Archives: Submissions
Creating Communal Narratives in Later Life: Old Age, Meaning and Memory in Asia
In fast aging Asian societies, becoming old is a highly complex juncture in the life course. For older Asians, who are aging more healthily than their predecessors, finding sources of meaning and identity is increasingly paramount. Although they share important backgrounds and experiences in maturing and growing old in the socio-political and economic environment of …
Religious Gifts and Social Transaction in Modern Asia
This panel aims to re-evaluate the idea of gift of Marcel Mauss and his notion that the religious gift is not free. The panellists in their ethnographic studies show how religious gifts are or not reciprocated, and how some social transactions involving gift-giving serve an important function to lubricate or create social relations in contemporary …
Crossroad of Culture, Battlefield of Information: The Cultural Exchange and Cultural Warfare in China (1921-1965)
What happened when different cultures encountered? This panel seeks to understand the collision of culture and information from two perspectives. We firstly aim to show how exchanges of information created new cultural products and cultural imagination. Angie Chau discusses how Chinese artist Chang Yu’s works were influenced by his encounter with French culture. Mian Chen’s …
Agents Remolded: Everyday Practices of Socialistic Workers in Maoist China
This panel discusses the everyday life under the interaction between the socialistic workers and the state mechanism in Maoist China. The first presenter explores how the identities of the porcelain potters were transformed from “backward” craftsmen to “advanced” socialistic workers during the social transformation in the 1950s. Based on ethnographic data, this study examines the …
Writing the Frontier: The State’s Creation and Deployment of Qing Frontier Knowledge
Today, China stands at a crossroads regarding its relationship to its Inner Asian peripheries. Faced with the unprecedented challenges of instability, foreign scrutiny, and a newly energized Chinese foreign policy aimed at Central Asia, Beijing seeks to strengthen its position on China’s modern frontiers. To this end, the five papers in this panel examine how …
China’s Urban Future: Can Inclusive Services Be Delivered Under Fiscal Decentralization?
Since the turn of the century, the Chinese government has vastly increased funding for social welfare programs, with the share of expenditure on social services rising to 40% of a budget that has grown 5-fold over this period. This has been aimed at reversing rising income and regional inequalities, as well as boosting domestic consumption …
Sacredness and Materiality in East and Southeast Asia
In contemporary East and Southeast Asia, the economic, social and political transformations and developments have affected on transformation and revitalisation of religion. Consequently, religious practices in these regions have been moulded and registered uniquely and significantly as enduring communal ties and memories, as well as spiritual authority in everyday lives of the people. In these …
Translation Transforms: New Faces of Asia Through Translation Activities
Translation as a cultural activity for conveying different intended agendas across borders through various semiotics is at a crossroads and faces the risk of transformation due to its unique historical, cultural, and geopolitical significance in the world. Indeed, translation is largely influenced by human’s mobility and migration that the ideas and perceptions of the world …
History Made Flesh: Visual and Narrative Representations of the Uncanny as Memory and Identity
The act of remembering and the recording and reproduction of history in modern Japan is not without controversy. Since the Meiji era, there has been a process of erasing, misremembering and reconstruction of the past. From the efforts to overrun pre-modern beliefs and political systems, to the (un)conscious act of forgetting and re-forming of pre- …
Heritagization in Chinese Cities: Practices and Debates
Since the 2000s, heritagization has become a major strategy of (re)development and city-branding in Chinese cities. From 798 Art District in Beijing to Xintiandi in Shanghai, from the Broad and Narrow Alley in Chengdu to Enning Road in Guangzhou, these urban redevelopment projects try to integrate or remake local cultural heritages into new urban landmarks …