SPECTACULAR COMPASSION

ABSTRACT

China's “Olympic Year” (2007–2008) was a watershed moment for the country and its ruling Chinese Communist Party. In this article, the author draws on her fieldwork experience as one of the few foreigners living in rural Tibetan regions during the Tibetan unrest in spring 2008 to consider the implications of the Olympic year from the margins of the state. Taking inspiration from recent anthropological debates about the nature of humanitarianism and sovereignty in neo-liberal and post-socialist states, the author considers the Tibetan unrest and the Sichuan earthquake that occurred just three weeks later on 12 May as particularly emblematic disastrous events linked by a new biopolitics of “charity” or “compassion” (Ch. aixin) in the context of state-led disaster relief. To get at the contested nature of morality and sovereignty in practice, the author focuses on nationally televised post-quake death rituals in which statist abstract compassion for lost Chinese citizens confronted the universalized compassion of embattled Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities.     

东北亚文明的创造性起源与发展性保存——以中国和韩国的宗教思想和礼仪为中心(上)

中国将自身的固有思想和印度思想融合后,产生了禅宗和新儒学两种创造性的宗教思想。韩国狂热地接受了这两种思想。不过有趣的是,这两种思想的痕迹在中国人的日常生活中已经难觅踪迹,而在韩国人的日常生活中却能够轻易找到。可以说在理论和实践方面依然保存着这两种思想的国家大概在全世界也只有韩国了。例如,现在韩国的僧侣还在沿用中国唐朝时僧侣背诵的礼法文,普通韩国人举行婚礼、葬礼和祭祀时依然遵循中国的朱子家礼。与此形成对照的是,现在在中国人身上已经很难找到这些旧习俗的痕迹了。     

东北亚文明的创造性起源与发展性保存——以中国和韩国的宗教思想和礼仪为中心(下)

中国将自身的固有思想和印度思想融合后,产生了禅宗和新儒学两种创造性的宗教思想。韩国狂热地接受了这两种思想。有趣的是,如今这两种思想在中国人的日常生活中已经难觅踪迹,而在韩国人的日常生活中却能够轻易找到。可以说,在理论和实践方面依然保存着这两种思想的国家大概在全世界也只有韩国了。例如,现在韩国的僧侣还在沿用中国唐朝时僧侣背诵的礼法文,普通韩国人举行婚礼、葬礼和祭祀时依然遵循中国的朱子家礼。     

Abd al-Karim Qasim and the kurds of Iraq: Centralization,resistance and revolt, 1958–63

Despite the presence of women's migration from Syria to Egypt, until recently the extent of their contribution and influence has received insufficient attention. This paper aims to feminize the narrative of migration from Syria to Egypt by positioning women more centrally in this narrative through their cultural activities, especially the establishment of women's magazines. The Syrian/Lebanese and Egyptian phases of these women's lives are treated as a continuum and it is shown that their home life experience in Syria shaped their later life in Egypt. Conceptually, the paper envisions the diffusion of ideas resulting from the migration of Syrian women to Egypt towards the end of the nineteenth century as a process of regionalization, which is termed cross-glocalization.     

Paid work and socio-political consciousness of garment workers in Bangladesh

During the era of globalization, while international capital and world market factories are shaping the course of industrialization and “development” in many countries, it remains to be seen how far such “development” is conducive to increasing and improving women's paid work specifically, and labour rights, and empowerment in general. Using my research in Bangladesh, I juxtapose garment workers' experience to assess the implications of world market factories on women workers, their wages, work conditions, skill development, organizational links, and empowerment. In this article, I argue that women's multiple responsibilities and specific social locations as women and paid workers create distinctive form of activism and political consciousness. In addition, I suggest that the intersections of women's lives in the family and the workplace and their networks with other women create what Morgan and Bookman (1988) call “double consciousness” as women and as workers. This double consciousness generates multiple forms of resistance and social movements against the nexus between the state, multinational and local entrepreneurs.     

“Women will keep the household’

The transition into married life for rural-urban female migrants in Bangkok impacts their gender identities in unexpected ways. This article uses the experiences of a married migrant woman as a case study to explore and discuss how migrant women mediate the loss of autonomy and the added familial expectations that arise from this transition. The author suggests that given their prior migration experiences as independent income-earners women in this particular community enter marriage with broadened gender identities that fracture under marital gender norms. This places significance and value solely upon their nonpaid homemaking duties. The double burden of work inside and outside the home expands the roles of migrant women as wives and mothers, but at the same time it reinforces existing inequities within the conjugal relationship. Nonetheless, migrant women continue to actively participate in the construction of their conjugal contract and in decision-making within their households. In sum, this case study illustrates how conflicting desires, gender role norms, and particular migration situations are meaningfully mediated by women and how this negotiation affects decision-making regarding family organization and future mobility intentions.     

Finding a place

This article examines the ways in which modernization and globalization are experienced, negotiated, and understood by women in rural-to-urban migration in contemporary China. In the last two decades, labor mobility in China has increased dramatically, with millions of people leaving the countryside for the promise of money and a modern life in the coastal special economic zones such as Shenzhen and in the global cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. This article discusses the narratives of rural migrant women working in the city of Beijing. A striking feature of these narratives is the variety of conflicting evaluations of place presented, not just by different women, but also by the same individuals. For example, the stated wish to stay in the city as long as possible often conflicts with complaints about the hardships faced there. Conversely, it is very common for women to describe their home in the village with fondness and nostalgia, but to say that they never want to go back. The author of this article aims to understand the conflicting evaluations and desires about both geographic and social place that these women express, and the dilemmas they face in trying to “find their place.” Key to the paper is an analysis of how local discourses on modernity, gender, and rural/urban difference shape — in both symbolic and material ways — modernization and globalization and their consequences for individuals' search for a place in the world.     

The Possibility of Liminal Colonial Subjecthood: Yayutz Bleyh and the Search for Subaltern Histories in the Japanese Empire

ABSTRACT

This article examines whether writing histories of colonial subjects is possible. Traditional colonial histories subsume the colonial subject's individual history under a larger narrative of subjugation, which often does not allow room for people to exist outside the dichotomized role of collaborator/resister. This approach has left a gap in the scholarship for histories of colonial subjects whose lives do not easily fit either category. This article addresses this gap by detailing the life of Yayutz Bleyh, an Atayal woman who became one of the most important participants in the Japanese colonial administration of Aboriginal Affairs in Taiwan. For over six years, the author gathered fragmented pieces of information regarding Yayutz from a multitude of sources – visuals, as well as oral and written materials from inside and outside the colonial archive – in order to sketch the contours of an extraordinary woman and her life. Through the process of filtering these disparate sources, it was the silences regarding certain issues and the discrepancies that emerged among sources that proved to be the most revealing about Yayutz as someone who straddled both the world of the colonizer and the colonized.     

日本佛教题材文学的演变及当代转型

始于明治元年的"废佛毁释"运动彻底改变了日本佛教的命运,由此产生的新文化语境与思想生态对日本佛教题材文学的创作产生了重大影响。纵观近代以来约150年间的日本佛教题材文学,其中的佛教思想接受模式呈现了从信仰、怀疑、理性主义到多元宗教观的变迁,实践了与佛教地位转型相呼应的文学创作转型。而多元信仰的必然结果是人们无暇顾及自我磨砺,急功近利的宗教心理使得"他力思想"和"恶人正机"等方便法门取代了注重修行的正统佛教思想。新生代僧侣作家的登场则将传统僧侣文学和现代文学融于一体,既让人们了解到神秘的僧界,亦使佛教更多地介入了现代世俗生活,他们作品中呈现的多元宗教观亦符合当下日本民众的多元信仰形态。     

The capacity to aspire: young persons and gender–age relations in southern Tajikistan and North India

ABSTRACT

Rather than studying young men's career- and/or economic-based aspirations, this article explores the obstacles that hinder youths of both sexes in gerontocratic southern Tajikistan and North India from developing the capacity to make their own life choices. Focusing mainly on the selection of marital partner and largely on women, I explore the narratives of those who have never even dreamed of a good life, of others who have dreamed but been unable to actualize their dreams, of a few who have started to plan the way forward, and of a tiny number who actually managed to achieve their aspirations, teasing out the influences that facilitate this. I suggest that even educated youths with some control over their public lives are constricted by their family relations and that it requires quite specific support to defy one’s family, which can create significant vulnerabilities in settings with no other safety net.     

Gender,Work and Resistance: South Korean Textile Industry in the 1970s

This paper examines the forces behind South Korean women workers' labour activism in the 1970s, an era of rapid export-orientated industrialisation. Most of the labour strikes initiated by women occurred in the labour-intensive manufacturing sector, and they were in sharp contrast to the overall labour quiescence of male workers during the same period. The actions of South Korean women refute widely held assumptions about the docility of Asian women workers. This case study suggests that women rebel when their lives undergo drastic changes under a set of macro and micro circumstances. Women dialectically interact with the capitalist-patriarchal structure as conscious human agents, and the result of such interaction is their gender- and class-based collective resistance.     

Between Maternalism and Feminism: Women in Nicaragua's Counter‐Revolutionary Forces

To date very little scholarship has focused on the experiences of women who fought or collaborated with Nicaragua's counter‐revolutionary forces (known as the Contra) in the 1980s. Based on qualitative research conducted in Waslala, this paper examines the circumstances which led a group of women to become positioned as Contra supporters. It then explores how these women constructed their gender identities in the light of their collaboration with the Contra. It argues that despite their participation in a right‐wing political organisation and despite their tendency to draw upon understandings of themselves as mothers, widows and victims of war, these women should not be seen as inherently conservative and reactionary, given that they have also been inspired by forms of political organisation that are indicative of an emergent feminist identity.     

The Worst Is Not over Yet: The Lives and Deaths of the ‘Self’ and ‘Others’ in Brazil's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper focuses on the politics of life and death in Bolsonaro's Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is argued that while this administration, and the president himself, have long supported violence against individuals and social groups they did not see as fully human, their response to the pandemic marked a public transition from valuing certain kinds of lives as opposed to others, to a general contempt for human lives. The paper explores this transition by discussing the reification of the economy to the detriment of the people who produce and consume.     

Lifestyle Preferences and Strategies of Spanish Working Mothers: A Matter of Choice?

There is a rich debate surrounding the causes of women’s heterogeneous work–life orientations and strategies. This article focuses on the debate between postmodern individualistic approaches and gender approaches that emphasise the pervasiveness of socio-structural factors. After offering a profile of Spanish women in the twenty-first century, we present the results of qualitative research based on 30 semi-structured interviews with working mothers from different social backgrounds. We discuss Hakim’s ‘preference theory’ by exposing how social class shapes Spanish working mothers’ work–life attitudes and behaviour and how these further change over the life cycle or as a result of changing contexts.     

Persistence and change in Soviet and Russian relations with Afghanistan

This paper examines persistence and change in the Soviet Union's and then Russia's relations with Afghanistan with respect to development and security. First, a detailed analysis of the promise and reality of Soviet development assistance reveals conceptual shortcomings in their attempt to induce economic development in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union's heritage is then revealed in order to understand Russia's current perception of post-Taliban Afghanistan as well as Russia's emerging interests and commitment to Afghanistan's economic development. This paper argues that Russia will most likely replicate standard industrialization development approaches in contributing to Afghanistan's development. Therefore, Russia will probably run into problems similar to those that led to the failure of the Soviet modernization project, which consisted of large-scale development projects that were inappropriate to the country's institutions and the lives of most Afghans. It is questionable whether such reiteration will induce economic development now, in the complex setting of a fragmented and fragile state with a multitude of external players looking out for their own interests.     

Remembering the family home: emotions,belonging, and migrant men in multicultural Australia

Abstract

The article opens a space in which to discuss migrant men's emotions and their engagement with family life. It focuses on Australia's Goan community to explore the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relation to remembered family and childhood. The article suggests a “family” that is not only a domestic home but is constituted across both time and space. The men's memories of their childhood and family life prior to arrival in Australia are central to their constitution of self within Australia. These memories provide the men with the emotional means to contest their positioning in Australia's multicultural framework. The men's memories of childhood are experienced beyond domestic and multicultural spaces, making remembered families an important part of their work lives and sense of success in Australia.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DEATH CULT IN 1930s JAPAN AND THE DECISION TO DROP THE ATOM BOMB

In the 1930s Japan developed a death cult which had a profound effect on the conduct of the Japanese armed forces in the Pacific War, 1941–1945. As a result of government directed propaganda campaign after the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868, the ruling military cliques restored an Imperial system of government which placed Emperor Meiji as the Godhead central to the constitution and spiritual life of the Japanese nation. A bastardised Bushido cult emerged. It combined with a Social-Darwinist belief in Japan's manifest destiny to dominate Asia. The result was a murderous brutality that became synonymous with Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and conquered civilians. Japan's death cult was equally driven by a belief in self-sacrifice characterised by suicidal Banzai charges and kamikaze attacks. The result was kill ratios of Japanese troops in the Pacific War that were unique in the history of warfare. Even Japanese civilians were expected to sacrifice their lives in equal measure in the defence of the homeland. It was for this reason that American war planners came to the shocking estimate that as many as 900,000 Allied troops could die in the conquest of mainland Japan – Operation DOWNFALL. Contrary to the view of numbers of revisionist historians in the post-war period, who have variously argued that the atom bombs were used to prevent Soviet entry into the war against Japan, Francis Pike, author of Hirohito's War, The Pacific War, 1941 – 1945 [Bloomsbury 2015] reaffirms that the nuclear weapon was used for one purpose alone – to bring the war to a speedy end and to save the lives of American troops.     

Iveta Silova. From Sites of Occupation to Symbols of Multiculturalism. Reconceptualizing Minority Education in Post-Soviet Latvia. Greenwich,CT: Information Age Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1593114613.

This article explores the personal spatialities of the majority of inhabitants in Estonia and Sweden. The author analyzed survey data and used variables about the perception of cultural distances, interest in receiving news from other countries via mass media, and contacts with people from these countries. The analysis suggests a hypothesis that in Estonia, personal spatiality is shaped primarily by institutional factors (e.g. the media, the economy). In Sweden, the formation of personal spatiality is based on versatile sources and is more autonomous with regard to the media than in a transition country such as Estonia. The analysis also demonstrates that the symbolic division of the world into East and West shapes the imagined Nordic and Baltic space and people's thinking patterns about ‘others’.     

Traditionalization,or the making of a reputation: women,weddings and expenditure in Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

This article aims to show how traditionalization is enforced by women in Tajikistan in the realm of marriage, focusing on the economic dimension of life cycle rituals: ritual expenditure and gift-giving. It shows that from women’s points of view, performing ceremonial competition may itself be a resource to recover their reputation, for example when a matrimonial rupture has harmed it. Focusing on single mothers, it demonstrates how practices of traditionalization performed by women can be directed at addressing gender constraints and stereotypes, such as the normative relation between marriage and femininity, and how they may also secure women’s separate sphere of competence and relative financial autonomy.     

Introduction to “two languages,two souls”

Abstract

Morisaki Kazue is a poet, essayist, and chronicler of the lives and histories of Japan's minorities. One of her recent books, Karayuki-san (Asahi Shimbun, 1976), an oral history of the lives of the prostitutes who followed the Japanese armed forces during World War II, became a widely praised bestseller. The article that follows describes what must be understood as the central experience in Ms. Morisaki's life: her birth and childhood in Korea and the permanent influence this had on the structure of her life and thought.