Title: Painters and politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 
Author: Andrews, Julia Frances
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History | Asian  Studies | China
Publisher's Description: Julia Andrews's extraordinary study of art, artists, and artistic policy during the first three decades of the People's Republic of China makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern China. From 1949 to 1979 the Chinese government controlled the lives and work of the country's artists - these were also years of extreme isolation from international artistic dialogue. During this period the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in eradicating most of the artistic styles and techniques it found politically repugnant. By 1979, traditional landscape painting had been replaced by a new style and subject that was strikingly different from both contemporary Western art and that of other Chinese areas such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.Through vivid firsthand accounts, Andrews recreates the careers of many individual artists who were forced to submit to a vacillating policy regarding style, technique, medium, and genre. She discusses the cultural controls that the government used, the ways in which artists responded, and the works of art that emerged as a result. She particularly emphasizes the influence of the Soviet Union on Chinese art and the problems it created for the practice of traditional painting.This book opens the way to new, stimulating comparisons of Western and Eastern cultures and will be welcomed by art historians, political scientists, and scholars of Asia.   [brief]
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Title: The state and the poor: public policy and political development in India and the United States
Author: Echeverri-Gent, John
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Asian  Studies | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This comparison of rural development in India and the United States develops important departures from economic and historical institutionalism. It elaborates a new conceptual framework for analyzing state-society relations beginning from the premise that policy implementation, as the site of tangible exchanges between state and society, provides strategic interaction among self-interested individuals, social groups, and bureaucracies. It demonstrates how this interaction can be harnessed to enhance the effectiveness of public policy. Echeverri-Gent's application of this framework to poverty alleviation programs generates provocative insights about the ways in which institutions and social structure constrain policy-makers. In the process, he illuminates new implications for the concepts of state autonomy and state capacity.The book's original conceptual framework and intriguing findings will interest scholars of South Asia and American politics, social theorists, and policy-makers.   [brief]
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Title: The age of wild ghosts: memory, violence, and place in Southwest China
Author: Mueggler, Erik 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Asian  Studies | China | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community - a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.   [brief]
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Title: Diffusion of distances: dialogues between Chinese and Western poetics 
Author: Yip, Wai-lim
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Asian  Studies | Philosophy | China | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: In this collection of passionately argued essays, the internationally acclaimed poet and critic Wai-lim Yip calls Western scholarship to account for its treacherous representation of non-Western literature. Yip moves from Plato to Hans-Georg Gadamer, from Chuang-tzu to Mao Tse-tung, from John Donne to Robert Creeley, as he attempts to create a double consciousness that includes the state of mind of the original author and the expressive potentials of the target language. He aims, first, to expose the types of distortions that have occurred in the process of translation from one language to another and, second, to propose guidelines that will prevent this kind of linguistic violence in the future.   [brief]
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Title: The colonial Bastille: a history of imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940
Author: Zinoman, Peter 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Asian  Studies | Asian History | Southeast Asia | Politics
Publisher's Description: Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant ne . . . [more]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian  Studies | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: Other modernities: gendered yearnings in China after socialism
Author: Rofel, Lisa 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian  Studies | China | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this analysis of three generations of women in a Chinese silk factory, Lisa Rofel brilliantly interweaves the intimate details of her observations with a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity in a postmodern age.The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares the lives of three generations of women workers: those who entered the factory right around the Communist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era. Exploring attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture, she convincingly connects the changing meanings of the modern in official discourse to the stories women tell about themselves and what they make of their lives.One of the first studies to take up theoretically sophisticated issues about gender, modernity, and power based on a solid ethnographic ground, this much-needed cross-generational study will be a model for future anthropological work around the world.   [brief]
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Title: Tokyo life, New York dreams: urban Japanese visions of America, 1890-1924 
Author: Sawada, Mitziko 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian  Studies | Japan | Asian American Studies
Publisher's Description: Tokyo Life, New York Dreams is a bicultural study focusing on Japanese immigrants in New York and the ideas they had about what they would find there. It is one of the first works to consider Japanese immigration to the East Coast, where immigrants were of a different class and social background from the laborers who came to the West Coast and Hawaii. Beginning with a portrait of immigrants' lives in New York City, Mitziko Sawada returns to Tokyo to examine the pre-immigration experience in depth, using rich sources of popular Japanese literature to trace the origins of immigrant perceptions of the U.S.Along with discussions of economics and politics in Tokyo, Sawada explores the prevalent images, ideologies, social myths, and attitudes of late Meiji and Early Taisho Japan. Her lively narrative draws on guide books, magazines, success literature, and popular novels to illuminate the formation of ideas about work, class, gender relations, and freedom in American society. This study analyzes the Japanese construction of a mythic America, perceived as a homogeneous and exotic "other."   [brief]
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Title: Early modern Japan
Author: Totman, Conrad D
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian  Studies | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: This thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering na . . . [more]
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Title: Marketing the menacing fetus in Japan
Author: Hardacre, Helen 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Anthropology | Women's Studies | Asian  Studies
Publisher's Description: Helen Hardacre provides new insights into the spiritual and cultural dimensions of abortion debates around the world in this careful examination of mizuko kuyo - a Japanese religious ritual for aborted fetuses. Popularized during the 1970s, when religious entrepreneurs published frightening accounts of fetal wrath and spirit attacks, mizuko kuyo offers ritual atonement for women who, sometimes decades previously, chose to have abortions. As she explores the complex issues that surround this practice, Hardacre takes into account the history of Japanese attitudes toward abortion, the development of abortion rituals, the marketing of religion, and the nature of power relations in intercourse, contraception, and abortion.Although abortion in Japan is accepted and legal and was commonly used as birth control in the early postwar period, entrepreneurs used images from fetal photography to mount a surprisingly successful tabloid campaign to promote mizuko kuyo . Enthusiastically adopted by some religionists as an economic strategy, it was soundly rejected by others on doctrinal, humanistic, and feminist grounds.In four field studies in different parts of the country, Helen Hardacre observed contemporary examples of mizuko kuyo as it is practiced in Buddhism, Shinto, and the new religions. She also analyzed historical texts and contemporary personal accounts of abortion by women and their male partners and conducted interviews with practitioners to explore how a commercialized ritual form like mizuko kuyo can be marketed through popular culture and manipulated by the same forces at work in the selling of any commodity. Her conclusions reflect upon the deep current of misogyny and sexism running through these rites and through feto-centric discourse in general.   [brief]
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Title: Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India
Author: Arnold, David 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Asian  Studies | South Asia | Asian History | Medicine | History
Publisher's Description: In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.Focusing on three major epidemic diseases - smallpox, cholera, and plague - Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.   [brief]
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Title: Japan's new middle class; the salary man and his family in a Tokyo suburb, 
Author: Vogel, Ezra F
Published: University of California Press,  1971
Subjects: Asian  Studies | Sociology | Economics and Business
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Title: Family life in a Northern Thai village: a study in the structural significance of women
Author: Potter, Sulamith Heins
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Asian  Studies | Gender Studies | Southeast Asia
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Title: Hindu places of pilgrimage in India ; a study in cultural geography
Author: Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan
Published: University of California Press,  1983
Subjects: Asian  Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Geography
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Title: Provincial passages: culture, space, and the origins of Chinese communism
Author: Yeh, Wen-hsin
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian  Studies | Asian History | China | History
Publisher's Description: Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly evokes the changing landscapes, historical circumstances, and personalities involved. The human dimension of this transformation is captured through the biography of Shi Cuntong (1899-1970), a student from the Neo-Confucian county of Jinhua who became a founding member of the Party. Yeh's in-depth analysis of the dynamics of change is combined with a compelling narrative of the moral dilemmas in the lives of Shi Cuntong and other early leaders. Using sources previously closed to scholars, including recently discovered documents in the archives of the First United Front, Yeh shows the urban Communist movement as an intellectual revolution in social consciousness.The Maoist legacy has often been associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Yeh's historical reconstruction of a pre-Mao, non-organizational dimension of Chinese socialism is thus of vital interest to those seeking to redefine the place of the Communist Party in a post-Mao political order.   [brief]
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Title: Splendid monarchy: power and pageantry in modern Japan
Author: Fujitani, Takashi
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Cultural Anthropology | Asian  Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultur . . . [more]
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Title: The silk weavers of Kyoto: family and work in a changing traditional industry
Author: Hareven, Tamara K
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Asian  Studies | Asian History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: The makers of obi, the elegant and costly sash worn over kimono in Japan, belong to an endangered species. These families of manufacturers, weavers, and other craftspeople centered in the Nishijin weaving district of Kyoto have practiced their demanding craft for generations. In recent decades, however, as a result of declining markets for kimono, they find their livelihood and pride harder to sustain. This book is a poignant exploration of a vanishing world. Tamara Hareven integrates historical research with intensive life history interviews to reveal the relationships among family, work, and community in this highly specialized occupation. Hareven uses her knowledge of textile workers' lives in the United States and Western Europe to show how striking similarities in weavers' experiences transcend cultural differences. These very rich personal testimonies, taken over a decade and a half, provide insight into how these men and women have juggled family and work roles and coped with insecurities. Readers can learn firsthand how weavers perceive their craft and how they interpret their lives and view the world around them. With rare immediacy, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto captures a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.   [brief]
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Title: Taming the wind of desire: psychology, medicine, and aesthetics in Malay shamanistic performance
Author: Laderman, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian  Studies | Medical Anthropology | Psychology | Southeast Asia | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Charged with restoring harmony and relieving pain, the Malay shaman places his patients in trance and encourages them to express their talents, drives, personality traits - the "Inner Winds" of Malay medical lore - in a kind of performance. These healing ceremonies, formerly viewed by Western anthropologists as exotic curiosities, actually reveal complex multicultural origins and a unique indigenous medical tradition whose psychological content is remarkably relevant to contemporary Western concerns.Accepted as apprentice to a Malay shaman, Carol Laderman learned and recorded every aspect of the healing seance and found it comparable in many ways to the traditional dramas of Southeast Asia and of other cultures such as ancient Greece, Japan, and India. The Malay seance is a total performance, complete with audience, stage, props, plot, music, and dance. The players include the patient along with the shaman and his troupe. At the center of the drama are pivotal relationships - among people, between humans and spirits, and within the self. The best of the Malay shamans are superb poets, dramatists, and performers as well as effective healers of body and soul.   [brief]
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Title: Huang Di nei jing su wen: nature, knowledge, imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text, with an appendix, The doctrine of the five periods and six qi in the Huang Di nei jing su wen
Author: Unschuld, Paul U. (Paul Ulrich) 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian  Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi ("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen. For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the Su wen, he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.   [brief]
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Title: Controlling corruption
Author: Klitgaard, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Politics | Asian  Studies | Economics and Business | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Corruption is increasingly recognized as a preeminent problem in the developing world. Bribery, extortion, fraud, kickbacks, and collusion have resulted in retarded economies, predator elites, and political instability. In this lively and absorbing book, Robert Klitgaard provides a framework for des . . . [more]
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