Bøker utgitt av Harvard University, Asia Center

By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.

This book examines the Nanjing decade of Guomindang rule (1927-1937) and the early post-Mao reform era (1980-1992) of Chinese history that have commonly been viewed as periods of state disintegration or retreat. And they were-at the central level. When reexamined at the local level, however, both are revealed as periods of state building.

Among the most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. But with almost no support from the government, local officials, teachers, and citizens pursued alternative visions. Their efforts led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system.

One of the most exciting developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of a rich, diverse tradition of women's writing of the imperial period. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

Eyferth charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as "State Protection Buddhism," a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism's place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion.

Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power.

In the early 20th century, China began to import and then to manufacture thousands of consumer goods. Politicians feared trade deficits. Intellectuals feared loss of national sovereignty. And manufacturers wondered how they could survive a flood of cheap imports. Gerth argues that the responses of these groups helped foster modern nationalism.

These chapters trace the biographical thread running through Nakagami's works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited for marketing. This book offers ethnographic case studies on the symbolic qualities of idols and how they relate to the conceptualization of self among adolescents.

In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.

By looking at how Tokyo Disneyland is experienced by employees, management and visitors, Aviad Raz shows that it is much more an example of successful importation, adaption, and domestication, and that it has succeeded precisely because it has become Japanese even while marketing itself as foreign.

Richard Davis has expertly crafted a stirring narrative of the last years of Song, focusing on loyalist resistance to Mongol domination as more than just a political event. Seen from the perspective of the conquered, the phenomenon of martyrdom reveals much about the cultural history of the Song.

Kawai Eijiro was a controversial figure in Japan during the interwar years. Atsuko Hirai examines the family and school influences that contributed to the development of Kawai's thought, and analyzes the manner in which the ideas of Western philosophers and British labor ideologues were absorbed into a receptive and creative East Asian mind.

Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea's modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of the ideas of human rights as they have developed in the Korean context.

The development of modern China's most important export commodity, silk, is traced from the opening of the treaty ports to the 1930s. This study examines the silk industry, one of China's most advanced traditional economic enterprises, as it moved into large-scale trade with the West.

This study of Chinese women in the book trade begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early 19th century. Building on these studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber and the significance of this novel for women.

Focusing on themes of crisis and innovation, this book illuminates the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; analyzes links between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and rethinks the "premodernity" of the eras.

In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853-1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.

The unique amalgam of prayer and play at the Sensoji temple in Edo is often cited as proof of the "degenerate Buddhism" of the Tokugawa period. This investigation of the economy and cultural politics of Sensoji, however, shows that its culture of prayer and play reflected changes taking place in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in the city of Edo.

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880-1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Friendships between writers of the mid-Tang era became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. Anna M. Shields explores these texts to reveal the complex value the writers found in friendship-as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding.

Through an exploration of contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, Wei-Ping Lin paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. Analyzing these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework, she traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the rise of the political novel to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s. Yeh explores in detail the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes, among them the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global.

In Defensive Positions, Noell Wilson shows how control of coastal defense by regional domains exacerbated the shogunate's inability to respond to major military and political challenges as Japan transitioned from an early modern system of parcelized, local maritime defense to one of centralized, national security in the nineteenth century.

Miri Nakamura examines bodily metaphors such as doppelgangers and robots that were ubiquitous in the literature of imperial Japan. Reading them against the historical rise of the Japanese empire, she argues they must be understood in relation to the most "monstrous" body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.

The Chinese Communist welfare state was established with the goal of eradicating income inequality. Paradoxically, it widened that gap, undermining a primary objective of Mao Zedong's revolution. Nara Dillon traces the origins of the Chinese welfare state from the 1940s to the 1960s to uncover the reasons why the state failed to achieve this goal.

Joseph R. Dennis demonstrates the significance of imperial Chinese local gazetteers in both local societies and national discourses. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely dispersed throughout China.

In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang investigates the visual culture of Daoism, China's primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to earlier and later times. Huang shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the usual dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design.