Author : Donald M. Seekins
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 50,34 MB
Release : 2014-06-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1317601548
Rangoon, a city of many identities, has since colonial times been a focus of conflict between the vertical power of the (colonial, military-run) state and the horizontal power and coping strategies of its residents.
Author : Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 34,85 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0415626250
Lively debates around property, access to resources, legal rights, and the protection of livelihoods have unfolded in Vietnam since the economic reforms of 1986. Known as Doi Moi (changing to the new), these have gradually transformed the country from a socialist state to a society in which a communist party presides over a neoliberal economy. By exploring the complex relationship between property, the state, society, and the market, this book demonstrates how both developmental issues and state-society relations in Vietnam can be explored through the prism of property relations and property rights. The essays in this collection demonstrate how negotiations over property are deeply enmeshed with dynamics of state formation, and covers debates over the role of the state and its relationship to various levels of society, the intrusion of global forces into the lives of marginalized communities and individuals, and how community norms and standards shape and reshape national policy and laws. With contributors from around the world, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of East and Southeast Asian studies, including politics, culture, society, and law, as well as those interested in the role of the state and property relations more generally.
Author : Stephen L Keck
Publisher : Springer
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 13,96 MB
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1137364335
British Burma in the New Century draws upon neglected but talented colonial authors to portray Burma between 1895 and 1918, which was the apogee of British governance. These writers, most of them 'Burmaphiles' wrote against widespread misperceptions about Burma.
Author : Alicia Turner
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 15,13 MB
Release : 2014-10-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0824847911
Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese, the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but sāsana, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese Buddhists interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920 as signs that the Buddha’s sāsana was deteriorating. This fear of decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of rarely used sources-- newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation lists, and colonial reports—to trace three discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of sāsana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing definition of religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and redefining the boundaries of religion operated as a key technique of colonial power—shaping subjects through European categories and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality—she explores how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and inflecting religion to shape their colonial situation and forward their own local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in scholarly conversations about religion and colonialism, but in theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of “religion” and “secular.” It contributes to ongoing studies of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of sāsana as a discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for granted.
Author : Adam Simpson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 30,65 MB
Release : 2020-09-14
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0429656483
This book provides a sophisticated, yet accessible, overview of the key political, economic and social challenges facing contemporary Myanmar and explains the complex historical and ethnic dynamics that have shaped the country. With clear and incisive contributions from the world’s leading Myanmar scholars, this book assesses the policies and political reforms that have provoked contestation in Myanmar’s recent history and driven both economic and social change. In this context, questions of economic ownership and control and the distribution of natural resources are shown to be deeply informed by long-standing fractures among ethnic and civil-military relations. The chapters analyse the key issues that constrain or expedite societal development in Myanmar and place recent events of national and international significance in the context of its complex history and social relations. In doing so, the book demonstrates that ethnic and cultural diversity is at the core of Myanmar’s society and heavily influences all aspects of life in the country. Filling a gap in the market, this research textbook and primer will be of interest to upper undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of Southeast Asian politics, economics and society and to journalists and professionals working within governments, companies and other organisations.
Author : Lindsay Bremner
Publisher : Actar D, Inc.
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 38,58 MB
Release : 2022-05-25
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1638408041
An edited volume by Monsoon Assemblages, a European Research Council funded research project. The book presents the methods that Monsoon Assemblages has evolved for engaging the monsoon, a globally connected weather system, as a coproducer of urban life and space in South and Southeast Asian cities. It challenges views of climate as an inert backdrop to urban life, instead suggesting that it is materially and spatially active in shaping urban politics, ecologies, infrastructures, buildings and bodies. It combines critical texts with cartography, photography and ethnography to present the project’s methodology and its outcomes and invites urban practitioners to think differently about space, time, representation and human and non-human agency. It offers intra-disciplinary, intra-active methods for rethinking human and non-human relations with weather in ways that meet the challenges of climate change and the Anthropocene.
Author : Gene Cooper
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 33,42 MB
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1136250301
During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were both suppressed and secularized. Temples were closed down by the secular regime and their activities classified as feudal superstition and this process only intensified during the Cultural Revolution when even the surviving secular fairs, devoted exclusively to trade with no religious content of any kind, were suppressed. However, once China embarked on its path of free market reform and openness, secular commodity exchange fairs were again authorized, and sometimes encouraged in the name of political economy as a means of stimulating rural commodity circulation and commerce. This book reveals how once these secular "temple-less temple fairs" were in place, they came to serve not only as venues for the proliferation of a great variety of popular cultural performance genres, but also as sites where a revival or recycling of popular religious symbols, already underway in many parts of China, found familiar and fertile ground in which to spread. Taking this shift in the Chinese state’s attitudes and policy towards temple fairs as its starting point, The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China shows how state-led economic reforms in the early 1980s created a revival in secular commodity exchange fairs, which were granted both the geographic and metaphoric space to function. In turn, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the temple fair phenomenon, examining its economic, popular cultural, popular religious and political dimensions and demonstrates the multifaceted significance of the fairs which have played a crucial role in expanding the boundaries of contemporary acceptable popular discourse and expression. Based upon extensive fieldwork, this unique book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese religion, Chinese culture, Chinese history and anthropology.
Author : Eugene Cooper
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 50,21 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0415520797
During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were suppressed, however, once China embarked on its path of free market reform secular commodity exchange fairs were again authorized, and sometimes encouraged as a means of stimulating rural commerce. This book reveals how once these secular "temple-less temple fairs" were in place, they came to serve not only as venues for the proliferation of popular cultural performance genres, but also as sites for the revival of popular religious symbols. Examining its economic, popular cultural, popular religious and political dimensions this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the temple fair phenomenon.
Author : Francesca Bray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 15,5 MB
Release : 2013-06-19
Category : History
ISBN : 1136184295
What can the history of technology contribute to our understanding of late imperial China? Most stories about technology in pre-modern China follow a well-worn plot: in about 1400 after an early ferment of creativity that made it the most technologically sophisticated civilisation in the world, China entered an era of technical lethargy and decline. But how are we to reconcile this tale, which portrays China in the Ming and Qing dynasties as a dying giant that had outgrown its own strength, with the wealth of counterevidence affirming that the country remained rich, vigorous and powerful at least until the end of the eighteenth century? Does this seeming contradiction mean that the stagnation story is simply wrong, or perhaps that technology was irrelevant to how imperial society worked? Or does it imply that historians of technology should ask better questions about what technology was, what it did and what it meant in pre-modern societies like late imperial China? In this book, Francesca Bray explores subjects such as technology and ethics, technology and gendered subjectivities (both female and male), and technology and statecraft to illuminate how material settings and practices shaped topographies of everyday experience and ideologies of government, techniques of the self and technologies of the subject. Examining technologies ranging from ploughing and weaving to drawing pictures, building a house, prescribing medicine or composing a text, this book offers a rich insight into the interplay between the micro- and macro-politics of everyday life and the workings of governmentality in late imperial China, showing that gender principles were woven into the very fabric of empire, from cosmology and ideologies of rule to the material foundations of the state and the everyday practices of the domestic sphere. This authoritative text will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those working on global history and the histories of gender, technology and agriculture. Furthermore, it will be of great use to those interested in social and cultural anthropology and material culture.
Author : Samuel Y. Liang
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 27,53 MB
Release : 2014-07-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317656113
China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities’ continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities’ socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement. Remaking China’s Great Cities will be of great interest to students and scholars working across a range of fields including Chinese studies, Chinese culture and society, urban studies and architecture.
