East Asian Languages and Cultures

The article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool – alongside the long-established Sinological erudition – for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to the medical and astronomical manuals of the occidentals but also to their histories. The translation-cum-commentary Miscellanea from the western seas by Yamamura Saisuke (1801) is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as the European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent, while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan now exposed to the dynamics of the global European presence.

The applicability of the Person-centered Approach to psychotherapy (i.e. PCA) toward culturally varying clients is often claimed to be limited, as it has developed based on Rogers’ ideas that are often accused of being culturally biased. In particular, Rogers’ concept of self-actualization with its emphasis on personal autonomy and independence has been subject to the criticism that it reflects Western individualistic cultural emphases on the view of the independent self while disregarding the view of the interdependent self that is prevalent in non-Western collectivistic cultures. This article explores Rogers’ concept of self-actualization, evaluating the applicability of the PCA toward both Western and non-Western cultural contexts. Arguing for its applicability to culturally varying clients, it suggests that organismic potentialities of individuals involve the tendencies toward both independence and interdependence that may be manifested by the actualizing tendency in different ways, influenced by different cultures. Therefore, although what clients aim to achieve in terms of self-actualization may be different, therapists need to focus on what is universal in relation to self-actualization, that is, the actualizing tendency that is the motivation for therapeutic change. It also explores what focusing on the client’s actualizing tendency would mean and involve in multicultural counseling.

A photo-collage of past and present street visuals in Asia, Aestheticizing Public Space explores the domestic, regional, and global nexus of East Asian cities through their graffiti, street art, and other visual forms in public space. Attempting to unfold the complex positions of these images in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions, Lu Pan explores how graffiti in East Asia reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences and narratives. On a broader level, this book aims to shed light on how aesthetics and politics are mobilized in different contested spaces and media forms, in which the producer and the spectator change and exchange their identities.

Japanese Traditionality and Women's Representation in Animes: Naruto Example - book version of my master thesis. // Bu çalışma yüksek lisans tezimin kitap hâline getirdiğim son versiyonudur. Kitaplaşma sürecinde içerik genişletilmiş, tezin tarih bölümü çıkartılarak gerekli bilgiler diğer başlıklara yedirilmiştir. Bu kitap sadece Kitapyurdu sitesinde satılmaktadır.

When Wendi Deng (邓文迪 ), from China magically fell into the pan-national world of international business and married the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, (who had abandoned Australia for the same stateless realm of five star hotels), at once we recognized that age old story of the gold digger and the sugar daddy. Perhaps though our belief in a simple storyline was, if not wrong, at least incomplete. Origins matter after all. As a teacher to young women in Zhengzhou, central China for three years recently, I could sense the conflicting currents of duty, ambition and the hope for love that tossed them about in relationships. The mix for each modern girl was individual, and Deng herself is a product of those choices. It is surely no accident then that Wendi Deng and another high profile Chinese-American transplant, Florence Sloan, were co-producers of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film which deals directly, though often through a veil of tears, with just these dilemmas.

Department of Linguistics
The University of Adelaide
2012

An investigation into the challenge of writing Chinese characters and kanji for native speakers of languages using logographic scripts.

Comment and constructive criticism most welcome. Neurolinguistics is not part of the undergraduate linguistics curriculum, but it is something I would like to study at post-graduate level. Please bring any blatant errors of understanding to my attention.

This article traces the time practices relevant to Edo-period pleasure quarter life and business in 18th and 19th century Japan, discussing two time patterns that appeared in pleasure quarter price lists at the time which allowed customers to engage sex workers and geisha entertainers for company: on the one hand, more long-term, loosely circumscribed stays in the quarters based around diurnal rhythms of light and darkness; on the other hand shorter transactions centered on units of time measured with incense sticks - two aspects of time that were central to the trade plied in the quarters. I argue that the sex trade is significant in that it provided a rare example of a service “paid by the hour” in early modern Japan,  thus crucially also calling us to (re-) consider larger issues regarding the economic value of time within the early modern Japanese world of work, and especially its relationship to modern time and labor. The exigencies of a certain trade required the elaboration of a set of time units and, where necessary, a system to measure and co-ordinate them, which ultimately indicates the existence of an abstract notion of time that commanded a certain monetary value in early modern Japan. As such, the present article serves to qualify narratives that mainly identify the commodification of time with Japan’s industrialization, modernization and Westernization in the late 19th century, as well as with the dissemination of mechanical clock-time.

The first attempt at spelling reform in South Korea took place in the early 1950s as the Korean War (1950–53) drew to a close. The subsequent Han’gŭl Crisis is often interpreted as an example of the authoritarianism of President Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman), yet the event also represents a clash of generations between the supporters of the Unified Orthography of 1933 and the previous spelling standard. During the han’gŭl simplification debates, the legacies of Chu Sigyŏng (1876–1914) and Pak Sŭngbin (1880–1943) reemerged as their followers continued a contentious linguistic debate that stretched back into the colonial period. The event ended as a victory for the Unified Orthography of 1933, but several ambiguous questions remain for further investigation. Ultimately, behind the claims of “scientific rationalism” in the current han’gŭl spelling are the forgotten memories of linguistic activism and the difficulties in uniting divergent linguistic practices in post-Liberation Korean society.

Probabilmente perché in Italia mancano scuole a livello universitario idonee a stimolare – come avviene per l'India, il Tibet, la Cina, il Giappone, per non citare che i paesi che più richiamano l'attenzione dei nostri orientalisti – l'interesse e lo studio della Birmania, delle sue genti, della sua civiltà, è già arduo attendersi di reperire, anche nelle migliori biblioteche, un minimo di opere fondamentali per iniziare una ricerca seria nel campo della birmanologia. Per ovviare a questa carenza, altrimenti inspiegabile, ho pensato di far cosa utile pubblicando la bibliografia che segue per offrirla al lettore interessato a questi studi, perché in poco tempo possa avere a disposizione un panorama bibliografico ch'io ho potuto ottenere soltanto a prezzo di non pochi anni di ricerche, soprattutto all'estero, spesso per la cortesia di autorevoli amici che mi hanno inviato a prestito opere della loro biblioteca o fornito utili indicazioni per poterle consultare.
Mi sembra, oltre a ciò, che in lavori simili non esista un corredo bibliografico così ricco e, credo, anzi, che molte opere qui citate siano state talvolta del tutto trascurate, forse perché ritenute superate dal tempo, mentre a parer mio, sono da ritenersi basilari per uno studio documentato.
Perciò mi auguro che il seguente “contributo ad una bibliografia generale sulla Birmania” sia accolto come il coronamento di tutto il lavoro, addirittura la base di esso.

Renzo Carmignani,  1971 “Birmania storia arte civiltà”: 303

Quan niệm về chữ hiếu ở mỗi nền văn hóa là khác nhau. Không chỉ thế, ngay cả trong cùng một nền văn hóa, nếu xuất phát điểm khác nhau thì cách nhìn nhận về chữ hiếu cũng khác nhau. Tham luận này nghiên cứu trường hợp chữ hiếu trong nền văn hóa Korea nhằm góp phần làm sáng tỏ nhận định vừa rồi. Bằng phương pháp so sánh sử - văn hóa, chúng tôi sẽ làm nổi bật những đặc trưng của truyền thống hiếu đạo trong văn hóa Korea thông qua những câu chuyện chính sử mang tính Nho giáo trong “Samguk sagi” (Tam quốc sử ký) và những câu chuyện huyền sử mang tính Phật giáo trong “Samguk yusa” (Tam quốc di sự).

New book in Japanese, published by Chikuma Paperbacks, aimed at a popular audience. (parents, teachers, media, critics, college students).  Examines common stereotypes of Japanese education in light of a range of new international comparative datasets.  Suggests shifting to a comparative perspective on domestic debates, thus making Japanese educational research more global in character and amplify its contribution to international scholarship.  Japanese link here: https://honto.jp/netstore/pd-book_30760764.html

This dissertation is an ethnography of intimacy as it is transacted in the political economy and commodity culture of K-pop. I view both K-pop singers and fans as intimate laborers in the affective economy of global K-pop and explore how intimacy is commodified as a product in digital media. Popular music studies have often defined fan activities in the pop music sector as domestic, and thus feminine. However, female K-pop fans’ activities complicate the conventional dichotomies of domestic versus public, and feminine versus masculine, as their relationships with K-pop idols—male singers in particular—are built upon female dominance acquired through digital surveillance and fetishization of idol bodies. These activities have long been deemed abnormal, hysterical, irrational, and unintelligent; however, I see K-pop fans as active consumers who seek intimate solidarity through purchased feelings of pleasure, power, and ascendancy.
K-pop fandom is not phenomenal—it is performative.

This research article briefly attempts the importance, history and contribution of “Electronic media” in general, and Radio Pakistan Gilgit in particular in promoting the local cultures, traditions and languages spoken in the Gilgit-Baltistan Regions of Pakistan, with special reference to Wakhi Barnama - "Sada-e- Bam-e- Dunya", i.e., “Voice of the Roof of the World”.

Modern genetics, ecology and archaeology are combined to reconstruct the domestication and diversification of rice. Early rice cultivation followed two pathways towards domestication in India and China, with selection for domestication traits in early Yangtze japonica and a non-domestication feedback system inferred for ‘proto-indica’. The protracted domestication process finished around 6,500–6,000 years ago in China and about two millennia later in India, when hybridization with Chinese rice took place. Subsequently farming populations grew and expanded by migration and incorporation of pre-existing populations. These expansions can be linked to hypothetical language family dispersal models, including dispersal from China southwards by the Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian groups. In South Asia much dispersal of rice took place after Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers adopted rice from speakers of lost languages of northern India.

Northeast India is the epicentre of phylogenetic diversity in the Sino-Tibetan family, with perhaps 20 independent Tibeto-Burman subgroups and as many as 300 languages spoken there. Politically, Northeast India is divided into the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura. Linguistically, it can be divided into Northern, Central and Eastern Border areas. The languages of this region remain relatively little-known and underdescribed. This chapter reviews the state of current knowledge concerning Northeast Indian Tibeto-Burman languages, and urges further research on individual languages and low-level subgroups in the area.

This chapter’s goal is to update the case for reconstructing the ethno-linguistic prehistory of “Tani” – a cluster of closely related ethno-linguistic groups found primarily in the mid-Eastern Himalayan region, in the modern Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. It aims to demonstrate that important aspects of Tani prehistory can be effectively reconstructed, and argues that such reconstructions can serve as useful counterweights to dominant, yet historically vacuous, "claims" over the Tani-speaking region by large regional nation-states.

The previously non-discussed ancient east Asian Wanderwort araj~aran ‘interjection; barely, suddenly’ is discussed and presented in great detail, and traced throughout many languages phonologically and semantically. The root has also undergone local secondary semantic developments in places, meanings which have then been borrowed into neighboring languages, some already carrying the same root, some thus borrowing only the new semantic meaning. After detailed lexical documentation of this root in various languages, a possible semantic map is presented at the end of the study. Language groups and languages involved in this very geographically spread out Wanderwort are the Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Yukaghir languages, as well as Tocharian B, Selkup, Kott, Russian, Japanese and Iñupiatun Eskimo.

ADDENDUM: Note that the final version of this paper has been published on the 17th of December, 2020 as: Piispanen, P.S. (2020) An Ancient East Asian Wanderwort. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 73(4), p. 569-586.
https://doi.org/10.1556/062.2020.00029

This is the seventh addendum to my manifesto "Rapid Progress in the Genetic Classification of the World’s Languages ". It contains a list of almost 200 useful books I've collected about the world's Language families. It is obviously not exhaustive, and it includes books only (not papers or online resources).

This thesis engages with the praxis of diasporic Sinophone biopolitics across East Asia exploring travelling imaginaries, hybrid material cultures, and articulations of embodied difference striking across geopolitical and temporal boundaries. By considering the interfaces of ethnic Chinese across local cultures in Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong inflected by globalizing influences, I question how a cohesive Sinophone identity outside mainland China might be nurtured and managed through a multicultural approach. Through the lens of literary works by Li Yongping (李永平), Kuo Pao Kun (郭寶崑), and Wong Bik-Wan (黃碧雲), this thesis investigates the heterogeneous formation of Sinophone identities calibrated by the time and place specificities of each articulation and lived practice. Each author articulates distinct yet intersecting perspectives towards the Sinophone body as one that is gendered and (de)sexualized and the sociopolitical consequences of linguistic hybridity at the crossroads of international margins and routes. The first chapter takes up Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral 《郑和的 后代》 (1995) to tease out Singapore’s multilingualism, racial hybridity, and the impact of the city-state’s language policies on ethnic Chinese identity. The second chapter will focus on Li Yongping, a Sinophone Malaysian author who emigrated to Taiwan, and the affective images of wandering, ghostly ethnic Chinese women circulating in his work. The third chapter delves into Wong Bik-wan’s short story collection, Tenderness and Violence《温柔与爆裂》 (1994), and her misogynistic perspective on the corporeal manifestations of Sinophone Hong Kong modernity. By attending to the physical and conceptual movements that these texts each represent and enable, close analyses of the figures populating all three works illuminate the power of gendered and subaltern bodies as they intersect with critical frameworks of postcoloniality and Sinophone studies. Taken together, this thesis argues that Sinophone synergies across diverse Sinitic communities create a space for interaction and negotiation to reevaluate the Chinese identity and “Chineseness” vis-à-vis tradition, cultural uniformity, geographical boundaries, geopolitical boundaries, biopolitical manifestations, and transculturation.

CỔ HỌC ĐIỂM TÔ: NGHIÊN CỨU HÁN NÔM TỪ GÓC NHÌN CỦA CÁC NHÀ KHOA HỌC TRẺ (Nguyễn Tuấn Cường, Đỗ Thị Bích Tuyển chủ biên, Hà Nội: Nxb. Khoa học xã hội, 2020, 416 trang khổ 16x24, giá bìa 160k). Sách gồm 19 bài viết về nhiều chủ đề của 17 tác giả là các nhà nghiên cứu trẻ trong lĩnh vực Hán Nôm.


TÙNG THƯ VĂN HOÁ HÁN NÔM
Đơn vị tổ chức: Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm
Với sự phối hợp của Công ty TNHH Sách và Truyền thông VN
Chủ trì: PGS.TS Nguyễn Tuấn Cường (Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm)

Quyển 1: Quốc học vun bồi: Hồi cố và triển vọng nghiên cứu Hán Nôm đầu thế kỉ XXI (Nguyễn Tuấn Cường chủ biên, 2020)
Quyển 2: Cổ học điểm tô: Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm từ góc nhìn của các nhà khoa học trẻ (Nguyễn Tuấn Cường, Đỗ Thị Bích Tuyển chủ biên, 2020)
(còn nữa…)