10 Jan 2001
Positions: East Asia
Cultures Critique
, a new online journal from Project Muse
31 October 2000
UCLA
Center for East Asian Studies 1999 Summer Seminar (many interesting
links)
The Silk Industry In Japan In The 1800s (Genevieve Chin & Sindhu Mommaneni)
China's Population summary from SUNY New Paltz
20 Sept
a test of
PrintScreen and Word as a way to make Web pages with ArcView images
culturebank.com Japan & America: Opportunities For Mutual Understanding
I want to try to use this one as an opportunity for critical study. The article on 'Key Elements of Japanese History' has, to my eye, some nonsense mixed in with some good summaries of complexities. Worth exploring. The site's intention to enhance American cultural awareness is certainly praiseworthy...
Chinese Genealogy from oingo.com
19 Sept
Resources for Ch
inese Teaching
and Learning
China: a teaching workbook from Indiana University
National Questions and National Answers in the Chinese Revolution; Or, How Do You Say Minzu in Mongolian? (Christopher P. Atwood)
Found this in JSTOR: Death Ritual as Political Trickster in the
People's Republic of China
A. P. Cheater
The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 26. (Jul., 1991),
pp. 67-97.
Reforming Funeral and Interment Methods
Bridging the Gap: Understanding Chinese Cultural Differences (from a funeral directors' magazine...)
Contextualization and Taiwanese Funeral Rites (Scott F. Grandi)
18 Sept
moved county outline files to Miley (Anhui, Hunan, etc) and tested JOIN
function in ArcView ... very slow, but it did work.
allgwsvars.apr is available in p:/easia/ and works...
Minority and Regional Music of China: A Bibliography
14 Sept
Hong's Korean
Connection
Koreans in Japan: Past and Present ( FUKUOKA, Yasunori Saitama University Review, Vol.31, No.1.)
MINTOHREN: Young Koreans Against Ethnic Discrimination in Japan (Yasunori FUKUOKA* and Yukiko TSUJIYAMA** [Translation: John G. Russell***])
Korean Culture (PYOUNGSU KIM)
Music of Japan Today: Tradition and Innovation (Gregory Shepherd --stuff on Nihonjinron)
13 Sept
Studies of
Modern Chinese History:
50 Classics Published Between 1951 and 1974
...written by PhD students in the East Asian history program at the University of California, San Diego. Their writings seek not only to shed light on the classics from the point of view of present day standards, but, perhaps more importantly, to appreciate the extraordinary contributions made by earlier generations of scholars who labored under a variety of difficult circumstances, some of which were political (Cold War imperatives), and some of which were professional (no research access to the People's Republic).
Korean resources (annoying music, many links)
Ancient Korean History (an "alternative view")
China Archaeology (from archaeology.about.com)
History of Xinjiang Province prior to the Republican Era
11 Sept
A
Brief Chinese Chronology from CUNY Brooklyn (by dates, by political
forms, by economic developments)
China Window (links to details on many Chinese provinces)
China's Geographies (Geography 396, University of Kansas --nice maps, good brief summaries)
Provinces of China: Information Profiles (from University of New South Wales)
Web site directory for Regional Cities and Provinces from surfchina.com. Also food in China
Tourbook of China ("Newest Comprehensive Guidebook of China")
Sino-Judaic.org: the Jews of Kaifeng
China On Your Mind travel service (some useful descriptive information)
5 Sept
a slide program for
use in Korean Studies from U. Indiana (see their East Asian Studies Center for
more, especially under 'Resources and Publications')
Classical Chinese Literature (some classic texts, with links to English translations)
The Rise and Fall of Han China, China, Korea and Japan to the year 500, China, monarchy and Confucianism, to 1126, Japan, Buddhism and military aristocracies, Genghis Khan the Mongols and Asia, to 1300, China and the Ming Dynasty against the Mongols, and others...
25 Aug
Eyewitness: a North
Korean remembers (and see the Korea
Web Weekly site for lots more)
24 Aug
Center for Korean
Studies at U. Hawaii
22 Aug
Rhodes
University Asia links
Tiananmen Square, 1989: the declassified history from National Security Archive
21 Aug
Getty Thesaurus of
Geographic Names and GEONet Names Server
--two solutions to the gazetteer problem.
Stanford Guide to Japan Information Resources
13 July
Shiiba Village Japan
(Erik Kassebaum)
Once Upon a Time in China: a D&D-type scenario, in post-Tang times... remarkable...
maps of China --mostly historical. There's also a handy timeline of Chinese history
12 July
I extracted those CIESIN provincial/county files to d:/esri/digichina with
a separate folder for each of the 31. I'm thinking that each student will
take a province, and use both the individual outline data and the
county-level data for China as a whole.
China Review International from Project Muse --heavy on book reviews, a very useful perspective.
11 July
History of Science in
China (Fred L. Wilson)
CIESIN provinces of China with county boundaries --these might be useful with the GWS data? Thus, I JOINed the ethnicity dataset with the Sichuan outline and eventually up it came (took a while, getting ethnicity from Miley and so on...).
10 July
Geographic names files at miley.wlu.edu/gis/easia/geognames.html
for China and the Koreas
A fragment from http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/geo/histgeo/bios.htm (HISTGEO listserv biographies) :
Peter K. BolI am Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. For the past several years I have been particularly interested in the intersection between intellectual and cultural history and local history from the eleventh century on. The late Robert Hartwell, formerly Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, willed to Harvard his work on an historical GIS of China from the eighth to the 19th century and I plan to collaborate with historians in the US and historical geographers at the Academia Sinica in Taipei and the Institute of Historical Geography at Fudan University in Shanghai to ensure that Hartwell community. Because the basic unit for the collection of statistics in China was the county or district (xian), the creation of an historical GIS with county boundaries is one of the most promising tools for the analysis of historical change and regional diversity in Chinese society.
26 June
East Asian studies
links
("Sites to help meet the growing demand for
information" from College and Research Libraries News July 1998 --
By Ching Chang, Sheau-yueh J. Chao, and Belinda
Chiang
16 June
Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences
5 June
Hakka
discussion threads
CHINESE ROOTS LIE IN AFRICA, RESEARCH SAYS (ROBERT LEE HOTZ, TIMES SCIENCE WRITER)
pdf reprint of Chu et al. 1998 Genetic relationship of populations in China (PNAS) and Cavalli-Sforza's Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project commentary
and the idea that students could be assigned bits out of Needham, to research and report on briefly... The Science and Civilisation in China project gives the Table of Contents of the volumes (DS721 .N39)
Mark Elvin Sediments of Time: environment and society in Chinese history (QH540.83 .C6 S44)
Asian Virtual Library China Links page
FIFTEEN CENTURIES OF CHINESE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: CREATING A RETROACTIVE DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM (Robert M. Hartwell*)
University of Michigan's China Data Center
31 May
some Japan
links and some Korea
links and some China
Links
24 May
UCLA Center for East Asian
Studies and their guide to web
resources
16 May
Chanced upon a Science review of
AUTHOR Pomeranz, Kenneth.
TITLE The great divergence : Europe, China, and the making of the
modern world economy / Kenneth Pomeranz.
PUBLISHER Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2000.
Leyburn-Level 4 HC240 .P5965 2000
and while getting it from the stacks chanced upon
AUTHOR Tipton, Frank B., 1943-
TITLE The rise of Asia : economics, society, and politics in
contemporary Asia / Frank B. Tipton.
PUBLISHER Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, c1998.
Leyburn-Level 4 HC460.5 .T56 1998
13 May
A number of journal backfiles available via JSTOR:
Pacific
Affairs 1928-1995
Australian
Journal of
Chinese Affairs 1979-1994
Harvard Journal
of Asiatic
Studies 1936-1994
Journal of
Asian Studies
1956-1994
Far Eastern
Quarterly 1941-1956
Monumenta
Nipponica 1938-1994
3 May 2000
The course is now approved as Anthropology 230, and slated for Fall
term. I'm starting to work with maps, like one for western
China
I'm especially concerned to have students discover and make use of the resources in our library. Some years ago, when I was teaching EAS 190, I started a project of making a comprehensive guide to East Asian materials at W&L, and that project could be revived as an aspect of this course, using the web as the medium. Also important is the evolving journal literature in East Asian Studies --just how accessible is that, and how much do our students know about and make use of it?
I have a long habit of making bibliographies which represent associations of ideas and approaches, and which emerge out of allusive searches --hunts that are inspired by what's found in other hunts. Half an hour with Annie, starting with materials mentioned above and then going on to searches for since-1995 materials in the realms of East Asia, China, Japan (etc.) produced this collection of sources that I'll explore.
I also did a search in Bibliography of Asian Studies
for G. William Skinner and came up with these
items. Clearly, BAS is an important addition to the search
armamentarium.
8 October
Early-morning notes to myself, which turn out to repeat some of the above
but lay out a more coordinated scheme for subjects:
Anthropology draws upon the whole gamut of evidence, is happy trying out different perspectives, prefers the relative to the absolute. In approaching the Problem of East Asia as a cultural region, how should we think about who these people are? Multiple perspectives are a necessity, elements to take into account, parts of the puzzle of comprehending other Peoples.Each of the above has data sources, open questions, classic writings, controversies, yawning gaps... which make interesting problematics for course discussion.First, the biological perspective makes an interesting window, not generally used as a part of the traditional definition of anthropology but now much more a possibility. The Cavalli-Sforza frame lets us think of getting at migrations, isolates, permeabilities of populations.
A linguistic take is also important, including the complexities of orthography, language choice, standardization, borrowings...
And 'myths' are another perspective: who have they said they are? Not just the creation stuff (interesting as that is), but also the culture heroes identified and remembered, the movements and conquests alleged. Who's a Barbarian? How are Ideals defined ("The Superior Man...")? From distant past to here-and-now.
What's the technological history? The inventions, the borrowings, the adoption (and de-adoption --viz Perrin) of innovations, ties to science (Needham, of course)
What are the basic social elements of family and kin, how have they worked and where have the tensions been? (Freeman, the Wolfs)
What's the demographic history --the numbers, the flows (including emigration), the dynamics. Fukien, Canton, Hawaii, continental US, etc.
Evolution of society --including things like urbanization, political development, regional systems, empire, subjection and domination, stratification, modernization, borrowing, high culture and low culture, overseas enclaves and assimilation, etc.
Things change, things continue, things seem not to change. How does this happen? Can we identify some core that's the essence of being Chinese or Japanese or Korean? And once we've identified it, can we really understand it, account for its transmission to new generations? There's a long history of trying to do just that ==> the outsider's perspective. We need to understand that better, since it's responsible for so much misunderstanding BUT it's our only way in. Aesthetics is one useful vehicle for this. The material world's artifacts encode a lot of stuff, and can be "unpacked".
28 September 1999
Another call from Joan, wondering if I'd still be interested... and of
course I would, though the GIS possibilites would certainly change how
I'd approach the course --maps wherever possible and relevant.
4 Feb 1998
Joan O'Mara asked yesterday if I might be interested in teaching a course in "East Asian Cultural Anthropology" in East Asian Studies. That could be interesting and worthwhile, so I've made this space to gather fragments as I encounter them, though it'll be a background activity.
A quick look at ANNIE with the kw searches 'japan anthropology', 'korea anthropology', 'china anthropology' turns up nearly 40 titles (none 'korea', not too surprisingly), covering a pretty wide range of topics and versions of what might be "anthropological". Some nice places to start, though I suspect there's quite a bit of recent essential stuff that's missing and would need to be ordered.
I guess I'd attempt to deal with topics and subjects and approaches that aren't covered in other EAS courses. The 'Chinese Culture' course looks to be art-and-lit based, and probably emphasizes high culture; it probably doesn't consider village, region, family, demography, agriculture, technology. And who knows if it deals with the contemporary. There doesn't seem to be a Japanese analog.
Just who are these people, in a genetic/linguistic/ethnic sense? What binds them together, and what divides them? Over time, what are the assemblages of stuff (material and otherwise) that characterize different subpopulations of East Asia? And what evidence has been used to argue for particular constellations? How have people occupied and transformed the physical landscapes?
Cavalli-Sforza 1994 (QH431 .C395) is quite eloquent on the subject of affinities and distances amongst East Asian populations, noting that the southern Chinese are genetically closer to southeast Asians than to the northen Chinese. And the minority peoples are evidently subjects of particular study these days. There are some nice analyses of surname distributions (pp. 233-234)A lot of temptation to use things like Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture (DS822.5 .S3 1997) and Buruma's book, and I've got Rauch's The Outnation (DS330 .R38 1992) to explore further. These all have somehow to do with Japanese cultural essentials, as of course does How to Wrap 5 Eggs.