korea is developing. I was curious about how and in what ways it continues to attract the attention of young scholars like Dong-kyu Kim and Jun Hwan Park, as well as offering new questions to veterans of Korean shaman studies like Jongsung Yang. As these contributions abundantly demonstrate, and as many of us have argued for a long time, there is no such thing as a fixed “Korean shamanism,” but rather a body of religious practices that survive precisely because they are fluid, responsive to other changes in Korean society. Like quicksilver contemporary South Korea, and the shamans who share in its dynamism, scholarship too is a moving target, with new projects and new approaches continuously added to the conversation. At the same time, all of these works build upon some viable scholarship that has gone before.
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Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 3 (2012)

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In Memorium: Jerry H. Bentley, vi

ARTICLES

The Global View of History in China
Liu Xincheng, 491

This is an attempt to trace and contextualize Chinese scholars’ response—either positive or negative—to the “West-imported” concept of a “global view of history” after its emergence in China more than two decades ago. It also introduces how world historians in China are consciously employing this “global view of history” to compile their own world history textbooks, a practice that gave rise to a serious concern about world history methodologies. Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 3 (2012)”

Philosophy East and West, vol. 62, no. 4 (2012)

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ARTICLES

Hōnen and James on Religious Transformation: Psychological Conditions of Conversion and the Nembutsu
Yumiko Inukai, 439

Hōnen, the founder of the Jōdo School of Buddhism in Japan, came to a strong conviction of the efficacy of the nembutsu through his deep personal experience, in which he realized that he would be incapable of mastering the Buddhist teachings and practices. Although Hōnen refrains from urging the nembutsu practitioner to focus on the mental components of the nembutsu, a close reading of his texts reveals that he has a systematic view of a psychological process that the nembutsu practitioner must go through in order to recite the nembutsu properly. I argue that Hōnen’s account of a deep, dynamic psychological structure of the nembutsu practitioner exhibits a strong parallel to psychological factors in the preconditions of religious experience elucidated by James in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Moreover, interestingly, Hōnen’s religious conviction of the Jōdo belief being grounded in his own emotionally infused personal experience accords well with James’ contention regarding religion in general. James’ psychological analyses of religious experience provide an illuminating framework in which we can understand the significance of the psychological process of the nembutsu practitioner expounded by Hōnen in his teachings of the nembutsu as well as the importance of Hōnen’s own personal experience.
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