Showing papers in "The Journal of Asian Studies in 2004"
TL;DR: The study of women in twentieth-century China has expanded so quickly in the past two decades that a state-of-the-field survey becomes outdated in the time that it takes to assemble and write one as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The study of women in twentieth-century China has expanded so quickly in the past two decades that a state-of-the-field survey becomes outdated in the time that it takes to assemble and write one. This burgeoning area of inquiry draws its inspiration and approaches from many sources outside "the China field," a realm no longer hermetically sealed within exclusive logics of sinology or area studies. Research about Chinese women has been enriched by the growth of women's studies abroad and in China; by debates about gender as a category of analysis and its uneasy relationship to sex and sexuality; by conversations inside established scholarly disciplines about gender's entanglement with politics, migration, nation building, and modernity; by discussions across the disciplines about agency, resistance, subjectivity, and voice; and by several waves of refigured Marxism in the wake of feminist activity, the demise of socialism, and the development of postcolonial scholarship. During the same period, available sources and opportunities for research and fieldwork in China have expanded for both Chinese scholars and foreigners, giving rise to scholarly conversations that sometimes intersect and sometimes trace utterly separate trajectories. To complicate a state-of-the-field project even further, writing about women routinely crosses disciplinary boundaries. For China the disciplines that investigate "women" shift with the period of time under investigation as well as with changing disciplinary norms. History, for instance, used to stop at the edge of the People's
115 citations
TL;DR: Spatial Struggles: Postcolonial Complex, State Disenchantment, and Popular Reappropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China as mentioned in this paper, is a recent work of the Association for Asun Studies.
Abstract: Spatial Struggles: Postcolonial Complex, State Disenchantment, and Popular Reappropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China MAYFAIR MEI-HUI Y A N G Tin sun- is consolidating go to the National Science Foundation Presidential Yi*ing Investigator award, the I'( Santa llartura Inst utile ol Social. Behavioral, and Economic Research, and UC Santa Barbara's Inrrrdist iphnarv Humanities Center for funding feldwnrk aixl research. I received useful comments •in audi- etKes at (Ik lollowuig: the Conlrrencc on Diaspora ol Mind: New Directions in Contcmp ' , no, 3 (August 20O4>:719-7*V O 2004 by the Association for Asun Studies. Inc. t
73 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors point out that some of the eruption of the erotic into the public has been attributed to the expansion of transnational public culture, in particular the images, texts, and commodities flooding India after the liberalization of the economy.
Abstract: DURING THE 1990s, THE INDIAN PUBLIC SPHERE witnessed a proliferation of representations of erotics.' Some of the eruption of the erotic into the public has been attributed to the expansion of transnational public culture, in particular the images, texts, and commodities flooding India after the liberalization of the economy. It has also been attributed to the advent of transnational satellite television-and here I refer not only to "imported" shows such as The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara but, more importantly, to soap operas, films, and talk shows produced specifically for viewers in India and its diasporas and beamed via transnational satellite networks such
68 citations
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper found a figure that displayed many distinctive features of women's dress in the region: a headpiece and headscarf; loose, flowing cropped pants; a short, tight-fitting, side-buttoned top; and an exposed abdomen marked by a prominently carved navel.
Abstract: IN THE SUMMER OF 1998, I returned to the village of Shanlin in Fujian's eastern Hui'an County, a site where I had conducted fieldwork for nearly two years in the mid1990s.1 As my hosts eagerly updated me on changes in the community since my last visit, I was struck by their vivid descriptions of a new statue that had been erected atop one of the nearby mountains. A towering twenty meters tall, this stone carving of a woman in local attire had been installed on International Women's Day earlier that year, part of a township initiative designed to attract greater numbers of tourists to this only recently accessible coastal area by highlighting the "appeal" of local folk culture. When I hiked up to view the statue, I found a figure that displayed many of the distinctive features of women's dress in the region: a headpiece and headscarf; loose, flowing cropped pants; a short, tight-fitting, side-buttoned top; and an exposed abdomen marked by a prominently carved navel. An inscription at the base of the
51 citations
TL;DR: In the mid-1930s, P. C. Tyagaraja Iyer, a judge in the southern Indian town of Chittoor, argued against legislation granting property rights to women as discussed by the authors, rejecting the notion that daughters and sons could possess an equal stake in the property of their fathers.
Abstract: Writing to the government of Madras, P. C. Tyagaraja Iyer, a judge in the southern Indian town of Chittoor, argued against legislation granting property rights to women. Rejecting the notion that daughters and sons could possess an equal stake in the property of their fathers, the judge sought to defend the family as a site of male patrilineal privilege. Although such sentiments were not unusual-Tyagaraja Iyer's letter forms just one part of a voluminous correspondence opposed to legal reformthe epigraph makes starkly explicit a legal gendering of property ownership that was often left implicit in colonial discourse. Property relations within families, in his terms, depended on women's inequality.' In its mid-1930s context, Tyagaraja Iyer's emphatic assertion of such inequality was occasioned by a developing legal and political challenge to his vision of the patrilineal joint family. Whereas the judge maintained that property must be held jointly by fathers and sons, other legislators and activists invoked discourses of conjugality and capital to articulate a different model of both family and economy. Tyagaraja Iyer's statement, therefore, sought to defend existing inequalities in the colonial property law in the face of significant challenges.
51 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In contemporary China, road construction is a top priority for state economic planners as part of the effort to build "material civilization" (wuzhi wenming), however, roads also invoke the discourse of "spiritual civilization" in that roads can transport the "peasant" out of his backward conservatism by integrating him with a progressive global economy as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In contemporary China, road construction is a top priority for state economic planners as part of the effort to build "material civilization" (wuzhi wenming). Roads, however, also invoke the discourse of "spiritual civilization" (jingshen wenming) in that roads can transport the "peasant" out of his backward conservatism by integrating him with a progressive global economy. The civilizing mission of road construction creates an emerging border-physical and conceptual-between the new cosmopolitan China and its backward hinterland. The self-evident notion that roads are beneficial and "civilizing" also imbues Western representations:
49 citations
TL;DR: For some Hmong, whose residence in the United States has eventuated in citizenship and/or a degree of economic security, this longing has taken the form of nostalgia touring-to Laos, Thailand, China, even Vietnam, in search of a sense of connectedness to the lives from which they were so abruptly severed as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: SINCE 1975, AFTER THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE UNITED STATES from intervention in the Vietnam War, Hmong highlanders from Laos have been arriving in the West. Those Hmong who became refugees had assisted the CIA in a covert anticommunist effort within Laos; the failure of this effort necessitated political exile, especially for those who had served as guerrillas. Minorities in their homelands, they had dwelled on the high mountain slopes, practicing swidden agriculture, speaking Hmong language, and retaining distinctive styles of dress and a highly elaborated religiocultural system.' Through their alliance with the United States, they had hoped in vain to gain a greater measure of political self-determination within Laos.2 Instead, perhaps two hundred thousand Hmong now reside in various localities across the United States. Smaller communities are found in France, Australia, Canada, and French Guyana. It was with haste and regret that they left their homes, and, even after more than two decades have passed, for many of the middle and elder generations, their longing for the Asian agrarian lifestyles that they have lost has remained alive. For some Hmong, whose residence in the United States has eventuated in citizenship and/or a degree of economic security, this longing has taken the form of nostalgia touring-to Laos, Thailand, China, even Vietnam-in search of a sense of connectedness to the lives from which they were so abruptly severed.3 Hmong still live agrarian lives in villages in all of these countries. A huge settlement was also formed in Thailand, comprising over twenty thousand Hmong refugees from Laosclosely tied as family and friends to Hmong Americans-who had been displaced with the closing of the last officially sponsored refugee camp and who found alternate
43 citations
36 citations
TL;DR: In the back of a house in the city of Surabaya at the eastern end of Java is a room where two gay men complete a new edition of the zine GA Ya Nusantara (GN).
Abstract: IT IS NIGHT; IN THE BACK OF A HOUSE in the city of Surabaya at the eastern end of Java is a room where two gay men complete a new edition of the zine GA Ya Nusantara (GN). At a table, Joko, one of the men, bends down over a ledger; with pen and ruler, he extends inked lines horizontally from a list of about 250 subscribers from across Indonesia, tabulating who has paid for the upcoming issue. Indra, the other man, sits before an old computer adding final touches to the new issue of the zine before sending it to a local print shop. He looks down, then up again, entering a handwritten story sent from a gay man from a small Sumatran town. All that remains is the short stack of letters from men who wish to be included in the personals section. Next to the letters lies the glossy photograph of a gay man from Bali; as this month's cover boy, his smoldering eyes will greet those who take GA Ya Nusantara into their hands. On the eastern coast of the island of Borneo, in the city of Samarinda, is a network of gay men: some hail from local Dayak and Banjar ethnic groups, and others are migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia. On this day, I am sitting in the windowless, rented room of Haru, a man from Java, when he removes a worn copy of GA Ya Nusantara from a small locked cupboard. He shares each new edition with gay friends, including Awi, an ethnic Banjar from Samarinda who lives with his sister and her husband and children. None of these family members know Awi is gay, but Awi tells
33 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe a project that has a beginning but no clear end, where anthropologists do not have the luxury of drawing a line in the sands of time and declare a closure date for our research.
Abstract: UNLIKE OUR HISTORIAN FRIENDS, anthropologists do not have the luxury of drawing a line in the sands of time and declaring a closure date for our research. Ethnography never ends. Even the demise of the original field-worker does not conclude the enterprise, given the inevitability of re-studies (usually conducted by younger scholars eager to overthrow past paradigms). This article is a product of contemporary ethnography; it describes a project that has a beginning but no clear end. At some point during the 1990s, the research took on a life of its own and, if anyone is in charge, it is certainly not the ethnographer. In many respects, therefore, the project parallels the digital revolution: decentered, unpredictable, and "out of control."1 My address focuses on the long-term consequences of international migration and the historical dynamics of diaspora formation. The research is longitudinal in the sense that it tracks a single, tightly bound kinship group during thirty-five years of field research.2 From its inception, this has been what anthropologists refer to as a multisited ethnography, even though that term had not been invented when the research began (see Marcus 1995). The project started in 1969 as a "typical" (for that era) village study, focusing on a Cantonese community of two thousand people. The village, known as San Tin, lies smack on what was-in the 1960s-the front line of the cold war, four hundred yards south of the border between British Hong Kong and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution China. San Tin is the home of the Man lineage, one of the five major surname groups that dominated political life in the Hong Kong New Territories until the 1960s (Baker 1966). After a year and a half in this village, I moved to London and conducted a follow-up study of restaurant workers who had emigrated from San Tin (J. Watson 1974; 1975b, 103-31). Since that initial engagement, I have tracked San Tin people all over the world-to Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Scandinavia during the 1970s; from there to Canada in the 1980s; and
31 citations
TL;DR: Hartford and Goldstein this paper pointed out that "the earlier conflict between Chalmers Johnson and his critics was often more apparent than real" (1989, 19) and "the much-moderated state of our current interest in China's communist revolution derives from years of subsequent research on China's pre-1949 revolutionary history".
Abstract: THIS ARTICLE WAS PROMPTED BY A LINE in the otherwise irreproachable survey of Western scholarship on China's pre-1949 revolutionary history by Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein. Concluding their analysis of the decades-long debate surrounding his peasant-nationalism thesis, they declared that, "[iUn fact, the earlier conflict between Chalmers Johnson and his critics was often more apparent than real" (1989, 19). In fact, that verdict derives from years of subsequent research, plus the much-moderated state of our current interest in China's communist revolution. For those with memories of times past, however, the furor over what began as a PhD dissertation by an unknown Berkeley political science student was real enough, and differences grew more pronounced as their implications evolved from academic debate to political polemic and beyond. Any such proclamation of harmony thus seems to necessitate one additional response, aimed at restoring a measure of contentious balance to the record and the story of how Johnson, contrary to all early expectations, came to be recognized by Western students as a founding father of their revolutionary discipline.
TL;DR: The emperor-system ideology as discussed by the authors is a self-serving multiethnic discourse in which they linked the diversity of the empire to the heterogeneous origins of the so-called Yamato people (the majority Japanese).
Abstract: THE MODERN JAPANESE STATE CALLED on its subjects to imagine themselves as members of a national community joined by a common bond to the imperial institution. This form of imagining—the so-called emperor-system ideology—did not emerge fully formed after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 but, rather, was the continually changing product of decades of institutional, political, and intellectual development and conflict (Gluck 1985; Gordon 1991; Fujitani 1996; Garon 1997). A central paradox of modern Japanese history is that this ideology evolved more or less contemporaneously with the acquisition of an ethnically and culturally diverse colonial empire. Ideologues tried hard to rectify the contradiction between a state organized around a uniquely Japanese sovereign and an undeniably diverse population of subjects. They did this in the early twentieth century by espousing a self-serving multiethnic discourse in which they linked the diversity of the empire to the heterogeneous origins of the so-called Yamato people (the majority Japanese). On the one hand, writers argued that the Yamato people were of mixed racial stock, while on the other hand, they justified colonial expansion as the reunification of peoples who in ancient times had enjoyed the beneficence of Japanese imperial rule (see Oguma 1995, and particularly 1998). They argued in effect that Japan had always been multiethnic and that colonial subjects had always been Japanese. In this way, they were able to compartmentalize the manifest diversity of the empire’s population by relegating it to the category of residual difference that would disappear in due course as policies of assimilation (dōka) and “imperialization” (kōminka) took effect—just as the heterogeneity of the early Japanese population had been effaced by the spread of imperial rule through the archipelago.
TL;DR: In the early 1870s, approximately four hundred children under the age of sixteen passed through the courts and jails every year (Pr. LGP, 9.18.1872, file 3102; RJP 1872, 1875). In Madras Presidency of the 1890s, an average of seven hundred juveniles were convicted annually, mostly of theft.
Abstract: IN 1853 CHARLES HATHAWAY, inspector general of prisons in Punjab, wrote a memo to the provincial government outlining the peculiar problems posed by juvenile offenders within and without the colonial prison. The system currently in place for the punishment of child criminals, Hathaway wrote, was a dismal failure. Young vagrants and thieves drifted in and out of British-Indian jails, returning often and becoming progressively more delinquent with each visit. Under such circumstances, the inspector general asked, “how is his chance of reformation bettered?” (RIPP 1853). Hathaway’s alarm illuminates a vexed debate about the punishment and reform of juveniles in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Punjab in the early 1870s, approximately four hundred children under the age of sixteen passed through the courts and jails every year (Pr. LGP, 9.18.1872, file 3102; RJP 1872, 1875). In Madras Presidency of the 1890s, an average of seven hundred juveniles were convicted annually, mostly of theft (HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D–4F). These are modest numbers; certainly they do not suggest an epidemic of juvenile delinquency. Nevertheless, the study of incarcerated populations in colonial India is not simply about a few thousand unfortunates who were locked away in a new type of institution. It is a critically important part of the larger subject of disciplinary techniques, discourses, and institutions in the context of the post-Mutiny years, when administrators’ anxiety about the uncontrolled pockets of native society (Mills 2000, 75), metropolitan interest in a more humane colonialism, and the desire of colonial professionals for laboratories in which they might construct their own modern selves converged in a flowering of new mechanisms for the control of deviant populations: rebels, “criminal tribes,” vagrants, prostitutes, lunatics, and the contagious. Whereas colonial encounters with various categories of adult deviants have been studied in detail by Anand Yang (1985), Sumanta Banerjee (1998), James Mills (2000), and others (see also Arnold 1993; Sen 2000), the invention and treatment of juvenile delinquency—based on a hope that children, being morally, physically, and socially “soft,” might be relatively amenable to colonizing intervention by the parental state— have received almost no attention from scholars. Alone in this picture of neglect is Gautam Chatterjee’s Child Criminals and the Raj (1995), which has limited analytical
TL;DR: Songling and Aihua were trying to explain why one could find many such urns by the banks of the river that ran through their village, Moonshadow Pond.
Abstract: "In the old society, people could not afford to complete a burial, so they left their relatives' urns in the ancestral temple. Then during the Cultural Revolution, when things were really chaotic (luan), some kids moved the urns down to the river .... My landlady, Songling, and her neighbor, Aihua, a long-time local cadre and party member, sat in Songling's living room drinking tea. We were discussing death ritual in the old society, during Maoist times, and in the present. In southern Chinese death ritual, the bones of the deceased are exhumed and reburied in large ceramic urns several years after the initial burial.1 Songling and Aihua were trying to explain why one could find many such urns by the banks of the river that ran through their village, Moonshadow Pond.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present three ethnographic treatments of the cultural productivity of Asian men and women around issues of sexualityzines in gay Indonesia (Tom Boellstorff), transnational television programs produced in India (Purnima Mankekar), and the production and consumption of video in the Hmong diaspora (Louisa Schein).
Abstract: MOVING AWAY FROM THE COLONIAL TROPE of a feminized Orient that is remote and suffused with erotic alterity (Said 1978; Alloula 1986; Kabbani 1986), this collection presents three ethnographic treatments of the cultural productivity of Asian men and women around issues of sexuality-zines in gay Indonesia (Tom Boellstorff), transnational television programs produced in India (Purnima Mankekar), and the production and consumption of video in the Hmong diaspora (Louisa Schein). We begin from the premise that Asia has historically been a transnational crossroads of cultures. Our position, therefore, is that, despite some continuities and enduring patterns, there are no regionally specific Asian sexualities that can be considered in isolation from global processes (Manderson and Jolly 1997). Our analyses of the erotic in different sites and media texts crosscut scales from the local, to the subnational, and to the national and the transnational. Yet at the same time that we track the differential production, circulation, and reception of media texts in particular sites, we demonstrate the difficulty of keeping these scales apart and point to the mutual imbrication of the local and the translocal.
TL;DR: A Suitable Boy as mentioned in this paper is a novel about arranged marriage in India. But it does not address the problem of finding suitable matches for various characters in the cast of the novel, which is a central theme of most Indian parents and guardians.
Abstract: Arranging suitable matches for various characters in the cast constitutes a central theme of Vikram Seth’s 1,349 page novel, A Suitable Boy. Mrs. Rupa Mehra decided that in order for the prospective bridegroom to qualify as “suitable” for her daughter Lata, he would have to be “a good, decent, cultured [Khatri] boy” (1993, 4), and she spent the bulk of her time utilizing the train passes inherited from her dead husband in traveling from place to place in search of just such a boy. For the character Amit, the Calcutta-born young poet, son of Mr. Justice Chatterji, “an arranged marriage with a sober girl” (418)—divined his father’s elderly clerk, Biswas Babu—was the solution to all problems thrown up by life. These resolutions, seemingly incongruous with the temperaments of the characters—for instance, the rebellious Lata or the quirky Amit—are humorous because they are bizarre. Yet, they offer an astute insight into a central preoccupation of most Indian parents and guardians, namely, to seek out a suitable match for their wards based on a set of socially determined criteria. The flourishing existence of arranged marriages among Indians is for many proof of the firm hold of “tradition” on present-day Indian social life. The negotiation of
TL;DR: Moriyama et al. as mentioned in this paper reported that from 50 to 80 percent of workers in important industries are youths (seishōnen), and in particular virtually all of those working in aircraft manufacture are aged fifteen to twenty.
Abstract: From July 1937 to August 1945, as Japan fought a war to establish first a “New Order in East Asia” and then a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the Japanese state conscripted an increasing number of adult workers into the military and mobilized hundreds of thousands of elementaryand middle-school graduates to replace them as “industrial workers” (sangyō senshi) in the nation’s munitions factories. By early 1943, authorities estimated that “from 50 to 80 percent of workers in important industries are youths (seishōnen), and in particular virtually all of those working in aircraft manufacture are aged fifteen to twenty” (Moriyama 1943a, 6). As their prominence increased, so did elite anxieties. Police agents repeatedly swept through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities, rounding up thousands of young workers allegedly engaged in criminal or immoral behavior, while experts in fields such as juvenile corrections, social work, labor management, and education produced a constant stream of articles, reports, and conferences about the dangers that a mass of inadequately socialized industrial warriors posed to themselves and the nation. As the cabinet’s January 1943 “Outline of Emergency Measures for the Protective Guidance of Working Youths” (Kinrō seishōnen hodō kinkyū taisaku yōkō) revealed, this social group occupied a central position, along with spies and thought criminals, in the regime’s schema of internal threats.
TL;DR: A rich tradition of study of ethnic and other minority peoples has shown how traditional markers of difference are sometimes curtailed by national policies and are sometimes appropriated for celebrations of national unity, even as minority peoples may themselves contest or resist such statesponsored intrusions and appropriations in defense of traditional ethnic identities and attachments to place as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A LIVELY EXCHANGE OF IDEAS AMONG SOCIAL scientists and historians regarding issues of identity has greatly energized Asian studies in recent decades. Scholarly discussion of identity has taken many forms and has pursued many themes, but among Asianists two topics stand out. First, studies of national identity have explored the legacy of colonial frameworks for various nation-building projects and have focused attention on the role of state power in forging the markings of identity and belonging (see, for example, Keyes 2002). Second, a rich tradition of study of ethnic and other minority peoples has shown how traditional markers of difference are sometimes curtailed by national policies and are sometimes appropriated for celebrations of national unity, even as minority peoples may themselves contest or resist such statesponsored intrusions and appropriations in defense of traditional ethnic identities and attachments to place (see, for example, Jonsson 2001). By projecting ethnic diversity safely onto the hinterlands, states (wittingly or not) enhance the unmarked category of the national majority by making the homogeneity of that majority, as it were, more self-evident. And at least in Southeast Asia, social scientists interested in matters of identity have abetted this enterprise by fixing their gazes disproportionately on the uplands, in good part due to traditions of concern
TL;DR: Hu Shi's autobiographical archive as discussed by the authors is a repository of cultural artifacts as well as a mine of information, and it has been used as a model for performativity in the discursive process.
Abstract: H U SHI (1891-1962) IS AT ONCE THE QUINTESSENTIAL public man and private person of modern China. He was the nation's most influential intellectual leader, scholar, and educator from 1917, when he returned to China after having completed his PhD work at Columbia University, until 1948, when he left for the United States on the eve of the Communist takeover of Beijing. His multifaceted roles during these years included a stint as China's ambassador to the United States (1938-42). While fame and stature turned him into an object of constant public gaze, he himself fed curiosity for such scrutiny: he was a most prolific producer of autobiographical records that he selected for publication, circulated among close friends, and duplicated for safekeeping in multiple locations. At the same time, he was a private person who vigilantly guarded the innermost secrets of his private life. The voluminous diaries, memoirs, and correspondence-a veritable autobiographical archive-that he assembled and preserved were a testimony to a lifelong effort on his part to set the parameters for how his private life was to be gazed at, constructed, and appreciated. It is as though he had inscribed his own life to provide a master narrative for his future biographers, thereby purging from the source anything that was not already scripted by him, and to foreclose unwanted prying-voyeuristic and otherwise-into his private life. While Hu Shi's autobiographical archive will remain a prodigious source of information about his life and times, this article treats it as a repository of cultural artifacts as well as a mine of information. Inspired by Judith Butler's notion of performativity and drawing on the insights from feminist auto/biographical and masculinity studies, this article situates Hu Shi in the discursive processes through
TL;DR: In 1986, a loose band of ideologically affiliated clerics (ulema)-all Sunni traditionalists and proponents of Sufi piety-decided to form the island's first Islamic-law-protection committee, Jameyyathu Himayathi Shareeathil Islamiya (JHSI) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: For the Muslim community of Androth Island, 1986 was a turbulent year. A loose band of ideologically affiliated clerics (ulema)-all Sunni traditionalists and proponents of Sufi piety-decided to form the island's first Islamic-law-protection committee, Jameyyathu Himayathi Shareeathil Islamiya (JHSI). Not long after its founding, the group issued an extraordinary fatwa. An innocuous legal ruling on obscure points of Islamic law this was not; rather, it was a provocative fatwa of condemnation leveled against fellow islanders. The target of the ulema's unusually opprobrious gesture was a nascent group of island Sufis known to its detractors as "the Shamsiyya."' Of the many allegations raised against the Shamsiyya, the most serious and curious was that its members worshipped the sun. According to the ten clerics who signed the fatwa, the consequence of such ritual innovation and other doctrinal errors was that the members of the Shamsiyya had become "unbelievers," or kafirs. In addition to its condemnation of the Shamsiyya, the ulema also condoned a policy of mosque expulsion. When the Shamsiyya resisted this injunction by trying
TL;DR: A to Z as discussed by the authors provides an impressive range of technical, philosophical, and doctrinal terminology for such a slim volume, taking into account Epstein's editorial decision to exclude references to Japan and Korea, in addition to the Himalayan regions and Central and Southeast Asia.
Abstract: holy truths, five skandhas), as well as a number of broad thematic concepts (blessings, relics, time). Taking into account Epstein’s editorial decision to exclude references to Japan and Korea, in addition to the Himalayan regions and Central and Southeast Asia, the resulting collection covers an impressive range of technical, philosophical, and doctrinal terminology for such a slim volume. Perhaps the only major category left unaddressed is that of sacred space; Bodhgayā, for example, lacks its own entry, as do the numerous Buddhist sites in China. Entries are typically glossed under their English translations or, less frequently, their pinyin or Sanskrit romanizations, together with the corresponding Chinese characters. Those unable to read the original kanji may refer to a polyglot appendix which lists the terms’ pinyin, Sanskrit, and Pali equivalents. This provides a useful, if somewhat cumbersome, solution for the more experienced reader who might not immediately recognize that “good and wise advisor” translates as kalyān.amitra or “expedient Dharmas” as upāyakauśalya. A few other idiosyncrasies seem to have crept in: “Guanyin,” for example, is glossed only under the Sanskrit “Avalokiteśvara”—a potential problem for students unfamiliar with the Sanskrit. And, one wonders how many readers looking for the Platform Sutra would think to search under “Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra.” Epstein has sought to overcome some of these difficulties through the judicious use of blind entries (as in the case of “Ks.itigarbha Bodhisattva,” which refers the reader to “Earth Store Bodhisattva“) and the inclusion of extensive pinyin, Sanskrit, and Pali indices. The entries themselves vary widely, from brief dictionary-style definitions (as with avı̄ci hell, kalpa) to extensive doctrinal exegeses (Chan school, meditation). Most quote verse and prose passages from scriptural translations, including references to “classic” studies by authors such as T. W. Rhys-Davids and I. B. Horner as well as the BTTS’s own works. Throughout, Master Hsuan Hua’s commentary forms this book’s core material, providing a layer of traditional dharma discourse while serving as the standard bearer of doctrinal and institutional authority. Only occasionally do his descriptions seem to undercut the very entry being defined. This is the case with “Buddhist Sects,” which largely ignores doctrinal or institutional differences between Chinese Buddhist traditions in favor of a somewhat benign exposition on the buddhadharma’s universal appeal. Numerous black-and-white line drawings provide evocative additions to the text, in contrast to the forty-six color illustrations which appear somewhat ad hoc (Japanese and Korean images lack corresponding textual references) and repetitive (all but a few are portraits). Epstein views Buddhism A to Z not only as a reference work but as an introductory handbook of Buddhism as well. It is possible that this book’s narrow focus might confuse the beginning student expecting a culturally diverse presentation of Buddhist traditions. Read in the proper context, however, it documents the vitality of a living tradition. And, elements typically considered limiting by academic standards will likely be viewed as engaging and inspired by readers within the tradition. ANDREW QUINTMAN University of Michigan
TL;DR: The representation of other cultures invariably entails the presentation of self-portraits, in that those people who are observed are overshadowed or eclipsed by the observer as mentioned in this paper, and as a consequence the substantial presences of others are ignored or lost from view in the drama of the self seen in the imbroglio of contact.
Abstract: The representation of other cultures invariably entails the presentation of selfportraits, in that those people who are observed are overshadowed or eclipsed by the observer. As a consequence the substantial presences of others are ignored or lost from view in the drama of the self seen in the imbroglio of contact. . . . What is fashioned and refashioned is a euphemization of power in that materials which ostensibly purport to describe other people are effectively concerned with European selfrepresentation. (Richards 1994, 289)