Title: The abacus and the sword: the Japanese penetration of Korea, 1895-1910
Author: Duus, Peter 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | Japan | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: What forces were behind Japan's emergence as the first non-Western colonial power at the turn of the twentieth century? Peter Duus brings a new perspective to Meiji expansionism in this pathbreaking study of Japan's acquisition of Korea, the largest of its colonial possessions. He shows how Japan's drive for empire was part of a larger goal to become the economic, diplomatic, and strategic equal of the Western countries who had imposed a humiliating treaty settlement on the country in the 1850s.Duus maintains that two separate but interlinked processes, one political/military and the other economic, propelled Japan's imperialism. Every attempt at increasing Japanese political influence licensed new opportunities for trade, and each new push for Japanese economic interests buttressed, and sometimes justified, further political advances. The sword was the servant of the abacus, the abacus the agent of the sword.While suggesting that Meiji imperialism shared much with the Western colonial expansion that provided both model and context, Duus also argues that it was "backward imperialism" shaped by a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West. Along with his detailed diplomatic and economic history, Duus offers a unique social history that illuminates the motivations and lifestyles of the overseas Japanese of the time, as well as the views that contemporary Japanese had of themselves and their fellow Asians.   [brief]
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Title: Women and Confucian cultures in premodern China, Korea, and Japan
Author: Ko, Dorothy 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | East Asia Other | Japan | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan. What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Encounter: a novel of nineteenth-century Korea
Author: Han, Mu-suk 1918-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian Literature | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This historical novel, Encounter ( Mannam ), by Hahn Moo-Sook, one of Asia's most honored writers, is a story of the resilience in the Korean spirit. It is told through the experiences of Tasan, a high-ranking official and foremost Neo-Confucian scholar at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of Tasan's fascination with Western learning, then synonymous with Catholicism, he is exiled to a remote province for 18 years. In banishment he meets people from various social and religious backgrounds - Buddhist monks, peasants, shamans - whom he would not otherwise have met. The events of Tasan's life are effectively used to depict the confluence of Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, Taoist, and shamanistic beliefs in traditional Korea.A subplot involves three young sisters, the daughters of a prominent Catholic aristocrat, and affords the reader vivid glimpses into Yi-dynasty women's lives, particularly those of palace ladies, scholars' wives, tavern keepers, shamans, and slaves. In contrast to the long-held Confucian stereotype of female subservience, this story illustrates the richness of women's contribution to Korean culture and tradition. Encounter' s detailed narrative provides a broad and informed view of nineteenth-century Korea, making it a highly useful book for courses on Korean literature and society. It will also be an engaging read for lovers of historical fiction.   [brief]
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Title: The memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: the autobiographical writings of a Crown Princess of eighteenth-century Korea
Author: Hyegyŏnggung Hong Ssi 1735-1815
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Autobiography | Women's Studies | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: Lady Hyegyong's memoirs, which recount the chilling murder of her husband by his father, is one of the best known and most popular classics of Korean literature. From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, which depicts a court life whose drama and pathos is of Shakespearean proportions. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this first complete English translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply intelligent and articulate woman.JaHyun Kim Haboush's accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and of how the genre of autobiography fared in premodern times.   [brief]
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Title: Best friends and marriage: exchange among women 
Author: Oliker, Stacey J
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this fascinating book, Stacey Oliker delves into the intimate realm of women's friendships and explores the complex relation between friendship and family life. Based on a series of interviews with women from the middle and working classes, this work reveals the distinctive values of best friendship and marriage, how husbands and their wives' friends feel about each other, and how women friends talk about marriage problems. Best Friends and Marriage suggests that close friendships provide women with unique sources of intimacy, affection, identity, and community. Contradicting a widespread view of families as isolated and self-contained private worlds, Oliker suggests that "companionate marriage" did not replace the friendship and intimacy that pervaded communities of past times, but rather, that intimate friendship and companionate marriage evolved intertwined. Examining the cultures and dynamics of friendship, Oliker shows how women's position in society constrains the choices they make at home and in friendship, and shapes how best friends perceive each other's best interests. Best Friends and Marriage breaks ground in linking together the institutions of family and friendship, and in explaining intimacy in sociological and historical as well as psychological terms. In this way, a richly descriptive book also extends theory in the areas of family, community, and gender inequality.   [brief]
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Title: Echoes of the past, epics of dissent: a South Korean social movement
Author: Abelmann, Nancy
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Politics | Sociology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent , the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life - a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform.From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Cinderella dreams: the allure of the lavish wedding
Author: Otnes, Cele
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Women's Studies | Consumerism | United States History
Publisher's Description: The fabulous gown, the multitiered cake, abundant flowers, attendants and guests in their finery. The white wedding does more than mark a life passage. It marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture - romantic love and excessive consumption. For anyone who has ever wondered about the meanings behind a white dress, a diamond ring, rice, and traditions such as cake cutting, bouquet tossing, and honeymooning, this book offers an entertaining and enlightening look at the historical, social, and psychological strains that come together to make the lavish wedding the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture. With an emphasis on North American society, Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck show how the elaborate wedding means far more than a mere triumph for the bridal industry. Through interviews, media accounts, and wide-ranging research and analysis, they expose the wedding's reflection - or reproduction - of fundamental aspects of popular consumer culture: its link with romantic love, its promise of magical transformation, its engendering of memories, and its legitimization of consumption as an expression of perfection. As meaningful as any prospective bride might wish, the lavish wedding emerges here as a lens that at once reveals, magnifies, and reveres some of the dearest wishes and darkest impulses at the heart of our culture.   [brief]
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Title: Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving
Author: Weiner, Annette B 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving."The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.   [brief]
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Title: The play of time: Kodi perspectives on calendars, history, and exchange 
Author: Hoskins, Janet
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: Janet Hoskins provides both an ethnographic study of the organization of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of field work with the Kodi people of the island of Sumba, her book focuses on Kodi calendrical rituals, exchange transactions, and confrontations with the historical forces of the colonial and postcolonial world. Hoskins explores the contingent, contested, and often contradictory precedent of the past to show how local systems of knowledge are in dialogue with wider historical forces.Arguing that traditional temporality is more complex than many theorists have realized, Hoskins highlights the flexibility and relativity of local time concepts, whose sophistication belies the cliche of simple societies living in a world outside of time.   [brief]
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Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850
Author: Kuchta, David 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.   [brief]
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Title: Marriage and inequality in Chinese society 
Author: Watson, Rubie S. (Rubie Sharon) 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, poli . . . [more]
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Title: Chinese femininities, chinese masculinities: a reader
Author: Brownell, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: The past two centuries have witnessed tremendous upheavals in every aspect of Chinese culture and society. At the level of everyday life, some of the most remarkable transformations have occurred in the realm of gender. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities is a mix of illuminating historical and ethnographic studies of gender from the 1700s to the present. The essays in this highly creative collection are organized in pairs that alternate in focus between femininity and masculinity, between subjects traditionally associated with feminism (such as family life) and those rarely considered from a gendered point of view (like banditry). The chapters provide a wealth of interesting detail on such varied topics as court cases involving widows and homosexuals; ideal spouses of early-twentieth-century radicals; changing images of prostitutes; the masculinity of qigong masters; sexuality in the era of reform; and the eroticization of minorities. While most of the essays were specifically written for this volume, a few are reprinted as a testament to their enduring value. Exploring the central role of gender as an organizing principle of Chinese social life, Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinities is an innovative reader that will spark new debate in a wide range of disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: A courtship after marriage: sexuality and love in Mexican transnational families
Author: Hirsch, Jennifer S
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From about seven children per woman in 1960, the fertility rate in Mexico has dropped to about 2.6. Such changes are part of a larger transformation explored in this book, a richly detailed ethnographic study of generational and migration-related redefinitions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in r . . . [more]
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Title: Romance on a global stage: pen pals, virtual ethnography, and "mail-order" marriages
Author: Constable, Nicole
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Asian American Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: By the year 2000 more than 350 Internet agencies were plying the email-order marriage trade, and the business of matching up mostly Western men with women from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America had become an example of globalization writ large. This provocative work opens a window onto the complex motivations and experiences of the people behind the stereotypes and misconceptions that have exploded along with the practice of transnational courtship and marriage. Combining extensive Internet ethnography and face-to-face fieldwork, Romance on a Global Stage looks at the intimate realities of Filipinas, Chinese women, and U.S. men corresponding in hopes of finding a suitable marriage partner. Through the experiences of those engaged in pen pal relationships - their stories of love, romance, migration, and long-distance dating - this book conveys the richness and dignity of women's and men's choices without reducing these correspondents to calculating opportunists or naive romantics. Attentive to the structural, cultural, and personal factors that prompt women and men to seek marriage partners abroad, Romance on a Global Stage questions the dichotomies so frequently drawn between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis.   [brief]
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Title: Framing the bride: globalizing beauty and romance in Taiwan's bridal industry
Author: Adrian, Bonnie 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Asian Studies | Cultural Anthropology | East Asia Other | Gender Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV. An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan's hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the "West" and "Western" cultural images of beauty. Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage - one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery - how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalization into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images.   [brief]
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Title: The inner quarters: marriage and the lives of Chinese women in the Sung period
Author: Ebrey, Patricia Buckley 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women's lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.Ebrey questions whether women's situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.   [brief]
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Title: Wage, trade, and exchange in Melanesia: a Manus society in the modern state 
Author: Carrier, James G
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Ponam Island, a small community in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, is the subject of this innovative study. The authors extend the criticism within anthropology of ethnographies that attempt to analyze village communities without reference to the nations of which they are a part, and that equate the traditional and the exotic with the untouched. They do so by describing the links between a peripheral village society and Papua New Guinea's national economy and institutions, in a way that will interest all those concerned with development and underdevelopment.The analysis focuses on major socioeconomic areas of village life: education, migration, wage employment, and remittance; trade, commerce, and exchange; subsistence fishing; ceremonial exchange. The authors' findings challenge the idea that colonial and Western-oriented encroachment leads to the decay of village societies or to their adopting Western values and practices. Ponam has been under significant Western influence for almost a century, yet the society has not decayed. It remains flourishing and generative, uniquely itself and neither blindly traditional nor mindlessly Western.   [brief]
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Title: Hanging out in the virtual pub: masculinities and relationships online 
Author: Kendall, Lori 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | American Studies | Technology and Society | Anthropology | Electronic Media | Media Studies | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: Lori Kendall is one of the first to explore the brave new world of social relations as they have evolved on the Internet. In this highly readable ethnography, she examines how men and women negotiate their gender roles on an online forum she calls BlueSky. The result is a first-rate analysis of the emerging social phenomenon of Internet-mediated communication and a ground-breaking study of the social and cultural effects of a medium that allows participants to assume identities of their own choosing. Despite the common assumption that the personas these men and women craft for themselves bear little resemblance to reality, Kendall discovers that the habitués of BlueSky stick surprisingly close to the facts of their actual lives and personalities.   [brief]
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Title: Dearest beloved: the Hawthornes and the making of the middle-class family 
Author: Herbert, T. Walter (Thomas Walter) 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne - for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness - was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.   [brief]
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Title: Nietzsche, genealogy, morality: essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of morals
Author: Schacht, Richard 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | German Studies | European History | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity.In this unique collection focusing on the Genealogy , twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as ressentiment , asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age.   [brief]
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