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This book brings together material on headhunting from several
Southeast Asia societies, examines its cultural contexts, and
relates them to colonial history, violence, and ritual.
In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing." Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways. Biographical Objects is an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.
The prognosis for individuals with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
(DMD) is improving, with some men with DMD living into their 30s
and 40s. More vital than ever, this book helps teachers and parents
to support children and young people with DMD with their education
and transition into adulthood. Leading experts on DMD explain
Duchenne and its impact in easy-to-understand terms. Going beyond
physical management, particular focus is put on learning and
behavioural issues, including speech delay and difficulty learning
to read, as well as common comorbid conditions, such as ADHD,
autism and OCD. Raising aspirations, the book gives guidance on
effective support in the classroom and advice on the transition to
adulthood, employment and independent living.
Typically, scholars approach migrants' religions as a safeguard of
cultural identity, something that connects migrants to their
communities of origin. This ethnographic anthology challenges that
position by reframing the religious experiences of migrants as a
transformative force capable of refashioning narratives of
displacement into journeys of spiritual awakening and missionary
calling. These essays explore migrants' motivations in support of
an argument that to travel inspires a search for new meaning in
religion.
This is the first book to bring together comparative material on
headhunting in a number of Southeast Asian societies, to examine
the cultural contexts in which such practices occurred, and to
relate them to colonial history, violence, and ritual. This volume
documents and analyzes headhunting practices and shows the
persistence of headhunting as a symbol or trope. Ethnographers of
seven regions (the Philippine highlands, Sarawak, Brunei, and South
Borneo, and the Indonesian islands of Sulkawesi, Sumba, and Timor)
share their experiences of living with former headhunters
(including an eyewitness account of a headhunting feast), attending
rituals, and collecting oral histories to understand the heritage
of headhunting in context. In asking what meaning taking heads has
assumed in the postcolonial era, they report on contemporary people
who reenact headhunts, often with effigies or surrogates for the
head itself. The essays trace the changes in the imagery of
headhunting, explaining why contemporary indigenous peoples fear
new predators in the form of government officials, Western
missionaries, Japanese businessmen, and tourists. This inversion of
traditional terrorism reimagines the violence of colonial conquest
and postcolonial control as a new form of predation against those
who were once headhunters themselves.
The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration,
fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established
civilisations and cultures of travel well before European explorers
arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The
twentieth century, with its various wars fought in and over the
Pacific, is only the most recent era to witness military strife and
economic competition. While "Asia Pacific" and "Pacific Rim" were
late twentieth-century terms that dealt with the importance of the
Pacific to the economic, political, and cultural arrangements that
span Asia and the Americas, a new term has arisen-the transpacific.
In the twenty-first century, U.S. efforts to dominate the ocean are
symbolized not only in the "Pacific pivot" of American policy but
also the development of a Transpacific Partnership. This
partnership brings together a dozen countries-not including
China-in a trade pact whose aim is to cement U.S. influence. That
pact signals how the transpacific, up to now an academic term, has
reached mass consciousness. Recognising the increasing importance
of the transpacific as a word and concept, this anthology proposes
a framework for transpacific studies that examines the flows of
culture, capital, ideas, and labour across the Pacific. These flows
involve Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. The
introduction to the anthology by its editors, Janet Hoskins and
Viet Thanh Nguyen, consider the advantages and limitations of
models found in Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American
studies for dealing with these flows. The editors argue that
transpacific studies can draw from all three in order to provide a
critical model for considering the geopolitical struggle over the
Pacific, with its attendant possibilities for inequality and
exploitation. Transpacific studies also sheds light on the cultural
and political movements, artistic works, and ideas that have arisen
to contest state, corporate, and military ambitions. In sum, the
transpacific as a concept illuminates how flows across the Pacific
can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance.
The anthology's contributors include geographers (Brenda S. A.
Yeoh, Weiqiang Lin), sociologists (Yen Le Espiritu, Hung Cam Thai),
literary critics (John Carlos Rowe, J. Francisco Benitez, Yunte
Huang, Viet Thanh Nguyen), and anthropologists (Xiang Biao, Heonik
Kwon, Nancy Lutkehaus, Janet Hoskins), as well as a historian
(Laurie J. Sears), and a film scholar (Akira Lippit). Together
these contributors demonstrate how a transpacific model can be
deployed across multiple disciplines and from varied locations,
with scholars working from the United States, Singapore, Japan and
England. Topics include the Cold War, the Chinese state, U.S.
imperialism, diasporic and refugee cultures and economies, national
cinemas, transpacific art, and the view of the transpacific from
Asia. These varied topics are a result of the anthology's purpose
in bringing scholars into conversation and illuminating how
location influences the perception of the transpacific. But
regardless of the individual view, what the essays gathered here
collectively demonstrate is the energy, excitement, and insight
that can be generated from within a transpacific framework.
Southeast Asian Lives presents life stories of ordinary people in
Southeast Asia, one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing
regions in the world. The narratives illustrate the richness of
life histories in revealing what it was like to go through the
wrenching social adjustments that accompanied successive political
transformations as Southeast Asia moved from colonialism through
wartime occupation by the Japanese to the emergence of new nation
states. The authors who present these life stories are all
anthropologists. Their narratives bear witness to fieldwork
encounters that gave rise to close, long term friendships with the
remarkable personalities whose lives are presented here, or with
their families. By explaining the cultural and historical context
of these highly personal, intimate accounts, the authors make them
accessible to the widest possible audience and show what a fertile
source such material can be for an anthropology that seeks to do
justice to personal experience. ""Southeast Asian Lives"" is a
valuable resource for anthropologists and for researchers studying
literature, history, biography and personal narratives. However,
the book is much more than that. These moving accounts of real
people adjusting to massive change offer a fascinating picture of
the world of Southeast Asia that will intrigue anyone living in or
concerned with this extraordinary region.
Janet Hoskins provides both an ethnographic study of the
organization of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a
theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern
world. Based on more than three years of field work with the Kodi
people of the island of Sumba, her book focuses on Kodi calendrical
rituals, exchange transactions, and confrontations with the
historical forces of the colonial and postcolonial world. Hoskins
explores the contingent, contested, and often contradictory
precedent of the past to show how local systems of knowledge are in
dialogue with wider historical forces.
Arguing that traditional temporality is more complex than many
theorists have realized, Hoskins highlights the flexibility and
relativity of local time concepts, whose sophistication belies the
cliche of simple societies living in a world outside of time.
Caodaism is a new religion born in Vietnam during the struggles of
decolonization, shattered and spatially dispersed by cold war
conflicts, now trying to reshape the goals of its four million
followers. Colorful and strikingly syncretistic, it incorporates
elements of Chinese, Buddhist, and Western religions as well as
more recent outstanding world figures like Victor Hugo, Jeanne
d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the United States) Joseph Smith,
the founder of Mormonism. The book looks at the connections between
“the age of revelations” (1925–1934) in French Indochina and
the “age of diaspora” (1975–present) when many Caodai leaders
and followers went into exile. Structured in paired biographies to
trace relations between masters and disciples, now separated by
oceans, it focuses on five members of the founding generation and
their followers or descendants in California, showing the
continuing obligation to honor those who forged the initial vision
to “bring the gods of the East and West together.” The
syncretism of the colonialperiod has been transformed by the
experience of exile into a diasporic formation, at the same time
that Caodaism in Vietnam has emerged from a period of severe
restrictions to return to the public arena. Caodaism forces us to
reconsider how anthropologistsstudy religious mixtures in
postcolonial settings, since its dynamics challenge the unconscious
Eurocentrism of our notions of how religions are bounded and
conceptualized.
Caodaism is a new religion born in Vietnam during the struggles of
decolonization, shattered and spatially dispersed by cold war
conflicts, now trying to reshape the goals of its four million
followers. Colorful and strikingly syncretistic, it incorporates
elements of Chinese, Buddhist, and Western religions as well as
more recent outstanding world figures like Victor Hugo, Jeanne
d'Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the United States) Joseph Smith, the
founder of Mormonism. The book looks at the connections between
"the age of revelations" (1925-1934) in French Indochina and the
"age of diaspora" (1975-present) when many Caodai leaders and
followers went into exile. Structured in paired biographies to
trace relations between masters and disciples, now separated by
oceans, it focuses on five members of the founding generation and
their followers or descendants in California, showing the
continuing obligation to honor those who forged the initial vision
to "bring the gods of the East and West together." The syncretism
of the colonialperiod has been transformed by the experience of
exile into a diasporic formation, at the same time that Caodaism in
Vietnam has emerged from a period of severe restrictions to return
to the public arena. Caodaism forces us to reconsider how
anthropologistsstudy religious mixtures in postcolonial settings,
since its dynamics challenge the unconscious Eurocentrism of our
notions of how religions are bounded and conceptualized.
Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized
in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously
beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The
authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this
understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with
attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From
tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television
broadcasts of Japanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber
paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese
emperor's palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger
to the political functions of classical Khmer images - the authors
challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new
ways of thinking about culture. The chapters consider art objects
as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are
experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances,
political and religious events and imagination, and in individual
peoples' lives; how they move from one context to another and
change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are
collected, traded, and looted or when their images appear in art
history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not
part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single
universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple,
divergent, and case-specific answers to the question ""What is the
use of art?"" and argue for the need to study art as it is used and
experienced.
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