Books on the topic 'Understanding Asia's Past'

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

The monograph examines the features of environmental norms, methods, legal relations, ensuring their understanding and accessibility, compensation for present and past environmental damage, and the formation of competitive principles of environmental law. The article analyzes the current legal problems of using natural resources - soils, subsurface resources, forests, water, wildlife, climate protection, taking into account public access to information about them, land management, combining civil and administrative methods of regulation, and the structure of environmental law. The subject of the research is the systems of environmental legislation in some European and Asian States, its implementation in the Arctic, Baikal, Crimean territories, in cities and other settlements in order to prevent and suppress environmental offenses. For scientists, teachers, postgraduates, undergraduates, students of higher legal institutions studying environmental, natural resource, land law, as well as for a wide range of readers interested in modern legal problems of nature protection.

The strong continuities between colonial eugenics agendas and postcolonial population control efforts are striking elements in the history of eugenics in South Asia. This article discusses the role of different strands within colonial eugenics—particularly neo-Malthusianism—at different points in time and in the region's different postcolonial nations. It mentions that eugenics in a poverty-stricken colonial context provides a powerful and enduring template for connecting reproductive behavior to the task of revitalizing the nation as a whole. This article relates the history of eugenics in colonial India with the history of birth control advocacy. It discusses in detail the eugenics associations that held public meetings and advocated contraceptive use. It provides an understanding of the relative insignificance of heredity to Indian eugenics in light of the conditions for the development of eugenic science in India.

Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India’s foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. As a part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, this volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime. This volume probes reasons behind the relevance of differentiated cartography of territorial nationalism in our shared understanding of space, politics, society, and the community.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.

Historically, regional power shifts have tended to be messy affairs. Such changes often produced not only wars, but long, drawn-out forms of conflict that devastated the regions in which they occurred. With the exception of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, none of these power-shift conflicts have yet been truly global, and it is unlikely that the rivalry between the United States and China will spill over into a global confrontation any time soon. The chapter provides an overview of two of the key conflict areas within East Asia, notably Korea and Southeast Asia, mainly from a Chinese perspective, and it indicates how a better understanding of the international history of the region can help with measuring the framework for current rivalries. It also suggests key issues for consideration in terms of how the potential for great power conflict can be reduced.

The unprecedented economic growth in many East Asian societies in the few past decades have placed the region center stage, and increasing globalization have made East-West cultural understanding of even greater importance today. This book is the most comprehensive on East Asian cognition and thinking styles to date, and is the first to bring together a large body of empirical research on “naïve dialecticism” (Peng & Nisbett, 1999; Peng, Spencer-Rodgers, & Nian, 2006) and “analytic/holistic thinking” (Nisbett, 2003), theories in cultural psychology that stem from Richard Nisbett’s (2003) highly influential and successful book on The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. More specifically, the current book examines the psychological, philosophical, and cultural underpinnings and consequences of “dialectical thinking” (Peng & Nisbett, 1999) and cognitive holism (Nisbett, 2003) for human thought, emotion, and behaviour. Since the publication of Peng and Nisbett’s (1999) seminal article, research on this topic has flourished, and East-West cultural differences have been documented in almost all aspects of the human condition and life, from the manner in which people reason and make decisions, conceptualize themselves and others, to how they cope with stress and mental illness, and interact with others, including romantic partners and social groups. Twenty-one chapters written by leading experts in psychology and related fields cover such diverse topics as cultural neuroscience and the brain, lifespan development, attitudes and group perception, romantic relationships, extracultural cognition (the adoption of foreign mind-sets and perspectives), creativity, emotion, the self-concept, racial/ethnic identity, psychopathology, and coping processes and wellbeing. This research has practical implications for business and organizational management, international relations and politics, education, and clinical and counselling psychology, and may be of particular interest to business professionals, managers in government and non-profit sectors, as well as educators and clinicians working with East Asians and Americans of East Asian descent.

Resurgent Asia analyses the phenomenal transformation of Asia, which would have been difficult to imagine, let alone predict, fifty years ago, when Gunnar Myrdal published Asian Drama. In doing so, it provides an analytical narrative of this remarkable story of economic development, situated in its wider context of historical, political, and social factors, and an economic analysis of the underlying factors, with a focus on critical issues in the process of, and outcomes in, development. In 1970, Asia was the poorest continent in the world, marginal except for its large population. By 2016, it accounted for three-tenths of world income, two-fifths of world manufacturing, and one-third of world trade, while its income per capita converged towards the world average. However, this transformation was associated with unequal outcomes across countries and between people. The analysis disaggregates Asia into its four constituent sub-regions—East, Southeast, South, and West—and further into fourteen economies—China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka—which account for more than four-fifths of its population and income. This book enhances our understanding of development processes and outcomes in Asia over the past fifty years, draws out the analytical conclusions that contribute to contemporary debates on development, and highlights some lessons from the Asian experience for countries elsewhere. It is the first to examine the phenomenal changes that are transforming economies in Asia and shifting the balance of economic power in the world, while reflecting on the future prospects in Asia over the next twenty-five years. A rich, engaging, and fascinating read.

This second volume in the series collects papers from two workshops held at the University of Göttingen in 2019 and 2020. The international meetings tackled questions related to merchants and money in a comparative perspective, with examples spanning from the Bronze Age to the early Modern period and embracing Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and East Africa. The first part of this volume presents historical case studies of how merchants planned and carried out commercial expeditions; how risk, cost, and potential profit was calculated; and how the value of goods was calculated and converted. The papers in the second part address current theories and methods on the development and function of money before and after the invention of coinage. The introduction of balance scales around 3000 BCE enabled the formation of overarching indexes of value and the calculation of the commercial value of goods and services. It also allowed for a selected set of commodities to take on the role of currency. Around 650 BCE, this led to the invention of coinage in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Asian Americans were brought into the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, during World War II under the assumption of a secure loyalty. They served as research analysts, special operations members, morale operations propagandists, secret agents gathering covert intelligence, and, after the war, as war crimes investigators in East Asia where their cultural and linguistic skills, coupled with the correct racial uniforms, made them invaluable to America’s first centralized intelligence agency. These agents were drawn from New York City to Honolulu, where Asian immigrants and their American-born offspring had developed loyalties that were multiple and flexible, not singular and fixed. Despite this, European American OSS recruiters admitted them even as they believed their own loyalty was more certain and fixed, since they hailed from families with roots reaching far back into America’s past. In their joint struggle against the Imperial Japanese forces, these Asian Americans and their European American OSS colleagues generated propaganda to demoralize the enemy and encourage surrender, gathered overt intelligence from a wide variety of media sources, obtained covert intelligence inside enemy-occupied territory, and trained and executed guerrilla operations scores of miles behind the battle lines where, if captured, they faced torture and execution. Immediately after the war, they conducted war crimes investigations that included some Asian American collaborators, raising questions about the meaning of loyalty. The end result of their activities was not only the satisfaction of seeing Imperial Japan defeated, but a new understanding of loyalty, race, and Asian Americans.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

This book brings together two sets of articles and book chapters by the late author, an extraordinary scholar of Islam in South Asia. The first part of the volume examines Shia–Sunni relations in Pakistan, while the second concerns violent Islamism in the country, covering both the Talibanisation of the Pashtun belt and the jihadi dimension of South Asian Salafism. The book explores the many reasons why Pakistan has been the crucible of political Islam. It offers a historical view of this development, factoring in the impact of colonialism and conflict, including the Soviet–Afghan War and the post-9/11 Western military operations in Afghanistan. While making clear the major importance of these external influences, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the US, the book also places Pakistan's political Islam in the context of local cultures, mobilising her anthropological erudition without ever indulging in culturalism. Finally, it emphasises the sociological determinants of sectarianism, Talibanism and jihadism, as well as the political economy of these ideologies. The book is indispensable for understanding the present dynamics of Pakistan.

Chapter 5 examines cross-cultural neuroimaging studies of neural processes underlying social interactions. East Asian and Western cultural experiences produce specific cognitive and neural strategies in perception of face and expression, empathy for others’ emotional states, regulation of one’s own emotion, understanding others’ beliefs, perception of others’ social status, and processing of social feedback. The cultural differences in neurocognitive processing of others have been observed in most part of the social brain network, covering both cortical and subcortical structures, and support culturally specific behavior.

Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region’s past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America’s ongoing political struggles.

The first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. This book is the first comprehensive book to explore Islam's evolution in this region over the past century and a half, from the British colonial era to the present day. The book presents a rich historical account of this major Muslim nation, insights into the rise and gradual decline of Islamic modernist thought in the South Asian region, and an understanding of how Islam has fared in the contemporary world. Much attention has been given to Pakistan's role in sustaining the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, in the growth of the Taliban in the 1990s, and in the War on Terror after 9/11. But as this book shows, the nation's significance in matters relating to Islam has much deeper roots. Since the late nineteenth century, South Asia has witnessed important initiatives toward rethinking core Islamic texts and traditions in the interest of their compatibility with the imperatives of modern life. Traditionalist scholars and their institutions, too, have had a prominent presence in the region, as have Islamism and Sufism. Pakistan did not merely inherit these and other aspects of Islam. Rather, it has been and remains a site of intense contestation over Islam's public place, meaning, and interpretation. Examining how facets of Islam have been pivotal in Pakistani history, this book offers sweeping perspectives on what constitutes an Islamic state.

The contributors to this volume include young as well as established scholars who use a variety of materials from case law to legal treatises and everyday records of rule to foreground the performative power of law and elaborate new subject positions incarnated by the law. The analysis of law as a historical and cultural project provides the means for the contributors to critically reflect on how legal sources illuminate and perhaps even challenge our understanding of the discipline of history. Some of the themes explored by the contributors include questions of documentary truth, the genealogies of custom, the recuperation of the force of law through everyday violence, the idea of a legal public, the life of extraordinary law and the crafting of legal subjectivity, hyperlegality, non-state law, and so on. South Asian legal history for the most part developed as a series of binaries: law/law-ways, rights/customs, rule of law/reign of violence, and heteronomy of law/autonomy of legal subjects. Many chapters in this volume analyse situated and everyday practices of law as they endeavour to transform South Asian legal history. The volume’s rich detailing of the ways in which non-elites engaged with the law should provide many opportunities to reflect on South Asian legal history and its future itineraries.

This chapter presents an analysis that emphasizes the interpretive possibilities of contestory or ambivalent readings of multiracial narratives. As argued in Chapter 1, only a portion of the moviegoing audience can read Keanu Reeves as a multiracial Asian. Rather than recapitulate viewing habits that render multiraciality irrelevant, using a multiracial perspective to understand The Matrix film series enables a far richer and more rewarding film experience. Understanding Reeves's character Neo as multiracial makes visible the interrelated representations of multiraciality, future utopias, and cyclical time in the film trilogy. The studio marketed the film as a merger of Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema, yet its visual imagery is at odds with its narrative and extratextual portrayal of hybridity. During the same period as the release of the trilogy, Reeves was becoming increasingly visible as an Asian American, due in part to the publicity for the film. His multiraciality, then, was linked to a film narrative that depends upon conflicting depictions of the hybrid body, echoing a larger societal ambivalence about the much-lauded multiracial future.

This chapter has two major goals. The first is to introduce some of the major sets of bodhisattva precepts and to discuss their significance in both India and East Asia while paying attention to some of the areas that our current state of knowledge does not allow us to understand. Besides the contents of the precepts, bodhisattva ordinations and the expiation of wrongdoing are considered. The second part of the chapter, with particular emphasis on the Tendai school of Japan, focuses on how the bodhisattva precepts led to a more nuanced understanding of Buddhist ethics by focusing on such issues as killing and compassion.

Meeting future food needs without compromising environmental integrity is a central challenge for agriculture globally but especially for the Asia Pacific region – where 60% of the global population, including some of the world’s poorest, live on only 30% of the land mass. To guarantee the food security of this and other regions, growers worldwide are rapidly adopting genetically modified (GM) crops as the forerunner to protect against many biotic and abiotic stresses. Asia Pacific countries play an important role in this, with India, China and Pakistan appearing in the top 10 countries with acreage of GM crops, primarily devoted to Bt cotton. Genetically Modified Crops in Asia Pacific discusses the progress of GM crop adoption across the Asia Pacific region over the past two decades, including research, development, adoption and sustainability, as well as the cultivation of insect resistant Bt brinjal, drought-tolerant sugarcane, late blight resistant potato and biotech rice more specific to this region. Regulatory efforts of the Asia Pacific member nations to ensure the safety of GM crops to both humans and the environment are also outlined to provide impetus in other countries initiating biotech crops. The authors also probe into some aspects of gene editing and nanobiotechnology to expand the scope into next generation GM crops, including the potential to grow crops in acidic soil, reduce methane production, remove poisonous elements from plants and improve overall nutritional quality. Genetically Modified Crops in Asia Pacific provides a comprehensive reference not only for academics, researchers and private sectors in crop systems but also policy makers in the Asia Pacific region. Beyond this region, readers will benefit from understanding how GM crops have been integrated into many different countries and, in particular, the effects of the take-up of GM cropping systems by farmers with different socioeconomic backgrounds.

This chapter aims to contribute to understanding the existing knowledge gaps in the linkages of energy, water, and land use in Southeast Asia and explores the political economy of energy transition in the Mekong region (MR). Investigating the struggle over hydropower development and decision-making on water and land across the region, the study shows that countries that are the winners or losers in the hydropower development schemes are not the only ones managing the Mekong; rather, it is part of the region-wide strategy of nations to sustain the MR. The relationship between MR cooperation programmes and China is a main concern, and the chapter discusses the roles of issue linkages as a mechanism for achieving sustainable development.

Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

Chinese diaspora archaeology in North America is at a tipping point. On one hand, archaeologists have collected tremendous amounts of data and made significant contributions to our understanding of Chinese immigrant life; on the other, the field remains slow to move past outdated approaches that rely on dichotomies of continuity and change that essentialize Chinese immigrants. This volume will challenge tired approaches and provide models for future work by bringing together chapters from scholars working on new and more nuanced approaches for interpreting Chinese diaspora archaeological sites in North America. Chapters will address the conceptualization of the field (as diaspora, in relation to Asian American studies, etc.), highlight the diversity of Chinese contexts in North America (urban and rural Chinatowns, mining communities, railroad camps, etc.), foregrounding the understudied aspects of Chinese migrant life (entrepreneurialism, cross–cultural interaction, creativity, etc.). Rather than being a report on the state of the field, our goal is that this volume will instead actualize change and shape the future direction of the sub–discipline, as well as bring Chinese diaspora archaeology into broader discussions about topics such as race and migration.

Chapter 8 lays out the political economic trade-offs in privacy protection designs and their implications for the types of privacy risks and constraints on innovations. To delve more deeply, it then contrasts the U.S. and EU approaches. This leads into an analysis of the protracted U.S.–EU disputes on privacy safeguards and the efforts to forge international agreements on privacy protection forged at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. The most promising initiatives will require a significant role for global civil society in governance. The three issues examined in Part III are interlinked. A robust trade regime for the cloud ecosystem requires that common international understandings about cybersecurity and digital privacy also be developed. However, tidy grand bargains are unnecessary to make progress on these linked issues.

This groundbreaking, five-volume series offers a fully illustrated history of Egypt and Western Asia (the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran), from the emergence of complex states to the conquest of Alexander the Great. Written by leading scholars, whose expertise brings to life the people, places, and times of the remote past, the volumes focus firmly on the political and social histories of states and communities. Individual chapters present the key textual and material sources underpinning historical reconstruction, paying particular attention to recent archaeological finds and how they impact our understanding. The third volume covers the period from 1600 to 1100 BC or in archaeological terms, the Late Bronze Age. Twelve chapters survey the history of the Near East “From the Hyksos to the late second millennium BC” and discuss the Hyksos state of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and the Nubian kingdom of Kerma prior to the unification marking the creation of the New Kingdom, the super power of the period; the imperial powers of the Hittites in Central Anatolia and of Mittani in Upper Mesopotamia, which came to be replaced by the rising star of Assyria; the kingdoms of Kassite Babylonia and of Elamite Iran as well as the Mycenaean world centered on the Aegean. Topics include state formation, consolidation and disintegration, the role of political ideologies, social hierarchies and religious practices, modes of governance and administration, and the conflicts, diplomatic efforts, and trade and knowledge networks that connected states and communities between the Sahara, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

The Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world. They used to live in the Arakan/Rakhine State of Burma/Myanmar for centuries, though it is a predominantly Buddhist country. Being victims of persecution as a result of ethnic cleansing and genocide, they started migrating to neighbouring countries from 1978, and after the massive migration August 2017 onwards, about 1.3 million Rohingyas now live in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. This book offers a comprehensive portrait of how the state becomes instrumental in producing ‘stateless’ people, wherein both Myanmar and Bangladesh alienate the Rohingyas as illegal migrants, and they have to face unemployment, mental and sexual abuse, and deprivation of basic human necessities. The Rohingya proposes a new framework and theoretical alternative called ‘subhuman life’ for understanding the extreme vulnerability of the people as well as the genocide, ethnocide, and domicide taking place in the region. With several concrete ethnographic evidences, Nasir Uddin, apart from reconstructing the Rohingyas’ regional history, sheds light on possible solutions to their refugee crisis and examines the regional political dynamics, South and Southeast Asian geopolitics, and bilateral and multilateral interstate relations.

In South Asia, the earliest development of plant and animal husbandry and the first manifestation of urbanism occurred in the northwestern part of the subcontinent from the eighth through the third millennium cal bc. Archaeological excavations and zooarchaeological analyses have provided evidence for change through time in animal–human relations in that region, where wild forms of goat, sheep, zebu cattle, and water buffalo are or were native. Reviews of the faunal evidence for these animals show that the processes of domestication and development of pastoralism varied between taxa and in each case were complex. Genetic investigations of modern relatives, domestic and wild, have yielded insights into their entangled roots resulting from a (pre)history of human interaction with animals and their movement across the landscape. Our current understandings are compelling, but limited by lacunae in the archaeological records of the region and by the lack of successful analyses of ancient DNA.

With its origin dating back to as early as the 500 BC, the ukkil forms part of a centuries-old woodcarving art and tradition of the Suluk, one of the many indigenous ethnic groups of Nusantara (Southeast Asia). Suluk ukkil bears striking resemblance to the Malay ukir, both featuring similar patterns and motifs. The ukkil is often used to decorate jewellery, boats, houses, grave markers, and mosques. It is also used to decorate the hilts and sheaths of bladed weapons such as the barung. The barung refers to the thick, leaf-shaped sword of the Suluk. A barung with beautifully carved hilt and sheath, especially those using expensive wood, is considered high value and usually reserved for Suluk aristocrats. This book narrates the expressions, motifs and meanings behind ukkil carved on the barung. It is based on the results of a two-year field research conducted in different districts of Sabah. It presents data gathered through various interviews with owners, elders, and subject-matter experts. It also presents data from direct observations of heirloom barung that are still found in the hands of a few Suluk and individuals from other indigenous ethnic groups. It presents new insights from analysis made using the Theory of Iconology, a framework of analyzing art popularized by German art historian Erwin Panofsky. The predominant themes of ukkil found on ancient barung in Sabah are Islamic; zoomorphic such as birds, lizards, snakes, and squids; plantomorphic such as vines, flowers, and leaves; and cultural such as those depicting local myths, culture, values and traditions of the Suluk. Each of these images and themes represent realities that shaped the daily lives of the Suluk from the past until today, including the wind, the ocean waves and sea currents, all of which are essential for travel and navigation. They also depict concepts, beliefs and practices important to the Suluk such as freedom, livelihood, aristocracy, harmony within the community, leadership, spirituality, and Islamic principles. The Suluk are a sea-faring people who have a deep relationship with their immediate environment, especially the sea. Suluk carvers draw inspiration from nature, the environment around them, their local culture, their religious practices, and their own values and ideals in life. Both the ukkil and the barung are an embodiment of their rich past, their livelihood, creativity, their faith, their principles and their values in life. Sadly, the practice of ukkil-carving is fast declining nowadays, with only very few practitioners left and so few individuals interested in learning about it. The barung too, where the ukkil is often carved on, is no longer being produced in large numbers. As the ukkil, like all forms of art, constitute an integral part of a nation’s culture and identity, it is important for it to be understood, preserved, and protected. This book provides fresh knowledge and insights that will help the Suluk and other indigenous tribes of Malaysia and Nusantara in the understanding and preservation of the ukkil as an essential aspect of their country’s or their region’s culture and heritage. This book offers historical background that will help explain the identity of the Suluk as a culturally and artistically advanced people with deep interconnection with other indigenous ethnic groups in Malaysia and the rest of Nusantara as early as the pre-colonial period. Knowledge about the ukkil can help people connect and correct their thoughts about the Suluk while at the same time promote cultural awareness and diversity among Malaysians and other people in Southeast Asia. This book will hopefully pave the way for more research to be done on the arts and culture, not just of the Suluk but also of other indigenous ethnic groups in the region as well. That knowledge will serve as a medium for keeping harmony and cultural links among each and every Malaysian and Nusantaran.

The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.

The ancient Buddhist art of Gandhāra was rediscovered from the 1830s and 1840s onwards in what would become the North-West Frontier of British India. By the end of the century an abundance of sculptures had been accumulated by European soldiers and officials, which constituted the foundations for a new field of scholarship and internationally celebrated museum collections. Both then and since, the understanding of Gandhāran art has been impeded by gaps in documentation, haphazard excavation, forgery, and smuggling of antiquities. Consequently, the study of Gandhāran archaeology often involves the evaluation and piecing together of fragmentary clues. In more subtle ways, however, the modern view of Gandhāran art has been shaped by the significance accorded to it by different observers over the past century and a half. Conceived in the imperial context of the late nineteenth century as ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ art – a hybrid of Asian religion and Mediterranean artistic form – Gandhāran art has been invested with various meanings since then, both in and beyond the academic sphere. Its puzzling links to the classical world of Greece and Rome have been explained from different perspectives, informed both by evolving perceptions of the evidence and by modern circumstances. <br><br> From the archaeologists and smugglers of the Raj to the museums of post-partition Pakistan and India, from coin-forgers and contraband to modern Buddhism and contemporary art, this fourth volume of the Classical Art Research Centre’s Gandhāra Connections project presents the most recent research on the factors that mediate our encounter with Gandhāran art.

In a conversation about youth agency, the most common discourses that come up are of acts of liberation, resistance, and deviance. However, this perspective is fairly narrow and runs the risk of reinforcing pervasive and often polarizing depictions of youth. In order to broaden the understanding of young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications, it is necessary to ask: What types of agency do young people demonstrate? This book aims to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. As a part of the Education and Society in South Asia series, it provides insightful accounts of students’ daily routines on and around a public university campus in Kathmandu, Nepal, and calls attention to a group of non-elite university students who have remained less visible in scholarly and public debates about student activism, youth unemployment, and international migration. By placing different strands of literature on youth, aspiration, and mobility into conversation, In Search of a Future unveils new and important perspectives on how young people navigate competing social expectations, educational inequalities, and limited job prospects.

Transforming India into a digital state has been an objective of successive governments in India. However, the digital, by its very nature, is a capricious, multi-dimensional entity. Its operationalization across multiple sectors in India has highlighted the fact that the digital compact with publics in India is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, devices such as mobile phones have enabled access and efficiencies, and on the other, they have increased the scope for surveillance capitalism and the expansion of governmentality. The digital is at the same time a resource, commodity, and process that is absolutely fundamental to most if not all productive forces across multiple sectors. As a part of the Media Dynamics in South Asia series, this volume explores the making of digital India and specifically deals with the contradictions of an imperfect democracy, internal compulsions, and external pressures that continue to play crucial roles in the shaping of the same. Mindful of the key roles played by political economy and context and based on conversations with theory and practice, it makes a case for critical understanding of the digital embrace in India.

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, this book helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. The book identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. The book's emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The book shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.

This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.

Cultural anthropologists have devoted considerable attention to multiple non-nutritional meanings and uses of food in diverse cultural worlds. This essay begins with a wide-ranging overview of some ways anthropology has portrayed food’s links to every aspect of human existence. Because this discipline’s prime method, fieldwork, is rooted in proximity and intimacy, sharing food with subjects of study has always been part of ethnographic experience. One major fascination lies in how biological food needs that are shared with all animals become culturally embellished with infinite variations that are evident in diverse aspects of life from cuisine to religious symbolism. The essay shifts focus to one ethnographic location in rural North India to examine three pervasive themes surrounding food in South Asian culture: solidarity, separation, and decline as a pervasive critique of modern tastelessness. Offering initially grounded examples of each theme, the essay moves to broader circles of related meanings in varied practices and narratives. Thus employing a classical interpretive mode in cultural anthropology, this chapter thinks through food values by tacking between far-reaching generalizations and highly localized specificities. In the context of a volume largely and properly focused on food materialities, conflicts, and policies, the chapter aims to evoke less concrete, less quantifiable aspects of comestibles in human cultures that may be nonetheless relevant to understanding interrelated workings of food, politics, and society. In many cultural worlds, moralities of sharing confront circumstances of inequity through acknowledging hunger as bodily knowledge common to all.

Numerous crises have occurred since the beginnings of the modern economic system, from the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1636 and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the Dollar Crisis and Asian Financial Crisis. Scholars have written about the causes and remedies of financial crisis, resulting in a substantial amount of literature on the subject especially after the Great Depression. The writing on financial crisis declined between the end of World War II and the monetary crises in the early 1970s, but has become vibrant again since the 1980s. Some of the earliest voices that contributed to the intellectual history of studying financial crisis include Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Ricardo, Walter Bagehot, and John Maynard Keynes. These men provided the foundation for understanding the central issues and questions about financial crisis and influenced the debates and scholarship that followed. One such debate involved monetarists vs. business cycle theorists. The monetarists argue that crises are caused by changes in the money supply, while those favoring a business cycle approach insist that expansions and contractions are part of economic interactions and so the economy will at times experience crises. As crises continue to affect both domestic and global financial markets, more perspectives are added to the discussion, including those that invoke rational expectations and economic models, along with those that draw from international political economy. There are also questions that remain unanswered, such as the issue of crisis response and that of financial fragility.

Expertise in Counseling and Psychotherapy features seven master therapist studies from around the world and provides an extensive synthesis of these studies to produce the first international perspective of expert counselors and psychotherapists. The study of expertise has a rich history, whereas research on psychotherapy expertise has mostly surfaced in the past two decades. Jennings and Skovholt first applied qualitative methodology to the study of expert therapists in 1996. Qualitative research has proven to be an extremely effective method for capturing the complexity of the master therapist construct. One limitation of this line of research is that most studies have been conducted in the United States. Fortunately, there are a small but growing number of international qualitative studies on psychotherapy expertise. Moreover, these studies utilized essentially the same research questions and methodologies as our first study on expert therapists, making the consolidation of the findings seamless and trustworthy. The studies include three therapist expertise research projects in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Japan, and Korea. In North America, there are studies from the United States and Canada. In Europe, there are studies from Portugal and the Czech Republic. The qualitative meta-analysis of all seven data sets is the highlight of our book on master therapists from around the world. The findings and recommendations from this book will enhance the training of future psychotherapists and counselors. Understanding the universal characteristics of expert therapists practicing around the world offers training programs and mental health practitioners a heuristic for optimal therapist and counselor development.

Jean Vanmai’s Chân Đăng The Tonkinese of Caledonia in the colonial era is a rare insider’s account of the life experiences of Chân Đăng, the Vietnamese indentured workers who were brought from Tonkin to work in the New Caledonian nickel mines in the 1930s and 1940s, when both Indochina and New Caledonia were French colonies. Narrated from the unique perspective of a descendant of Chân Đăng, the novel offers a deep understanding of how Vietnamese migration, shaped by French colonialism and the indenture system, led to the implantation of the Vietnamese community in New Caledonia, in spite of the massive repatriation of the workers and their families to Vietnam in the 1960s. Through his writing which blends his own family story with the rich oral testimonies of his compatriots, Jean Vanmai, a passionate advocate for the recognition of the part played by the Chân Đăng in the New Caledonian national history, has succeeded in giving these often faceless and powerless ‘coolies’ a strong collective voice. The translation into English of that voice was long overdue. Only accessible until now to French speakers, this English version opens up the exceptional account of the personal and emotional complexities of the Chân Đăng’s experience to a global readership. The English version not only advances knowledge of the history of indentured labour and colonialism in the Asia-Pacific, thus offering Anglophone historians and interested readers a new understanding of the processes through which histories and memories travel and translate across national, oceanic, and linguistic borders, it also constitutes an invaluable historical resource for Anglophone Vietnamese diasporic communities. One of the significant revisions in this English version is the restitution of the diacritical marks to all the Vietnamese names in the novel. Rather than a simple correction of the printing of Vietnamese diacritics which was unavailable at the time of publication of the origin text, it lends greater authenticity to the story for the Anglophone reader and symbolically restores their full identity to the Chân Đăng protagonists, who had become mere matriculation numbers under the colonial indenture system. The critical introduction by Tess Do and Kathryn Lay-Chenchabi is a richly documented text that contextualizes the novel for the Anglophone reader. The photographs and official documents, carefully selected from a wealth of sources, including the National Archives of both New Caledonia and New Zealand, the private community collections and Jean Vanmai’s family photo albums, all contribute to an illuminating and informative visual overview of the Chân Đăng’s working and living conditions in New Caledonia. This emotive illustration of the past also functions as an important reference for the common future shared by all Caledonians, in that it conveys to the reader the long-lasting imprint left by the Vietnamese community on New Caledonia’s economic and cultural scene since the Chân Đăng first migrated to this country more than two centuries ago.

China is an abnormal economic power. No country has grown so rapidly for so long and in such an extreme manner. Media coverage has soared because China’s rise is now challenging the world’s balance of power. Yet one is as likely to read about a possible financial crisis as its emergence as the world’s largest economy. But much of the analysis is flawed, as are many of the policy prescriptions. China’s unbalanced growth, for example, is seen as a risk but in reality is a virtue. Its soaring debt levels are perceived as signaling a financial collapse but can also be interpreted as evidence of financial deepening. Its trade and foreign investment initiatives are blamed for exacerbating America’s economic decline, even though there is little connection between the two. The factors that have influenced broader concerns, such as corruption and political liberalization, are often misunderstood. And Beijing’s foreign policies in Asia need to be deciphered and dealt with differently if there is to be any hope of moderating geopolitical tensions with the United States and its regional allies. Explaining why there is such extreme variation in views and why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong is the theme of this book. Observers see China’s rise through multiple lenses. Geopolitical differences in values and mistrust is part of the explanation, but differing analytical frameworks, along with China’s size and complexity, are the major reasons. Understanding these differences is critical to forging more constructive relations between China and the rest of the world.

Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.

Why does religion inspire hatred? Why do people in one religion sometimes hate people of another religion, and also why do some religions inspire hatred from others? This book shows how scholarly studies of prejudice, identity formation, and genocide studies can shed light on global examples of religious hatred. The book is divided into four parts, focusing respectively on: theories of prejudice and violence; historical developments of Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and race; contemporary Western Antisemitism and Islamophobia; and, prejudices beyond the West in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Each part ends with a special focus section. Key features include: - A compelling synthesis of theories of prejudice, identity, and hatred to explain Islamophobia and Antisemitism. - An innovative theory of human violence and genocide which explains the link to prejudice. - Case studies of both Western Antisemitism and Islamophobia in history and today, alongside global studies of Islamic Antisemitism and Hindu and Buddhist Islamophobia - Integrates discussion of race and racialisation as aspects of Islamophobic and Antisemitic prejudice in relation to their framing in religious discourses. - Accessible for general readers and students, it can be employed as a textbook for students or read with benefit by scholars for its novel synthesis and theories. The book focuses on Antisemitism and Islamophobia, both in the West and beyond, including examples of prejudices and hatred in the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, Paul Hedges points to common patterns, while identifying the specifics of local context. Religious Hatred is an essential guide for understanding the historical origins of religious hatred, the manifestations of this hatred across diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the strategies employed by activists and peacemakers to overcome this hatred.

It is unlikely that any country in Asia in recent years has undergone such internal policy shifts in so short a time as Myanmar. Until recently, the former British colony had one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, a country where Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was held in continual house arrest and human rights were denied to nearly all. Yet events in Myanmar since the elections of November 2010 have profoundly altered the internal mood of the society, and have surprised even Burmese and seasoned foreign observers of the Myanmar scene. The pessimism that pervaded the society prior to the elections, and the results of that voting that prompted many foreign observers to call them a “sham” or “fraud,” gradually gave way to the realization that for reasons, variously interpreted, positive change was in the air. Taking into account the dramatic changes the country has seen in the past two years-including the establishment of a human rights commission, the release of political prisoners, and reforms in health and education-David I. Steinberg offers an updated second edition of Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know. More than ever, the history, culture, and internal politics of this country are crucial to understanding the breaking headlines emerging from it today and placing them in a broader context. Geographically strategic, Burma/Myanmar lies between the growing powers of China and India, and has a thousand-year history as an important realm in the region-yet it is mostly unknown to Westerners. Burma/Myanmar is a place of contradictions: a picturesque land with mountain jungles and monsoon plains, it is one of the world's largest producers of heroin. Though it has extensive natural resources including oil, gas, teak, metals, and minerals, it is one of the poorest countries in the world. And despite a half-century of military-dominated rule, change is beginning to work its way through the beleaguered nation, as it moves to a more pluralistic administrative system reflecting its pluralistic cultural, multi-ethnic base. Authoritative and balanced, Burma/Myanmar is an essential book on a country in the throes of historic change.