Asian Journal of Social Science最新文献

Neighborhood and community effects studies have informed urban policies in the West for three decades. Since about ten years ago, this research line is seen increasingly in East and Southeast Asia as well. As an emerging field, the literature has yet to be critically reviewed and its body of literature provides a unique opportunity to study the effects that different research communities might have on its development. This systematic review collects 165 studies and gives a critical appraisal of this literature, specifically focusing on publication bias. Findings show that “true” neighborhood effects might be overestimated. Health research shows greater publication bias than human geography and general social science. Studies by only local scholars are more prone to bias than studies from collaborative teams or only nonlocal scholars, suggesting that this field is relatively early in its life-cycle or that publication pressure is much higher in Asia compared to the West.

The rule of social distancing, coupled with the closing down of ethnic enclaves, has led immigrants to become isolated from their ethnic groups. In this study, we investigate the increasing role of ethnic online communities in immigrants’ information-seeking behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of 726 posts in MissyUSA reveals how an ethnic online community helps Korean immigrant women deal with the pandemic, reflecting the essence of a community amid societal lockdown. The findings suggest that these online communities supplement immigrant women's medical knowledge, build non-medical knowledge helpful to disadvantaged immigrants, and offer transnational knowledge regarding medical systems, products, and travel. These results provide evidence of how ethnic online communities promote immigrants’ ongoing incorporation into society through the development of domestically and transnationally engaged medical and non-medical knowledge.

Pakistan is a postcolonial multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious state. Different cultural collectivities struggle for the preservation of their social identity and procurement of their fair share in the economic and political resources of the state. Numbers provide these ethnic groups the knowledge about their own strength relative to other ethnic groups and accordingly to make demands. In Pakistan, a decennial is conducted to know the exact number and nature of its demography and accordingly make policies. Pakistan since 1947 till date has conducted six censuses in total and all are mired in controversy concerning the counting of competing ethnicities. This article using case study method and taking 2017's census as a case investigates two fundamental questions: why does the state of Pakistan keep an uncertainty around the numbers, and why do competing ethnic groups never trust the process of counting numbers and call it a manipulated process?

Adopting rational choice theory, this study assesses both rational and emotional aspects in understanding pathways into and out of crime through the narrative analysis of a Chinese female offender living in Hong Kong, China. We found that poverty enmeshed this divorced, single mother in a commitment problem with a moral dilemma entwined with rational and emotional considerations. We argue that emotional themes, including sadness, hope, love, satisfaction, frustration, and faith should be taken into consideration to fully understand women's choices in committing or desisting from crimes. Understanding this single mother's gendered and reasonable emotional expression and incorporating moral considerations into her rationale are pivotal in extending rational choice theory to successful prevention of female crime and the correction and desistance of female offenders.

This paper provides empirical data on the community-based security practice of installing alley gates in Jakarta. Studies of gated communities in Indonesia have associated gating with the latent class conflict. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative surveys of alley gate adoption, this paper shows that alley gating is a cross-class phenomenon. Moreover, the level of community's vigilance, that is, the degree of social capital in term of local security activities is presented as an alternative variable that can accommodate both the cross-class proliferation of gating and the local trajectory of gating.

In Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers, Tamas Wells explores how central political concepts like democracy and democratization can bear radically different meaning to different political actors. With the example of Myanmar...s reform period, prior to the 2021 military coup, Wells shows that diverging narratives of what democracy means have impact on how different national and international political actors understand each other, and in turn may threaten democratic reforms.

Cha-rye (tea etiquette), now considered representative of Korean tea culture, is a new tradition developed during the Park Chung-hee government (1961–1979) and subsequently promoted nationally and internationally. With Korea's rapid industrialization and modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, traditional culture began to disintegrate, which caused various social problems and resulted in ethical and moral confusion among the people. A tea culture revival was proposed by some tea masters as a solution for the chaos in society, and cha-rye was designated a “tradition” to be restored. Anti-Japanese nationalist ideology proved a good facilitator for the transformation of Korean traditional culture, but controversies based in practical limitations arose among tea masters in the process of establishing a Korean-style tea spirit and practice. The re-invention of cha-rye demonstrates how a tradition has been created through the complex and multi-layered dynamics of Korea's rapidly changing political and social environment in combination with nationalist ideology.

This paper analyzes Taiwan's contemporary public tea gatherings from the perspective of “sense-scape,” the cultural world of sensory experiences. Performing elegance by way of tea brewing, bodily gestures and movements, costumes, utensil arrangements, and spatial design represents what is innovative about Taiwan's tea art culture, often referred to as “literati tea.” As the fragrance and flavors of tea, light and shadows, sounds and music, visual presentations of utensils, and space, as well as the general atmosphere of these events are captured by the senses and organized by the emotions, they inform us about who we are and who the other is. Despite its Japanese cultural infusion and Chinese cultural legacy, which have always complicated claims of a truly Taiwanese origin, Taiwan's tea art has been eagerly adopted by mainland Chinese tea communities since the late 2000s. That a local practice and invented tradition strongly identified with Taiwan has been embraced as “traditional” cultural practice in contemporary China presents a paradox that deserves our attention.