UH Press Journals
About the Artist: Ani O’Neill, vii
Pills, Potions, Products: Kava’s Transformations in New and Nontraditional Contexts
Jonathan D Baker, 233
Abstract: This article focuses on kava (Piper methysticum G. Forst, Piperaceae) in its various forms: plant, beverage, medicine, and dietary supplement. Continue reading “The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 24, no. 2 (2012)”
Editor’s Introduction
Boudewijn Walraven, 5
The past century has seen a huge imbalance in the study of Korean Buddhism. Most attention has been devoted to the early period and particularly to Buddhism in Silla, where Wŏnhyo (617–686) emerged as a towering figure whose influence reached far beyond the Korean peninsula. Koryŏ, too, received considerable attention, particularly thanks to the printing of the Tripitaka, which became the basis for the Taishō Canon that is used as a standard edition by modern buddhologists. … With the advent of the Chosŏn court in 1392, however, the gradual adoption of Neo-Confucianism as the new state’s ideology implied a drastic deterioration of the position of Buddhism, which no longer could claim to be the dominant system of belief and was severely weakened institutionally. Twentieth-century scholars of Korean Buddhism (among whom quite a few Japanese) accordingly adopted a negative perspective on Chosŏn Buddhism. … Yet, Late Chosŏn Buddhism merits more attention, at the least because of the important role it continued to play in society, perhaps not at the official, public level, but in the private lives of people of all classes.
Continue reading “Journal of Korean Religions, vol. 3, no. 1 (2012): Late Chosŏn Buddhism”
Female Roles and Engagement of Women in the Classical Sanskrit Theatre Kūṭiyāṭṭam: A Contemporary Theatre Tradition
Coralie Casassas, 1
Continue reading “Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 29, no. 1 (2012)”
Editor’s Introduction
Guest Editor You-tien Hsing (University of California, Berkeley), 1
Analyses of the local state in China in the past three decades have made a major contribution to the theorization of the state. … [W]e have learned that the local state can no longer be treated as a passive agent, subordinate to the principality of the central state …. A growing number of studies on the unprecedented pace and scale of urban expansion in China since the 1980s have been undertaken in parallel with the theorization of the local state. … The key role of the local state is made plain in this body of research, as most changes are invariably dominated by the state and its policies. Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012)”
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Post-ing Lives
Gillian Whitlock, v
This special issue of Biography may seem exotic. It engages with a series of concepts that are unusual in studies of life narrative: beginning with zoegraphy and ending with the anthropocene. It turns to scenes of auto/biographical expression that may seem bizarre: animalographies, bioart, narratives of chronic pain, autobiogeography. It embraces creatures, critters, produsers, and avatars. Its critical canon is not traditionally associated with studies of life narrative: Bruno Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Neil Badmington, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben. The critical issues, concepts, and contexts we engage with in this issue, however, are anything but exotic. To the contrary: what it means to be human is a question that is fundamental to autobiographical narrative, and embedded in the history of autobiography in western modernity. Around posthumanism an assemblage of work is emerging that is important for critical work on life narrative now, and the essays in this special issue suggest why this is so.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 35, no. 1 (2012): (Post)Human Lives”
Investigating Motion Events in Austronesian Languages
D. Victoria Rau, Chun-Chieh Wang, and Hui-Huan Ann Chang, 1
S. Huang and M. Tanangkingsing found that six Western Austronesian languages share the common property of giving greater attention to path information than to manner. They proposed that Proto-Austronesian was probably path-salient. In order to ascertain the validity of their hypothesis, this study compares the motion events in a Yami Frog story with six Western Austronesian languages, followed by a research design using VARBRUL (a logistic regression analysis program) to analyze the factors that account for the variation between path and manner verbs in 20 Yami texts. Continue reading “Oceanic Linguistics, vol. 51, no. 1 (2012)”
James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China
Reviewed by Michael G. Chang, 299
Ralph Sawyer, Ancient Chinese Warfare
Reviewed by Peter Lorge, 303
Yunnan: Periphery or Center of an International Network? (reviewing Bin Yang, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan [Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE])
Reviewed by Michael C. Brose, 305
Continue reading “China Review International, vol. 17, no. 3 (2010)”
Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History
Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, 3
The multidisciplinary articles in this special issue were developed in conjunction with a research project on the cultures of porcelain in global history, hosted by the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. These articles all situate porcelain within wider contexts of material and visual culture. This approach reveals the complexities of the processes involved in the appropriation of Chinese ceramics in England and Iran and in the diffusion of Chinese-style ceramics in the western Indian Ocean, and explores the ways in which ideas about Chineseness were formed, and a global visual culture on the theme of porcelain production emerged.
Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 1 (2012)”
Editors’ Preface
Don Baker & Seong-nae Kim, 5
In this second issue in volume two of the Journal of Korean Religions, we continue our exploration of Korea’s complex religious culture while continuing to interrogate the meaning of “religion” in a Korean cultural context.
…
The five articles in this issue, dealing as they do with Confucians, Christians, Buddhists, and mudang, reflect the diversity of religious life on the peninsula. Moreover, they challenge attempts to impose a simplified definition of religion on Korea’s religious complexity, to dig unbridgeable trenches separating Korea’s various religious communities from one another, or even to distinguish between real religions and pseudo-religions in Korea. We hope this issue will stimulate further scholarly discussion of how the term “religion” has been used in a Korean context as well as of how best to represent and analyze the complex phenomena that form Korea’s religious culture.
Continue reading “Journal of Korean Religions, vol. 2, no. 2 (2011): Korean Religions in Inter-Cultural Contexts”
In Search of “Korean-ness” in Korean Religions through Border-crossing: A Comparative Approach
Nam-lin Hur, 5
What elements make Korean religions distinctive? This is an issue that has attracted a lot of attention from many scholars in the field. What would be an effective avenue to approach the ways in which external religions are adapted or transformed to Korean society and culture? In this article, Hur suggests that the task of tackling this question can benefit from a border-crossing approach, particularly through comparison with Japanese religions that offer a range of contrasting features. In order to illustrate this, Hur offers two examples that sharply distinguished Korean religions from Japanese religions in early modern times. One is the value of filial piety which dominated Korean Confucianism but was almost invisible in Japanese Confucianism. The other is Buddhism’s role in funerary rituals and ancestor worship: Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea was kept at bay from the dominant ritual arena of ancestor-related rituals; in contrast, Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan was the central agent of funerary rites and ancestor worship rituals. Hur suggests that border-crossing, comparative approaches that involve Japanese cases can contribute to de-localizing Korean religions and, at the same time, to localizing Korean-ness found in Korean religions in the context of society and culture.
Keywords: filial piety, ancestor worship, funerary rituals, Confucianism, Buddhism
Continue reading “Journal of Korean Religions, vol. 2, no. 1 (2011)”
Guest Editor: Eun-Young Jung
Rethinking Korean Identity in Music: Editor’s Introduction
Eun-Young Jung, 1
‘‘Fusion’’ and Questions of Korean Cultural Identity in Music
R. Anderson Sutton, 4
ARTICLES
“My Eyes Ended Up At My Fingertips”: Antoine, Autobiographical Documentary, and the Cinematic Depiction of a Blind Child Subject
Isabel Pedersen and Kristen Aspevig, 639
Antoine, an independent film by Canadian Laura Bari, gives voice to a blind, five-year-old boy, Antoine Houang, who narrates his life with stories, memories, and imaginative compositions. We argue that because of its basis in collaboration, Antoine extends the genre of autobiographical documentary. It is an autobiography by Houang, but it is also a documentary by Bari. The film uses tactics of each genre to construct a portrait of a blind subject that is enabling rather than constraining. Ultimately, Antoine affords both Houang and Bari the opportunity to create a film that pushes the boundaries of these genres to portray the life of a differently-abled subject who might have been barred from such a practice.
