{"title":"Review of: E. J. Michael Witzel, \"The Origins of the World’s Mythologies\"","authors":"B. Lincoln","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of: C. S. Adcock, \"The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom\"","authors":"J. Llewellyn","doi":"10.18874/ae.74.2.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/ae.74.2.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the absence of the institutional propagation of religious knowledge, how do people form an understanding of the yin world (yinjian), the Chinese spiritual realm where ancestors, spirits, and ghosts dwell, in contrast to the yang world (yangjian) where we live? Based upon fieldwork conducted in 2005, 2006, and 2010 in rural Chaling, Hunan, this article explores how the annual observance of the Ghost Festival, the time when souls are said to return to the world of the living, instills beliefs about the yin world. Elaborating on spirit mediums through whom villagers communicate with deceased family members, it examines how spirit possessions shape and are shaped by villagers’ understanding of the yin world. Traditions and assumptions engrained in local life enable a dialogue between the dead and the living, while the depictions of the afterlife through spirit mediumship embody images and visions of the yin world, making the invisible visible.
{"title":"The Invisible and the Visible : Communicating with the Yin World (Chinese Folklore Studies : Toward Disciplinary Maturity)","authors":"Mu Peng","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"In the absence of the institutional propagation of religious knowledge, how do people form an understanding of the yin world (yinjian), the Chinese spiritual realm where ancestors, spirits, and ghosts dwell, in contrast to the yang world (yangjian) where we live? Based upon fieldwork conducted in 2005, 2006, and 2010 in rural Chaling, Hunan, this article explores how the annual observance of the Ghost Festival, the time when souls are said to return to the world of the living, instills beliefs about the yin world. Elaborating on spirit mediums through whom villagers communicate with deceased family members, it examines how spirit possessions shape and are shaped by villagers’ understanding of the yin world. Traditions and assumptions engrained in local life enable a dialogue between the dead and the living, while the depictions of the afterlife through spirit mediumship embody images and visions of the yin world, making the invisible visible.","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":"335-362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The historiography of Chinese folklore studies commonly traces the advent of the discipline to the Folksong Studies Movement (Geyaoxue yundong 歌谣学运动; (hereafter, FSM) of the May Fourth era (1910s to 1920s)1 (Chao 1942; 1943; Honko 1986; Hung 1985; Tuohy 1991). In his critical study of this movement, Wolfram Eberhard highlighted the underlying forces of nationalism and cultural awakening that rendered early Chinese folklore studies a discipline of “political science” (Eberhard 1970, 2). If we look to the connection between nationalism and the rise of folklore in Germany, Finland, Greece, and Turkey, we notice that this politicized disciplinary inception is hardly unique to China, or as Eminov described, it is rather another episode of “the nationalism-folklore syndrome” (EMinov 1978, 174). In China, this deeply political nature has lasted well beyond the birth of the discipline, continuing throughout much of the twentieth century to shape the contours of folklore research. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chinese folklore studies had adopted a more self-reflective recomposition of its disciplinary orientation and practices. Folklorists have returned to grassroots communities while critically engaging China’s cultural policies and movements with their research. They also actively engage with disciplinary concerns and perspectives on a global scale. The articles in this special issue will introduce a few of these trends and developments by presenting recent work from the current generation of China-based folklorists.
{"title":"Guest Editor’s Introduction: Chinese Folklore Studies: Toward Disciplinary Maturity","authors":"Jing Li","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"The historiography of Chinese folklore studies commonly traces the advent of the discipline to the Folksong Studies Movement (Geyaoxue yundong 歌谣学运动; (hereafter, FSM) of the May Fourth era (1910s to 1920s)1 (Chao 1942; 1943; Honko 1986; Hung 1985; Tuohy 1991). In his critical study of this movement, Wolfram Eberhard highlighted the underlying forces of nationalism and cultural awakening that rendered early Chinese folklore studies a discipline of “political science” (Eberhard 1970, 2). If we look to the connection between nationalism and the rise of folklore in Germany, Finland, Greece, and Turkey, we notice that this politicized disciplinary inception is hardly unique to China, or as Eminov described, it is rather another episode of “the nationalism-folklore syndrome” (EMinov 1978, 174). In China, this deeply political nature has lasted well beyond the birth of the discipline, continuing throughout much of the twentieth century to shape the contours of folklore research. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chinese folklore studies had adopted a more self-reflective recomposition of its disciplinary orientation and practices. Folklorists have returned to grassroots communities while critically engaging China’s cultural policies and movements with their research. They also actively engage with disciplinary concerns and perspectives on a global scale. The articles in this special issue will introduce a few of these trends and developments by presenting recent work from the current generation of China-based folklorists.","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This research note gives an overview of the issues raised by the protest of a group of Asian Americans and their supporters against the allegedly Orientalist and discriminatory nature of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s event “Kimono Wednesdays.” In this note, I assess the protestors’ claims that the kimono try-on event at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (hereafter Boston MFA) was an instance of cultural appropriation taking place within an Orientalist framework conceptually linked to modern-day violence and discrimination toward Asian Americans. I then go on to reveal the key role of North American racial politics and identity in the protests and demonstrate how the protestors’ sense of the kimono as a symbol of pan-ethnic Asian American identity became a source of disagreement over who has the authority to represent others and say how a cultural symbol such as the kimono is worn or used, but also over Orientalism, cultural imperialism, and the concept of cultural appropriation.
{"title":"The \"Kimono Wednesday\" Protests : Identity Politics and How the Kimono Became More Than Japanese","authors":"J. Valk","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"This research note gives an overview of the issues raised by the protest of a group of Asian Americans and their supporters against the allegedly Orientalist and discriminatory nature of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s event “Kimono Wednesdays.” In this note, I assess the protestors’ claims that the kimono try-on event at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (hereafter Boston MFA) was an instance of cultural appropriation taking place within an Orientalist framework conceptually linked to modern-day violence and discrimination toward Asian Americans. I then go on to reveal the key role of North American racial politics and identity in the protests and demonstrate how the protestors’ sense of the kimono as a symbol of pan-ethnic Asian American identity became a source of disagreement over who has the authority to represent others and say how a cultural symbol such as the kimono is worn or used, but also over Orientalism, cultural imperialism, and the concept of cultural appropriation.","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"19 1","pages":"379-399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chinese Folklore Since the Late 1970s : Achievements, Difficulties, and Challenges (Chinese Folklore Studies : Toward Disciplinary Maturity)","authors":"Deming An, Li-hua Yang","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":"273-290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With the transformation of the urban-rural market system in the late Qing (1644–1911) and Republican periods (1912–1949), farmers in the rural hinterland of Beijing began using the agricultural slack season for handicraft production or coal mining. These activities diversified the economy from farming to include the production of special commodities. This article advances the concept of village production to examine both the modern transformations of village economic activities in this area and the villagers’ experiences of integration into a larger market during the process. By highlighting these shared embodied experiences, this perspective will contribute to the study of China’s rural society through understanding how the changes in village production played a role in constructing the villagers’ self-identification with the village community.
{"title":"Village Production and the Self Identification of Village Communities : The Case of Fangshan District, Beijing (Chinese Folklore Studies : Toward Disciplinary Maturity)","authors":"Ti Liu","doi":"10.18874/ae.74.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/ae.74.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"With the transformation of the urban-rural market system in the late Qing (1644–1911) and Republican periods (1912–1949), farmers in the rural hinterland of Beijing began using the agricultural slack season for handicraft production or coal mining. These activities diversified the economy from farming to include the production of special commodities. This article advances the concept of village production to examine both the modern transformations of village economic activities in this area and the villagers’ experiences of integration into a larger market during the process. By highlighting these shared embodied experiences, this perspective will contribute to the study of China’s rural society through understanding how the changes in village production played a role in constructing the villagers’ self-identification with the village community.","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":"291-306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67696645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his creative critique of industrial society and everydayness, Henri Lefebvre points out the contradiction and interdependence between leisure and work. Taking the narratives of Hakka women in northern Taiwan speaking about their personal experiences of singing or listening to mountain songs (san24go24, shan’ge) as an illustrative example, this article reveals multiple relations between leisure and work, acting as a theoretical compliment and extension of Lefebvre’s theory. Through a focus on personal narratives, the approach taken in this article enables us to examine and record certain forms of everydayness in the rural lives of Hakka women in Taiwan in the period between 1930 and 1955. This article explores the experiences of Hakka women being colonized through a discussion of life-history narratives in reference to listening to and singing mountain songs within the daily and extraordinary contexts of life within the local community. The article presents several findings, including how mountain songs acted both as social markers in colonial society and as channels to obscure the boundary between leisure and work.
{"title":"Leisure, work, and constituted everydayness mountain songs of Hakka women in colonized northern Taiwan (1930–1955)","authors":"M. Chien","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"In his creative critique of industrial society and everydayness, Henri Lefebvre points out the contradiction and interdependence between leisure and work. Taking the narratives of Hakka women in northern Taiwan speaking about their personal experiences of singing or listening to mountain songs (san24go24, shan’ge) as an illustrative example, this article reveals multiple relations between leisure and work, acting as a theoretical compliment and extension of Lefebvre’s theory. Through a focus on personal narratives, the approach taken in this article enables us to examine and record certain forms of everydayness in the rural lives of Hakka women in Taiwan in the period between 1930 and 1955. This article explores the experiences of Hakka women being colonized through a discussion of life-history narratives in reference to listening to and singing mountain songs within the daily and extraordinary contexts of life within the local community. The article presents several findings, including how mountain songs acted both as social markers in colonial society and as channels to obscure the boundary between leisure and work.","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":"37-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67695493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toward a Modern Buddhist Hagiography: Telling the Life of Hsing Yun in Popular Media","authors":"J. Chia","doi":"10.18874/AE.74.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18874/AE.74.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53972,"journal":{"name":"Asian Ethnology","volume":"74 1","pages":"141-165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2015-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67695570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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