© Copyright (2005)  Southeast Conference of the Association of the Association of Asian Studies.  SEC/AAS

Return to Contents, Volume XXVII, Southeast Review of Asian Studies

 

Abstracts of Papers Presented

 

In order to demonstrate the nature of research conducted by our membership as well as the institutions that attend our meeting, SERAS publishes abstracts of papers presented at our annual meeting.  The following pages contain many, but not all the abstracts of papers that were prepared and submitted by the authors.  They have been edited for length and clarity and arranged by the panel in which they were presented.

 

**Full paper is published in this volume.

 

Panel I A: From the Silk Road to Korea: East Asian Art History

 

Fred H. Martinson, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

 

The Qizil Grottoes in the Kucha Kingdom

 

There are a number of famous grotto sites in Northwestern China and Chinese Turkestan.  Possibly the most famous is Dunhuang in Western Gansu Province.  Others include Binglingsi and Maijishan in Gansu,  Bezeklik and Toyuk in the Turfan area of Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), and a number in the Kucha area further west in Chinese Turkistan: Aay, Kumtura, Qizil-gaha, Simsen, and the largest of all, Qizil.

 

I mention all of these to inventory and discover just which of these sites are most ambitious.  In my research, experience and travel, Dunhuang and Qizil stand out as the largest, most enterprising and most important.

 

This presentation will describe and reconstruct (on paper and in images) some of the grottoes at Qizil as best we can from our perspective in the 21st century.  Since 1995 I have explored five ideas about how Buddhist mandalas are expressed in Chinese art history as part of a series of presentations to the Southeast Conference of the Association of Asian Studies. This research journey has included mandalas per se; the iconography of Dazu as a site-mandala; the way in which structures on Buddhist mountains are built in regard to mandala or mandala-like plans; and the vihāra of Rawak near Khotan.

 

Yu Jiang, National Gallery of Art

 

Rooster or Phoenix: Some Tang-dynasty Ceramic Ewers and Their Possible Stylistic and Iconographic Sources

 

Some Tang-dynasty ceramic ewers, dated to the 7th to 8th century CE and with the commonly-called phoenix heads, have long been regarded as evidence of cultural and artistic exchanges between China and Central Asia at that time.  However, conflicting views exist among scholars about what sources contributed to such a mixture of Central Asian and Chinese shape and decorative design.  Many scholars think Chinese craftsmen were influenced by Sasanian silverwork in making these ewers of slender neck, flattened bulbous body, and high foot.  Unlike the Tang ewers, however, the handle of a typical Sasanian silver ewer of the 4th to 7th century ends with the shoulder, instead of connecting with the mouth on the top, which the Tang ewers have.  Sasanian silver or ceramic ewers from archaeological discoveries with the “phoenix-headed” handle that connects the mouth are attributed to much later time periods of the 12th to 13th century CE.  Thus Juliano and Lerner attribute the modeling of such a handle to the Sodgian sources because two Sogdian ewers of a similar shape, dated to about late 7th to early 8th century CE, were found in tombs in Central Asia by former Soviet Union archaeologists. 

 

Two aspects are still puzzling.  First, the Sodgian ewers Juliano and Lerner cite did not firmly pre-date the Tang ewers.  It is thus difficult to determine whether it was the Sodgian metalwork that inspired the Tang Chinese workers, or vice versa.  Second, the head of the handle that links to the mouth instead of the shoulder is conveniently called phoenixes by scholars without explaining why they were phoenixes instead of roosters, as some indeed appear to be roosters.  What was the significance of mounting this bird on the top of a dragon-shaped handle? What was the Tang Chinese concept of a phoenix with regard to their ritual, myth, or symbolic power?  What did they imagine a phoenix looks like? What were the possible stylistic and iconographic sources of these bird-heads? Where they influenced by Sasanian or Sogdian ideas, or did they derive locally in Tang China but transform their Central Asian prototype?    By examining the Chinese records of the many artistic activities of Sodgians and Sananids in Tang China, and the mutual absorbing and interaction between Central Asian and Chinese craftsmen, I will also reconstruct what exactly happened among them in cultural and artistic exchanges, thus avoiding a simple allusion to a Sino-Central Asia dialogue without explaining how and why such a synthesis was achieved among them.  

 

Panel I B: Rebellion and Exhibition: Perspectives on Indian History

 

Susan Rosenkranz, Florida Atlantic University

 

**Breathing Disaffection:  The Impact of Irish Nationalist Journalism on India’s Native Press

 

While historians have begun to explore the impact of Irish nationalism on India’s own journey toward independence in the late 1800s, few studies have examined the link between Irish and Indian journalism.  Notably, the same names that figured prominently in Irish and Indian politics graced the mastheads of their country’s most vocal newspapers.  Not satisfied with reporting the events of the day, editors Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Arthur Griffith, and their compatriots were defining the critical issues and making the news.

 

While Indian obstructionist measures frequently emulated the Irish paradigm, this paper argues that the creation of a critical Indian native press was an independent phenomenon.  What is significant is not whether Indian journalists looked to Ireland’s journalists for inspiration, but that the British Government perceived such a link, in terms of literary tone, editorial content, political agenda, and impact on the masses.  Government documents demonstrate how this perception of an alarming parallel dictated the course of government policy toward India’s journalists.   Reacting to an emboldened Irish press, the Council of India enacted a preemptive policy on the sub-continent, with the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 owing its existence to the Peace Preservation (Ireland) Act of 1870.  

 

Evidence also shows that Britain’s frequent suppression of India’s native papers reflected identical government practice in Ireland.  Resentment toward such reactionary measures made it inevitable that publishers and editors in India would mount spirited opposition.  In one of history’s great ironies, Britain’s actions in India were dictated not by India, but by Ireland; India’s actions were dictated not by Ireland, but by Britain.      

           

Finally, the paper explores the consequences for the British Empire, as the perceived link became reality.  Relentless in their insistence on national self-reliance, Tilak and Griffith proposed strikingly similar national agendas, informing their readers of the common cause that existed between India and Ireland.

 

Heather T. Frazer, Florida Atlantic University

The Mappilla Rebellion of 1896: Communalism, Historical Narrative, and Muslim "Fanatics" in India


The utilization of historical narratives to identify and define the nature of communal groups looms large in the recent history in South Asia. The Hindu fundamentalists responsible for the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in late 1992, for example, employed their version of history to justify their violent anti-Muslim program. This study delves into the historical narrative surrounding the Mappilla Rebellion of 1896 in which ninety Mappillas were killed inside the Hindu Manjeri Temple. Little has been written on this disturbance, and with world attention today focused on "Islamic terrorists," it is instructive to examine the actions of Muslim "fanatics" over a century ago in southern
India.

Mappillas (or Moplahs) trace their origins to the ninth century when
Arab traders peacefully brought Islam to the west coast of India. By the
late nineteenth century they were the largest and fastest growing group
in Malabar. However, the coming of the Portuguese and subsequent British
land settlement policies reduced the Mappillas to insecure tenancy,
precipitating a series of violent disturbances beginning in 1836 and
culminating in the infamous "Moplah Outbreak" of 1921-22.  Blaming
Hindus for economic exploitation, many Mappillas saw their attacks
against Hindus as religious acts, culminating in the virtual suicide of
all Muslims involved.

 

Scholars have correctly identified agrarian poverty, religious
fanaticism, and attempts on the part of the Mappillas to terrorize the
powerful Hindu landlords as possible explanations for the outbreaks.
However, evidence suggests that collective memory is a powerful force
and  the desire of the Mappilla community to reinforce its own
historical narrative played a significant role in the 1896 Rebellion.

 

Panel I C:  Three Views of Japanese Religion and Religious History

 

Hideo Watanabe, William Paterson University

 

Debate on the Nature of the Religious Beliefs and Attitudes of the Japanese

 

Two issues have been long under discussion regarding the major Japanese religions, Shinto and Buddhism.  1) Most Japanese are born and married Shinto but are buried as Buddhists.  Japanese people are simultaneously engaged in more than one religion.  How is this possible?  2) Japanese people themselves claim that they are not religious, yet a variety of social activities and personal behaviors are observed in Japan.  How should this apparent contradiction be understood? 

 

Concerning the first issue, the debate lies in whether these religions are viewed and practiced as separate cultural systems or as a single cultural system.  The concept of Japanese religions as separate cultural systems is based on institutional-organizational frameworks.  The consideration of Japanese religion as one religion is based on the way people view and practice Japanese religions.

 

The simultaneous subscription to multiple religions is due to the gap between the institutional-organizational framework and the way people actually practice religion.  The religious registration data is based on the institutional-organizational framework, but in reality each individual chooses his own unique combination of religious practices.

 

As for the second issue, the institutional-organizational position claims that Japanese are not religious are based on a lack of religious belief.  However, the ideational group holds that the Japanese have strong beliefs because many religious practices exist in Japan.  The ideational group explains that the Japanese belief system simply does not fall into the religious categories defined by the institutional-organizational group.

 

However, both approaches are complementary to the understanding of Japanese religions.  The macro approach of the institutional-organizational group helps us grasp the framework of Japanese religions, mainly through their historical organizational aspects.  The micro approach of the ideational group enables us to look at individual and cultural aspects.

 

(Above paper is published in 2005 issue of the Virginia Review of Asian Studies)

 

Daniel A. Metraux, Mary Baldwin College

 

Zen Buddhists in Bed with Japan’s Militarists: A Critical Analysis of Brian Victoria’s Perspectives on Modern Japanese Buddhist History

 

Buddhist scholar Brian Victoria wants his readers to pause and reflect more deeply on the very positive image of  that Engaged Buddhists have achieved in recent decades. He asks us to consider the possibility that during the twentieth century there were numerous cases where Buddhist activism was not at all conducive to the advancement of a peaceful and harmonious world order. His research has uncovered so many examples of leading Buddhists who have supported or even encouraged acts of violence and even barbarism that one must wonder if "Engaged Buddhism" deserves such a hallowed name today.

Victoria’s published work, which includes two monographs, Zen at War (1997) and Zen War Stories (2003), focuses almost entirely on the behavior of Japanese Buddhist leaders. Victoria investigates the role that Japanese Buddhists have played in the country's political and social life since the Meiji era (1868-1912), with a special focus on the 1930s and 1940s when Japan was making war first in China and later in the whole Asia-Pacific region.  This paper is a critical analysis of Victoria’s work with several suggestions where he may have erred.

Steven E. Gump, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

**Mythologies and Miracles:  The Saikoku Kannon Peregrinogenesis

The Saikoku Kannon pilgrimage, a pilgrimage to 33 Buddhist temples in Western Japan dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon, has a long and venerable history.  Within the field of peregrinology, the study of pilgrimages, I examine the origins (peregrinogenesis) and development of the Saikoku Kannon route.  Myth and miracle color stories of the earliest formulation, which date initially to the Buddhist monk Tokudo (656-735) and, later, to Emperor Kazan.  Yet the first textual evidence, and thus the earliest historical evidence, of a 33-temple pilgrimage to Kannon in Western Japan is not found until the 12th century; and the current order of the 33 temples was not codified until the fifteenth century.  The mythology of the pilgrimage, along with the miracle stories attributed to each of the temples along the route, are alive today as a part of the contemporary Japanese pilgrim’s experience.  What does the perpetuation of these stories (and this history) tell us about the meaning of pilgrimage within the Japanese religious tradition?  Can fact be sorted from fiction—or does it need to be?

Panel I E:  Dialogue Among Nations: East Asian International Relations

 

Hidetoshi Hashimoto, Towson University

 

 Human Rights Mechanism in the ASEAN Region

 

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was established in 1967 and is composed of Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. The ASEAN region has a population of about 500 million. The aims and purposes of ASEAN were laid down in the 1967 Bangkok Declaration. According to the Declaration, the main objectives of the ASEAN are to accelerate  economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region; and to promote regional peace and stability through abiding respect for justice and the rule of law. 

 

The ASEAN is a security alliance and forms a regional community of Southeast Asian states and provides a shared regional identity. ASEAN stresses the independence and sovereignty of states. ASEAN’s fundamental principle is to promote their rights and security as sovereign states.

 

            This article attempts to demonstrate, first, theoretical framework of regional human rights regime. Secondly, I examine past attempts to establish regional human rights mechanism in Asia.  Thirdly, I assess ASEAN region of efforts to establish a regional human rights protection mechanism.   

 

Glenn W. Scott, Elon University

Cautious Deserts: Transnational Press Coverage of Charles Robert Jenkins’ Resettlement from North Korea to Japan


After living almost 40 years within the insular society of North Korea, American-born Charles Robert Jenkins has emerged as a most unlikely figure in Asian-Pacific media coverage. He is the husband of Soga Hitomi, one of five Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the late 1970s and allowed to return to Japan in late 2002.  Jenkins and Soga met and married in North Korea. Because Jenkins has been listed for almost 40 years by the U.S. government as an army deserter, his interest in joining his wife in Japan has been problematic because of U.S.-Japan ties. His uncertain legal status has extended Soga's highly publicized anguish in awaiting a full unification  with her Japanese family, American husband and their two North Korea-born daughters.  

            Weighing events against theoretical perspectives on how journalists navigate issues of nationality, proximity, and cultural context, this paper examines transnational press coverage of this episode during two periods. The initial period involves the first several months after Soga returned, while Jenkins remained in North Korea with their daughters. The second period involves more recent events in which Jenkins has arrived in Japan, with the daughters, and has begun the awkward, somewhat surreal process of negotiating a resolution with the U.S. government. Analysis of  depictions in English-language news stories suggests that during the first period, Japanese newspapers took a more cautious approach toward covering Jenkins than did non-Japanese papers. At issue in the second period is journalists' activation of their national interests as more attention has been focused on the seemingly frail 64-year-old in his awkward return to uniform and active duty in the U.S. Army as he awaits hearings for a court martial.

 

Panel II B:  Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in 20th Century Vietnam

 

Christina Firpo, University of California-Los Angeles

 

**President Ho Speaks to the Children:  The place of the Child in Vietnamese Revolutionary Society as seen through Thieu Sinh Children’s Magazine October-December 1945.

 

The history of the immediate aftermath of the declaration of independence in Vietnam on September 2, 1945 awaits a socio-cultural analysis.  Historiography of this period is saturated with military and political analyses. But how much do we really know about its social programs and cultural history?  This paper examines the socio-cultural history of the child during the revolution.  In the midst of forming a new government, unifying the anti-colonial movement, and fighting the return of the French colonial government, President Ho Chi Minh called on the youth to liberate southern Vietnam. How did the government prepare the children for wartime and what was the child’s place in revolutionary society?

 

This paper uses the Thiếu Sinh children’s magazine, which was state-sponsored, to explore the revolutionary’s government cultural imaginings of the child’s place in society.  From its perspective, the child was neither wholly passive nor a subordinate child solider.  The child was expected to be an active member of society, functioning as a kind of social reserve for the future of independent Vietnam.  Children were expected to devote their physical and intellectual education to the betterment of revolutionary Vietnam.  In essence, from the point of view of the magazine, children did not exist so much as present members of society as prospective contributors to the collective future of  revolutionary society.

 

Marc Jason Gilbert, North Georgia College and State University

 

"Killed Some Viet Minh? Shabash!": British-Indian Military Culture and the Repression of the Viet Minh by the 20th Indian Division in Viet Nam, August-November, 1945  

 

It is well-known that in 1945 the occupying 20th British Indian Division facilitated the restoration of French colonial rule over post-war Viet Nam. This paper will examine the culture of the British officer corps in the 20th Division as a whole and discuss how that culture contributed to the Division’s fateful role in re-arming of the French in defiance of the Viet Minh’s appeals to remain neutral or act as a more honest broker between the colonizer and the colonized.  One key to this study is that the officers serving with the 20th seconded from non-Indian regiments saw no reason to favor the French over the Viet Minh and sought to prevent this outcome.

 

Panel II C:  Art and Reality: East Asian Literature

 

Karl K. Zhang, George Mason University

 

Peach Blossom Spring v. Shangri-La: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Utopian Literature

 

The paper starts with comparing different social models of the  Eastern and Western utopian literatures, as representative in T’ao  Ch’ien’s Peach Blossom Spring (Chinese North-South Dynasties, 4th  century) and Shangri-la in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933) as  well as the Hollywood smash hit based on the novel. It shows that though both works are renowned for their harmonious reclusive lives, they differ in terms  of the degree of the application with the simplistic ideals. While the  Peach Blossom was clearly inspired by the Taoist ideal of non- action, Shangri-la, a Western refuge of cultural/ religious idyll from the war-torn world, was created after the author had absorbed various China and Tibet travelogues of the early Western missionaries and explorers. The two works drew plenty of imitations and yielded huge influences on both the literary and
 real worlds. The efforts of “rediscovering” the Peach Blossom  Spring and especially Shangri-la in the contemporary China, India  and Nepal are introduced, with the suggestion that though mostly  literature and art imitate life, yet quite often the imagined
 literary works generate reality. The paper argues that Shangri-la story is not  merely of importance in talking about utopian literatures, it is also  exemplary to show how some people in the remote world have to live  in the imagination of the people who live in the center of the  world. Two years ago a county in the Yunnan Province of China officially changed its name to Shangri-la, which interestingly  attested one of the arguments of the postcolonial criticism that  colonial discourse could be both repressive as well as productive.

 Ray W. Chandrasekara, Albany College of Pharmacy

 

Modernism and the Politics of Madness in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Machine

 

The distinction between madness and normality, as we have learned from Foucault, is hardly as clear-cut as certain societies and historical eras have tried to make it. Indeed, the discourse on madness has been as charged socially and politically as the attempts to deal with AIDS today. Yet, if one thing is clear, it is that certain types of “madness,” ranging from obsession to alienation to schizophrenia, have informed the modernist project in ways unthinkable prior to the twentieth century.

 

The intellectual fascination with the mysteries of the mind, given unprecedented impetus by Freud, has led to what may be termed a politics of madness, whereby writers do battle over territories that they define in ever remote and recondite modes. That modernism led in both the West and in Japan to a proliferation of eccentric art forms and expressive activities is one reflection of this phenomenon. In the case of Japan, however, and at a time of increasing political repression of the proletarian left, there was what we may identify as a transference of that reification and fragmentation of social reality, to the inner mind itself. In this paper it will be argued that this process is apparent in two of Yokomitsu’s leading modernist works, “Machine” and “Time,” in which the obsession with the mind takes the form of a madness engineered by the metaphorical nature of social reality itself. At the downside of the analysis, the paper will reexamine the politics of this phenomenon in the tendency for the modernist project--with, to use Frederic Jameson’s sensually charged critical language, its throbbing charge of libidinal impulses--to take a fascist turn in both the West and Japan.

 

Panel II E: Teaching and Parenting

 

Binyao Zheng, Kennesaw State University

 

Traditional Music and Cultural Heritage: An Exploration of the Extra Curriculum in Music in Chinese Education

Traditional music learning is very popular in today’s Chinese Schools as part of extra curricular activities.  Many Children at different ages as well as adult learners are enthusiastically picking up the traditional music instruments, Guzheng Erhu, Flute, Dulcimer, and some others. This presentation tries to explore the societal background for such a movement and the reasons why people want to go back to the traditional instruments.

By playing a few pieces of traditional and modern Chinese music with the Erhu  (also called the Chinese violin), the presenter will analyze the messages of these pieces of music that reflect social emotional feelings and life styles. With the perspective of educational psychology the presenter would also discuss with the audience the impact of music learning upon the individuals growth in all the developmental domains: physical, cognitive, and social emotional. Audile system will be utilized to assist the presentation.

 

Panel III A:

 

Jeffrey Richey, Berea College

 

I, Robot: The Body as Machine in Liezi

 

The early Taoist tradition is famous for its commitment to “naturalness,” and organic metaphors pervade its texts.  Surprisingly, an important early Taoist text, the Liezi 列子 (c. 300 CE), contains two tales that celebrate embodiments of artificiality: an uncannily lifelike mechanical man, and an actual man who moves like a “machine” (xie械).  The appearance of narratives about automatons and cyborgs in early medieval Taoist literature can be explained as the result of several concurrent trends during the period: (1) the rivalry and mutual interpenetration of Buddhist and Taoist ideas, practices, texts, and traditions, (2) the early medieval Chinese literary taste for the strange and the anomalous, and (3) the continuing contestation of Confucian and Mohist models of selfhood in the post-Han era.  The double image of humanhood that emerges from these Liezi narratives – the mechanical as human (automaton), the human as mechanical (cyborg) – paradoxically functions to disable mechanical patterns of thought among its readers.  Whether visualizing themselves as automata (the lifelike but mechanized workings of which are open for display and examination) or as cyborgs (devoid of self-consciousness and its attendant curses), readers of the Liezi could use these images to attain the basic goals of early medieval Taoist practice: letting go of the illusion of discursive consciousness and embracing a blind belonging to the Way.

 

Panel III C: Creativity and Conflict: Religion in China

 

Tom Pynn, Kennesaw State University

 

The Wonder of Dao: Entering the Primordial Source of Creativity

 

In his work Creativity and Taoism, Chang Chung-yuan writes that “the aim of the Chinese philosophical teachings is to open out what is hidden within.”  While each of the Chinese philosophical systems has its own ideas and methods about how this is accomplished, they are univocal in their understanding that the practice of self-cultivation is at the heart of bringing out what is hidden.  From a Daoist point of view, creativity can be understood as a process in which the innermost is brought out in the production of novelty.  Thus, creativity, for the Daoist, is an emergent phenomenon in the interfusion of self and world.  As Chang Chung-yuan points out, when we read Daoist philosophy and poetry or gaze upon Daoist landscape painting we are able to experience aesthetically what the Daoist practitioner experiences spiritually.  Looking into Daoist conceptions of the process of creativity, therefore, involves both an understanding of self-cultivation and the different forms creativity takes—poetry and painting in particular. 

           

In this paper, I propose to examine Daoist conceptions of creativity by looking into the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi as well as the poetry of T’ao Ch’ien and Su T’ung-po  to identify salient features of the process of creativity.  Some of these features include: opening of the mind through the unexpected, the interfusion of subject and object, the identification of subject and object, the unity of static and dynamic, and tranquility.

           

Finally, I will address Chang Chung-yuan’s contention that the process of creativity from a Daoist perspective is a kind of sympathy by suggesting an alternative understanding: that empathy may prove a more accurate way of identifying the experience of penetrating the primordial source of creativity.

 

(Above paper is published in 2005 issue of the Virginia Review of Asian Studies.)

 

Panel III D:  The Arts in Three Asian Nations: India, Vietnam and China

 

Eric Henry, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

 

**Pham Duy and Vietnamese History


This paper shows how the career of Pham Duy, one of the founders of Vietnamese *tan nhac* or "new music" and its most eminent living practitioner, intersected at every point with Vietnamese social, intellectual, technological, and political history. His songs and lyrics, both in the Saigon and the U.S. phases of his career, always took stances with regard to contemporary issues as they unfolded. Through the medium of song, he has been one of the chief commentators on the Vietnamese scene. He has acted as a kind of
"conscience of Vietnam," refusing to say or do anything that does not assume the normalcy and inevitability of a Vietnam that will one day enjoy peace and order under a democratic and inclusive government.

 

Punam Madhok, East Carolina University

Jinas and their Female Guardian Spirits: The Temples of Mount Abu in Rajasthan

 

Jainism is one of the oldest religions of India dating back to the 6th century B.C.E. or earlier. Its name derives from the word Jina, which means conqueror or liberator. The Jains believe in a group of twenty–four Jinas, the last of whom was Vardhamana Mahavira (599–527 B.C.E.). He is regarded as the founder of this faith. Images of Jinas abound in Jain art. Devotees expect no worldly rewards to come from their veneration of Jinas because, having attained complete liberation, they do not actually exist at any level. Jinas are represented with unusual physical features, such as long arms and legs, to signify their supernatural character. While Jinas retain the primacy in Jain devotion and art, there are many other subservient deities who are worshiped and represented. These include the female guardian spirits of the Jinas. The most important among them are the three Yakshis Chakreshvari, Padmavati, and Ambika. Two Hindu deities, Sarasvati and Lakshmi, gradually became a part of the Jain pantheon. Vidyadevis or goddesses of knowledge, Vidyadharas or carriers of knowledge, and Apsaras or celestial nymphs also serve as attendants to the Jinas. Two of the most outstanding Jain temples in India are located at Mount Abu (11th to 13th century C.E.). The nude Jinas are portrayed in these temples as serene, youthful, handsome figures that remain unperturbed by the seductively elegant, semi–nude female guardian spirits that surround them. Perhaps this contrast was intended to indicate the superiority of the Jinas over even the divinities.

 

Li-ling Hsiao, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

 

The Body as Brush: the Homology of Calligraphy, Kung-fu, and Dance

 

This paper explores the underlying philosophical relationship between calligraphy, kung-fu, and dance, as suggested especially in the kung-fu novels of Jin Yong (Louis Cha) and in the choreography of Lin Hwai-min, artistic director of Taiwan’s renowned dance troupe Cloudgate. Precedent for this work was long ago set by the interrelationship of calligraphy and the kung-fu sword dance. The Tang calligrapher, Zhang Xu, for example, was famous for his unique kuangcao or “frenzied” cursive style, which was inspired by a sword-dance performed by one Madame Gongsun; similarly, the Tang painter Wu Daozi is said to have dramatically improved his brush skills after witnessing a sword-dance performed by the army general Pei Min. In the modern day, the interrelationship between calligraphy and the sword dance has evolved into an interrelation between calligraphy, kung-fu, and dance (the sword dance having broken, as it were, into its constituent elements). Jin Yong, the most popular of all modern kung-fu novelists – as famous in China as J.K. Rowling or Stephen King in the West – has depicted four fight scenes in which the heroes base their kung-fu maneuvers on the strokes of the calligrapher’s pen, and in some cases actually wield calligraphy brushes as weapons. Analogously, the highly respected choreographer Lin Hwai-min embodies the aesthetics of calligraphy in his most recent work Cursive, which premiered in Taiwan in 2001 and was performed on an American tour in 2003. Cursive uses traditional kung-fu movements to evoke both the strokes of particular characters and the movements of the brush. This paper focuses on how and why the traditional aesthetic of calligraphy has been appropriated by these two modern masters, and explores the logic by which calligraphy, kung-fu, and dance have come to be considered so mutually inherent. 

 

Panel III E:  Coping with Change: China’s Domestic Politics and Psychology

 

Nicky Ozbek, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga

 

On the Silk Road:  Change, Stress, and Coping Strategies

 

The roots of the practice of Psychology in the West reach deep into Chinese philosophical conceptual gifts of  Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism. In China, there is a re-birth of this academic discipline  after a near death experience between the years of 1966 and 1976. Today fifteen institutes of higher learning, out of 1080 universities, have established psychology departments and research laboratories. The 28th International Congress of Psychology was held in Beijing in August of this year. There are an estimated 10,000 Chinese psychologists, with master's and doctorate degrees

This equates to fewer than two psychologists for every million people.  The need to address  rising suicide and divorce rates, the unexpected incidents of violence on college campuses, and the needs of the aging population underscore the importance of planning for the educational training of applied psychologists in China. Already more that thirty

per cent of  Chinese universities have counseling centers for students. Insights gained from traveling the northern Silk Road from Beijing to Urumqui  to Shanghai, during a 2004 summer Fulbright, will be shared with particular emphasis on the obstacles to growth of  this discipline in China today. It is hoped that the tradition of their own 'Quiet Therapies" will provide support the  Chinese people.

 

Panel IVA: Teaching India through Theatre: The Little Clay Cart, a Case Study

 

Lauren Hobbs Sexton, University of Georgia

 

The Distance Traveled: The Little Clay Cart in Athens, Georgia

 

The play Mrichchakatika or Little Clay Cart, whether written by King Sudraka or borrowed from Bhasa, remains a foundational text within Indian Sanskrit literature. Written in approximately 5th century C.E., not much is known of early performances of Little Clay Cart. The lack of a possible “authentic” model for production styles leaves room for various interpretations. This essay, thus, addresses the question: how should a classical Indian be performed? Through analyzing past productions and, more specifically, a recent production of the play at the University of Georgia, this essay further examines how the introduction of cultural theory and multicultural criticism has influenced the performance and reception of Little Clay Cart. The 2004 production of Little Clay Cart in Athens, Georgia, as an amalgam of traditional Asian performance styles, functioned as a multicultural educational experience, a training ground for actors and, of particular importance for this essay, a localized cross-cultural phenomenon. The context of our production, which combined Indian dance, Balinese mask, and Chinese instrumentation, provided particular challenges in dealing with methods of translation, possibilities of exoticism, and an audience unfamiliar with non-western theatre. The result of this analysis reveals the series cross-cultural negotiations which must be made in producing classical Sanskrit drama in contemporary theatre.

 

(The above paper was published in the 2005 issue of the Virginia Review of Asian Studies)

 

Panel IV B:  Pirates, Patriots, and Reformers: Rediscovering Chinese History

 

Joshua H. Howard, University of Mississippi

Li Chenggan: Patriot, Populist, and Paternalist Engineer

This essay reconstructs the life and thought of the industrial reformer and engineer, Li Chenggan, (1888-1958). Guiding the Jinling Arsenal,  one of the first arsenals built in China during the nineteenth century self-strengthening movement, and its successor, Arsenal No.21,  Nationalist China's largest arms plant during the Anti-Japanese War,
Li’s work embodied several interrelated themes in modern Chinese history— the struggle to modernize, resist imperialist invasion, become self reliant and retain a sense of cultural values. A lifetime advocate of shiye jiuguo (industrialization for national salvation), Li stood at  the forefront of China’s state-guided military industrial modernization in wartime Chongqing. Li’s prominence during the War attests to the emergence of a professional stratum of technical managerial elites throughout industry, an emergence fostered by the state. Moreover, Li’s reforms in technology and social welfare demonstrate the Nationalist government’s increasing prominence in managing the economy and mobilizing society. At the same time, Li’s life was affected by the
profound social transformations ushered in by the Anti-Japanese War.  The challenges and contradictions posed by class formation to Li’s Nationalist project may have ultimately led him to cast his lot with the ascendant Communist regime. Like other members of the urban elite during the Chinese civil war, Li become increasingly alienated from the Nationalist regime, facilitating the Communist revolution.

Robert Antony, Western Kentucky University

Piracy and the Underground Economy in Early Modern China

 

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries south China was plagued with tens of thousands of pirates who effectively challenged Qing imperial authority and the social stability of the realm. My SEC-AAS paper grows out of my recent book on Chinese seafaring and piracy, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley, 2003). In this paper I explore further the economic dimensions and impact of piracy on local society in Guangdong, Fujian, and Taiwan between 1780 and 1810. Certainly pirates acted outside the law and the normal, licit trading system, but, as I argue in my paper, they and their networks of accomplices also played important roles in developing local economies. Pirates attacked shipping not to destroy trade but rather to gain a more equitable share in it. They created an important underground economy that operated alongside, but in competition with, the regular economy and marketing system. Black markets grew up to deal specifically in stolen goods and to supply pirates. Cut off from land by their life on the seas, pirates ultimately depended upon people on shore for food, water, matting, rope, spars, and tar, as well as gunpowder, weapons, and information. Pirates also needed help for disposing booty. Those who aided pirates became partners in crime. By extending their operations on land, pirates entrenched themselves in local villages and made contacts with a wide cross section of local society. They built up a huge network of accomplices that included fishermen, merchants, soldiers, gentry, and officials. Piracy was, in fact, an integral and pervasive part of late imperial south China’s maritime world. Whenever piracy flourished so too did the clandestine economy, providing tens of thousands of additional jobs to coastal residents.

 

Dorothea A. L. Martin, Appalachian State University

Role of Reformers in Pre-Modern China    

 

China’s rapid economic reforms over the past two decades have drawn world attention.  But speculation about political reforms that might follow in support of the growth of market based changes are couched in terms of the contradictions of the Communist Party of China leading an otherwise capitalist economy.  This paper takes a look at the persistence of the problems for political reformers in the pre-modern era and draws attention to the challenges of those who have faced the forces of China’s centralized governments.  From before the period of the “Hundred Flowers” era, through the late Ming, those who tried to modify or recommend changes to the status quo were always threatened with censure. 

 

The paper is focused on the careers of three such reformers: Mencius, Wang Mang and Wang Anshi.  Two particular  aspects of Mencius’ reforms are looked at: the use of the Mandate of Heaven to legitimize political rule and the economic notions encompassed in the well-field system.  Wang Mang, much villainized in Chinese history as a usurper, put forward a series of reforms enhance state revenues while reducing the stress on the peasant farmers but his efforts failed mostly from lack of bureaucratic cooperation.  Wang Anshi’s reforms mostly suffered similar fate to those of Wang Mang’s, the bao-jia system of collective responsibility the notable exception.

 

The conclusions rest on the notion that, while China’s civilization has undergone vast economic transformation over its history, those who would try to reform and alter the centralized form of government have essentially failed. Over the last 100 years, since the end of the last dynasty, China has continued to have governments by elites who, while interested in creating economic wealth, were not interested in power-sharing.  Success or failure of the recent generation of reforms to improve the lot of the common people—seen as the ideal goal of good government—is likely to rest on the ability of the government to also redistribute or share power with a wider segment of the population or the people my prove again to be the eyes and ears of Heaven and challenge the mandate rule. 

 

Panel IV C:  Observing Asia’s Politics

 

Jen Yi Lee, University of North Carolina-Wilmington

 

Towards a Win-Win Model for the Kashmir Conflict

 

The Kashmir conflict is a duo-conflict; it is both an internal conflict between India and India-controlled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK) and an external conflict between India and Pakistan. The external dimension of the Kashmir conflict has been the focus of much study. In view of the recent developments in the India-Pakistan bilateral relationship, it is timely to re-focus on the internal dimension of the conflict. This proposal seeks to address that and purports that there can and should be fruitful problem-solving between the central Indian government and the Srinagar-based state government of IJK. This proposal recommends that the “Autonomy Model” be pursued as the solution to the conflict.

 

(Above paper was published in the 2005 Virginia Review of Asian Studies)

 

Panel V A:  Girls and Women in Three Asian Nations: Japan, India and China

 

Xuexin Liu, Spelman College

 

**The Hip Hop Impact on Japanese Youth Culture

 

This paper explores the hip hop impact on Japanese youth culture with a special reference to the ganguro phenomenon among Japanese teenage girls. Ganguro has been identified as a new fashion style imitating certain hip hop physical features, such as blackened faces and necks with glimmering makeup, blond or white hair, boots with solid platform soles, and bright colored tight miniskirts. Such an imitation is in fact an open expression of individuality, freedom, and sexuality. This study assumes: (1) Such a new fashion style is a reflection of the global influence of hip hop culture and affects Japanese youth ideology. (2) The ganguro phenomenon is not only just a new fashion style but also an explicit self identity of those who attempt to depart from the traditional Japanese cultural values and the expected social attitudes and behaviors. (3) Ganguro has become part of Japanese youth culture in conflict with the Japanese mainstream culture, and although such a youth culture may not immediately spread to the whole Japanese young generation, it has its sociocultural and ideological significance in Japanese society. A research project was designed to get the direct feedback and input from the young Japanese participating in the studies. They were asked to answer a list of open-ended questions regarding some issues under investigation. The research findings provide sufficient evidence supporting the assumptions underlying this study. One of the most important findings is that the ganguro phenomenon reflects the hip hop impact on Japanese youth culture and its ideology.

 

Suchitra Samanta, Virginia Polytechnic and State University

 

**Experiencing Patriarchy and Poverty on the Body: Women’s Stories from Calcutta

My paper presents and discusses the lives of two impoverished women, working variously as care-givers, in Calcutta, India. Theoretically, I draw from feminist theories of the body, as well as multicultural and postcolonial feminist theory on “multiple” and “interlocking” oppressions that require a culturally specific analysis. Towards this end, I address the issue of patriarchal and traditional norms as these conflict with modernity, as experienced both in terms of the symbolic as well as material female body. In the context of poverty, I argue, this conflict between tradition and modernity is experienced with particular intensity, where symbolic concepts of the desired “purity” of the female body constrains poor girls from their Constitutional rights to an education and a way out of poverty, as they are pulled out by middle school, from the public eye, to preserve their chastity and honor. Modernity, ironically, implies also a globalized Indian economy where unskilled men may be out of work, drunk, or otherwise “absent” (as is the case so often with my informants’ husbands, sons, and brothers), and where these women perform grinding, unceasing, care-giving work for little pay to sustain large families. However, the single greatest pressure upon them is that of marrying off their daughters—where the amount of dowry, in cash and gold, is directly related to the perceived “honor” of the girl. Effectively “single” and working women, “doing it all” has deleterious effects on their material bodies, as exhaustion, blood sugar fluctuations, and vitamin-deficiency related illnesses. Oppression, I conclude, as both symbolic and material, multiple and interlocking, is especially firmly entrenched in the lives of the women of whom I write. However, they persist, because they must.

Panel V B:  Chinese Film and Society

Paul B. Foster, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dis-respecting Faces: Multifaceted Metaphorical Violence of Sons Against Fathers Described by the Generational Warfare Tactic

 

This paper examines the etymology of the Generational Warfare Tactic (GWT), the satirical raising of oneself a generation or more above one's opponent or conversely to lower the opponent during the ritual process of preparing for or engaging in battle in popular martial arts fiction and film. I define the concept beginning with Lu Xun's Ah Q by relating the concepts of “sons beating fathers” to the curse of “no progeny” (jue zi jue sun, or duan zi jue sun); the “method of spiritual victory”; and Ah Q's self-slap. Then I do the following: (1) trace the GWT back to three works of Ming Dynasty fiction – San guo yanyi, Shuihu zhuan and Xi you ji – particularly examining the characters Sun Wukong, Wu Song, and Li Kui; (2) demonstrate the wide variations of the GWT in Jin Yong's works; (3) identify its contemporary currency in martial arts TV and movies, as well as gangster movies and comedy sketches like those of Chen Peisi; and (4) show the impact of the generational warfare tactic on the modern vernacular language as demonstrated by the expression “your grandfather me” (ni yeye wo a) in the television series adaptation of Jin Yong’s novel Lu ding ji.  In the final analysis, I suggest the GWT transverses time and genre to operate instrumentally to reify Confucian hierarchical values through a constant, subversive linguistic manipulation of filial piety.

Bob Moore, Rollins College

 

Cultural Models of Love in China (China; Anthropology)

 

Cultural models are structures or schemas according to which members of any given cultural milieu learn to interpret and respond to the behavior of others.  A number of anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have generated models of romantic love in American contexts with special reference to models of what might be called “the romantic ideal” (e.g. Susan and Clyde Hendrick, Susan Sprecher and Sandra Metts, Eva Illouz, Dorothy Holland and Margaret Eisenhart).  Some cultural models of romantic attachment have been constructed for contemporary Chinese in the People’s Republic (e.g., by William Jankowiak, Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig and James Farrer), though, unlike the American models referred to above, none of these focus on the ideal image of romantic love.  Perry Link’s work on the portrayal of love in the popular literature of Shanghai in the early twentieth century does focus on an idealized image of romance, but nothing like Link’s analysis has been attempted for contemporary China.

 

My paper illustrates the ideal of romantic love in the PRC as this ideal can be derived from its portrayal in Chinese film.  Of particular note is the context of romance within the complex of emotional attachments in the family in general, and the increasingly individualistic approach to romance portrayed in recent (i.e., Sixth Generation) Chinese film.  Overall, this analysis reveals an evolving model of an idealized romantic love that is responsive to broad cultural influences, some of which are indigenous and some of which reflect factors that might best be described as global.

 

Marten Carlson, Denison University

 

Internationalization of Chinese Cinema: Exoticism, Orientalism, and Transnationalism

 

For this paper, I chose to look at the relationship between Chinese film and the West.  My paper centers on Chinese film directors’ supposed “selling out” of China to the West.  More specifically, I studied the films of Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou.  The first section of my paper concerns itself with the Chinese side of the Chinese/Western relationship.  I first discuss how these directors give over China to a Western gaze.  I look at how the Chinese directors “exoticize” China to please a Western audience.  I specifically look at how directors show ethnic practices and beautiful landscapes to entice a Western audience.  I also consider the reasons why directors would feel the need to make films pleasing for a Western audience.  The second section deals with the Western side of this relationship.  Using Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, I analyze the West’s subjugation of the East in their desire for a gaze at the East.  I look at the pressure that the West puts on the East for pleasing cinema.  In the concluding section, I look at the possible future of Chinese Cinema.  Using Rey Chow’s ideas on translation, I try to look at the problem as if it is not the fault of either side, but rather a problem that occurs when culture crosses borders.

 

Panel V C: Perspectives on Memory and Identity: Japan

 

Matthew Levey, Birmingham-Southern College

 

Memory of `World War II in a Multinational Perspective

 

An analysis of the different ways in which “World War II” is remembered and an argument for the need to internationalize discourse on memory of the war, using specific examples from the history of Japanese, German (both the GDR and FRG) and American memory of the war.

 

My goal is to suggest that a multinational framework, in contrast to the predominant mode of writing about the memory of one nation (or the occasional works comparing the memory of two nations), best enables one to make sense of the rhythms of war memory as a general phenomenon and to see how it operates in particular nations. Because so much of what is written about war memory by scholars and commentators and so much of what participants say about their wartime experiences is rooted in some vision of one’s national  involvement in the war, one easily loses sight the fact that there are general rhythms of memory of the war and that an analysis of one nation’s memory is greatly enhanced by placing it in relation to how the peoples of other nations view the war. More specifically, I would recommend that scholars place the memory of war from one nation in at least a triangular relationship, as opposed to a dyadic comparison with one other nation, because a multi-centered approach significantly reduces the risk of using one nation’s memory as the standard of judgment and analysis of the memory of other nations and seeing a nation’s memory as static and unchanging.

 

Description

Analysis of the history of the memory of the war in multiple nations shows that war memory has changed over time and has changed in comparable ways. If one looks at Japanese, German and American  material from the late 40s or 50s and from the 90s it will become abundantly clear that in each of these nations, the parameters of discussion has changed significantly. For example, Japanese speak  today predominantly of “the fifteen year war” (jugonen senso) and use the term “the Greater East Asian War” (daitoa senso) only rarely. This is a fundamental shift, from a sense of Japan’s wars in Asia and the Pacific as justified to one that is criticized as “aggressive.” In the United States, we still use the term “World War II” (not used in Japan), but it now has a much broader conceptual reach, including the Holocaust and other aspects not strictly in the purview of traditional military history, which predominated in the early postwar period.

 

Finally, the multinational view is important because it helps prevent the easy reification possible when one writes of the “American” or “German” or “Japanese” view of the war, as if such national consciousnesses actually exist.  A single-nation focus or dyadic comparisons produce most easily a conception that there is a particularly German or Japanese or American view of the war and that these different views are somehow so substantially different from each other that they can be reified in this manner. By showing how American and German and Japanese views can share some features in common and have similar temporal rhythms, I hope to show, without de-emphasizing the ways they do differ,  that the fundamental issues of war memory can be seen only in this kind of comparative perspective.