The Korean language is ranked 11th among the languages in the world in terms of numbers of speakers. Korean is now studied as an important foreign language in an increasing number of countries. This book provides a good overview of the language in a readable way without neglecting important structural aspects of the language. Furthermore, the book explains geographical, historical, social and cultural context of the language.
This book provides a general description of the Korean language by highlighting important structural aspects of the language, whilst keeping technical details to a minimum. It situates the Korean language in its geographical, historical, social and cultural context so that readers can gain a good understanding of its speakers and the environment in which it is used. Covering a wide range of topics on Korean including its genetic affiliation, historical development, sound patterns, writing systems, vocabulary, grammar and discourse, the book also illuminates differences between North and South Korean, and related language planning and policy issues. "The Korean Language" is designed to be accessible primarily to English-speaking learners of Korean and scholars working in disciplines other than linguistics, although it also serves as a useful introduction for general linguists. The book will complement Korean language textbooks used in the classroom. It will be welcomed not only by readers with a wider interest in Korean studies, but also by Asian specialists in general. Moreover it will be valuable reading for so-called heritage learners of Korean.)

During the period 1965 to 1990 East Asia was the world's fastest growing region. Economic Development in Pacific Asia provides illuminating, non-technical perspectives on key facets of the region's economies. The text focuses on the eight countries which accounted for the majority of the economic growth: Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Empirical evidence is used to provide a revealing, multi-dimensional statistical profile of the countries as well as the region as a whole. Rather than present a statistical history of each country, the text highlights the relative performance in terms of the variables which are studied within each chapter. Akhand and Gupta examine a range of popular topics including: the relative role of factors accumulation versus technology change factor price distribution and employment growth, poverty and income distribution the Asian Crisis and corruption. In addition, the book examines topics rarely covered in the current economics literature such as urbanization, the gender gap and the digital divide. It provides an accessible and wide ranging assessment of the existing evidence and current arguments on East Asian economic development, and is a valuable addition to economists, policy makers and those interested in Asian economic affairs.

During the period 1965 to 1990 East Asia was the world's fastest growing region. Economic Development in Pacific Asia provides illuminating, non-technical perspectives on key facets of the region's economies. The text focuses on the eight countries which accounted for the majority of the economic growth: Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Empirical evidence is used to provide a revealing, multi-dimensional statistical profile of the countries as well as the region as a whole. Rather than present a statistical history of each country, the text highlights the relative performance in terms of the variables which are studied within each chapter. Akhand and Gupta examine a range of popular topics including: the relative role of factors accumulation versus technology change factor price distribution and employment growth, poverty and income distribution the Asian Crisis and corruption. In addition, the book examines topics rarely covered in the current economics literature such as urbanization, the gender gap and the digital divide. It provides an accessible and wide ranging assessment of the existing evidence and current arguments on East Asian economic development, and is a valuable addition to economists, policy makers and those interested in Asian economic affairs.

Laos - the Lao People's Democratic Republic - in one of the least understood and studied countries of Asia. Its development trajectory is also one of the most interesting, as it moves from state, or perhaps more appropriately, subsistence, to market, at the same time as finding itself in a key geographical position in the fast-changing southeast Asian region, where, with boundaries more permeable, and new patterns of spatial integration forming, a new Greater Mekong sub-region is emerging. Based on extensive original research, this book, unlike others on Laos which concentrate on the macroeconomic picture, assesses how economic transition and marketization are being translated into progress (or not) at the local level, and at the resulting impact on poverty, inequality and livelihoods. It concludes that the process of transition in fact contributes to the growth of poverty for some people, and shows how people manage to cope in very unfavorable circumstances.

Korea is currently witnessing huge social change with unprecedented divorce rates and the disintegration of the traditional family system. Fusing audience research and ethnography, "Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea" presents a compelling account of women's changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life-television.
Within the historically-specific social conditions of Korean modernization Kim analyses how Korean women of varying age and class groups cope with the new environment of changing economical structures and social relations. The central arguments presented revolve around the revelatory and self-reflexive nature of TV talk and its function as a form of empowerment. The book argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. Kim reveals Korean women as creative, energetic, and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West.
Based on original empirical research, "Women, Television and Everyday Life in" "Korea" explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. Going beyond the traditional Anglo-American view of media and culture, this text will appeal to both Korean area studies and media and communications studies.

This edited collection offers a broad consideration of contemporary rhetorical scholarship, tied to political, ethical, and spiritual themes. Originating from the 2004 conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, the contents of this volume reflects the conference themes of rhetorical agendas in current theory and research. The volume starts off with transcripts of the talks presented by the conference's featured speakers. The essays that follow are organized around five key topics: history, theory, pedagogy, publics, and gender. These chapters address subjects ranging from religious identity to civil rights; from weapons of mass destruction to literacy testing and electronic texts, reflecting the wide array of areas under study across the rhetoric discipline. With contributions from well-known scholars as well as newcomers, the breadth and diversity of this collection make a significant contribution to rhetorical scholarship, and will stimulate additional work. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students in rhetoric studies in speech communication, English, and related disciplines.

This book introduces the syntactic process of auxiliary formation and applies it to the grammatical analysis of the indicative, or non-modal, auxiliary verbs of Modern Tamil. Using data from spoken and written registers gathered over several years, the book demonstrates for the first time the systematic nature of auxiliary verb phenomena, and how they are integrated into the grammar of the language.
Including fresh information on new verb constructions, verbal categories and tenses, this book will be a welcome addition to the current general linguistics literature, in particular the study of verbal categories and the morphosyntactic processes that instantiate them.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the future shape of Europe and the US role in it became the subject of considerable speculation. Almost simultaneously, China emerged variously as a pariah state, a likely peer-rival to the sole superpower, the USA, and a potential disrupter of international stability and almost instantaneously, Beijing replaced Moscow as the key source of Western insecurity. In this book, Mahmud Ali questions the logic behind this perception, reflected in both popular and academic literature, and highlights an often unacknowledged and largely unknown aspect of the Cold War - that a covert and intimate collaboration between the US ad the PRC took place in the closing decades of the war.
In the first part of "US-China Cold War Collaboration" Ali underscores the dominant themes in post-1990 analyses of reasons behind the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in relation to the increased US commentary about the potential threats perceived in an emergingChina. In part 2 the author makes extensive use of US, Chinese and Soviet documentation and explores the true nature of the US-PRC relationship with a view to demonstrating the impact of that relationship on the Soviet Union. The final part of the book focuses on one of the most prominent geographical theatres if US-PRC covert collaboration - Soviet occupied Afghanistan - and highlights the extent and depth of secret collusion between the two intelligence services.

Series Information:
Asia's Transformations/RoutledgeCurzon Studies in Asia's Transformations

Farm and business lobby groups played a vital role in the erosion of the American-led trade embargo against China from 1949-79. In this comprehensive study, based on recently declassified primary source material, trade negotiations and agreements are examined and a detailed account of developing economic links between East and West is also provided.
Developing economic relations and tensions with US policy are discussed in the context of PRC and Western economic and agricultural problems, Beijing's development strategies, Sino-Soviet relations and the backdrop of War in Asia. The story starts with regional grain shortages as a result of Mao's self-sufficiency policies. Washington failed to prevent its allies from stopping politically influential private and semi-official trade promotion organizations from maintaining more stringent trade restrictions aimed at preventing China's economic development. Mitcham also charts the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward and China's eventual recovery, capped by rapprochement, the re-opening of important diplomatic and trade relations and Beijing's readjustment policies. By the late seventies, the stage was set for the rise of the Chinese economic engine, and a shift in economic thinking that continues to have repercussions both within China and around the world today.
For historians, economists, political scientists, government officials, business representatives and others with an interest in Chinese economics and history, China's Economic Relations with the West and Japan will be essential reading.

Finding the Beat explores humankind’s ability, propensity, and enjoyment in finding the beat in live and recorded experiences of music-making through the lens of entrainment, the human capacity to perceive a beat and to synchronize to it. Anyone who has attended a concert, gone to a club, or watched a sporting event has witnessed and/or participated in tapping, clapping, or dancing along with a piece, song, or chant. It doesn’t matter who or where you are in the world—as humans we spend a lot of time taking pleasure in matching our bodily movements with a perceived beat. Drawing upon diverse examples from the North American and British rock repertoire, Nathan Hesselink demonstrates that listeners are gripped in deep, compelling, and socially meaningful ways when musicians play with or against expectations set up by entrainment. Via musicology, music theory, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and cognitive neuroscience, he illustrates the creative, aesthetic, and participatory pleasure and wonder afforded by our collective ability to find the beat.

Events of the past twenty years, including the Cold War and the War on Terror, have meant that the environments of international development co-operation have changed extensively, with dramatic consequences for development policies and North-South relations in general.

Perspectives on European Development Cooperation takes stock of such changes, describing and analyzing the new European development agenda, including the role of the European Union. Essays by prominent authorities in the field examine the development policies of individual donor countries and focus on the principles and objectives governing aid strategies and the performances of these policies.

This book will be of interest to students of development studies and those involved in determining development policy.

Almost all women and men claim that gender equality within their relationships is the ideal. In practice, however, equality is not predominant within many couples and families. This book develops current debates about individualisation within families a " particularly how partners understand and resolve tensions between the need for togetherness and personal autonomy, and how partners view and work with increasing gender equality.

Individualism and Families is based on a large Swedish study from two of the foremost European experts on the sociology of the family. The study looks particularly at partnering, parenting, intimacy, commitments, attitudes to finances and gender divisions of labour.

Almost all women and men claim that gender equality within their relationships is the ideal. In practice, however, equality is not predominant within many couples and families. This book develops current debates about individualisation within families particularly how partners understand and resolve tensions between the need for togetherness and personal autonomy, and how partners view and work with increasing gender equality.

Individualism and Families is based on a large Swedish study from two of the foremost European experts on the sociology of the family. The study looks particularly at partnering, parenting, intimacy, commitments, attitudes to finances and gender divisions of labour.

In spite of the considerable attention devoted to the third/ninth century by scholars of Arabic literature, credit for the elaboration of the notion of adab in its wider meaning of literary culture is given to and concentrated upon only a handful of writers. The disproportionate emphasis, within and outside the Arabic literary-historical and critical tradition, has been at the expense of certain crucial aspects of that tradition. This book re-evaluates the literary history and landscape of the third/ninth century by demonstrating and emphasising the significance of an important transformation, namely the one signalled by the transition from a predominantly oral-aural culture to an increasingly writerly, literate, and bookish one. This transformation had a profound influence on the production of learned and literary culture; on the modes of transmission of learning; on the nature and types of literary production; on the nature of scholarly and professional occupations and alliances; and on the ranges of meanings of certain key concepts, such as plagiarism. In order better to understand these, attention is focused on a central but understudied figure, Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 280/893

Over the past few decades, Islam has emerged as a political force on the international scene and Islam in World Politics analyzes the factors leading to, and the implications of this heightening of the profile of a religion.
In the political sphere, there is a wide range of emphasis both in which an Islamic society might be realized and the way in which such a society might conduct its relation with the non-Muslim world. Within these different emphases are some radical tendencies. A cluster of fringe groups, broadly referred to as Islamists, have hijacked and appropriated the rhetoric of Islam, applying it to a promised "Islamic" reality to be realized once "Islam is fully applied."
The essays within" Islam in World Politics "are driven by the concern to address there issues. Areas that are covered include an examination of the challenge of Islamism to the Muslim world, the sue of Islam as a political tool on the international scene, its contributions to the theory and practice of global finance, its role in gender discourse, and its articulations in the Indian Sub-continent, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Arab World.

The essays in this collection examine the emergence of Islam as a force in today's international political arena. Driven by a concern to understand factors leading to, and the implications of, this heightened political profile the contributors go beyond polemics and apologetics. The book critically examines some of the major events, movements and trends in the Islamic world over the past fifty years and their impact on the international scene. Reflecting the diversity and heterogeneity of the Muslim world, the book covers issues including: -the challenge of Islamism to the Muslim world -the use of Islam as a political tool on the international scene -Islam's contribution to the theory and practice of global finance -Islam's role in gender discourse -Islam's articulations in the Indian Sub-continent, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Arab world. Very little of the current literature deals with political Islam globally, and very few books go much beyond the Middle East and its terrorist groups. This volume fills that gap, providing a compelling cross-national, cross cultural and interdisciplinary analysis of Islam as a potent political force.

Taking a comparative approach, this text examines the processes of globalization by analyzing television case histories in Japan, China and Hong Kong. The text illustrates how television is becoming increasingly global. The conditions of the television industry, of the production of the news, and in particular of the public service broadcaster appear in a symbolic role, metaphors for the reconfiguration of relationships between the global and the local. the three case histories on interviews with key participants in exemplar events: Japanese attempts to set up a rival to CNN and to internationalize NHK; CCTV's defence of its dominant position, under pressure from upheavals in both Chinese society and the government bureaucracy; and the establishment, sale and erratic progress of Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV. gap in the media studies literature as well as making a major contribution to comparative research in Asia.

Linda Morrison brings the voices and issues of a little-known, complex social movement to the attention of sociologists, mental health professionals, and the general public. The members of this social movement work to gain voice for their own experience, to raise consciousness of injustice and inequality, to expose the darker side of psychiatry, and to promote alternatives for people in emotional distress. Talking Back to Psychiatry explores the movement's history, its complex membership, its strategies and goals, and the varied response it has received from psychiatry, policy makers, and the public at large.

This bibliography is a record of British relations with Tibet in the period 1765 to 1947. As such it also involves British relations with Russia and China, and with the Himalayan states of Ladakh, Lahul and Spiti, Kumaon and Garhwal, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Assam, in so far as British policy towards these states was affected by her desire to establish relations with Tibet. It also covers a subject of some importance in contemporary diplomacy. It was the legacy of unresolved problems concerning Tibet and its borders, bequeathed to India by Britain in 1947, which led to border disputes and ultimately to war between India and China in 1962. These borders are still in dispute today. It also provides background information to Tibet's claims to independence, an issue of current importance.
The work is divided into a number of sections and subsections, based on chronology, geography and events. The introductions to each of the sections provide a condensed and informative history of the period and placethe books and article in their historical context. Most entries are also annotated. This work is therefore both a history and a bibliography of the subject, and provides a rapid entry into a complex area for scholars in the fields of international relations and military history as well as Asian history.

This book discusses an important area of the Persian Gulf region: Southwest Persia. In the late 1800s, the British put pressure on the Iranian government to open up a certain route through the Southwest of the country, and this in turn affected the economic development of the region. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the area's people, commerce and industry and the impact of British influence there at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Theatre occupied a particularly important place in the life of the elite, for whom owning a theatre troupe was highly fashionable and for whom theatre performances were an integral part of formal gatherings, various rituals and ceremonies. Based on an exploration of original historical records, including comparisons with other forms of ancient theatre, Shen provides an overview of elite theatre in Ming China and examines the details of theatrical performance.

Based on a collection of labor contracts and other documents, this book examines the legal, economic and social relations of labor as they developed in the commercial enterprises of Tokugawa Japan. The urban focus is Kyoto, the cultural capital and smallest of the three great cities of the Tokugawa period, but the data comes from a wider region of commercial and castle towns and rural villages in central Japan.
Tokugawa businesses were family firms, but the system differed from that found in European cities at this time, and differences in family practice also resulted in a different organization adapted to business needs. This semi-public family environment also lent itself to conflict as outsiders were incorporated into family space, hierarchies and affairs. Conflict and its resolution is a topic of special interest in this study. Problems such as embezzling, stealing and absconding, and the mechanisms developed to address these problems in the paternalistic environment of family firms are portrayed through letters and other documents of accusation, investigation, apology, reconciliation and punishment. Numerous translated excerpts of documents written by and for workers and employers bring the voice of the people to life and in this analysis of labor relations.

Belarus is one of the least studied European states to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In fact, few Western specialists paid much attention to its affairs during the Soviet era. Nevertheless, Belarus constitutes an important and sensitive border region between Russia and the western part of the continent. In Postcommunist Belarus, a stellar group of contributors examines the issues and the search for identity that Belarus has confronted in the period leading up to and following independence. The country is run in an authoritarian fashion by President Alexander Lukashenko and many observers, both inside and outside Belarus, would use the term "dictatorship" to describe his rule. Belarusian authorities prefer to emphasize the strong support of the people for the president and his cautious approach to economic reform. It seems unlikely that the country can hold out permanently against the wider pressures of democratization and economic reform that are transforming its neighbors. The country's situation offers political scientists many facets for comparison with established models. Belarus is grappling with challenges that are conceptual and psychological as much as they are political, economic, and social. Through new research, the contributors to Postcommunist Belarus offer an important, coherent, and comparative perspective on this little-known country.

Based on extensive research, this comparative study examines the past, present and future of management in the transitional economies of East and Central Europe, Russia, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam. It discusses the nature of the transition process, identifying different transition paths, highlighting common features and outlining useful theoretical approaches. Each chapter covers a wide range of aspects of management in the countries covered, including details of the historical and cultural background, the transition process, and both external and internal factors, and the macro and micro situation. Its multidisciplinary approach, makes this book suitable for both a practitioner and an academic readership