Transregional

By arrangement with faculty and with approval of the DGS.

Multilingualism and cultural contact have characterized the area today known as Chinese Turkestan for at least for the last 3000 years.  Indo-European languages were replaced mostly by Turkic, and now Turkic is being replaced by Chinese. The linguistic suppletion is not without a cultural cost and occurs within a regional geopolitical calculus. This talk discusses how Mandarin and Uyghur came to be dominant in the region; how linguistic territory is negotiated between Uyghur and Mandarin, not only within Xinjiang but worldwide; and how this negotiation reflects nationalist and geopolitical...

It is said that when the Vietnamese monk physician Tuệ Tĩnh (c. 1330-c.1400) was approximately fifty five years old he was sent, with nineteen other monks, on the diplomatic mission of 1385 as a living present to the Ming Dynasty from the Vietnamese royal court. It is also said that although Tuệ Tĩnh himself was never allowed to return to Vietnam that he was able to send copies of the text he wrote while living there back with a later diplomatic mission. Undoubtedly this medical text, Nam Dược Thần Hiệu (Miraculous Drugs of the South), had a profound impact on the history of Vietnamese...

This talk explores the circulation of West African dance in contemporary Seoul through dance classes and festivals, and the perspectives of Korean individuals, particularly women, practicing West African dance on the corporeal and affective qualities of blackness and Koreanness. Based on an ethnographic case study on Guinean Dance Class at the Salim Health Co-op, a feminist and community-oriented organization, I show how the West African dance practice is mobilized as a “liberating” experience for the female dancing body that has been traditionally seen as lewd and suspicious throughout the...

For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under China-based rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. His talk uncovers the systems Uyghurs used to maintain a sense of their homeland as a center in the face of the knowledge that their...

This seminar critically explores how anthropologists use contemporary social theories to formulate the junctures of meaning, interest, and power. It thus aims to integrate symbolic, economic, and political perspectives on culture and social process. If culture refers to the understandings and meanings by which people live, then it constitutes the conventions of social life that are themselves produced in the flux of social life, invented by human activity. Theories of culture must therefore illuminate this problematic of agency and structure. They must show how social action can both...

In the midst of sweeping new paradigms of “global history,” “world literature,” or “world philology,” what specifically can Eurasian comparisons contribute to our understanding of the premodern world? This lecture analyzes practices of Eurasian comparisons over the past decades, asking what kind of work has been done, who has engaged in this work and to what effect. It then reflects on the glass ceilings and inequalities involved in comparisons of premodern Eurasia, and addresses the ethical challenges and responsibilities that are at stake in doing this kind of work. Throughout, the lecture...

Keynote speech: “Entering Asia” by Kären Wigen, Professor of History, Frances and Charles Field Professor, Stanford University (9:45am-10:30am) In a much-discussed editorial of 1885, a leading Tokyo journal called for Japan to “leave Asia” (datsu-A). But when did the Japanese enter Asia in the first place? One way to answer this is to trace the career of continents on their maps. Introduced to the Sinophone world by the Jesuits, the continental scheme appears to have gained little traction in the early Qing or Chosŏn contexts, but in Japan it became a standard feature of world maps and...