CEAS Colloquium Series
President George W. Bush has repeatedly presented the United States’ occupation of Japan as the model for Iraq’s democratization. Does the Japanese occupation illuminate contemporary reconstructions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other contemporary war-torn societies? Certain similarities do stand out: as in Japan half a century earlier, the US has proclaimed its intention to return “sovereignty” to a democratic Iraq while preserving a dominant American military presence. Yet beyond this obvious similarity lie profound differences in American strategy, goals and commitments, as well as in the...
References to past painting are common, if not required, in cultures with established traditions of canonical masterworks and an active market for art. Such references require a consciousness of historical change, but do not require an awareness of historical relativity. A single moment in cultural time may serve as the universal standard for all generations. But what if we find multiple references from distinct historical moments in a single painting? What if we find illusionistic styles being used right alongside historically earlier, “pre-illusionistic” styles in a critical environment...
What motived over 80 senior politicians and 80 senior staff to make an official visit on October 19, 2004 to one of Japan’s most controversial and important religious sites–Yasukuni Shrine? Although expressly prohibited by the postwar constitution, the current Prime Minister and his allies continue to make visits to express what they say is their “sincere desire for peace.” But what else is going on at this site? John Nelson’s talk will be accompanied by his new 25-minute film on the shrine made for university audiences. Using rare video footage from within the shrine–showing rituals carried...
Please note this lecture will be given in Chinese
The fountainhead of early Chinese migration to North America originated in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong Province. Up until 1960, more than half of the ethnic Chinese in the United States came from the small rural county of Taishan, located in the Pearl River delta. In recent years, the culture of the Pearl River delta (the culture of the Taishanese), referred to by Chinese scholars as Guangfu culture, has become an object of scholarship for a number of Chinese social scientists. Some recent Chinese studies have explored the cultural dimensions of issues such as Guangfu emigration and...
With the foundation of the Liao state in the early tenth century, the Kitan became one of the major political forces in East Asia. While we have virtually no material record of the pre-dynastic Kitan, the new Liao aristocracy, right from the beginning, has left an impressive amount of the most sophisticated material relics, many of which were made by Chinese craftsmen and look Chinese. But recent discoveries also include ritual paraphernalia of a distinct Liao style. This lecture looks at some of the most striking of these latter artifacts, golden crowns, and discusses their design in...
Xinjiang today is the focus of major development efforts, a source of gas and oil for the industries of eastern China, and the gateway to vigorous Chinese economic and diplomatic initiatives in Central Asia. It is also a locus of concern over separatist and terrorist activity, and a region where ambitious plans run up against stark environmental restraints. While some of these issues are new, many are not: the questions of Xinjiang’s commercial promise, agricultural development, ecological carrying capacity, ethnic character and, in general, the degree to which it is integration to China as a...
Please note this lecture will be given in Chinese. German abstract films and American underground films are among the two most important schools of twentieth-century Western avant-garde cinema to emerge since the 1920s. In German abstract cinema, Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter’s works have been directly inspired by Chinese art. Meanwhile, Maya Deren has been praised as “the mother of American underground cinema,” with her film Meditation on Violence advancing the artistic expression of martial arts. The works of these filmmakers embody Chinese culture, particularly Daoist thought.
After a bloody civil war that followed the end of World War II, Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing’s Forbidden City in 1949. Instead of liberating the country, the communists transformed China into one of the worst tyrannies of the twentieth century, sending at least five million civilians to an early grave and bringing misery to countless more. Frank Dikötter talks about his new book, which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs to interweave the stories of ordinary men and women with the brutal politics of Mao’s court. People of all walks of life...
PRICE INFLATION is intrinsic to new capital creation in modern capitalism, and “inflationary accumulation” via the banking system has funded rapid industrial growth. This idea was sketched out by Joseph Schumpeter 100 years ago, though it has been mostly forgotten since. Japan in the 20th century illustrates this process very clearly, as I explore in my bookCapital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle(Cornell, 2013). The 20th century was also the most inflationary century in history. Already, the 21st century looks different. Japan is where the modern-...
Based on ethnographic studies in public hospitals in four Chinese cities in 2011-2013, this project examines the institutional and cultural factors behind the practice of unofficial payments for hospital care in urban China. The corporatization of public hospitals that started in the 1980s and intensified in the 1990s-2000s resulted in earning them widespread distrust. The generalized distrust in hospitals and physicians induced patients to revive a tradition of delivering hongbao (red packets containing money) to physicians, but imbued it with new meanings and new practices. Patients offered...
According to the constant stream of media accounts, relations between North and South Korea are a predictably constant, frozen in a perpetual cease fire, or unstably liquid, always on the verge of a breakthrough or armageddon. This talk aim to depart from these approaches by taking a longer period of history than the news cycle permits and analyzing different dimensions and sites of North-South interactions to argue that while the absence of full normalized relations creates a figurative vacuum, interpretations and uses of international pressures for domestic purposes by both North and South...
*THIS TALK WILL BE IN CHINESE* As a puppet state of Japan, Manchukuo created an ideology of New Manchu in the northeastern part of China. This paper first explores how Manchu turned into New Manchu, and then discusses the logic of imperialism hidden behind the rhetoric of new Manchu. The logic implied that Japan was advanced, civilized and attractive but Manchu was underdeveloped, inferior and uncivilized, so Manchu needed to be civilized and transformed by Japan. The paper finally discusses who lives happily under the governance of the Manchukuo, and tries to examine the complicated...
One of the most striking symbols created by Daoism—China’s indigenous religion—is the hybrid “imagetext” that creates ambiguity between words and images, legibility and illegibility, the representational and the nonrepresentational. Various charts, talismans, and magical writs preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon appropriate elements of writings to create new visual forms. Daoist practice of “imagetext” highlights the long-lasting fascination with writing in religious Daoism. Not a simple interface of text and image, “imagetext” is imbedded in cosmological and spatial dimensions,...
In the conventional understanding of Chinese history, the Song dynasty (960-1279) appears as a period during which civil officials, fortified by a renewal of Confucian values and recruited through an expanded civil service system, inaugurated a period of civilian rule that led to a domination of literati over military officials in the administration of the dynasty. This view derives ultimately from the official Song History (Songshi) of 1345. Based on an examination of the dynasty’s financial administration, my present research challenges this assumption and proposes that the deeper structure...
In this lecture, Jane Portal will explore both the traditional and the more innovative art being produced in North Korea under the present regime. She will discuss the role of archaeology in North Korea through some specific examples. She will also discuss the Kim cult as manifested in North Korea and the art produced in this closely controlled environment. Using examples seen and some acquired during two trips to North Korea in 2001 and 2002, she will present a variety of different types of art and suggest some influences on their production. Having studied Chinese at Cambridge University,...
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