Category: Asia

Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World

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Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as an ideologue of Japanese National Learning (Kokugaku), Atsutane’s significance as a religious thinker has been largely overlooked. His prolific writings on supernatural subjects have never been thoroughly analyzed in English until now. In When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World, Wilburn Hansen focuses on Senkyo ibun (1822), a voluminous work centering on Atsutane’s interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo street urchin named Kozo Torakichi who claimed to be an apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of Japanese folklore. Hansen uncovers in detail how Atsutane employed a deliberate method of ethnographic inquiry that worked to manipulate and stimulate Torakichi’s surreal descriptions of everyday existence in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the Other World. Hansen’s investigation and analysis of the process begins with the hypothesis that Atsutane’s project was an early attempt at ethnographic research, a new methodological approach in nineteenth-century Japan. Hansen posits that this “scientific” analysis was tainted by Atsutane’s desire to establish a discourse on Japan not limited by what he considered to be the unsatisfactory results of established Japanese philological methods.

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3209-4 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China

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Between 1044 and 1104, ideological disputes divided China’s sociopolitical elite, who organized into factions battling for control of the imperial government. Advocates and adversaries of state reform forged bureaucratic coalitions to implement their policy agendas and to promote like-minded colleagues. During this period, three emperors and two regents in turn patronized a new bureaucratic coalition that overturned the preceding ministerial regime and its policies. This ideological and political conflict escalated with every monarchical transition in a widening circle of retribution that began with limited purges and ended with extensive blacklists of the opposition. Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China, by Ari Daniel Levine, is the first English-language study to approach the political history of the late Northern Song in its entirety and the first to engage the issue of factionalism in Song political culture.

“This study is important for the clarity with which it presents a critical period in the development of Chinese imperial history and government. It is entirely original, well written, and the scholarship is very sound. Levine is deeply grounded in the texts and debates he is examining, and his command of the language of the sources, both primary and secondary, is excellent. Divided by a Common Language provides a significant contribution to Chinese, and especially Song, historiography.” —Hugh P. Clark, Ursinus College

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3266-7 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

A Study and Translation of the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra

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Bodhisattvas of the Forest, by Daniel Boucher, delves into the socioreligious milieu of the authors, editors, and propagators of the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra (Questions of Rastrapala), a Buddhist text circulating in India during the first half of the first millennium C.E. In this meticulously researched study, Daniel Boucher first reflects upon the problems that plague historians of Mahayana Buddhism, whose previous efforts to comprehend the tradition have often ignored the social dynamics that motivated some of the innovations of this new literature. Following that is a careful analysis of several motifs found in the Indian text and an examination of the value of the earliest Chinese translation for charting the sutra’s evolution.

“This important study makes the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra available, for the first time, in an English translation that highlights the differences between the oldest version (a third-century Chinese translation) and the much later Sanskrit version. Highly recommended for all those who are interested in the process of evolution of Mahayana scriptures over time.” —Jan Nattier, International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University

Studies in the Buddhist Traditions
September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2881-3 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism

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For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism, edited by Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3204-9 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Asian Settler Colonialism

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Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers’ claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

“When Native Hawaiian activists lash out against Asian settler colonialism, we must remember what Malcolm X said: ‘The conditions that our people suffer are extreme, and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine.’ This book takes a candid and necessary look at indigenous views of Asian settlement in Hawai‘i over the past century.” —Yuri Kochiyama, civil rights activist

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3300-8 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Hawaii at the Crossroads

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Hawai‘i at the Crossroads of the U.S. and Japan before the Pacific War, edited by Jon Thares Davidann, tells the story of Hawai‘i’s role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i’s Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This volume, based on papers presented at the 2001 Crossroads Conference by scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia, explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—truly the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3225-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Hakka Soul

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Hakka Soul: Memories, Migrations, Meals, by Chin Woon Ping, chronicles the dreams, ambitions, and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country, and a communist guerilla insurgency had broken out in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Her stories follow the family’s move to the United States and a journey to China to visit her father’s ancestral home.

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies
August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3289-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

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Alternate attendance (sankin kotai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and the city of Edo, where they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. Based on a prodigious amount of research in both published and archival primary sources, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan, by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, renders alternate attendance as a lived experience, for not only the daimyo but also the samurai retainers who accompanied them. Beyond exploring the nature of travel to and from the capital as well as the period of enforced bachelorhood there, Vaporis elucidates—for the first time—the significance of alternate attendance as an engine of cultural, intellectual, material, and technological exchange.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3205-6 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific

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What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3241-4 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China

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The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as “the reinvention” of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of “classical” Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China, by Beata Grant, is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3202-5 / $46.00 (CLOTH)

Bridal Laments in Rural China

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Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China, by Anne E. McLaren, is the first in-depth study of Chinese bridal laments, a ritual and performative art practiced by Chinese women in premodern times that gave them a rare opportunity to voice their grievances publicly. Drawing on methodologies from numerous disciplines, including performance arts and folk literatures, the author suggests that the ability to move an audience through her lament was one of the most important symbolic and ritual skills a Chinese woman could possess before the modern era.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3232-2 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

“Performing Grief introduces us to the fascinating culture of the bridal lament. Drawing upon the rich materials from the small village of Shuyuan in Nanhui near Shanghai for her primary materials, the author reconstructs a once vibrant culture in which young women on the eve of their wedding voiced their anxieties in ritual songs. The study is based on extensive local research, makes full use of the existing scholarship on female traditions of lament inside and outside China, and illustrates its argument with the almost complete translation of one of the most fully preserved cycle of laments. This study is an absolute must for anyone who is interested in the position of women in traditional society until quite recently. It also is essential reading for anyone working in the field of Chinese women’s literature as it highlights the rich oral traditions of poor rural women.” –Wilt Idema, Harvard University

Our Great Qing Now Available in Paperback

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Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China, by Johan Elverskog, is now available in paperback.

“Elverskog’s book is a pleasure to read, managing as it does to weave together a detailed knowledge of modern Mongol history and the broad scope of its relevance for Asian history. His research is solidly based in the classics of Mongol history, as well as close readings of an impressive array of archive materials . . . made accessible to the non-specialist here for the first time. He frames his arguments within a wide-ranging body of theoretical work covering both religion and politics. At the same time, this book is refreshingly comparative, especially in terms of other empires (from the Roman to the British).” —Journal of Chinese Religions

“Masterful . . . represents an important contribution to the ‘new Qing history’ that is now changing the image of late imperial China by offering more nuanced interpretations of this period.” —International Journal of Asian Studies

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3330-5 / $23.00 (PAPER)

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