In the past ten years, art historians have done research to explore Chinese “tastes” for luoti (literally: “unclothed bodies”) in Republican China, mainly focusing on the visual representations of nudes in fine art history as well as the related history of Western artistic education in the Shanghai area. Many scholars have noted that nudes, especially “Western” female nudes, appear frequently in print media; however, existing studies have not yet provided satisfying answers to the following questions: how was luoti understood in the Republican Era? How was luoti represented in the popular press, particularly in pictorials? From where did the “Western” nudes “flow” to China, eventually appearing in Chinese media? Who produced the nudes? Who (re-)arranged the nudes in the pictorials? How and why? The dissertation examines a large amount of textual and visual representations of luoti which were discussed, debated, and presented in illustrated newspapers and magazines of the 1920s-30s, such as Beiyang huabao 北洋畫報 (“Pei-yang Pictorial News,” 1926-1937), Shanghai manhua 上海漫畫 (“Shanghai Sketch,” 1928-1930), Sheying huabao 攝影畫報 (“Pictorial Weekly,” 1925-1937) and Linglong 玲瓏 (“Linloon Magazine,” 1931-1937). On the one hand, I investigate the genealogy and formation of a Chinese understanding of the term luoti, and analyze its linguistic and discursive variations in Chinese literature and public debates of the period. On the other hand, I deal with visual materials of the period, the theme and form of which has roots in Chinese historical heritage, and also largely resulted from the “cultural flows” at the time. Having systematically traced the (often Western) origins as well as the trajectories of dissemination of nude photographs, this study scrutinizes editorial strategies that aimed at incorporating nudes into periodical publications. Ultimately, I argue, editing visual and textual representations of luoti into pictorials was part of transcultural production, and “editorial agency” played a pivotal role in selecting, framing, contextualizing, and interpreting nudes. The culture of “uncovered bodies” was thus discovered.
The dissertation takes a transcultural approach toward Chinese caricatures the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their global connections, exploring their associations with the visual arts of the time. The study argues that Chinese caricatures emerged due to transcultural interactions, reflecting Chinese attempts to balance and even reverse asymmetries in visual presentations and power dynamics. The dissertation encompasses caricatures produced in China, including those published in colonial Hong Kong. By analyzing these caricatures, the study reveals how Chinese and foreign caricaturists overcame asymmetries in four critical aspects: the painting genre, publications, imagery and concepts. These visual agents manifested caricatures as a thriving art form for Chinese audiences, introduced Western-style humor magazines and caricatural visual languages, various foreign concepts, and ultimately created their unique caricatural expressions that connected with the global community.
In this work, we present methods to obtain a neural optical character recognition (OCR) tool for article blocks in a Republican Chinese newspaper. Our basis is a small fraction of the image corpus for which text ground truth exists. We introduce a character segmentation method which produces over 90,000 labeled images of single characters and train a GoogLeNet classifier as an OCR model. In addition, we create synthetic training data from character images extracted from Song-Ti fonts. Randomly augmented on the fly and used for pre-training, they increase OCR accuracy from 95.49% to 96.95% on our test set. Finally, we employ post-OCR correction based on a pre-trained masked language model and present heuristics to select the required hyperparameters, by which we are able to correct 16% of remaining classification errors, increasing accuracy on the test set to 97.44%.
It is tempting to assume that FAIR data principles effectively apply globally. In practice, digital research platforms play a central role in ensuring the applicability of these principles to research exchange, where General Data Protection Regulation (EU) and Multi Level Protection Scheme 2.0 (PRC) provide the overarching legal frameworks. For this article, we conduct a systematic review of research into Chinese Republican newspapers as it appears in Chinese academic journal databases. We experimentally compare the results of repeated search runs using different interfaces and with different points of origin. We then analyze our results regarding the practical and technical accessibility conditions. Concluding with an analysis of conceptual mismatches surrounding the classification of items as “full-text“, and of a case of total data loss that is nevertheless symptomatic of the limited degree of data re-usability. Our results show structural challenges preventing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-usability from being put into practice. Since these experiments draw upon our Digital Humanities (DH) research, we include a state-of-the-field overview of historical Periodicals and digitization research in the PRC. Our research on the one hand addresses DH practitioners interested in digital collections, and technical aspects of document processing with a focus on historical Chinese sources. On the other hand, our experience is helpful to researchers irrespective of the topic. Our article is accompanied by a data publication containing sources and results of our experiments, as well as an online bibliography of the research articles we collected.
This study shows that photography, despite its use in the colonial conquests of the second half of the nineteenth century, came to empower actors in East Asia and became one of the tactics that allowed them to contest and reverse unequal power structures. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese revolutionary movements envisioned photojournalism as one of the tools that would lead to their plan to transform the Chinese nation from a dynastic empire into a republic. A close reading of press photographs issued in the anarchist illustrated journal Le Monde (1907) and the Revolutionary Alliance-affiliated The True Record (1912-1913), edited and published in the Chinese language in the transcultural contexts of Paris and Shanghai, sheds light on the tactical uses of photography as a mean of resistance in the context of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. Furthermore, by focusing on the images and artefacts developed and used by Sinophone actors including politicians Li Shizeng, Wu Hui, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Jingjiang, and also by the prominent Lingnan artists Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren, this dissertation remarks on the relevance of the photographic historian’s choice of sources. If the exclusive consultation of the colonial archive supports and perpetrates the perception of photography as a means of colonial violence, considering different visual archival sources and local uses of the camera uncovers a radically different story.
This dissertation examines the dynamics of knowledge production and transcultural interactions in Ming-Qing China and Tokugawa Japan through the lens of famine plant manuals, i.e. writings that center on edible plants for use in times of food shortages. I argue that this genre was created out of the specific socioeconomic settings in pre-modern East Asia where food shortage proved to be a recurring theme, by a transnational epistemic community that shared interests in the natural world and concern for governmental affairs. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of knowledge transformation and cultural interconnections: in the historical world of the Sinosphere where the learned elites shared a “high culture” written language and a rich literary tradition, most visibly embodied by the Sinitic script, concepts were expressed in words that did not cross borders via translation, but via their recontextualization and co-articulation in new socio-cultural and linguistic realities. Drawing evidence from administrative manuals, medical texts, local gazetteers and private notes, my findings suggest four main points concerning the shuffling classifications and hierarchies of famine food knowledge. First, despite that state intervention in famine relief was framed as Confucian signs of benevolent rule, famine plant manuals were created as responses to the limitations of the governments’ capacities to implement relief campaigns. Second, although derived from the bencao (materia medica) genre, famine plant manuals were largely devoid of medical interest and thus provided an alternative approach to natural history. The understanding of famine foods was shaped by the accessible natural resources and by epistemic interconnections within pre-modern East Asia, and such understanding also transformed the planning and utilization of the natural world, generating new knowledge about it. Third, although the increasing availability of textual knowledge about famine plants benefitted from the flourishing commercial publishing industry, the production and circulation of famine plant manuals featured a not-for-profit logic, underlined as a benevolent and charitable cause. Fourth, famine plant manuals negotiated between diverse knowledge fields, with statecraft and bencao in particular. On the one hand, they were tailored to governmental purposes and became absorbed in an all-encompassing famine relief discourses. On the other hand, they broadened the range of objects of investigation in the study of the natural world and suggested a de-medicalized approach.
This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of contemporary art in Kolkata. It closely follows several individual artists and art groups who endeavour to defy established conventions and create new works of art. Yet, confronted with a new work of art, a doubt sets in. Wasn’t this made before? Can we be sure that it’s not a copy? The doubt of novelty and originality has always troubled the visual arts, and was particularly pronounced in (post)colonial Calcutta, where works were condemned by some as belated repetitions of European modern art. Convictions of belatedness have been successfully debunked, but with the emergence of ‘contemporary’ art the doubt of novelty emerges yet again. To understand the predicament of artistic novelty this dissertation unfolds a cyclical ritual theory of contemporary art that includes the practices surrounding the artwork, while not forgetting the artwork itself – an analysis that involves the entire set of practices implicated in the production, exhibition, circulation, and preservation of art. This theory is subsequently applied to the field of contemporary art in Kolkata. The ethnographic chapters focus on the tension between artistic attempts to make new works of art and the various limitations that artists encounter; artists are not just caught up in artistic conventions, but are simultaneously impeded by limited economic means and trapped in a peripheral position where they always seem to lag behind, caught up in a city that doesn’t seem to live up to its own history. Yet, by making ambiguous works that resonate with the city in various ways, artists defy conventions, bypass limitations, and offer moments in which the world can be experienced anew.
Magisterarbeit eingereicht an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Johann W. Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main, April 1984. Die Arbeit behandelt die vermeintlich dem daoistischen Meister Lü Dongbin (Tang-Dynastie) zugeschriebenen Kommentare zum Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching, Laozi, Lao-Tzu). Diese reichen in ihrem Spektrum von philosophischen Spekulationen zu handfesten und praktischen Anweisungen alchemischer bzw. meditativer Praktiken (neidan, waidan). Sechs Kommentare wurden identifiziert und analysiert. Von jedem Kommentartext wurden die Kapitel 1, 6 und 18 übersetzt und näher betrachtet.
Day by day account of a journey through the People's Republic of China in the winter of 1981/1982. Travel dates: December 10, 1981 to February 18, 1982. Travelers: Yennie Shen, and Thomas Hahn. The two would spend later three years studying and working in China, from 1984-87. The diary covers 17 cities and two famous mountains in ten provinces. 1981 was the first year the PRC allowed individuals to enter the country (vs. organized groups and tours). Many places were not accessible at the time, and Deng Xiaoping's reform movement hadn't yet taken hold. After the economic and ideological shock wave of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the country was just now slowly reorienting itself towards an uncertain future.
Emily Graf examines social practices of commemorating writers as cultural heroes in memorial museums from a global perspective, placing the institutionalization of the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) at the center of her investigation. She asks how writers are remembered and forgotten in and by space. If they are remembered, how does their display in memorial museums produce the image of the writer as hero?
Author museums have been treated with much skepticism in literary studies, as they encourage an author-focused reading rejected by scholars of New Criticism and reader-reception theorists alike. The concept of the “author-as-hero” immediately triggers a scholar’s hermeneutics of suspicion, rejecting such institutions for their instrumentalization of the author (most visibly by the nation- or more intensely the so-called “propaganda-state”) and for seducing the naïve reader to become a literary tourist or unwitting worshiper. Thus author museums still form an under-researched field in (world/ comparative) literary studies and within museology go unnoticed due to their marginality as a museum genre. Thus the cultural-moral proscription that the author ought not be treated as hero continues to exist largely detached from a world-wide social practice of commemorating writers as heroes by societies around the globe.
What agency do objects, human actors and institutional structures gain in the process of making a literary hero? And since a hero’s charisma is by definition volatile, how does this production change over time? Taking into account the interdependencies and inequalities within world literature, Graf also investigates how the display of one writer is connected to other writers in memorial museums across the globe. What kinds of material links can be found to other literary or political heroes in their living spaces, their collections of objects and books or their visual representations in photographs, paintings or sculptures? How can these connections within a larger hero genealogy hinder or facilitate the writer being remembered or forgotten?
Graf’s thesis approaches the existence of literary heroes as a social reality, arguing that the author-as-hero as he is mediated and commemorated in museum space forms a Second Body of the writer beyond his mortal physical one. This Second Body has proven resilient to critical approaches, which is why this thesis goes beyond such a critical approach, not unmasking the differences between the writer’s representation and the writer as a historical figure, but inquiring why these differences occur and how they affect a society’s memory of a particular writer. Three representatives of left-wing literature, Lu Xun, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Lai He (1894-1943), are the object of this research, precisely because processes of their valorization in the aesthetic and political realm are strongly entangled and are thus prone to be dismantled by critical approaches as mere ideologically motivated instrumentalizations of writers. Lu Xun was institutionalized in museum space in the PRC in the 1950s under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, Bertolt Brecht in the GDR in the 1970s under the Socialist Unity Party and Lai He in Taiwan in the 1990s under the increasing influence of the Democratic Progressive Party. During their lifetime in the first-half of the twentieth century, these three figures had aesthetically been connected in their roles as left-wing writers, remote from the literary and political center of left-wing literature localized in Moscow but stretched across national borders into China, Germany and Taiwan. Their institutionalization, however, took place each in a different temporal and socio-historical setting, revealing differing processes of valorization of the heroic.
As sources, Graf’s study draws on written and oral histories of author museums. Interviews with current and retired museum directors, museum staff and literary scholars provide insights into the production of Lu Xun, Bertolt Brecht and Lai He. On-site interviews with visitors along with their guest-book entries from recent and past visits help understand their museums’ reception. Archival material, such as photographs of past exhibitions, further enable her to reconstruct former representations of the writers for a diachronical reading of their display and recent reports to superior institutions (such as the State Administration of Cultural Heritage or the Akademie der Künste (Ost)) reveal where museums are localized in their national network of cultural institutions.
The transcultural research perspective taken in this project is mirrored in the overall structure of the thesis. It takes scale as its defining criterion and structuring element. The focus on scale avoids the pitfalls of case studies, as these would either remain within the boundaries of national literatures or allow only for comparative readings, which help to highlight similarities and differences, but can fail to explain where these derive from. Instead of the common linear book structure featuring chapters that build on one another, Graf’s ambition is to analyze Lu Xun, Bertolt Brecht and Lai He by approaching them from two directions. The reader can either start from a specific “piece” of material literary heritage (e.g. Lu Xun’s death mask) and zoom out to the field of world literary heritage (including the accessibility of Brecht’s Sterbezimmer in the GDR or Lai He’s entry into a literary martyr shrine in Taiwan ruled by martial law). Alternatively, the reader can start from the field of world literary heritage and zoom in to Lu Xun’s museum – into the museum’s attic – where discarded busts of Maxim Gorky and Mao Zedong, covered in dust, are slipping from the collective memory of Lu Xun. Accordingly, this thesis can be read from two directions. The reader can either choose to start with the macro or micro level, can choose to take a step closer or a step back. As a result, the thesis has two official titles:
Lu Xun on Display: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of World Literary Heritage or
The Materiality of World Literary Heritage: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of Lu Xun.
The motivation to approach the material display of Lu Xun, Bertolt Brecht and Lai He in this manner is methodological. It has two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to tackle one of the fundamental challenges of interdisciplinarity in today’s academic order, which recurrently confronts us with the crucial question: What readership do we address? By offering two starting points, the aim of this project is to address two different readerships in particular: Sinologists trained in Chinese history, literature and culture are very familiar with Lu Xun and can start from a specific object on display, well aware of the degree to which Lu Xun as writer and historic figure has been valorized in Chinese literary criticism and historiography. Readers who are not familiar with Chinese literature but have a background in (trans-) cultural studies, (comparative) literature or material heritage studies can start from the global perspective on what this thesis defines as “world literary heritage” and slowly, step by step, approach the Chinese writer Lu Xun from a global perspective to learn more about his specific case. Secondly, the two directions aim to question a unilateral process of valorization in society, addressing the question: Who attributes value to whom? Read back to back, this thesis reveals that the process of attributing value to the writer Lu Xun is circular, not unilateral. It is not Lu Xun’s inherent value as a writer that inevitably leads him to be displayed in a museum (the author makes the museum), nor can his institutionalization in museum space guarantee his value in society (the museum makes the author). Especially in a globally interconnected museum landscape, in which literary tourists and pilgrims travel to sites of memories outside of their own linguistic and cultural sphere, both directions of valorization must be taken into consideration when trying to make sense of the making of the author-as-hero. This lesson from twentieth-century authors holds true in the context of the increased mobility of literary pilgrims and circulation of material heritage in the twenty-first century, in which their memories are being kept alive. But a return to the author as a “national hero” also shows indications of continued attempts to localize writers firmly within national borders, attempts which reveal the importance of taking author museums seriously as sites of collective memory.
Im Unabhängigkeitskampf an der Seite Gandhis und des Indischen Nationalkongresses, entwickelte sich der Politiker und Intellektuelle Rammanohar Lohia (1910-1967) im postkolonialen Indien zu einem kontroversen Kritiker Premierminister Nehrus. Die historiografische Arbeit widmet sich mit der Oppositionspolitik einem wenig beachteten Aspekt seines politischen Lebens. Anhand einer Untersuchung von Lohias Schriften werden mit Demokratie und gewaltfreiem außer-konstitutionellem Widerstand zwei prägende Elemente seines politischen Denkens und Lebens identifiziert. Mithilfe von Presseberichten werden seine individuellen und kollektiven Satyagraha-Kampagnen der 1950er-Jahre rekonstruiert und als parteipolitische Strategie analysiert, mit denen demokratischer Wandel herbeigeführt werden sollte. Schließlich wendet sich die Arbeit den Reaktionen in Regierung, öffentlicher Meinung und Wählerschaft zu und bringt dabei Widersprüche zutage im Umgang mit dem Erbe der Nationalbewegung und der Rolle gewaltfreier Proteste. Im Ganzen zeigt sich Lohia ebenso als Stütze der jungen parlamentarischen Demokratie liberalen Zuschnitts wie als Verfechter außer-konstitutionellen Widerstands mit populistischen Neigungen. Nicht zuletzt leistete er einen Beitrag, Gandhis Methoden des Unabhängigkeitskampfes in das Nehruvian India zu überführen, das sich seinerseits gewisser kolonialstaatlicher Traditionen nicht entledigen konnte.
This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.
How do autocratic regimes maintain stability and why are some more durable than others? This study argues that the concept of social control adds value in explaining durable autocracies and attempts to connect the scholarship on social control with autocracy research. To that end, this study develops a theoretical framework of social control system, which combines ideological, physical, and daily life control. These control mechanisms can be implemented reactively or proactively and, depending on the circumstances, they either work alone or simultaneously to maximize the effect of control. To test the theory of the social control system, this dissertation conducts an in-depth case study on North Korea. It uses North Korean publications and declassified documents on North Korea from its former communist allies as primary sources as well as secondary literature to provide background information and apply theoretical explanation. North Korea is a highly repressive and long-lasting dictatorship that has undergone three-generational hereditary succession despite various hardships. I examine three critical episodes when the stability of the North Korean regime was severely challenged. These three cases are examined chronologically and the chosen temporal periods match the periods of the three leaders of North Korea – from the founder Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il and the incumbent leader Kim Jong Un. I argue that the North Korean regime survived political shocks and maintained stability due to its social control system and its adaptation to the changing circumstances.
It is tempting to assume that FAIR data principles effectively apply globally. In practice, digital research platforms play a central role in ensuring the applicability of these principles to research exchange, where General Data Protection Regulation (EU) and Multi-Level Protection Scheme 2.0 (PRC) provide the overarching legal frameworks. For this article, we conduct a systematic review of research into Chinese Republican newspapers as it appears in Chinese academic journal databases. We experimentally compare the results of repeated search runs using different interfaces and with different points of origin. We then analyze our results regarding the practical and technical accessibility conditions. Concluding with an analysis of conceptual mismatches surrounding the classification of items as “full-text“, and of a case of total data loss that is nevertheless symptomatic of the limited degree of data re-usability. Our results show structural challenges preventing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability from being put into practice. Since these experiments draw upon our Digital Humanities (DH) research, we include a state-of-the-field overview of historical Periodicals and digitization research in the PRC. Our research on the one hand addresses DH practitioners interested in digital collections, and technical aspects of document processing with a focus on historical Chinese sources. On the other hand, our experience is helpful to researchers irrespective of the topic. Our article is accompanied by a data publication containing sources and results of our experiments, as well as an online bibliography of the research articles we collected.
Academic research about digital non-Latin script (hereafter: NLS) research data can pose a number of challenges just because the material is from a region where the Latin alphabet was not used. Not all of them are easy to spot. In this paper, I introduce two use cases to demonstrate different aspects of the complex tasks that may be related to NLS material. The first use case focuses on metadata standards used to describe NLS material. Taking the VRA Core 4 XML as example, I will show where we found limitations for NLS material and how we were able to overcome them by expanding the standard. In the second use case, I look at the research data itself. Although the full-text digitization of western newspapers from the 20th century usually is not problematic anymore, this is not the case for Chinese newspapers from the Republican era (1912–1949). A major obstacle here is the dense and complex layout of the pages, which prevents OCR solutions from getting to the character recognition part. In our approach, we are combining different manual and computational methods like crowdsourcing, pattern recognition, and neural networks to be able to process the material in a more efficient way. The two use cases illustrate that data standards or processing methods that are established and stable for Latin script material may not always be easily adopted to non-Latin script research data.
Out of the looting tunnels on Tell Nebi Yunus at Nineveh, which were dug into the ruins of the Late Assyrian military palace by henchmen of the so-called Islamic State, there came, amongst other objects, relief panels featuring anthropomorphic representations. These figures, shown in frontal view, are unusual when compared to the wider repertoire of Assyrian images known from the royal palaces on Kuyunjik. The decoration and context of these stone slabs raise questions regarding their function.
My dissertation project is centred on the artistic interaction between China, Paris and Vienna in the early 20th century. Academic studies have generally agreed that Asian modernism was affiliated with European modernism. Based on this consensus, scholars have cast Asian artists as the recipients of modern European art. My project challenges this argument by studying the interplay of spatial orders, communication systems and the dynamic mobility of art and artists in this time period. In my research, I found an interactive relationship between Europe and Asia in which it was not only Europeans who influenced Asians, but Asians also inspired Europeans. Each learnt equally from the other, and the formation of modernism was built upon this cultural exchange. Through tracing the circulation of various artworks and artistic ideas between China, Paris and Vienna, this research seeks to clarify artists’ underlying strategies of applying exotic cultures, the strong interaction of artistic languages, and the coexistence of values of understanding modern art. According to the instability and complexity of culture, the dissertation’s structure follows two artistic threads "drawings" and "decorative art" in order to analyze from a micro perspective. In the end, this research intends to demonstrate that the invention of modernism was an entangled and complex process based on cultural mobility.
This paper introduces the Early Chinese Periodicals Online database (ECPO), based at the University of Heidelberg. It offers a short overview of the development of this research-driven database as it grew to incorporate additional projects. Today, the ECPO hosts a variety of textual and visual sources from the Republican period (1912 – 1949), as well as biographical data of twentieth-century academic and political elites. We aim to show how this database can be used and extended to pursue historical network research, even for scholars previously unfamiliar with digital infrastructures. The concluding part discusses privacy concerns in data curation and management, which are increasingly relevant for studies of twentieth-century actors and limit the potential to release and reuse these datasets, especially if they pertain to the People’s Republic of China’s political history.
Das Wolkenheimkloster liegt südwestlich der Stadt Peking, ungefähr 75 km vom Stadtzentrum entfernt. Bis heute werden dort etwa 15.000 Steinplatten mit buddhistischen Sutrentexten aufbewahrt, die vom Anfang des 7. bis zum Ende des 12. Jhs. angefertigt worden sind. Ein kleiner Teil befindet sich in der Donnerklanghöhle, der einzig zugänglichen und frühsten von insgesamt neun Höhlen auf dem Steinsutren-Berg. Die Texte darin sind ausnahmslos einseitig auf Steinplatten gemeißelt und in die Wände eingesetzt. Sie wurden im Jahr 616 oder kurz davor fertiggestellt. Der weitaus größte Teil Steinsutren lagert jedoch in acht verschlossenen Höhlen und in einer Grube unter einer kleinen Pagode neben der großen Südpagode.
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, diese umfangreichste steinerne Bibliothek der Welt in ihrer Ganzheit zu verstehen. Dazu wird zum einen die Entwicklungen innerhalb des 500 Jahre andauernden Projekts sichtbar gemacht und zum anderen die Rolle des Steins als Textträger untersucht. Wie der Untertitel „Typologie und Materialität“ zeigt, besteht die Dissertation aus zwei Teilen. Der erste und umfangreichste Teil ist die typologische Untersuchung der Textträger. Eine systematische Erschließung des gesamten Bestands gemäß Gestalt und Layout zeigt, welche Typen von Steinsutren im Wolkenheimkloster hergestellt wurden. Aufbauend auf diese Untersuchung sollen unter anderem folgende Fragen beantwortet werden: Können die verschiedenen Typen in eine chronologische Reihenfolge gebracht werden? Hat die sich phasenweise entwickelnde Herstellung zur Wandlung der Typen geführt? Hatten die jeweiligen Typen Vorbilder oder wurden sie eigenständig im Wolkenheimkloster entwickelt? Ein wichtiges Ergebnis dieser Arbeit ist es, mit der Klassifizierung es erstmalig ein Instrument zur Datierung der bisher undatierten Steinplatten zur Verfügung zu stellen. Mithilfe der datierten Prototypen lassen sich Rückschlüsse auf die Herstellungszeit der undatierten Steinplatten ziehen. Danach folgen Überlegungen über ihre jeweilige Herkunft, sowie Beispiele. Im zweiten Teil wird die Herstellung der Steinsutren im Wolkenheimkloster eingebettet in die Geschichte der Entwicklung der chinesischen buddhistischen Sutrentexten betrachtet. Dazu werden die gegenseitigen Einflüsse zwischen den buddhistischen Handschriften, Druckschriften und Steininschriften analysiert.
This thesis consists of five chapters: the first three deal with the evolution of Chinese foreign aid from its inception to the publishing of China’s first foreign aid White Paper in 2011; the two remaining chapters are reform case studies taking us up to the present. Chapter 1, “Relational Foreign Aid: Tracing the Origins of the Chinese Aid Thinking”, traces the origins of the concepts that are considered basic principles of China’s foreign aid today and explains when and in which context they were formulated first. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that China’s early foreign aid was likely influenced by interactions between the Chinese Communists and the representatives of the United States in China. It shows, in particular, how the Communists’ attempts to obtain economic assistance from the U.S. and the U.S.’s denial of ideological grounds on ideological grounds appear to have shaped the principle of political non-interference. Finally, chapter 1 argues that Chinese foreign aid was relational, in the sense of trying to find “common interests” (gongtong liyi 共同利益) in order to create relational power and overcome the international isolation China was faced with after 1949, and claim the China seat from the Republic of China (on Taiwan) in the United Nations General Assembly. Drawing on the Relational Theory of world politics, proposed by Qin Yaqing’s 秦亚青 (2018), it analyses how foreign aid was linked to constructed common interest of building economic independence, which China saw as a precondition for political independence. In the process, this chapter challenges several dominant assumptions: first, that foreign aid was dominated by Mao Zedong and driven by ideology, and second, that Chinese aid was “merely an extension of Soviet aid”. Chapter 2, “The Long March to “Win-Win”: Assembling Chinese Foreign Aid Thinking”, continues my historical enquiry and fills a gap that has been largely neglected in the research on Chinese foreign aid: the years between 1978 and 1995. It zooms in on government-linked foreign aid discourses and argues that the major foreign aid reform of 1995, namely the introduction of foreign aid concessional loans (对外援助优惠贷款) managed by the newly set-up China Exim Bank, were the outcome of a reform process, that started in 1979. Thereby, the chapter first debunks the assumptions that foreign aid lost its importance with the new leadership, often found in the literature on Chinese aid. It shows that, quite to the contrary, it was in 1979 (at least according to known documents) that foreign aid was explicitly called a strategic foreign policy tool, which was indispensable to secure a stable international environment for China’s modernisation policy. It argues that the new “Four Principles of Economic and Technical Co-operation” (Jingji jishu hezuo de si xiang yuanze经济技术合作的四项原则), whose emphasis on “co-operation” was perceived by many as a departure from aid, in fact, represented an attempt to strike a delicate balance between finding ways to maintain good relations with recipients and to promote China’s own economic development. Second, this chapter uses primary and secondary source material to show that the shift away from aid toward economic co-operation-which China’s government had indeed sought and which works on Chinese aid or Sino-African relations repeatedly described as having occurred in the early 1980s-essentially did not take place. This happened only after China faced a new crisis: the Tian’anmen square protests, which ended with a violent crackdown and led to sanctions imposed by Western countries. It was then perceived as necessary to significantly increase aid to developing countries in order to ensure their political support – and this, in turn, led to the creation of foreign aid concessional loans as a new mode of aid delivery. Finally, the chapter argues that in order to understand the thinking and action logic behind Chinese foreign aid today, one has to understand the assemblage of Chinese concessional loans. Chapter 3, “Chinese Aid Meets the West – Tracing (Hidden) Reform Debates”, discusses how contrary to widespread assumptions in the West that behind Chinese aid there was a clearly defined strategy, the Chinese aid system was (and in fact, still is) characterised by policy experimentation. As argued by Sebastian Heilmann (2018, 111), policy experimentation has been an asset and the key to the adaptability of China’s political economy, allowing this authoritarian regime to find innovative solutions to long-standing or newly emerging challenges. Yet, in foreign aid policy experimentation has created a system that is described as highly complex, fragmented and ineffective by its stakeholders. The chapter follows a foreign aid reform debate that started in 2010 – and initiated a reform process that is still ongoing. Although this debate addressed many of the concerns DAC donors voiced towards Chinese aid after 2005, it remained “hidden” because it was conducted almost exclusively in Chinese. The chapter concludes by analysing the first visible outcome of this (hidden) reform debate: the White Paper on China’s Foreign Aid which was published in 2011 and spelt out the official master narrative for Chinese foreign aid for the first time in the history of Chinese aid. Chapter 4, “Reform of the Foreign Aid Administration” and Chapter 5, “Credit Risk Management Regulations for Chinese Policy Banks”, introduce two reform case studies: The first case study deals with the introduction of the first comprehensive legal document on foreign aid, the “Measures for the Administration of Foreign Aid” in 2014 (MOFCOM 2014b), and the establishment of the new foreign aid agency China Internationa Development Co-operation Agency (CIDCA) in 2018, which replaced the Ministry of Commerce as the lead administration actor for foreign aid. The second case study deals with the introduction of new credit risk management regulations for China’s two policy banks, China Development Bank (CDB) 国家开发银行 and China Export-Import (Exim) Bank 中国进出口银行, which issue Chinese government loans to developing countries: the “Measures for the Supervision and Administration” (Jiandu guanli banfa 监督管理办法), issued in November 2017. The function of the case studies is not only to analyse the legal documents and legal processes at the centre of both reforms. Rather, they serve as exemplary cases of how major reforms, which addressed aspects of Chinese aid that have been hotly debated in the West, went completely unnoticed because the related information was available only in Chinese. Furthermore, the case studies are also methodological suggestions on how to trace reforms as they unfold. The thesis concludes with five arguments: China’s foreign aid is relational; it is based on policy experimentation; it is guided by historical memory, which is in part responsible for the fact that China’s foreign aid is an externalisation of China’s domestic modernisation policy; China’s foreign aid is not a China story but a global story, it is embedded in a global context and has been directly or indirectly shaped by global shifts.
Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Auseinandersetzung chinesischsprachiger Wissenschaftler mit dem Werk Carl Schmitts zwischen 1989 und 2018. Von der Niederschlagung der Proteste auf dem Tiananmen Platz bis zur Änderung der Verfassung im März 2018 untersucht sie die Wirkung dieser Auseinandersetzung entlang des Wandels im Liberalismusdiskurs und zeigt, wie sich von Schmitt inspirierte Positionen zunehmend auch in wissenschaftlichen Debatten um einen „Sozialistischen Rechtsstaat chinesischer Prägung“ durchsetzen.
Mit der Analyse der chinesischsprachigen Beiträge zum „Schmitt-Fieber“ in ihren vielfältigen globalen Verflechtungen verknüpft die Arbeit eine Wirkungsgeschichte Schmitts im Sinne einer History of Political Thought mit Ansätzen einer Global Intellectual History und deren Fokus auf Prozessen der Übersetzung und Adaption von Begriffen.
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die zentralen Debatten zwischen britischen und indischen Tierschützern und dem Kolonialstaat in Britisch-Indien im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (ca. 1870-1920). Dabei wird vor allem danach gefragt, welche Arten von Gewalt gegen nichtmenschliche Tiere als Tierquälerei klassifiziert und durch koloniale Gesetze reguliert wurden. Der Einfluss der an diesen Debatten beteiligten Tierschutz-Aktivisten auf das Verständnis von Tierquälerei war deshalb von Relevanz, weil diese Akteure die kolonialen Tierschutzgesetze mitprägten und in Tierschutz-Publikationen über die Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen in Indien diskutierten. Die bislang wenig untersuchte Transkulturalität der Austauschprozesse zwischen englischen und indischen Tierschutz-Aktivisten bei der Formierung eines globalen Tierschutz-Diskurses bildet den Hauptuntersuchungsgegenstand dieser Arbeit.
Chinese porcelain is not simply a material product, but a transcultural medium, with a long history that has been preserved in museums and by collectors all over the world. Unlike tea, spices, and (to some extent) silk, which are difficult to trace since they were all consumed at their destinations, trade porcelain is a special medium, durable enough to survive to the present day. By the early 16th century, the Portuguese and Spanish had opened the sea route to China. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Netherlands, England, and other European countries also joined this lucrative trade. During the 17th century, possessing and displaying Chinese export porcelain, known as ‘white gold,’ became a status symbol among European aristocrats, as evidenced by the porcelain rooms of Europe’s royal families, such as the stunning one in the Palace of Charlottenburg built for Sophie Charlotte, the second wife of Frederick III, King of Prussia. Naturally, European potters attempted to replicate this exotic curiosity to cut down on or eliminate the cost of importing it. The Dutch were the first to imitate Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in a small town called Delft. However, this so-called ‘faience’ was not true porcelain, as it did not quite match the quality of Chinese porcelain. In 1709, the formula for “real” porcelain was discovered after much experimentation at Meissen by Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719). Forming a transcultural circle, European culture was also appropriated to Chinese official wares, especially from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century. This dissertation has paid close attention to the painted enamel ware in the Qing court, a new art form introduced by the envoys and missionaries from Europe. My analysis focus on three aspects of representations: interaction, appropriation, and adaptation. The main goal of this study was to investigate the bi-directional interflow of Chinese and European porcelain during the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing on the complex systems of artisans in kilns, workshops, courts, and ateliers and how they mutually appropriated techniques and ideas.
How to design a database of historical periodicals that can be used for research and teaching? In this section, Liying Sun and Matthias Arnold (members of the Research Cluster ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at Heidelberg University) present a newly established database of Chinese women’s magazines.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Frage nach der Einbettung der Tempel in das Sozialgefüge der Stadt. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht dabei das Personal dieser Tempel: die Priester und Kultfunktionäre, die den reibungslosen Ablauf des täglichen Kults sicherstellten, ebenso wie Handwerker oder Köche, deren Tätigkeiten im Zusammenhang mit dem Kultbetrieb standen. Die über 1.000 Alltagsdokumente aus den Archiven der Stadt Aššur erlauben, familiäre, berufliche und ökonomische Verbindungen zwischen Individuen zu rekonstruieren. Damit ermöglichen sie einen für die neuassyrische Zeit einmalig detaillierten Einblick in die Lebenswelten dieser Menschen.
Academic research about digital non-Latin script (hereafter: NLS) research data can pose a number of challenges just because the material is from a region where the Latin alphabet was not used. Not all of them are easy to spot. In this paper, I introduce two use cases to demonstrate different aspects of the complex tasks that may be related to NLS material. The first use case focuses on metadata standards used to describe NLS material. Taking the VRA Core 4 XML as example, I will show where we found limitations for NLS material and how we were able to overcome them by expanding the standard. In the second use case, I look at the research data itself. Although the full text digitization of western newspapers from the 20th century usually is not problematic anymore, this is not the case for Chinese newspapers from the Republican era (1912-1949). A major obstacle here is the dense and complex layout of the pages, which prevents OCR solutions to get to the character recognition part. In our approach, we are combining different manual and computational methods, like crowdsourcing, pattern recognition, and neural networks to be able to process the material in a more efficient way. The two use cases illustrate that data standards or processing methods which are established and stable for Latin script material may not always be easily adopted to non-Latin script research data.
After a long and elaborate production process, a ceramic or porcelain object comes into being as a finished work. Hence, any further handling of this finished work, especially to directly and physically alter it, would immediately arrest one’s attention. A number of research and catalogues are dedicated to the mounting, inscription, and reproduction of Chinese porcelain in different epochs and geographic locations. Such projects are principally committed to reconstructing the historical facts and presenting images of these objects and they provide immensely valuable material for this dissertation. However, scant research has explored the relation between the objects and their social and political contexts in a way that attends to the power system in which they operated. In establishing this relation, this dissertation studies the entrenchment of these artefacts in circuits of power, with a particular focus on the ownership of Chinese porcelain in eighteenth-century Europe and China. This power relation is highly complex, with the possessors discussed in this dissertation having diverse geographic and ethnic origins. By means of four case studies, this dissertation explores how possessors in Europe and China handled Chinese porcelain possession in both concrete and abstract terms. Through their handlings, the possessors intentionally asserted or emphasized their legitimate ownership, and at the same time utilized the porcelain pieces as a medium for the strategic achievement of their aims and functions.
Im Bereich der Komplementär- und Alternativmedizin (CAM) werden seit ca. 40 Jahren zunehmend Therapien angeboten und rezipiert, welche religiöse oder spirituelle Assoziationen wecken können. Viele dieser Medizinsysteme bezeichnen ihren Ansatz in Abgrenzung zur sogenannten „Evidenzbasierten Medizin“, die als fragmentierend empfunden werden kann, als „ganzheitlich“. Als Begründung hierfür dient in diesen CAM-Angeboten oft die postulierte Einheit von "Körper, Geist und Seele", auch der Bereich einer "Spiritualität" wird in den entsprechenden Therapiemethoden häufig integriert. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden paradigmatisch Ayurveda-Einrichtungen in Deutschland untersucht: Feldforschungen mit dichter Beschreibung des Settings und teilnehmender Beobachtung, qualitative Interviews mit Patient:innen und eine Internetanalyse des medialen Auftretens werden dazu herangezogen. Aus der Arbeit ergibt sich, dass empirisch der Anspruch auf Ganzheitlichkeit in keinem Medizinsystem erfüllt werden kann. Eine historische und interdisziplinäre Analyse zeigt die enge Verflechtung des sogenannten „Holistischen Milieus“, in welchem sich die CAM verorten lässt, mit zugeschriebenen spirituellen Erwartungen und Erfahrungen. Die erhobenen Befunde werden mit religionswissenschaftlichen Methoden (Materiale Religion, Religionsästhetik) analysiert, diese werden dann mit anthropologischen, kognitions - und neurowissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen transdisziplinär zusammengeführt. Durch diese Methodentriangulation kann gezeigt werden, wie es durch die „sensorische Wucht“ der sinnlichen Eindrücke einer Ayurveda-Einrichtung in Verbindung mit kognitiven Prägungen und einer „perzeptiven Synthese“ der Wahrnehmungen emisch im entsprechenden Setting zum Erleben und zur Erfahrung von „Ganzheitlichkeit“ – teils verbunden mit „spirituellen“ Erfahrungen – kommt. Der Autor, welcher Religionswissenschaftler und Internist ist, verweist in einer Zusammenfassung auf mögliche Konsequenzen für die Evidenzbasierte Medizin.
Die vorliegende Fallstudie untersucht die unterschiedlichen Formen, in denen die Bewohner des alevitischen Dorfes Bicir in der Provinz Malatya ihre rituelle Praxis im 20. Jh. bewahrten und weitergaben. Ausgangspunkt sind Handschriften aus den 1950er Jahren, in denen sich zwei religiöse Autoritäten des Dorfes ritualrelevante Notizen in Osmanisch-Türkisch machten. Ausgehend von diesen Manuskripten erforscht Janina Karolewski mit einer Kombination philologisch-historischer und ethnologischer Methoden die Geschichte des Dorfes und analysiert den Gebrauch von Schriftlichkeit in einem stark von Mündlichkeit geprägten, ländlichen Umfeld. Ein Fokus liegt auf den Trägern rituellen Wissens und ihren Strategien zum Tradieren alevitischer Ritualpraxis.
This dissertation examines the emergence and development of Buddhist grottoes in Northern Sichuan 四川, southwestern China, during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). The discussion centers on twelve rock carvings sites scattered in Guangyuan 廣元, Mianyang 綿陽, Bazhong 巴中, Nanchong 南充, Guang’an 廣安, and Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture 阿垻藏族羌族自治州, marking the early traces of Buddhist grottoes in this area. This dissertation aims to move the discussion of these sites beyond the present discourse of central-peripheral dichotomy by focusing on the construction of the sites in their physical and social contexts. By employing an interdisciplinary approach using archaeological, art historical and historical geographical research methods to examine these sites, I have been able to reconstruct the generation of Buddhist sites within the dynamic complex web of influences both local and external, past and present from which these sites emerged. In so doing it gives a voice to Buddhist material culture of local monuments in the local perspective and also to regional social histories recorded in the grottoes which has hitherto been silenced by the over-arching narrative of “Localization”. It is herein argued that Buddhist grottoes in Northern Sichuan are not a derivation of the monumental sites in Northern China, but a varying combination of elements from the three most important types of Buddhist material culture in medieval China: the construction of Buddhist grottoes in the Northern Dynasties (386-581 CE), the sculptural art style of the Southern Dynasties (420-589 CE), and the “Tang Metropolitan Art Style” of the Tang dynasty. The earliest group of Buddhist sites in this area follows the practice of constructing niche-based grottoes through collective patronage which originated from Northern China during Northern Dynasties, while the carvings themselves follow the Buddhist artistic tradition of the Southern Dynasties centered in Chengdu, Sichuan. The agents of this integration were migrant monks fleeing civil unrest and government officials who had been assigned to this area from the north in the early seventh century. From the end of the seventh century to the mid-eighth century, the new metropolitan style of the Tang dynasty, which originally developed as a regional art style in Chang’an 長安 and Luoyang 洛陽, became an important new element in the Buddhist art of Northern Sichuan. The adoption and adaption of these external influences was not passive. The importance of the local as an active agency is highlighted by the differentiation in the rock carvings in the two regional centers, Guangyuan and Bazhong. Although to date the difference between these two centers has generally been explained as being a direct consequence of the two different roads linking Chengdu to Chang’an and Luoyang, it is herein argued that the asymmetric development appears to have resulted not only from the temporal-spatial variation in the matrix of Buddhist art but also from their different attitudes and responses past-present and internal-external influences.
It is widely acknowledged that the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic institution was an “entirely novel” enterprise in the province of Punjab since it was wholly managed and staffed by Indians. But the most novel and unique characteristic of the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic movement, as this PhD dissertation shows, was the manner in which it syncretised ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ education. In this dissertation, it is this synthesis of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features that I have analysed by critically examining various aspects of the D.A.V. movement such as the aims and ideals of its founders, the genesis and growth of its institutional network between 1880 and 1920, the heterogenous nature of its financial model and the nature of its curriculum. Because the D.A.V. movement was one of the most popular indigenous educational enterprises of colonial India, I have tabulated and described the vast network of D.A.V. schools and colleges that were spread across Northern India in the early twentieth century. But the primary focus of this dissertation is the question of novelty of the D.A.V. education model, as manifested in its unique combination of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features.
This thesis is a longitudinal study of judicial power in India and captures the history of the Supreme Court from the perspective of positive political theory. Combining measurements of competitiveness of political participation with quantitative indicators that describe the court as a composite actor, the thesis identifies both the structuration of opportunities for judicial power expansion as well as critical junctures resulting from the court’s strategic choices. Each chapter combines empirical data and historiographic narratives to portray such phases of institutional flux, re-conceptualizing the overall trend towards judicial power expansion as distinct sequences of judicial overreach, jurisdiction stripping, and judicial self-empowerment alternating between regime supportive judicial activism and judicial assertiveness. Like all good dependent variables the power of the Indian Supreme Court thus varies over time, while the theoretical frameworks for tying together this thesis always derive from the same paradigm of separation-of-power-games, drawing on strategic approaches in judicialization studies to explain juristocratic patterns of judicial power expansion in India.
Beatrice Höller carefully analyzes the distinct and multivalent word-image relations rendered on three inkstone cases created in late fifteenth century Kyoto.
The exquisitely designed cases are not only well known; with each one designated as an “important cultural property,” there has been research by lacquer specialists in terms of stylistic, material, technical or poetic and historical aspects. The author focuses on the multiple socio-cultural layers of meaning by employing a number of notions, concepts and paradigms, including “cultural memory”.
The inkstone cases were all created during or after the rule of Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1449-1473, d. 1490), the eighth shogun of the Ashikaga House, who is known for his penchant for cultural pursuits rather than military prowess or political cunning. His rule and legacy is also characterized by one of the most devastating civil wars in Japan, the so-called Ōnin War (1467-1477), which destroyed the capital of Kyoto completely. It marked the beginning of a vast and destructive civil war that ended only after roughly one-hundred years towards the close of the sixteenth century. This era of martial strife caused unprecedented social upheaval and saw the construction of new cultural centers outside Kyoto, as well as novel forms of performing, visual and martial arts. It is the latter aspect of the fifteenth century, along with retired Shogun Yoshimasa’s taste and cultural pursuits, and an approach that involves processes of identity formation through poetic allusions and their material re-interpretations with which this book is concerned.
The author describes, analyzes, contextualizes, and historicizes the inkstone cases in each of her chapters from a new angle, digging ever deeper into layers of meaning, interpretation and contextualization whilst addressing and exploring different concepts. At the same time, she delves into material and visual properties, the poetics of the intricately rendered classical poems and their multiple levels of interpretations, along with the local and spiritual dimensions of the iconographies rendered or implied, which constitutes an immensely important aspect during this period of military and political conflicts.
Seit fast 10 Jahren wird am Heidelberger Zentrum für Transkulturelle Studien (HCTS) im Rahmen der Heidelberg Research Architecture mit Pan.do/ra eine open source Plattform zur Annotation von Audio- und Video-Material angeboten. Das web-basierte System erlaubt es mehreren Nutzern gleichzeitig, frei gewählte Segmente eines Videos mit unterschiedlichen Arten von Annotationen (Layer oder Spuren) zu versehen, zu bearbeiten, auszutauschen und zu exportieren. Dieser Beitrag stellt verschiedene Anwendungsszenarien an der Universität Heidelberg vor. Der Einsatz in der Forschung wird am Beispiel islamischer Predigten, der Einsatz in der Lehre am Beispiel japanischer Propagandafilme des Zweiten Weltkriegs dargestellt. Der Beitrag diskutiert dabei kritisch, wie hilfreich die vorgängige Annotation letztlich für die eigentliche Inhaltsanalyse ist. Außerdem werden der Einsatz als institutionelle Videoplattform und abschließend die Anforderungen und Herausforderungen für ein nachhaltiges Angebot auf universitärer Ebene diskutiert.
Der Gegenstand der vorliegenden Forschungsarbeit sind hanzeitliche Begräbnistexte, die spezifisch für den Bestattungsritus hergestellt und dem Grab beigegeben wurden und der Kommunikation zwischen dem Jenseits und dem Diesseits dienten. Anhand der ersten systematischen Analyse von etwa 180 Gräbern mit Begräbnistexten wird die Entwicklung der Jenseitsvorstellung und deren Antriebskräfte, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des gesellschaftlichen Wandels in der Han-Zeit, untersucht. Die Entzifferung der Schriftzeichen und philologische Erläuterung und Übersetzung der Texte bildet zwar die Basis der Forschungsarbeit, aber steht die Materialität der Texte im Fokus, d. h. ihrer Form und materiellen Beschaffenheit, sowie ihrer Räumlichkeit, also ihrer physischen und symbolischen Position im Grab, das Layout der Begräbnistexte und die in ihnen verwendeten Siegel. Eine statistische Auswertung des geografischen und zeitlichen Auftretens der Begräbnistexte dient einerseits dem Zweck, die Verbreitungszentren der vier Textgattungen zu identifizieren und regionale Interaktionen aufzuzeigen. Anderseits wird der Zusammenhang zwischen dem Ausbruch von Epidemien und der Verbreitung der grabschützenden Texte in der Ost-Han-Zeit diskutiert und anschließend anhand ausführlicher Textanalysen der Frage nachgegangen, ob grabschützende Texte als Produkte des Volksglaubens oder des Daoismus anzusehen sind.
How can clientelistic politics be transformed into programmatic politics in a subnational state with a well-recorded history of patronage politics? We explore institutional pathways away from clientelism by systematically explicating clientelistic propensities with programmatic citizen-oriented ones in undivided Andhra Pradesh. This paper engages with a paradigm shift in policy from clientelistic to programmatic service delivery in rural development by exploring three major rural welfare programmes in undivided Andhra Pradesh: need-based redistribution, evolution of self-help groups and implementation of the right to work in India through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme. We argue that the capacity of the state to deliver owes a great deal to bureaucratic puzzling and political powering over developmental ideas. We combine powering and puzzling within the state to argue the case for how these ideas tip after evolving in a path-dependent way.
My dissertation examines how amateur photography emerged and developed in China from 1900 to 1937, and how the photographic societies, exhibitions and publications opened new avenues of photographic expression after six decades of problematic colonial photography. Through the examination of a lot of private photographs by the amateur photographers in the Republican period, I argue that photography, once a luxury hobby of the elites in the late nineteenth century was transformed into a new communicative and expressive medium for new intellectuals and bourgeoisie in Republican China. This rise of amateur photography in China and the new photographic vocabulary developed by the photographic societies, exhibitions, and publications from the 1900s to the 1930s indeed contributed to the particular aspects and eventual growth of Chinese visual modernity which is a comprised, complex conception of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century China.
This dissertation focuses on the development of policies against bonded labour and slavery in India between 1843 and the 1990s. Starting with the abolition of the slave trade by the British in 1833, the author argues that the following developments of the policies and the interpretation of the high courts of anti-slavery legislation, incrementally changed over the period of 200 years. Taking a historical institutionalist approach, this work suggests an adaptation of the theory of gradual institutional change developed by Thelen, Mahoney and Streeck and tests it to the case of the abolition of slavery in India with a particular focus on bonded labour.
This dissertation examines the China missionary Timothy Richard’s literary work by discussing how he utilized periodical publications to achieve goals in his life and career. Literary work, according to Richard, means using publication in newspapers to promote Christianity and Western learning. Richard served as the secretary of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese (the S.D.C.K.) from 1891 to 1915. When working in the S.D.C.K., he met the time that China started to embrace Western learning. Achieving successful literary work, Richard engaged in both Chinese and English publications so as to balance between Chinese readers, i.e. Chinese officials and intellectuals, and English readers, i.e. missionary groups in China and readers in the U.K. His literary work helped him to achieve the goal of promoting China’s modernization and spreading Christianity at the same time. The present research uses Richard’s life as the framework to discuss his efforts at literary work, so as to show how it developed in his every stage of life. In his early age, Richard regarded the media as a tool to express God’s blessing on mankind, preaching the Gospel among the Chinese; in his midlife, he utilized publication in newspapers to introduce Western learning for China; in his old age, media became a spiritual sustenance which he came to rely on. Through his literary work, Richard not only helped China to understand Western civilization, especially with regard to science and technology, but also made the British further understand China, promoting cultural interactions between the Far East and the West.
The objective of this research is to examine the Bitcoin rally of 2017 as it occurred in Japan and establish a greater context for why it was the Japanese retail investors that propelled the nation to being the largest trader of the cryptocurrency at the end of the year. This dissertation begins with the examination of the technical and economical properties of Bitcoin by classifying it as fulfilling two roles: that of a means of payment and that of an investment commodity. Following that is a description of Bitcoin’s roots and the history of its non-speculative usage. These chapters serve as a base for examining the cryptocurrency’s role in Japan. The third chapter examines the Japanese retail investor and the Japanese retail investment landscape with a focus on the question of the low rates of risk-asset participation in face of a favorable investment environment. Historical context is drawn upon to argue that the present situation, wherein most financial assets are kept as cash, is rather the result of the historical path dependence than the present-day conditions in which Japanese retail investors operate. The final chapter addresses the question of high-risk activities in the form of gambling and margin trading by a group of predominantly middle-aged men and connects this propensity to engage in zero-sum games with Bitcoin’s success in Japan. The author argues that the solitary practice of high-risk financial activities enabled by trusted institutions is separate from the general savings tradition that suffered shocks following the low interest-rate regime and that it was the high-risk gambles that became the primary cause for the popularity of Bitcoin. The dissertation concludes with the argument that the success of Bitcoin in 2017 had been in no small part achieved precisely by inverting the hard-line libertarian values of its creators and making it a centrally-held commodity offered by a banking-like institution with a strong public presence.
The present work offers several contributions to the study of the Western Han thinker Yang Xiong and in particular of his work entitled "Fayan". It concentrates on three areas that have received comparatively little attention despite their importance: the textual history of the "Fayan"; the three major commentaries that have shaped and continue to shape its reception (by Li Gui, Sima GUang, and Wang Rongbao); and the logic of the text’s composition and the way this was perceived in the Han dynasty.
This paper introduces the project “Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)” [1]. ECPO joins several important digital collections of the early Chinese press and puts them into a single overarching framework. In a first phase, several databases on early women’s periodicals and entertainment publishing were created: “Chinese Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period” (WoMag), “Chinese Entertainment Newspapers” (Xiaobao), and databases hosted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. These systems approach the material in two ways: in the intensive approach all articles, images, advertisements, and related agents are recorded and assigned to a complete set of scanned pages, while in the extensive approach the main characteristic features of publications are stored.
ECPO has begun to join these various materials in a second, ongoing phase of the project. Today, ECPO provides open access to 267 publications comprising over 280.000 pages of print. A key aspect is to make entire issues available, front-to-back, including illustrations, advertisements, and even blank pages. For 138 publications we also provide descriptions of individual items in Chinese with Pinyin transcription. These records also contain genre and column information, basic content analysis, as well as names and roles of agents associated with an item.
Our new cross-database agent service allows us to manage the approximately 47.000 names recorded in WoMag and ECPO: a) merge identical names across databases, b) identify agents and assigning names to them, and c) link agent records to authority data (GND, VIAF, Wikidata). Besides creating a curated list of agents occurring in the publications, we also aim to add missing persons to authority files like the GND.
One crucial aspect ECPO is full text capability. Unfortunately, OCR software cannot be used out-of-the-box, for a number of reasons: document analysis fails to recognize complex newspaper layout, character recognition fails when it faces emphasis marks next to characters, and recognized passages have to be grouped in the right semantic order.
The paper will discuss approaches to further exploring and analyzing the knowledge hidden in these publications, together with efforts to open the collection’s data for re-use. We will demonstrate workflows in the Agents service and cross-database record curation. We also present results from a crowdsourced approach to newspaper segmentation to generate segments that can easier be OCRed. In addition, we introduce first ideas to create a module for encoding text in TEI and relate it to the database.
Das Werk und die Rezeption des Hindi Schriftstellers G.M. Muktibodh ist geprägt von der Auseinandersetzung zwischen verschiedenen Tendenzen der Hindi Literatur zwischen 1930 und 1960, welche sich auf eine mögliche Zuordnung von Autor und Werk zu den Richtungen Progressivismus, Experimentalismus oder Neue Lyrik konzentrierte. Anhand von Untersuchungen des lyrischen Werks, der literaturkritischen Essays sowie der Rezeption des Autoren sollen diese zu ihrer Zeit stark polarisierenden Strömungen auch in ihren Überschneidungen näher bestimmt werden. Es wird das Portrait eines modernen Hindi Schriftstellers gezeichnet, der neben seiner kreativen Arbeit Stellung zu literarischen, sozialen und politischen Fragen bezog und so ein geändertes Selbstverständnis von der Rolle des Poeten und Autoren in seiner Gesellschaft repräsentierte.
This dissertation focuses on the unique trend of nautch-girl (Indian dancing girl) artworks that emerged in Britain during her colonial clasp on India, which coincided with the increasing exploration of (and changing attitudes towards) the role of women in British society. The nautch girl was considered a controversial figure in Britain, particularly since she was associated (usually erroneously) with sexually immoral behaviour and prostitution, while also being patronised widely by members of Britain’s high society within India and Britain. The attention paid towards the body, performance and sexual character of the nautch girl, which spanned across art forms and was particularly resonant and vivid in the visual arts and musical entertainment, appeared to simultaneously promote acts of voyeurism and disparagement. Most notably, however, the process of culturally locating the nautch girl in British artworks not only bolstered (or occasionally condemned) imperialist intentions, but also demonstrated how Britain was susceptible to the processes of transculturality in the adoption of the “art” of the nautch girl within its own artistic and cultural practices.
This dissertation examines the use of four of ubiquitous polarities in the political-administrative discourse of the Qing dynasty as represented in the Imperial Statecraft Compendium (Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編, hereafter HCJSWB), printed in 1827, and its sequels. The compendia appeared between 1827 and 1903 and include writings on theoretical and practical aspects of government and administration from all reigns of the Qing dynasty. The polarities that this dissertation focuses on, ren-fa, ming-shi, gong-si and li-yi, have been a part of the political-administrative discourse since at least the Warring States period (475–221 BC) and still play a role in the political discourse of the People’s Republic of China. The authors of the writings included in the statecraft compendia employed the polarities to structure their arguments by addressing aspects of administrative problems that are in tension and must be brought into balance. The polarities served to formulate questions such as the following. What is the optimal balance between local discretion and central regulation within the bureaucracy, and how can it be established? How to ensure that officials fulfill their duties? Can civil servants be motivated with the prospect of private benefit while still ensuring that they decide in the public interest in their day-to-day administration? How to extract enough revenue to maintain the functional capacities of the state without burdening the people excessively? These questions are questions that have no universally valid answers, but must be answered in the context of concrete circumstances.
Unter den Stichwörtern Liberalisierung, Globalisierung und Modernisierung veränderte die indische Regierung ab Mitte der 1980er Jahre drastisch ihre Innen- und Außenpolitik und begann Konsum als der Volkswirtschaft zuträglich zu propagieren. Seitdem ist die Produktion indischer Kleidung vielfach vom globalen Jahreszyklus der Mode geprägt. Luxuriöse Designermode wurde in diesem Zuge zu einem wichtigen Element neuer Narrative um Körper und nationale Identität. Die vorliegende Ethnographie zeichnet diesen Wandel mit Hilfe einer historisch orientierten transkulturellen Forschungsperspektive nach. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie grenzüberschreitende Medien auf ästhetisches Empfinden und Körperbilder einwirken und wie Gandhis khadi von einem simplen Baumwollstoff im Dienste des Freiheitskampfs im wirtschaftsliberalisierten Indien zu einer opulenten Designerware wurde und heute als Kulturerbe (Heritage) vermarktet wird. Die Arbeit demonstriert darüber hinaus anhand zahlreicher Beispiele, wie zentral Gold und andere Edelmetalle in der visuellen und materiellen Kultur des Subkontinents sind.
Die Dissertation befasst sich mit dem Topos Religionen in der Moderne jenseits von klassischer Säkularisierungstheorie und der unspezifischen Rede von einer „Wiederkehr der Religionen“. Als Fallbeispiel dient die gelebte Religiosität in der neocharismatischen Megakirche City Harvest Church im gegenwärtigen Singapur. Anliegen der Arbeit ist es, die bereits vorliegende Forschungsliteratur durch eine spezifisch religionswissenschaftliche Perspektive auf die gelebte Dimension einer gegenwärtigen Megakirche zu bereichern und dabei dem wechselseitigen Verhältnis von gelebter Religiosität und globaler Moderne nachzugehen: Wie gestaltet sich die gelebte Religiosität in einer Kirche wie der City Harvest Church und dazu noch in Singapur als einer Stadt, die gleichsam von Anfang an modern war? In welcher Beziehung steht diese gelebte Religiosität zum Kontext einer globalen Moderne bzw. global zirkulierenden Diskursen und Praktiken (die gleichsam die portable „Grammatik“ dieser Moderne bilden) einerseits und dem spezifischen, lokalen Kontext des modernen Singapur andererseits? Die Beantwortung dieser Fragen erfolgt in der vorliegenden Arbeit von einem kulturwissenschaftlich-kritischen Standpunkt aus. Im Anschluss an die Kultursoziologin Eva Illouz geht es der Arbeit darum zu verstehen, wie religiöse Diskurse, Praktiken, Vergemeinschaftungs- und Subjektformen in globalen und lokalen Verflechtungsprozessen zu dem wurden, was sie sind, und wie sie als das, was sie sind für die Menschen „etwas leisten“. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung machen einmal mehr deutlich, dass die globale Moderne keineswegs mit einem Bedeutungsverlust religiöser Diskurse, Praktiken und Vergemeinschaftungsformen oder mit ihrem Rückzug in die Privatsphäre einhergehen muss. Stattdessen schärfen sie unseren Blick für die bleibende Bedeutung und die sich wandelnden Erscheinungsformen von Religionen unter dem Eindruck einer globalen Moderne.
The study examines the beginnings of a Tibetan-language newspaper history by analyzing the Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long, i.e. the “Mirror of News from Various Regions [of the World]” (in short: Melong), in a socio-historical context. The Melong was produced between 1925 and 1963 from the Indo-Tibetan border town of Kalimpong, by the Christian convert Babu Tharchin. It developed into one of most influential early newspapers in Tibetan-language. Different from its precursors, the Melong was not mainly envisioned as a medium to propagate religious contents (such as Christian missionaries had done) or political propaganda (such as the Republicans in China had done). The Melong’s main editor Tharchin attributed value to the newspaper itself: as a medium of an active public of a nation state. After giving a concise history of mediated communication on the Tibetan plateau with a focus on print media, the production environment of the Melong’s print shop “Tibet Mirror Press” in Kalimpong is examined. Here, Tharchin, with his workshop, is identified as one of the first commercial print-publishers for the Tibetan language. His partly commercial outlook gave way to a new agency of a mass audience, in theory levelling people as equal potential customers, disregarding traditional socio-cultural hierarchies. A detailed content analysis of editorial comments published in the newspaper underlines this trend. The same data allows insights into how Tibet as a nation state was imagined within the Melong, at the same time appropriating contents in language and style to specific communicative protocols established amongst Tibetan-language speakers. Five case studies based on the general content of the newspaper further highlight the strategies for making foreign concepts understood; whilst in the process changing the newspaper. These are: religion (Christianity), knowledge production (discourses on the shape of the earth), world politics (coverage of the Second World War), economics (advertisements), and time (the newspaper as prophecy). On one hand, the study thus investigates transformation processes of the participating community, Tibet. On the other hand, it investigates, how, in the process, the global product newspaper was adapted for a Tibetan-speaking audience, analyzing transformation processes of the genre newspaper. Due to the state of available source material, the study focuses on the imaginations of Tibet within the contents of the newspaper and thus combines Benedict Anderson’s theses of “imagined communities” with a transcultural approach.
Basing much of my study on analysis and classification of 127 figures of Maitreya, I interpreted the iconography of this Bodhisattva and accompanied with my translation of the Maitreya Sutra "the visualization of the rebirth of the Bodhisattva Maitreya in the heavenly paradise Tusita". I took the contemplating figure of Maitreya with crossed legs in the grottos of Yungang, China, as the focus of my analysis and interpreted it as a "practicing visualization", based on the aforementioned sutra and on commentary about this sutra by the Silla monk Yonhyo. Yonhyo explained that adherents of Maitreya had to practice the visualization which was described in the sutra in order to attain future opportunities seeing Maitreya either in Tusita heaven or in Jambdvipa. And I also interpreted the crown of the contemplating figure, which is Korean National Treasure No.78. The crown of the contemplating figure No.78 described the palace of Maitreya in Tusita. This figure of Maitreya is practicing the visualization of heavenly paradise Tusita.
Die Studie untersucht das Verhältnis von Pentekostalismus und Politik in den Philippinen. Dafür werden zuerst Diskurse und Figuren mit nationaler Ausstrahlung beschrieben – auch solche, die von der Forschung bislang ignoriert wurden, wie die einflussreichen Kreise um den Pfingstbischof Villanueva. Sodann wird ihre Rezeption in einer Mittelschichtsstadt im mittleren Süden des Landes analysiert, wodurch die Rolle lokaler Hegemonieverhältnisse bei der Artikulation pentekostaler Politik deutlich wird. Ein Fokus liegt auf den Debatten zu den Präsidentschaftskandidaturen von 2004 und 2010 und zum Reproduktionsgesundheitsgesetz. Die konsequente Berücksichtigung der Verflechtung von globalen, nationalen und lokalen Diskursen macht politische Rationalitäten sichtbar, für die der Forschungsblick bisher verstellt war. So lässt sich entgegen der verbreiteten Annahme, dass die Pfingstbewegung weltflüchtig, religiös intolerant und sozialpolitisch insensibel sei, zeigen, dass diese Klischees schon ab den 1980ern innerpentekostal problematisiert wurden und in den 2000ern Parteiallianzen mit marxistisch-leninistischen und islamistischen Gruppen gebildet wurden. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur neue Perspektiven auf die Religions- und Politikgeschichte des Landes, sondern auch auf die allgemeinen Zusammenhang von Religion, kollektiver Identitätsbildung und Populismus.
This dissertation examines contemporary Japanese prayer monasteries (kitō jiin) as sites of religious branding and priestly training. It also explores ways Sōtō Zen prayer monasteries shed light on the broader topic of interplay between training and branding in the making of this-worldly benefits (genze riyaku).
One of the basic problems that researchers have to face, when dealing with early Chinese bamboo or wood manuscripts, is natural disintegration. In almost every case, the binding strings that once held together the slips originally constituting a manuscript do either not exist anymore or only remain as traces on individual slips. The problem of reconstruction becomes even more complex, if the manuscript in question was not scientifically excavated or even is of unknown provenance. The present article shows how an analysis of verso lines and mirror-inverted imprints of writing on a group of bamboo slips from the Yuelu Academy collection can help to reconstruct the original structure of the respective manuscript roll. The described analysis can in certain cases enable or facilitate the complete reconstruction of bamboo manu-scripts, even if external archeological evidence is lacking.
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In den 1920ern und 30ern hat Shanghai Filmgeschichte geschrieben. Die Werke, die die Massen ins Kino lockten, thematisierten die Konflikte der Zeit: Die weltanschauliche Kluft zwischen Metropole und Provinz, Liebes-Heirat als Gegenentwurf zur arrangierten Ehe oder die Rolle der Frau. Am Heidelberger Zentrum für Asienwissenschaften und Transkulturelle Studien, kurz CATS, sind die Filme Thema eines Uni-Seminars. Neben der Filmanalyse drehten die Studenten selbst und stellten ihre Werke jetzt der Öffentlichkeit bei der „Golden Chopstick“ Gala vor.
In an article that was recently published in Guangming ribao 光明日報, Professor Xing Wen 邢文 of Dartmouth College argues that the Laozi 老子 from the Peking University collection of Han bamboo slips is without doubt a forgery. To prove this, Xing forwards several arguments relating to the two main areas “outer appearance/material design” (xingzhi 形制) and “calligraphy” (shufa 書法). Although the article indeed uncovers certain problems of the Peking University Laozi edition, the forwarded arguments are insufficient to support the claim for a forgery, as will be shown in the following.
Discussion of the Zouyanshu, an early Han collection of legal cases; of the role of testimony as mediated evidence in early Chinese legal texts; and of the role of law in early China, especially in relation to ritual and religion.
Irgendwas mit Medien, irgendwas mit Menschen. So unpräzise sind die Vorstellungen von vielen Schülern, wenn es um ein Studium geht. Allein in Deutschland gibt es zurzeit mehr als 18.000 verschiedene Studiengänge. Campus-Reporter Nils Birschmann spricht mit Prof. Axel Michaels vom Südasien-Institut über ein ungewöhnliches, aber sehr gefragtes Studienangebot an der Universität Heidelberg.
Der Beitrag erschien in der Sendereihe "Campus-Report" - einer Beitragsreihe, in der über aktuelle Themen aus Forschung und Wissenschaft der Universitäten Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe und Freiburg berichtet wird. Zu hören ist "Campus-Report" montags bis freitags jeweils um ca. 19.10h im Programm von Radio Regenbogen. (Empfang in Nordbaden: UKW 102,8. In Mittelbaden: 100,4 und in Südbaden: 101,1)
Siddhaṃ sind die Zeichen für Keimsilben aus den indischen Brahmi-Schriften, die besonders in den esoterischen Schulen des japanischen Buddhismus Verwendung finden. Der Fokus der Arbeit liegt auf der Erörterung der Siddhaṃ in der Kunst und ihrer Anwendung in Ritualen der Heilung. Als philologische Basis dient der japanische Schlüsseltext von dem Mönch Kakuban (1095-1143) über die kontemplative Meditation des Siddhaṃ A, kurz Ajikan. Dabei wird zunächst geprüft, ob und inwieweit das Siddhaṃ A und weitere Siddhaṃ in der Kunst auftreten und eine Funktion in Ritualen der Heilung haben. Darauf aufbauend wird auf die religionsgeschichtlichen und politischen Hintergründe eingegangen, bevor die Siddhaṃ in der japanischen Kunst und ihre Funktion in Ritualen beleuchtet wird. Dabei liegt der Schwerpunkt auf der Blüte der Siddhaṃ vom 11.-14. Jh.. Das Material wird systematisch in die Disziplinen Architektur, Malerei, Skulptur, Schriftkunst und Kunstgewerbe eingeteilt. Jedes Objekt wird auf seine rituellen Funktionen untersucht. Über die Kunst hinaus werden die Siddham in Meditationen und Ritualen der Heilung analysiert. Dabei zeigt sich, dass es in der Heilung mit den Siddhaṃ um einen geistigen Weg geht, der schließlich zur Buddhaschaft führen kann. Die Siddhaṃ bilden in Ritualen für Lebende und Verstorbene die Basis für eine Form der buddhistischen Heilkunst, die ebenso einen Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der japanischen Heilmethode Usui Reiki Ryôhô ausgeübt haben und darin als Schlüssel-Element zur Heilung des Geistes benutzt werden.
China und Indien gehören zu den spannendsten Märkten für deutsche Firmen. Trotzdem wissen wir erstaunlich wenig über asiatische Wirtschaft und Kultur. Die Universität Heidelberg will das ändern. Dort entsteht ein hochmodernes Zentrum für Asienwissenschaften. Campus-Reporter Nils Birschmann hat sich das Projekt mit dem Indologen Prof. Dr. phil. Axel Michaels genauer angeschaut.
Der Beitrag erschien in der Sendereihe "Campus-Report" - einer Beitragsreihe, in der über aktuelle Themen aus Forschung und Wissenschaft der Universitäten Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe und Freiburg berichtet wird. Zu hören ist "Campus-Report" montags bis freitags jeweils um ca. 19.10h im Programm von Radio Regenbogen. (Empfang in Nordbaden: UKW 102,8. In Mittelbaden: 100,4 und in Südbaden: 101,1)
Along with the recent rise of new historical narratives of the League of Nations, growing attention has been paid to the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC) as a pionner international organization for cultural exchange preceding UNESCO. Motivated by the new approach of Transcultural History, this thesis examines the ICIC as an international stage where various actors such as intellectuals, private organizations, governments and the ICIC itself come into conflict over the idea of intellectual co-operation, and it places an emphasis on the ICIC’s historical process of transformation. In so doing, the thesis firstly employs the distinction of two cultures: the universality of culture based on Western civilization and the particularity of culture based on national cultures. Secondly, it places a great emphasis on the involvements of non-Western countries in the ICIC’s work of intellectual co-operation, particularly Japan and China. Thirdly, it employs the empirical historical method and pursues a multi-archival approach in order to examine the transcultural relationship between the ICIC, Japan and China. In these respects, this thesis demonstrates the process of the establishment of the ICIC with special reference to the Union des Associations Internationales, stressing that the ICIC began with the universalistic idea of intellectual co-operation based on Western civilization. Turning its focus toward Japan and China, the thesis argues that the primary purpose of Japan’s intellectual co-operation was to introduce Japanese culture in the West in close conjunction with the Japanese government, while discussing that China’s intellectual co-opeartion was implemented as part of the governmental policy for its national reconstruction. Returning its attention to the ICIC again, the thesis reveals the ideological shift of the ICIC’s idea of intellectual co-operation in the 1930s. In particular, it argues that, confronted with backlashes from Japan and China, the ICIC in the 1930s shifted its emphasis in the idea of intellectual co-operation from the universality of culture based on Western civilization to the particulality of culture based on national cultures.
Japanische Querrollen - das sind historische Dokumente, die aus Textpassagen und kunstvollen Malereien bestehen. Sie sind umständlich zu handhaben und oft schwer zugänglich, da sie in Museen, Bibliotheken oder in Schreinen verwahrt werden. So wie die Rollen aus dem 14. bis 19. Jahrhundert, die den buddhistisch-shintoistischen Gott Hachiman preisen. Wissenschaftler der Universität Heidelberg, unter Leitung von Prof. Dr. Melanie Trede vom Institut für Kunstgeschichte Ostasiens, haben sieben Querrollen digitalisiert, um sie für die Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen.
Water sharing among the provinces of Pakistan is as much an economic challenge due to resource shortage as it is a political one due to the fabric and cohesion of this nation. This study provides an in-depth analysis of a long-standing dispute dating back to the colonial era which reaches beyond the allocation of a much-needed natural resource. It addresses the politics of water as well as water policies.
NOTE: Map in the appendix section depicts provincial boundaries and names as of 1991 (the year of the Water Apportionment Accord). For information on respective current names of provinces see the empirical section of the study.
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary and transcultural study of food cultures in Mughal and post-Mughal India between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Using historical as well as anthropological tools of analysis, and drawing on a variety of documentary and manuscript sources in Persian, English and Hindi, it seeks to unravel various facets of the linkages between food, society and culture in the regions of the Indian subcontinent under the political sway or cultural influence of the Mughal Empire. Under this broad thematic umbrella, the dissertation analyses the manner in which food mediated relationships of power and acted as a symbol of social discourse within the Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic cultural worlds. It traces the development of Mughal politico-cultural instruments of legitimacy that involved the use of food as a key symbol. This entails a deconstruction of prevalent cultures of consumption and connoisseurship, as well as the manner in which views of food were shaped in medical knowledge and lore. In particular, it is shown that the culture of connoisseurship engendered within the Indo-Persian ecumene was patron-consumer oriented and represented a masculinisation of food discourse, wherein the role of women in the creative processes of food production as well as in the articulation of taste was conspicuous by its absence. The dissertation also includes an examination of the broad patterns of dietary change that occurred in the early modern period as vegetables from the New World such as tomatoes, potatoes and chillies entered the Indian subcontinent via Europe and were subject to a process of culinary indigenisation. Cross-cultural comparative analyses, particularly with reference to Europe as well as to the Islamic Middle East and Central Asia, also form an integral part of this work.
It has become a firmly established belief among economic and labour historians that Sri Lanka’s plantation industry rested almost exclusively on imported Tamil labour during the 19th century. Although strong evidence countering this “dualistic” viewpoint has been produced since the late 1970s—especially by Éric Meyer—, the contribution of the local Sinhalese peasantry to estate wage labour remains underestimated or, indeed, largely ignored. This article strives to support Meyer’s point by bringing together old and new evidence illustrating the at times substantial Sinhalese participation in plantation wage labour.
During most of the nineteenth century, the economy of the British crown colony Ceylon depended almost exclusively on the export of plantation products. After modest beginnings in the 1820s and 1830s, coffee cultivation spread on the island in the 1840s. During the 1880s, the coffee plantations were superseded by plantations of a new crop—tea. Both cultivation systems were almost pure export monocultures, and both relied almost exclusively on imported wage labour from South India. Thus, it is surprising that labour immigration—a process vital to the efficient functioning of the plantation economy—received practically no government attention for the better part of the nineteenth century. Migration between South India and Ceylon was free of government control, support or regulation. Instead, certain functional equivalents—such as the kangany system—organised immigration and coordinated supply and demand. Only very late in the century, when the kangany system had revealed a number of dramatic organisational weaknesses, the Ceylon Government started to get directly involved in labour and immigration policy.
Bei einer Einwohnerzahl von 1,369 Milliarden (Stand Juli 2013) weist die VR China zwar ein geringes Durchschnittsalter der Bevölkerung mit 36,3 Jahren auf, global gesehen aber leben hier bereits jetzt die meisten über Sechzigjährigen. China ist dem Klub der alternden, entwickelten Industriestaaten beigetreten – ohne bereits selbst ein entwickeltes Industrieland zu sein. Neben dem notorischen Frauenmangel und dem rapiden Anstieg der Lebenserwartung auf durchschnittlich 72 Jahre, beunruhigt die Tatsache, dass gegenwärtig die erste Elterngeneration der Ein-Kind-Politik das Rentenalter erreicht: Ihre Nachkommen, Einzelkinder, müssten beide Elternteile und vier Großelternteile (d.h. sechs Personen) versorgen. Auch wenn das im Juli 2013 lancierte Gesetz zum „Schutz der Rechte und Interessen älterer Menschen“ die Kinder von über Sechzigjährigen zu regelmäßigen besuchen verpflichtet, kann dies die staatlich kaum existente Altenpflege nicht wirklich ersetzen. Der Vortrag am 3. Juni 2015 stellt die Frage nach den Bindungen und Ligaturen angesichts einer sich verändernden Ökonomie und Moral-Landschaft in einzelnen Lebensverläufen alter Menschen. Referentin ist Prof. Dr. Angelika Messner, die das Chinazentrum der Universität Kiel leitet.
Das Thema „Anders altern: Kulturelle Vielfalt und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten“ steht im Zentrum des Studium Generale, zu dem die Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2015 einlädt. Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler der Ruperto Carola wie auch anderer Hochschulen im In- und Ausland beleuchten verschiedene Aspekte des Alterns aus Sicht ihrer jeweiligen Disziplinen. Das Spektrum der Vorträge reicht dabei vom Umgang mit dem Altern und alten Menschen in Asien über ethische Betrachtungen zum Alter bis hin zu Darstellungen des Themas in der zeitgenössischen Literatur.
In der vielschichtigen Kulturgeschichte Indien lassen sich unterschiedliche Ansätze in der Behandlung des Alterns und der Alten unterscheiden. Dennoch lässt sich verallgemeinernd sagen, dass den Alten nach langläufiger Vorstellung Respekt und Verehrung gebührt. In übersteigerter Form können die Alten sogar als gottgleich betrachtet werden. In Nepal, d.h. genau genommen im Kathmandu-Tal, werden die Alten nicht nur so betrachtet, sondern in einer Serie von komplexen und ausschweifenden Ritualen auch ganz explizit als solche behandelt. Anhand von Bildmaterialien und Videoaufnahmen führt der Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Alexander von Rospatt, der am Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies der University of California in Berkeley lehrt und forscht, in die faszinierende Welt dieser Rituale ein, um durch sie einen Blick auf den Umgang mit den Alten im südasiatischen Kontext zu werfen (Vortrag am 1. Juni 2015).
Das Thema „Anders altern: Kulturelle Vielfalt und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten“ steht im Zentrum des Studium Generale, zu dem die Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2015 einlädt. Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler der Ruperto Carola wie auch anderer Hochschulen im In- und Ausland beleuchten verschiedene Aspekte des Alterns aus Sicht ihrer jeweiligen Disziplinen. Das Spektrum der Vorträge reicht dabei vom Umgang mit dem Altern und alten Menschen in Asien über ethische Betrachtungen zum Alter bis hin zu Darstellungen des Themas in der zeitgenössischen Literatur.
Most previous scholarship has asserted that the Qing Empire neglected the sea and underestimated the worldwide rise of Western powers in the long eighteenth century. By the time the British crushed the Chinese navy in the so-called Opium Wars, the country and its government were in a state of shock and incapable of quickly catching-up with Western Europe. In contrast with such a narrative, this dissertation shows that the Great Qing was in fact far more aware of global trends than has been commonly assumed. Against the backdrop of the long eighteenth century, the author explores the fundamental historical notions of the Chinese maritime world as a conceptual divide between an inner and an outer sea, whereby administrators, merchants, and intellectuals paid close and intense attention to coastal seawaters. Drawing on archival sources from China, Japan, Korea, and the West, the author argues that the connection between the Great Qing and the maritime world was complex and sophisticated. The evidence reveals beyond doubt that the Manchu administration indeed never lost sight of the harsh strategic and logistical realities of managing, if not ruling, a vast maritime landscape. In summary, this dissertation provides new insights into the East Asian maritime world, China’s regional links on the eve of the modern age, and the area’s deepening role in the development of an increasingly global history. It also has an obvious topical relevance, with the People’s Republic of China’s increasing efforts to extend its control over natural resources and seaways in the Western Pacific. It might be seen as the largely overlooked maritime counterpart to that covered by Peter Perdue’s impressive volume: "China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia," which looks at the history of imperial China’s western landward expansion in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century.
For long, historians have considered the telegraph as a tool of power, one that replaced the colonial government’s a posteriori structures of control with a preventive system of authority. They have suggested that this revolution empowered colonial governments, making them more effective in their strategies of communication and rule. In this dissertation, I test these assumptions and analyze the use of telegraphic communication by Ceylon’s colonial government during the second half of the nineteenth-century; to determine not only the impact of the telegraph on political decision-making but also how the telegraph and politics became embedded together, impacting on colonial government and its decision-making and on everyday administrative processes. I examine telegraphic messages alongside other forms of correspondence, such as letters and memos, to gauge the extent to which the telegraph was used to communicate information between London and Ceylon, and the role that the telegraph played locally, within Ceylon, between the Governor General and the island’s regional officials. I argue that, contrary to conventional ideas, the telegraph did not transform colonial government practices. Rather, the medium became entrenched in a multi-layered system of communication, forming one part of a web of colonial correspondence tactics. While its role was purposeful, its importance and capacities were nevertheless circumscribed and limited.
Als das Reformwerk Mahmuds II. mit der Vernichtung der Janitscharen im Jahr 1826 seinen Anfang nahm, kam es zeitgleich mit den Reformschritten des Sultans – jedoch nicht durch diese ausgelöst – zu einer Verdichtung des konsularischen Netzes der europäischen Großmächte auf osmanischem Boden. Gleichzeitig führten die Territorialverwaltungen in manchen Provinzen des Osmanischen Reiches eigenständige Reformen durch, die im Zeichen der Modernisierung bzw. des modernen (Steuer-)Staates standen. Angesichts der eigenständig initiierten Modernisierungsschritte der Territorialverwaltungen einerseits und des wachsenden Einflusses der europäischen Konsuln in der osmanischen Provinz andererseits, fragt die vorliegende Studie, ob die Konsuln ihren Einfluss dazu nutzten, im lokalen Rahmen Modernisierungsschritte voranzubringen oder sogar die Verwaltungselite vor Ort zur Einführung derartiger Maßnahmen unter Druck zu setzen. Am Beispiel der Bemühungen des britischen Konsuls Charles Blunt (1800-1864) für die Durchführung und Einhaltung von Quarantänen in der Hafen- und Handelsstadt Saloniki während der Früh-Tanzimat zeigt diese Arbeit, wie ein europäischer Konsul durch den Einsatz unterschiedlicher Druckmittel die lokalen Behörden davon überzeugte, in ihrem Zuständigkeitsbereich noch vor der reichsweiten Einführung moderner sanitären Maßnahmen selbst Quarantänen durchzuführen. Blunt beteiligte sich aktiv am politischen Prozess der Entscheidungsfindung vor Ort und muss somit als wichtiger Agent der osmanischen Modernisierung in dieser Region gelten.
Der Schriftsteller Hirotsu Kazuo (1891-1968) ist in Japan hauptsächlich bekannt als engagierter Kämpfer für Gerechtigkeit im Zusammenhang mit dem Matsukawa-Zwischenfall vom 17. August 1949. Dieses Engagement ist als die konsequente Fortführung dessen zu sehen, was in den Jahren der Taishô-Demokratie (1912-1926) zu keimen begann und in den Kriegsjahren ab 1931 zur Vollendung gelangte: Eine Lebenshaltung, die es einem ermöglicht, den politischen und gesellschaftlichen Gegebenheiten sachlich und furchtlos ins Auge zu sehen, sich des eigenen Standpunktes zu vergewissern und dann kühl und überlegt nach Maßgabe der als richtig erkannten Werte und Kriterien zu reagieren und nicht nachzugeben, auch wenn man mit seinen Überzeugungen gegen den Strom zu schwimmen gezwungen ist. Typisch für den Autor Hirotsu Kazuo ist die Verquickung von moralischen und ästhetischen Prinzipien, bringt er doch diese Lebenshaltung explizit mit der Gattung der „Prosa“ – japanisch "sanbun" – in Zusammenhang, wobei hier die erzählende Prosa gemeint ist. Hirotsu zufolge ist die Prosa als Kunstgattung am besten geeignet, das reale Leben des Menschen aus unmittelbarer Nähe zu betrachten und kommentierend zu begleiten. Aus dem postulierten Realitätsbezug der Prosa-Kunst folgert Hirotsu weiter, daß der Prosa-Schriftsteller quasi per definitionem Interesse an seinem sozialen und politischen Umfeld haben und folglich bis zu einem gewissen Grad auch engagiert sein müsse. Hirotsu prägt den Begriff vom „Geist der Prosa“ – "sanbun seishin" – und meint damit zweierlei: einerseits den für das Genre „Prosa“ charakteristischen Geist, andererseits eine bestimmte geistige Haltung im realen Leben, die dem der Gattung „Prosa“ attestierten „Geist“ entspricht. Die Konzeption des „Geistes der Prosa“ spielt eine zentrale Rolle in Hirotsus Denken und Handeln ebenso wie in seinem schriftstellerischen Schaffen. Der hohe moralische Anspruch, den Hirotsu an sich als Intellektuellen stellt und den er mit seiner Literatur verfolgt, ermöglichte es ihm, in den Jahren des Krieges bis 1945 nicht „einzuknicken“ und entgegen allen Gleichschaltungsversuchen von Regierungsseite, gegen den „Geist der Zeit“ und gegen die Mehrheit seiner Schriftstellerkollegen und das Drängen einiger von ihnen seine geistige Unabhängigkeit zu wahren und sich nicht für die Ziele einer expansionistischen Außenpolitik und einer repressiven Innenpolitik vereinnahmen zu lassen. Er ließ sich nicht benutzen als Instrument der Regierungspropaganda, ließ sich nicht dazu herab, Gefälligkeitsliteratur zu schreiben, etwa, um die „Moral des Volkes“ zu heben oder Verständnis für die Kriegspolitik zu wecken. Doch Hirotsu blieb in den schwierigen düsteren Jahren der Militärherrschaft nicht nur moralisch integer und geistig distanziert, er hat – auch dies unterscheidet ihn von vielen anderen Autoren, die sich in eine Art innerer Emigration zurückzogen wie zum Beispiel Tanizaki Jun’ichirô – konsequent weitergeschrieben und weiter veröffentlicht, auch wenn die Bedingungen des Publizierens im Lauf der Zeit zunehmend schwieriger wurden und die Zahl der Publikationen zwangsläufig abnahm. So veröffentlichte er im Jahre 1931, dem Jahr des „Mandschurischen Zwischenfalls“, mit dem Japan in einen Krieg mit China hineinschlitterte, der von kritischen Historikern als Beginn des erst mit dem 15. August 1945 endenden „Fünfzehnjährigen Krieges“ gesehen wird, 12 Titel, darunter zwei Bücher, die jeweils mehrere kürzere Beiträge umfassen. 1932 sind es zweiunddreißig Titel, 1933 vierunddreißig. So geht es weiter, bis in die 1940er Jahre hinein. Erst jetzt nimmt die Zahl der Veröffentlichungen nach und nach ab. 1943 sind noch dreizehn Titel verzeichnet, 1944 drei, 1945 kein einziger mehr. In den fünfzehn Jahren des Krieges blieb Hirotsu durchweg ein kritischer und unabhängiger Beobachter der Zeitverhältnisse, die er mal direkt, mal indirekt in seinen Aufsätzen und Erzählungen kommentierte und kritisierte.
In der vorliegenden Studie wurden die zentralen Texte (sowohl kritische Aufsätze ("hyôron") als auch Erzählungen ("shôsetsu")) Hirotsus aus der Kriegszeit in ihrer Erstveröffentlichungsversion analysiert, angefangen mit dem in Japan im politischen und im geistesgeschichtlichen Diskurs vielzitierten "Sanbun seishin ni tsuite (kôen memo)" („Über den Geist der Prosa (Vortragsnotizen)“ von Oktober 1936 über die Erzählungen "Chimata no rekishi" („Aus dem Leben einfacher Leute“, Januar 1940) und "Wakaki hi" („Jugendtage“, Juni 1943) bis hin zu dem von der Literaturkritik wie von den Literaturhistorikern hoch gelobten Meisterwerk der Essayistik Tokuda Shûsei ron („Tokuda Shûsei“) vom Juli 1944, dem letzten Titel, den Hirotsu zur Zeit des Krieges veröffentlichte. All diese Texte legen Zeugnis ab von der kritisch-distanzierten Haltung, die Hirotsu in den Kriegsjahren konsequent einnahm, und von einem lebendigen „Geist der Prosa“, der sich in den beiden erzählenden Texten über deren zentrale Figuren (die tatkräftige Frau Onui in dem einen, der eher zurückhaltende, stille Kojima und sein Vater in dem anderen Fall) manifestiert und sogar in Hirotsus Beschreibung des Schriftstellers Tokuda Shûsei (1871-1943) ausmachen läßt. Die Analyse macht deutlich, wie ein einzelner Autor, von einem liberal-demokratischen Standpuntk aus, ohne Zugehörigkeit zu und Rückhalt durch politische Organisationen, zur Zeit des Krieges versuchte, die geistige Autonomie zu wahren und für Menschlichkeit und Individualität einzutreten. Die Texte sind zu verstehen als Dokumente eines im Westen bisher kaum wahrgenommenen, konsequenten geistigen Widerstandes in einem System, das zwar nicht ganz so totalitär und monströs war wie das Dritte Reich unter Adolf Hitler, das aber dennoch innenpolitisch durch massive Unterdrückung der freien Meinungsäußerung, durch Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung, Zensur und Einschüchterungsmaßnahmen aller Art gekennzeichnet war und darauf abzielte, alle Ressourcen den außenpolitischen Expansionszielen und dem nationalen Machtstreben unterzuordnen. Diese Texte konnten der Vorzensur wie der Nachzensur entgehen, weil der Autor es vermochte, seine distanzierte Haltung so geschickt in scheinbare Banalitäten und lockeren Humor zu verpacken, daß die Zensurbehörden sich täuschen ließen. So konnte selbst ein eminent und explizit politischer Text wie "Kokumin ni mo iwasete hoshii" („Auch die Meinung der Bürger soll gehört werden“, Oktober 1939) unverändert durch Eingriffe der Obrigkeit veröffentlicht werden. In diesem Aufsatz hantiert Hirotsu geschickt mit eben jenen Begriffen, welche die Obrigkeit auf ihre „Black List“ gesetzt hat: „Liberalismus“ zum Beispiel (japanisch "jiyûshugi") wurde zu einer gefährlichen ideologischen Tendenz erklärt, durch welche das Land Schaden nimmt. Hirotsu schlägt hier scheinbar in die gleiche Kerbe wie seine Regierung, indem er vor dem "Liberalismus der Organe" warnt, nur daß er eben jenen als schädlich deklarierten „Liberalismus“ nicht den Bürgern, sondern den Staatsorganen attestiert und ihnen damit vorwirft, nicht den von der Regierung geforderten Werten und Haltungen zu entsprechen. Bei Hirotsu steht der Begriff „Liberalismus“ für „staatliche Willkür“ gegenüber den Bürgern. Scheinbar – das heißt, der sprachlichen Oberfläche nach – den Behörden nach dem Mund redend, sagt er tatsächlich jedoch das Gegenteil und kritisiert Unterdrückung und Bevormundung. Dies war Hirotsus Strategie.
Zugrundegelegt wurden der Analyse nicht die in den „Gesammelten Werken“ ("Hirotsu Kazuo zenshû", Verlag Chûô kôron sha) abgedruckten leicht zugänglichen Textfassungen, sondern die tatsächlichen Erstveröffentlichungsversionen aus den Jahren 1936 bis 1944, die in mühsamer Recherchearbeit in verschiedenen Archiven und Bibliotheken in Japan zusammengesucht, kopiert und abfotografiert wurden. Dies geschah vor dem Hintergrund der Überlegung, daß Texte bei der Aufnahme in eine Werkausgabe in Japan nicht selten verändert werden. Vor allem eventuell kompromittierende Äußerungen aus der Kriegszeit werden gerne entweder umgeschrieben oder ganz herausgestrichen. Durch die Heranziehung der Originalveröffentlichungen aus dem Kriegsjahren konnte die Gefahr einer „Nachbesserung“ auch der geistigen Haltung umgangen werden.
Die Studie leistet einen Beitrag zur textbasierten, philologisch untermauerten Widerstandsforschung, und es bleibt zu hoffen, daß sie den Weg aus der Nische der japanologischen Philologie hinaus in den westlichen Historikerdiskurs um Fragen des geistigen Widerstands im Krieg hinein finden und langfristig in einen interdisziplinären Diskussionszusammenhang gestellt werden wird, der neben Japanologie und Geschichtswissenschaft idealerweise auch noch die Philosophie und die Germanistik mit Fragen der Widerstandsliteratur einschließt.
The theatre is a contested realm in soft authoritarian Singapore. Applying the method of transculturality, this study follows Bourdieu’s theory of the ‘field of power’ and analyses the complex relationship between the ‘dominant dominators’ – the government – and the ‘dominated dominators’ – the theatre practitioners – in Singapore. This thesis explores how particularly small-scale local theatre practitioners actively negotiate with the government the ambiguously defined boundaries in order to turn theatres into public spaces, in which members of society can reflect on and debate pressing social issues. Using their substantial cultural capital and autonomy, theatre practitioners have creatively developed various strategies to counter or circumvent governmental boundaries in a non-confrontational way. Alongside these concrete strategies, theatre practitioners have found means to open up the theatre as a public space for society by transcending state multiculturalism without violating governmental boundaries. In this sense, the theatre as an institution located in between the government and the society has created a discursive public space and thus an ‘alternative’ public sphere to that of the government in Singapore.
4 Millionen Menschen pilgern jedes Jahr nach China, um die weltberühmte Terrakotta-Armee zu sehen. Es ist eine der größten und faszinierendsten Grabanlagen der Welt. Trotz jahrzehntelanger Forschung sind längst nicht alle ihre Geheimnisse enthüllt. Heidelberger Wissenschaftler helfen, die letzten Rätsel zu lösen. Doch das größte Geheimnis der Terrakotta-Armee bleibt verborgen.
Die Beiträge über die Terrakotta-Armee erschienen in der Sendereihe "Campus-Report" - einer Beitragsreihe, in der über aktuelle Themen aus Forschung und Wissenschaft der Universitäten Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe und Freiburg berichtet wird. Zu hören ist "Campus-Report" montags bis freitags jeweils um ca. 19.10h im Programm von Radio Regenbogen. (Empfang in Nordbaden: UKW 102,8. In Mittelbaden: 100,4 und in Südbaden: 101,1)
Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit japanischer Karikatur zu Zeiten des Russisch-Japanischen Krieges 1904-05. Nach einer Darstellung der Genese des satirischen Magazines unter dem Einfluss europäischer Karikaturisten in Japan in der frühen Meiji-Zeit sowie einer kurzen Einführung in die satirische Bildtradition Japans wird auf die Situation der Karikatur bzw. satirischer Formate in den Kriegsjahren 1904/05 eingangen. Anhand der drei auflagestarken zeitgenössischen Magazine Nipponchi, Tôkyo pakku und Kokkei shinbun sowie der Fabholzschnittserie "Nippon banzai. Hyakusen hyakushô" (2. Serie) des Künstlers Kobayashi Kiyochika wird dokumentiert, dass japanische Satiremagazine sich mehrheitlich in den Dienst der staatlichen Kriegspropaganda stellten. Die Arbeit definiert und kontextualisiert in Folge anhand des analysierten Bildmaterials die geläufigsten satirischen Bild-Topoi, einige Abbildungen werden exemplarisch besprochen. Eine zentrale These vorliegender Dissertation ist die stilistische und thematische Neuorientierung des japanischen Verlagswesens, wie sie etwa anhand des amerikanisch geprägten, "internationalen" Magazins Tôkyô pakku deutlich wird.
1869 brach auf den Kaffeeplantagen in der britischen Kolonie Ceylon (Sri Lanka) die Pflanzenkrankheit "Kaffeerost", verursacht durch den Rostpilz Hemileia vastatrix, aus. Innerhalb von nur knapp 15 Jahren beendete die Krankheit den kommerziellen Kaffeeanbau auf Ceylon nahezu vollständig. Die Bemühungen der botanischen Gärten in Kew (London) und dem örtlichen botanischen Garten in Peradeniya, den Pflanzern zu helfen, scheiterten. Stattdessen führte die Erfolglosigkeit der Wissenschaftler zu Konflikten zwischen Pflanzern und Wissenschaftlern. Kernproblem war die Frage, ob Wissenschaft mit Blick auf den praktischen Nutzen für die Pflanzer betrieben werden sollte, oder ob die botanischen Gärten ihre eigenen Forschungsinteressen verfolgen sollten.
Interkontinentale Schiffsreisen waren Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts dauerten trotz technischen Fortschritts immer noch mehrere Wochen. Langeweile war ein verbreitetes Phänomen, weshalb das Herausgeben einer Schiffszeitung durch die Passagiere ein beliebtes Mittel war, die Zeit im Transit zu verbringen. Anhand zweier solcher Zeitungen, der Massilia Gazzette und der Sutlej Gazzette, die zwischen Großbritannien und Indien bzw. Australien verkehrten, wird untersucht, wie solche Schiffszeitungen aussahen. Mit diesen Zeitungen versuchten die Passagiere in der Übergangszeit zwischen Abreise und Ankunft Orientierung und Sicherheit zu gewinnen.
Despite an increasing amount of research on commemorative paintings, Chinese paintings by educated scholars to commemorate the deceased have rarely been studied. This dissertation provides a series of case studies of Chinese literati memorial paintings to explore their visual representations in social and religious contexts. It shows how, and why, the first literati memorial paintings appeared in the Wu (i.e. Suzhou) area in Jiangsu province by the end of the 15th century, and flourished in the late Ming and early Qing periods, when secret messages were encoded in visual representations, either due to fear of political punishment or for religious and personal reasons. A representative in-depth case study is the painting Remembering the Past at Xingfu Chapel (Xingfu an ganjiu tu) by the Christian painter Wu Li (1632-1718) in 1672 for his deceased Buddhist monk friend Morong (?-1671) for having a good Buddhist afterlife and a three-year-soul-journey. This case study identifies the symbolic meanings of visual images in the seemingly innocuous landscape painting and shows how secret messages were encoded in religious allusions. This dissertation uncovers a new and important genre in Chinese painting and reveals the intellectual and religious inner-world of scholars and painters in the Ming and Early Qing China.
Englische Übersetzung von Gotelind Müller, Wolfgang Seifert, Joachim Kurtz: Geschichte Ostasiens: Heidelberger Forschungsbeiträge. In: Arbeitsgemeinschaft historischer Forschungseinrichtungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hrsg.): Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung 2011. München: Oldenbourg 2012, S. 61-72.
Historical understandings of globalization in Asia should not begin as they typically do in social science and policy analysis with the global geography of national territories that came into being after 1945. Long distance mobility moving in many directions at various speeds shape local realities everywhere in Asia from ancient times, Until the sixteenth century, Europe remained an peninsular outlier in a vast Asian space of human mobility running from Mediterranean to Pacific, along the Silk Road and coastlines from East Africa to Japan. After 1500, a sea-going world economy included the Americas, propelled European hegemony, and encompassed the Asian circulatory system, attaching its Western, Southern, and Eastern regions to networks of power dominated by Europe and the US. Those attachments stand out in today's world of nations, where states manage the political economy and cultural politics of globalization, but Asian dynamics of mobility over the long term and down to the present demand more academic attention, particularly as they pertain to coastal regions, inland frontiers, and expansive cultural spaces of territorial power. - David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization and Chair of the Department of History at New York University.
Englische Übersetzung von: Gotelind Müller-Saini: Hasegawa Teru alias Verda Majo (1912-1947). Eine japanische Esperantistin im chinesischen anti-japanischen Widerstand. In: Gimpel, Denise und Hanz, Melanie (Hrsgg): Cheng. Festschrift in Honour of Monika Übelhör, Hamburg 2001, S. 259-274.
Englische Übersetzung von: Müller-Saini, Gotelind: Chinesische Frauen zwischen Bildung und Geld. Ideal und Realität der Werkstudentinnen in den frühen Jahren der Republik. - In: Übelhör, Monika (Hrsg.): Zwischen Tradition und Revolution. Lebensentwürfe und Lebensvollzüge chinesischer Frauen an der Schwelle zur Moderne. Marburg 2001, S. 196-217.
This essay proposes to look at the process of introducing Western “scientific” concepts of “race” into China in terms of a negotiated process of “glocalisation” (Robertson), i.e. of being global and local at the same time. In comparison to other terms like indigenisation, appropriation, adaptation etc., the advantage of the “glocalisation” approach is to acknowledge the remaining link (and even at times contribution) to global discourse while at the same time focusing on a specific locality into which something is introduced and by which it is framed. This essay will demonstrate on the one hand in which ways linguistic, cultural and above all historical contingencies were of crucial importance in the process of glocalising “race” in China; on the other it will show how the specific motivation of individual actors made for notable twists in this development. Thus, it will become evident that although the Western “race” concept was taken up by various Chinese, this should not just be interpreted as a passive submission to an “imposed hegemonic discourse” but rather as an active manipulation by different “glocalisers” with their own ends, at times consciously using the pseudo-scientificy of a global discourse to fight against local, i.e. inner-Chinese adversaries. For demonstrating the above, a close reading and a historical contextualisation of texts and authors is proposed here, focusing on texts by Chinese intellectuals of the time.
Englische Übersetzung von: Müller-Saini, Gotelind: Atarashiki mura versus Xincun : zur chinesischen Rezeption eines japanischen Modells alternativer Lebensführung. In: Norm und Abweichung (2001), S. 685-694.
In March 2011, the National Museum of China, a union of the former Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of Chinese Revolution, opened to the public at Tiananmen Square, the heart of the Chinese Nation. The transition to a modern museum complex was fast, ambitious and, to a certain extent, drastic: Only 20% of the original building was kept; 80% is new structure. Thus the museum expanded on a gigantic scale from 65,000 m² to almost 192,000 m², currently constituting the largest museum in the world. It presents itself with a new look and new displays. Although the architects of von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) were officially commissioned in 2004, the approved design and the entire building project experienced fundamental changes right up until the opening of the museum in 2011.
This thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the redesigned National Museum of China, its current significance, its role as a cultural institution and as a representative of the Chinese nation. Chapter One (Framing the Subject: Origins and Concepts) introduces general museum concepts and the historic development of the National Museum of China. Chapter Two (Building Memory: The Architectural Form) examines the current architecture and its influence in the creation of memory and memorial culture. Chapter Three (Shaping History: The Presentation of the Collection) investigates the new presentation of the collection as well as continuities and changes in the display of the official master narrative. An appendix includes comprehensive results of various visitor surveys and statements of the museum staff from 2003, 2007 and 2011. This study presents the latest transformation of one of the most important cultural institutions of the People's Republic of China.
Wie gezeigt werden konnte, wurden die westlichen Maltechniken in der ersten Phase der wirtschaftlichen Kontaktaufnahmen für die Vorbereitung der Kolonisation eingesetzt. Die Portugiesen hatten auf der Suche nach neuen Gebieten, durch deren Kolonisation und Ausbeutung sie versuchten, ihre im Zusammenbruch befindliche Vormachtstellung in Europa zu retten, im Jahr 1543 Japan entdeckt, das sich in der Endphase eines hundertjährigen Krieges (sengoku jidai) befand und ausgezehrt war. Mittels Akkomodation, profitablen Handelsangeboten, Waffenlieferungen und freundschaftlichen Kontaktangeboten verschafften sich die Eroberer schnell Zutritt zum Gebiet um Nagasaki, dessen Bevölkerung, die Europa nicht kannte, sie für chinesische Händler und Mönche hielt, die willkommene Angebote und Hilfestellungen boten. Die Ähnlichkeit der europäischen christlichen Bilder (seiga) mit einheimischen Themen bewirkte eine schnelle Akzeptanz der Fremden und ihrer Religion im ausgebluteten Land, zumal sie sich anschickten, das Land beim Aufbau zu unterstützen. Da sie ausSüdasien gekommen waren und bärtigen Randvölkern ähnlich sahen, nannte man sie „Südbarbaren“ (nanbanjin). Die Absichten der Eroberer blieben unerkannt, und während das Land sich unter Toyotomi Hideyoshi, der die Landesvereinigung durchführte und von den Handelskontakten (nanbanbôeki) profitierte, allmählich erholte, versuchten die Eroberer es gezielt durch den Aufbau von Kirchen, Krankenhäusern und Unterrichtsstätten unter Kontrolle zu bekommen. An den Schulen wurden neben Religions- und Sprachunterricht auch Kulturtechniken gelehrt: Einheimische Maler der Kanô-Schule hielten auf Stellschirmen die Begegnungen mit den Eroberern fest, die sich als potente Handelspartner und Religionsstifter gaben, in Wirklichkeit jedoch den in Indien bereits etablierten kolonialen Lebensstil auch in Japan, das als Teilgebiet der „Ordensprovinz Indien und Japan“ eingestuft wurde, aufbauten. An den Kollegien lehrte man die Ölmalerei; mittels Vorlagen, die abzumalen waren, vermittelten die Eroberer ihre Heimat gezielt als reich, paradiesisch und militärisch machtvoll, doch wurde von den Malern auch die um 1590 erreichte begüterte Situation der Fremden vor Ort festgehalten: Denn nach rund 40 Jahren war das avisierte portugiesische Handelsmonopol etabliert; die Europäisierung, religiöse und kulturelle Überfrachtung während des Nanbanbooms befand sich auf ihrem Höhepunkt; damit stand man kurz vor dem erhofften Übergriff. In dieser Phase stand die Dynastie der Aviz und damit das Monopol in Übersee kurz vor dem Zusammenbruch; dieser wurde 1596 durch den Vertrag von Greenwich besiegelt. Mit zunehmender Erkenntnis der Gefahr, die von den vermeintlichen Händlern und Religionsstiftern ausging, wurden 164 Extegrationsmaßnahmen ergriffen, die im vollständigen Landesabschluß (sakoku seisaku) des Jahres 1639 gipfelten. In der zweiten Phase der wirtschaftlichen Kontaktaufnahmen wurden die westlichen Malund Zeichentechniken in Japan für den Erwerb naturwissenschaftlicher praktischer Fertigkeiten benötigt. In Europa rissen nach der Zerstörung des portugiesischen Monopols die schnell zum Firmengiganten VOC zusammengeschlossenen niederländischen Kaufleute den Überseehandel monopolistisch an sich und traten die Nachfolge der Kolonialherren an. Die japanische Niederlassung der VOC wurde im Zuge der Landesabschlußmaßnahmen auf eine Insel vor Nagasaki ausgelagert. Die Tokugawa- Regierung, die nach dem Tod des Landesvereinigers Toyotomi Hideyoshi die Macht an sich gerissen hatte, bemühte sich neben profitablen Handelsmanövern von Anfang an um den Erwerb medizinischer Kenntnisse, die man durch gezielte Kontaktaufnahmen mit den Betriebsärzten der Niederländer ab 1649 gewann; früheste Lehraufzeichnungen entstanden bereits 1661, im Umkreis des Aufenthaltes Engelbert Kaempfers wurden um 1700 auch Lehrsituationen bildlich dokumentiert. Ein nach Japan verbrachtes chirurgisches Lehrbuch des Ambroise Paré wurde 1706 übersetzt, es stellt die erste theoretische Grundlage der japanischen Medizin in westlicher Manier lange vor der Herstellung des ersten Anatomiebuches Japans. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt lehnte man das definitiv empirische und praktische Vorgehen noch aus religiösen und kulturellen Gründen ab, dies bezog sich auch auf den Einsatz realistischer Maltechniken für die Herstellung von medizinischem Abbildungsmaterial. Als sich ernsthafte Versorgungsschwierigkeiten im autarken Staatsgebiet einstellten und die Gefahr erneuter Konfrontationen mit Fremden wuchs, wurde im Zuge großflächiger Reformen ab 1716 (Kyôhô-kaikaku) auch die Forschergruppe der „Niederlandforscher“ (Rangakusha) aufgebaut, die sich mit der Erarbeitung europäischer Naturwissenschaftstechniken befaßte, obgleich diese die heimische Ethik und das kulturelle Selbstverständnis verletzten. Der gezieltere Erwerb der realistischen Maltechniken zu Dokumentationszwecken wurde nun unumgänglich. Durch die Aufhebung des Bücherimportverbots 1720 kamen immer wieder europäische naturwissenschaftliche Lehrwerke, darunter unterschiedliche Anatomiebücher, ins Land. Ein Lehrbuch der Malerei von De Lairesse und weiterhin Zeichnungen von Dürer vermittelten Grundlagen realistischer Darstellungsweisen, die benötigt wurden, um neben der Herstellung perfekter Kopien europäischer Vorlagen auch eigene praktische Forschungen in den Gebieten Kartographie, Astronomie, katasteramtliche Dokumentation, Biologie, Zoologie, Pharmazie und insbesondere Medizin zu dokumentieren.Nebenbei 165 wurden authentische Darstellungen der Lebensrealität der Niederländer auf der Insel hergestellt. Nachdem trotz größter ethischer Barrieren der unumgängliche praktische Schritt in die empirische medizinische Tätigkeit durch eine Obduktion 1771 getätigt war, wurden die daraus gewonnenen Erkenntnisse im 1774 erschienenen ersten Anatomiebuch Japans (kaitai shinsho) veröffentlicht. Dieses 5-bändige Werk enthielt neben perfekten Kopien europäischer Bildvorlagen auch erstmalig eigene Zeichnungen vom Präparat, die der Maler Odano Naotake anfertigte. Er ging damit noch in der japanischen Edo-Zeit und lange vor der gezielten Verwestlichung Japans, die auch die Integration der praktischen europäischen Medizin vorsah, einen Schritt, den in ähnlicher Weise Leonardo da Vinci gegangen war. Kawahara Keiga fertigte die erste topographische Karte Japans. In der dritten Phase der Kontaktaufnahmen wurde die westliche realistische Mal- und Zeichentechnik beim Aufbau eines westkompatiblen Industrie- und Rüstungsstaates eingesetzt. Die erzwungene Öffnung Japans 1853 für die westlichen Staaten, die den ungeschützten neuen Markt an sich reißen wollten, führte zu sofortigen Maßnahmen: 1855 wurden Schußwaffenfabriken gebaut und ein Amt für Westforschungen eingerichtet. Um diese Zeit und während der Hafenöffnungen (kaikoku) 1854/58 hielten Künstler der Utagawa-Schule die militärische Macht, die technischen Möglichkeiten der amerikanischen Kriegsschiffe und das selbstgefällige Verhalten der Fremden auf Drucken fest. Ab 1856 übernahm der „Pionier der Westmalerei der Moderne“(Harada Minoru), Kawakami Tôgai, im Westforschungsinstitut den Bereich Zeichnung. Ab 1861 bemühte er sich im „Amt für Malereiforschung“ (gagakukyoku) um die realistische Öltechnik: Beide Techniken wurden für kartographische Zwecke und den Bau militärischer Einrichtungen benötigt. Kawakami unterrichtete und koordinierte die Nachfolgergenerationen. Die Meiji-Restauration (meiji-isshin) 1868 beendete das Tokugawa-Regime, Kaiser Meiji proklamierte das Ziel des modernen Staates: Das Land sollte vollständig umstrukturiert werden; Ziel war der Aufbau eines reichen Rüstungs- und Industriestaates (fukokukyôhei), der den Konkurrenzkampf mit den westlichen Staaten aufnehmen und die Unabhängigkeit des Landes erhalten sollte. Daraufhin wurde die Industrialisierung nach europäischem Vorbild, ab 1876 die kulturelle Umerziehung, d.h. die Europäisierung der Bevölkerung (ôkaseisaku) eingeleitet. In dieser Zeit wurden europäische Frauen und die Landwirtschaft mittels der Öltechnik positiv vermittelt. Zwei Ministerien koordinierten den Aufbau der Infrastrukturen, der industriellen Grundlagen und der zukünftigen Exportindustriezweige Seide und Baumwolle, die Finanzierung des Aufbaus und die Maßnahmen zur 166 Produktionssteigerung (shokusankôgyô). Die Masse der Bauern wurde mittels einer Landsteuerreform (chisokaisei) als finanzielle Grundlage des Staates festgelegt und durch im voraus fixierte Steuereinnahmen vollständig ausgenutzt. Die Bauerntöchter arbeiteten bereits ab 1872 zu Dumpinglöhnen in den schnell hochgezogenen staatlichen Fabriken. Sofort entbrannte ein Bürgerkrieg, der das Land in eine prowestliche und in eine traditionalistische Fraktion spaltete. Ab 1876 kam es zu wiederholten Bauernaufständen, die durch unterschiedliche Maßnahmen, die in das Parasitäre Gutsherrentum (kisei jinushisei) mündeten, unterbunden wurden. Propagandistische Malerei wurde den Entwicklungen im Land entsprechend hergestellt: Der äußerst prowestlich eingestellte Maler Goseda unterstützte den Kaiser im Bürgerkrieg durch Propagandamalereien. Das Leben der gezielt ausgenutzten Bauernschicht wurde von kaisertreuen Malern bis zum Zeitpunkt wirtschaftlicher Kompatibilität idyllisch propagiert. Nur ein Westmaler wagte um 1870 Bilder mit antiwestlichem Inhalt. Der englische Journalist und Zeichenlehrer Charles Wirgman deutete die Situation der Bauern an. An der 1876 eingerichteten „Kunstschule für das Ingenieurwesen“ unterrichtete der italienische Professor für Landschaftsmalerei, Antonio Fontanesi. Dort erhielten viele Westmaler ihre Ausbildung, die westliche Zeichentechnik wurde für die Infrastrukturierung, insbesondere den Eisenbahnbau in Zusammenarbeit mit Ingenieuren benötigt. Das Tôkaidô-Hauptnetz war 1889 gelegt. Der Nachfolger des Beamten Kawakami am Amt für Malereiforschung (gagakukyoku), Koyama Shotarô, arbeitete ebenfalls an militärischen Einrichtungen. Dort unterrichtete er die Herstellung von Skizzen. Ab 1880 und in der Zeit der finanziellen Schwächung der Regierung durch Bürgerkrieg und Bauernrevolten, setzte man die Öltechnik für die Verherrlichung der ersten Ingenieursleistungen ein: Der „Erste Ölmaler Japans“ (Harada Hikaru), Takahashi Yuichi, ebenfalls Schüler des Beamten Kawakami Tôgai, glorifizierte unterschiedliche Ingenieursbauten und weiterhin die Ergebnisse des Mishima-Straßenbauprojekts, das deutlich die Übernahme europäischer urbaner Strukturen zeigt. Dabei stellte er die japanische Bautradition nur noch als schmückendes Beiwerk dar. Dennoch wurde seine persönliche Begeisterung und Bestrebung, die Westmalerei als kulturelles Gut zu etablieren (Kunstausstellungen, Museen), von der Regierung, welche die Aufgaben der Öltechnik eindeutig festlegte, abgelehnt. Alle Bereiche, auch kulturelle, dienten einzig der Industrialisierung; dies betraf nicht nur die Nutzung der realistischen Westtechniken für Aufbau- und Propagandazwecke, sondern auch die Förderung des Traditionskunsthandwerks für den Verkauf auf Weltausstellungen. Zeitgleich wurde Europa propagandistisch positiv vermittelt, dies unterstützte den Verwestlichungskurs auf 167 wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Ebene. In einem Punkt jedoch setzte Yamamoto nach 10 Jahren eine erste Grenze: Er vermittelte die moralische Einstellung der Europäerin und kritisierte damit die Verwestlichung in Bezug auf die Rolle der Japanerin, ein Punkt, der den Rüstungskurs nicht gefährdete. Mit Schritt in die wirtschaftliche Kompatibilität änderte sich die Propaganda: Harada Naojirô vermittelte nun, im Jahr 1886, die männliche Bevölkerung des wirtschaftlichen Konkurrenzgebietes Europa als geschwächt und krank. Zugleich griffen er und andere prowestliche Maler innere Gegner an, die den Rüstungskurs, dem auch die kulturelle Umerziehung diente, blockierten: 1890 griff die prowestliche Regierung auf einer Industriemesse mit einem Bild Harada Naojirôs die Traditionalisten durch religiöse Tabuverletzungen an und bekundete damit ihre Macht. Ein ähnliches Ziel verfolgten auch die Mitglieder des Meiji-Kunstvereins, die in der Tradition der Malerei als Fotografieersatz standen: Sie griffen das Traditionsmonopol der Ablehnung der realistischen Malweisen an; unter dem Label einer „didaktischen Westmalerei“ wurden traditionelle Themen mittels realistischer Darstellungsweisen korrumpiert. Damit drang der Verwestlichungskurs zum Zeitpunkt erster Erfolge als westkompatibler, d.h. kolonisationsfähiger Industriestaat bis in die kulturellen Tiefen des Landes vor. In dieser ersten Hälfte der Industriellen Revolution (ab 1890), die in Japan für die Zeit der bereits aufgebauten Fundamente und frühe Kolonisationen steht, transferierte Kuroda Seiki, der „Vater der modernen japanischen Westmalerei“ (Harada Minoru, Miwa Hideo ), den Malstil des französischen Lehrers Raphaël Collin als repräsentativ für Europa nach Japan. Sein Abschlußwerk, das im Salon geehrt wurde, eine Aktmalerei, diskreditierte, im Taiwanjahr 1895 auf einer Industriemesse gezeigt, die Europäerin moralisch. Zugleich demonstrierte man damit die Macht der Industrie über innere Gegner, die versuchten, die als anstößig empfundene Aktmalerei in Japan zu verbieten. Auch auf privater Ebene trieb Kuroda die Verwestlichung voran: 1896 gründete er den Schimmelverein (hakubakai), in dem freiheitliche Prinzipien des französischen Realismus auf Japan übertragen wurden. Zugleich wurde auch auf die Forderungen des Takahashi Yuichi reagiert, der die Westmalerei als Möglichkeit betrachtete, weltweit über die Entwicklungen in Japan zu informieren. In diesem Verein thematisierten Westmaler die Realität der ausgebeuteten Bauern, erste Ergebnisse der Industrialisierung und den Nationalstolz, Themen, die direkt Bezug auf die Fakten nahmen. Mit Erreichen des technischen Rüstungsstandards der westlichen Länder im Jahr 1900, internationaler Konkurrenzfähigkeit im Jahr 1903 und im Vorfeld weiterer Kriege und Kolonisierungen wurde 1903 der Pazifik-Kunstverein gegründet. Gründer Mitsutani, Schüler des Koyama, arbeitete in dessen Tradition und malte kriegspropagandistische Bilder. Zugleich diskreditierte Gründer Nakamura 1903 168 nicht nur den Westen durch eine exakte Aktmalerei, sondern deutete auch die durch die Verwestlichung möglicherweise schon zerstörte moralische Einstellung der Japanerin an. Japan verdrängte zwischen 1905 und 1908 die internationalen Marktführer des Seidenhandels. In dieser Phase, als die zu Beginn festgelegten Ziele eines reichen, militärisch starken Staates (fukokukyôhei und shokusankôgyô) erreicht waren, wurde die Westtechnik, die am Aufbau des Staates beteiligt gewesen war, im Jahr 1907 als gleichberechtigte Kulturtechnik neben die einheimische Kulturtechnik Nihonga gestellt. Damit avancierte sie zum kulturellen Symbol der erfolgreichen japanischen Industrialisierung nach westlichem Vorbild, die als Selbstschutzmaßnahme nach der Demütigung des Jahres 1853 eingeleitet worden war. Zum Zeitpunkt des Schritts in den japanischen Imperialismus, der keine inneren Streitigkeiten mehr tolerierte, bekundeten die Westmaler der einstigen ausschließlich prowestlichen Fraktion, daß sie auf der Seite der Traditionalisten standen: Die traditionelle Rolle der Japanerin sollte erhalten bleiben. Mit dieser Botschaft und durch die Nebeneinanderstellung beider Kulturtechniken schlugen sie gezielt den Weg der Harmonisierung ein, um das Land für die vordringlichen politischen, außenpolitischen und wirtschaftlichen Ziele zu vereinen. Auf den ab 1907 abgehaltenen kultusministeriellen Ausstellungen (Bunten) wurden, in der Endphase der Industriellen Revolution und auf dem Weg in den japanischen Imperialismus, Bilder prämiert, welche die Arbeit allgemein und die Arbeit in der Rüstungsindustrie thematisierten. Die durch den Eisenbahnboom erwerbslos gewordene Masse der Rikschafahrer, von Kriegspropagandist und Pazifik- Kunstvereinsgründer Mitsutani in ihrer aktuellen Armut drastisch dargestellt, war prädestiniert für den Einsatz in der Rüstungsindustrie. Auch damit knüpfte man an die von dem ersten Ölmaler Japans, Takahashi Yuichi, geäußerte Aussage an, die Malerei müsse Staat und Regierung dienen.
Selbst 20 Jahre nach der blutigen Niederschlagung der Proteste auf dem Tian’anmen-Platz in der chinesischen Hauptstadt Beijing erregen die Ereignisse noch das politische Gemüt der westlichen Öffentlichkeit. So fanden sich am 4. Juni 2009 in nahezu allen deutschen Medien Berichte über die Demonstrationen des Jahres 1989, die wichtige Einblicke in den bis heute anhaltenden Diskurs über die Rolle ausländischer Einflüsse auf die Bewegung zulassen. Die westliche Berichterstattung über die Ereignisse wirft eine Vielzahl an Fragen auf, die im Laufe dieser Arbeit zu beantworten sind: Errichteten die Aktivisten tatsächlich eine „Freiheitsstatue“ auf dem Tian’anmen-Platz? Welche Rolle spielte es, ob ihre Ideen „aus dem Westen importiert“ oder „originär chinesisch“ waren? Welche ideologischen Prämissen und Intentionen lagen hinter dieser Art der kulturellen Verortung? Waren die Aktivisten tatsächlich „pro-westlich“ orientiert? Ist es überhaupt gerechtfertigt, sie als „Demokraten“ zu bezeichnen? Bezüge zu Protesten jenseits der eigenen nationalstaatlichen Grenzen werden von Medien und Institutionen genutzt, um die politischen Ziele von Aktivisten zu bestätigen oder zu diskreditieren. Diese Art von Referenzen spielen jedoch nicht nur im Diskurs über soziale Bewegungen eine zentrale Rolle, sondern werden zudem von Aktivisten gezielt eingesetzt, um politische Botschaften zu transportieren und ihren Konflikt kulturgeschichtlich zu verorten. Dies ist das Thema dieser Arbeit.
The analysis of hidden power constellations in any translation process between cultures–in this special case between Asia and Europe–is an emerging feature in (trans-)cultural studies. However, with a strong focus on texts and images, techniques of direct material translation–such as plaster casts–are rarely discussed. And even if the cultural-historical value of this form of physical copying in European museum collections was rediscovered in the last decade, the analysis of their relevance in colonial translation politics has yet to be assessed.This paper focuses on the cultural-political history of French plaster casts. It is particularly interested in those made of the Cambodian temple of Angkor Vat during early French explorative missions, museum displays, and universal/colonial exhibitions (from the 1860s to 1930s). It explores the hypothesis that plaster casts were a powerful ‘translation tool’ to appropriate local, built heritage in the Indochinese colonies for global representation.
This paper diverts the ubiquitous attention paid to the contemporary art market and its dynamics as the main driving force to have catapulted so many Indian artists into public view. Instead, the paper maps alternative landscapes of artistic production that largely take place on a collaborative basis and offers further non-commercial explanations for this development. The approach seems all the more relevant since scholarship on contemporary India art, which has only gone global in the last decade, has seldom tried to understand in detail the local artistic networks and how they contest as well as nurture relations with the global art world. However, the author does not neglect the internationalized infrastructure of art fairs, galleries, collections, and biennales, but admits that they are important forces that opened-up possibilities hitherto not available for artists in the officially supported Indian art infrastructure, but also outlines its pitfalls.In the author’s own words: the paper “differentiates between the large disembodied formations that impersonate as ‘alternative’ artistic structures or democratic artists’ associations; all the while replicating a corporate body that functions through its disparate arms, – to control and direct through invisible means, art’s social functions, and on the other hand, the networks of solidarity that engender an altogether different economy of art: of reciprocal exchange and collaboration along with a rejection any form of a priori hierarchy”. With its attention on the latter context and based on critical self-introspection as well as first-hand experience, this contribution of an artist-cum-scholar supplements theoretical knowledge on the globalization of modernism and contemporary artistic phenomena with close insights in a rarely researched field of art. The paper takes Bangalore as a case in point a city that has yielded comparatively more critical and pointed art works than the wealthier art metropolises of Delhi or Mumbai, especially as the city is not (yet) an important spot on the map of global market circuits. The author elaborates not only on current self-organized initiatives, non-commercial artistic networks and platforms that lay at the heart of this phenomenon in Bangalore, but also links it back to the local historical impact of earlier art groups and art schools that helped to pave the way.
Despite the many technological innovations that had for some time contributed to a significant reduction of global travel times, intercontinental ship passages in the late nineteenth century were no quick affair. Depending on the route, such journeys could last between a few weeks and several months. During this time, crew and passengers shared the narrow space of the ship—largely isolated from the rest of the world and basically suspended between origin and destination. On many long-distance steamers, the production and consumption of ship newspapers became one possible means of whiling away the time in transit for the passengers. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how these extraordinary publications can serve as lenses not only on shipboard life but actually on historical actors of globalisation in a more general context. First, we seek to highlight why and how ship newspapers played an important role in the shaping of the peculiar social space of the passenger ship. We will then give a brief overview of the context in which these newspapers were produced and what kind of news they contained. In a third step, we will introduce two brief examples of topics discussed in ship newspapers and outline possible fields of research on which ship newspapers will be able to shed new light.
Lifestyle and consumer trends are part of people’s everyday lives everywhere. Trends in media and politics, though perhaps less frequently acknowledged as trends, shape the way societies are perceived and the way humans interact. Moreover, although we may think of trends as a recent phenomenon of post-war globalization, trends have been crucial in societies across the globe for much longer. In short, trends matter. Yet, despite their crucial role worldwide, trends have been subject to fairly little research beyond the quantitative social sciences. This is especially true for transcultural trends. This essay prefaces a series of upcoming articles in this journal all of which discuss case studies of trends that travelled from Europe to Asia or from Asia to Europe since the late 19th century to our current times. Why trends travel, who proliferates or obstructs trends, and how trends become popular are questions that are collectively addressed in all upcoming articles. This introductory essay discusses a series of analytical concepts that are all central to gaining a fuller understanding of the complex processes that underlie the transcultural travels of trends.
No single image from Japan, possibly even all of Asia, has been reproduced so often or undergone so many reincarnations in so many parts of the world as Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa.” At once abstract and concrete, this archetypical great wave is bound up with powerful mythologies of natural destruction and renewal. It draws attention to the border-crossing movement of ideas, people, technologies, capital, and commodities. It evokes the oceans over which Europe, America, and Japan have struggled for territorial control. It forces us to rethink the fruitful relationship between creativity and hybridity. But above all, it challenges the binary thinking of boundaries and limits, inside and outside, centers and peripheries. Hokusai’s woodcut has been a site where the tensions and contradictions of globalism have been negotiated and aestheticized since its appearance as part of the artist’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. This paper explored the multivalent meanings of this dramatic image through its iterations across a multi-sited network spanning Japan, Europe and America from the time of its publication in 1831 until 1904 in media ranging from Danish porcelains and French sheet music to Russian book illustrations. By looking closely at the local conditions, strategies, and practices associated with these cultural transfers, it argued for a more nuanced sense of the complex geographies of modernism and modernity.
Exhibitions have always been at the heart of the modern art world. They are contested sites, where the joint forces of the art objects, their social agents, and institutional spaces temporarily intersect and provide a visual arrangement to specific audiences, whose interpretations feed back into the discourse on art. From this perspective, “contemporary Chinese art,” both as phenomenon and discursive category referring to specific dimensions of artistic production in China post-1979, was mediated through various exhibitions that took place in the People’s Republic of China. After 1989, exhibitions of artworks from the PRC in European and North American museums significantly contributed to the broadening of Western knowledge about this artistic production. Since then, the two strains of exhibition activities grew while becoming increasingly entangled and the discursive category of “contemporary Chinese art” has gone global. This paper reviews the beginnings of this complex process by investigating the conditions that configured the first large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the PRC in Europe after 1979: the travelling group show China Avantgarde, which opened in Berlin in early 1993. The first part of the paper explores the wider historical conditions that impacted on the exhibition by contextualizing the event in relation to two important, if very different forerunners: the 1989 shows Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan. China/Avantgarde in Beijing and Magiciens de la terre in Paris.Yet the important entanglements between the respective curatorial concepts, affiliated art discourses, and the agents involved are also analysed. Constituting a specific network of mediators, mediating factors, and mediating institutions, these forerunners influenced the making of China Avantgarde in Berlin three years later. The second part of the paper discusses the Berlin exhibition in detail. It argues that the title reflects the contested use of the discursive categories “avant-garde” and “modern art” in Beijing and Berlin at the time, which helped translate and thereby shape a certain image of contemporary Chinese art beyond the actual artworks on display. Of paricular interes are the concerns of the European curators, who had to overcome various political, logistic, as well as conceptual challenges when selecting artists and artworks. Examining the catalogue as an instance where diverging strategies of how to present artworks from thePRC become visible, the paper argues that China Avantgarde was not so much a clear-cut, singular, and–by now–canonical event, but formed as well as informed a complex canonizing process that is still relevant today.
In the early 1960s, West German intellectuals began to discuss the role and importance of Mao Zedong. Recognition of Mao as a political icon soon spread into subcultural left-wing networks and publics. Driven by a desire to change the social and political conditions of West German society, artists and members of the growing student movement adopted the idea of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and reconfigured it for the West German context. At the same time, iconic images of Mao also entered popular culture. After the decline of the student movement, left-wing intellectuals’ accounts of Mao became trendsetting texts for a broad subcultural milieu. During the 1970s, an estimated 100,000-150,000 extra-parliamentary activists turned into adherents of Maoist cadre parties. Living directly at the European frontline of the Cold War, the appeal of Maoist ideology for West German activists derived from its promise to open up a “third way” beyond US capitalism and Soviet communism. The Chinese example inspired hopes for social liberalization, fundamental political change, and, for some, even national reunification. This paper traces how Mao acquired his iconic status among different West German networks and publics throughout the 1960s and 1970s and attempts to identify key agents in this process as well as their acts of trendsetting and gatekeeping.
Many strands of archaeology have not succeeded in disentangling the complex relationship between humans and things. They are based on the anthropocentric notion that the relationship between humans and things is guided by human intentionality and conceptualized from a human perspective. Within the last few years, material culture studies and workplace studies have demonstrated how objects can trigger practices or have an agency of their own. These studies have empirically applied Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus concept and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. In my view, it is time to extend the practice turn of culture studies and social anthropology to archaeology. This should not lead archaeologists to dismiss previous approaches but should encourage them to supplement them with additional insights. Humans and objects are connected by complex entanglements which are based on a mutual dependence. Humans use objects with multiple intentions, but at the same time feel that things move or prompt them to act. Humans communicate through objects but also with objects in the context of social practices. I argue for the transformative power of the human-thing-entanglement within processes of appropriation by drawing on contextual analyses of Aegean-type pottery in the Southern Levant in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.
This essay deals with the history of the perception of Tibet in the consciousness of Korea’s intellectuals from the seventh to nineteenth centuries. Since Tibet was peripheral from the viewpoint of Koreans, and direct contact between the two lands was sporadic at best, little continuity in the perceptions of Tibet can be traced. By the eighteenth century, much of the earlier contacts with Tibet, which had centred on Buddhism, were simply forgotten because, from the fifteenth century onward, Buddhism no longer enjoyed the status of the royally protected religio . For eighteenth- and nineteenth century Korean intellectuals, Tibet was first and foremost a part (albeit rather heterogeneous) of the China-centred political space and known mostly from Chinese sources. It is noteworthy, however, that in eigteenth century Korea, such faraway outskirts of the Sinitic oikoumene as Tibet increasingly drew attention. It points to an important epistemological shift that saw the “periphery” gaining in importance vis-à-vis the “centre”.
This paper addresses the ways in which animation has become a medium for the formation of transcultural fan communities. It focuses in particular on the trend for anime, which has generated asymmetrical, tension-filled and yet productive interactions among fans in East Asia and the West. Drawing on the ideas of “recentered” media industries, imagination, and collaboration formulated by Koichi Iwabuchi, Arjun Appadurai, and Anna Tsing, it provides a comparative analysis of three animated texts from three different eras and countries: the 1935 Betty Boop cartoon “A Language All My Own,” the 1998 Japanese television series Cowboy Bebop, and the 2003-08 Korean web-cartoon “There she is!!“ These texts and the fan communities that have formed around them illustrate the shifting flows and frictions of the global media environment, from its historical context in the early film era to its digital manifestations in the twenty-first century.
A popular, 1999 Taiwanese novel published for the Chinese book market set off a twofold transcultural trend: one in real life and one in literature. To explore this phenomenon, this paper considers the rising popularity of coffee culture and of “Western” food culture, as well as the increasingly important role that consumption and brand names play in popular literature on the Chinese mainland. I argue that desire, the power of imagination, and the transcultural qualities of the products in question constitute the crucial links between the two trends. Like other cultural products, such as lifestyle magazines, guidebooks, and movies, literary texts (especially successful ones) not only explain to consumers how to integrate new objects of consumption into their daily lives. They also provide ways of bestowing meaning on new forms of consumption and experience. Cultural products call upon consumers to fulfil their desires through imagination. The products concerned all have a global dimension, but are also firmly rooted in the Chinese reality. This gives them a certain vagueness and, at the same time, distinct meanings that render them particularly convenient for meeting the desires of a well-off, fashionable, cosmopolitan, and lifestyle-oriented part of the urban Chinese population: the xiaozi (petty bourgeois).
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Aus dem Blickwinkel der Welt- und Globalgeschichte, erscheint die Geschichte der Jüdischen Brigade zuerst thematisch eng an einen militärhistorischen Rahmen gebunden: Mitten in den Wirren des Zweiten Weltkrieges entsteht unter der britischen Regierung eine eher kleine militärische Einheit mit äußerst beschränkter Einsatzdauer. Bei genauerem Hinsehen offenbart sich jedoch die Besonderheit dieser Brigade, die nicht nur ausschließlich aus jüdischen, international rekrutierten Soldaten zusammengesetzt war, sondern der auch ein immenser publizistischer und administrativer Aufwand mit globalen Auswirkungen vorausging. Angefangen bei der Vielfalt jüdischer Bewegungen seit dem 19. Jhd., den kolonialen Verflechtungen im Umfeld der erste Jüdischen Legion während des Ersten Weltkriegs, bis hin zu den politischen und zivilgesellschaftlichen Ereignissen, die zur Aufstellung der Jüdischen Brigade 1944 führten, lassen sich viele unterschiedliche Aspekte anhand der Brigade sichtbar machen. Mit der Geschichte der Jüdischen Brigade lassen sich daher einerseits ein großer Teil der „entangled History“ des Nahen Ostens, Europas, britischer Kolonien und den USA offen legen. Andererseits zeichnen sich hier die gegenseitige Beeinflussung der zivilgesellschaftlichen, politischen und sogar militärischen Ebenen in den Ereignissen deutlich ab.
"Campus-Report" heißt die Radiosendung der Universitäten Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe und Freiburg. Die Reportagen über aktuelle Themen aus Forschung und Wissenschaft werden montags bis freitags jeweils um ca. 19.10h im Programm von Radio Regenbogen gesendet. (Empfang in Nordbaden: UKW 102,8. In Mittelbaden: 100,4 und in Südbaden: 101,1) Uni-Radio Baden: ein gemeinsames Projekt der Universitäten Freiburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe und Mannheim in Zusammenarbeit mit Radio Regenbogen – unterstützt von der Landesanstalt für Kommunikation. Sendung vom 07. März 2012
"Campus-Report" heißt die Radiosendung der Universitäten Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe und Freiburg. Die Reportagen über aktuelle Themen aus Forschung und Wissenschaft werden montags bis freitags jeweils um ca. 19.10h im Programm von Radio Regenbogen gesendet. (Empfang in Nordbaden: UKW 102,8. In Mittelbaden: 100,4 und in Südbaden: 101,1) Uni-Radio Baden: ein gemeinsames Projekt der Universitäten Freiburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe und Mannheim in Zusammenarbeit mit Radio Regenbogen – unterstützt von der Landesanstalt für Kommunikation. Sendung vom 25. Januar 2012
During Japan’s revolutionary years in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in particular after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, people experienced a great change in the traditional values that had governed various aspects of their life during the Edo period (1603-1867). In their religious life, Buddhism lost its authority as the Meiji government, propagating Shintoism, repeatedly ordered the proclamation of the separation of Shintoism and Buddhism after the Restoration. The proclamation brought about the anti-Buddhist movement haibutsu kishaku, and the nationwide movement doomed Buddhist statuary to a fate that it had never before met. But a number of statues, fortunately rescued from destruction, became recognized as sculptural works of Buddhist art during the late 1880s. This paper examines the change of viewpoints that occurred in the 1870s whereby the Buddha of Kamakura, a famous colossus of seated Amida (Amitâbha) from the mid-thirteenth century, was evaluated afresh and, from this perspective, tries to clarify the process in which the notion of the art of Buddhist sculpture was established in the Meiji period (1868-1912).
This is a translation of an essay by Atsushi Shibasaki, which was originally published in Japanese. Shibasaki investigates Japanese intellectual Tomanaga Sanj?r?’s lifelong engagement with Immanuel Kant and the development of the notion of international relations to argue that the process of translation and adaptation of seminal Western philosophical works are not a simple passive reception, but rather an active engagement, the selective nature of which reflects actual local historical and ideological circumstances.Gaynor Sekimori translatedand prepared this text for an English-speaking readership.
Cover and Impressum for Issue 2011/1 in pdf format.
Languages continually enrich themselves and other languages with concepts they exchange. While not a modern phenomenon, the denser and faster communications during the 19th and 20th centuries have resulted in a large-scale homogenization of the world's modern languages around a core of globalized concepts with their modern order and hierarchy. The common features of these concepts are hidden below the linguistic surface of the different languages and most speakers are unaware of them. Concepts are abstract and cannot directly guide action in time and space. For this purpose, recourse is taken to metaphor and simile. These in turn lend themselves to become the material for visual representation, for example in political cartoons. The article investigates the migration of such metaphors and their visualized forms across languages and cultures. It will focus on the metaphor of “China asleep/China awakened.” This metaphor became common parlance during the 19th century and has remained in the global metaphorical canon to this day. The article addresses the dynamics of this highly asymmetrical translingual and transcultural migration, the cultural brokers involved, and the contact zones where the exchanges take place.
In a first step, this article examines the facts and speculations about Cosmas Indicopleustes as a person. His most striking features are the great wealth of information he gathered on his far-reaching voyages as a merchant in early Byzantine times and the strong Nestorian tendencies of his Christian faith. These two constants are the intellectual framework of his Christian Topography, whose aim, structure and manuscript tradition are explained in the second section. The third part deals with the nature and background of Cosmas’ peculiar cosmological model, which he based on theoretical and biblical considerations. The forth part concentrates on Cosmas’ description of far eastern trade connections, as well as on his interest in the flora and fauna of India and Africa. Here, Cosmas largely drew on personal experience.The article presents both original passages from the Christian Topography and examples of the unique illustrations displayed in the old manuscripts.
The themed section Byzantium Beyond its Eastern Borders is based on a lecture-series that was organized by the Institute of Byzantine Archeology and Art History at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. This introductory article outlines the major concerns of the lecture-series and reflects on how the contributions featured here approach them.
This is a study of aniconic Buddhist art in India and China that refers back to the iconoclasm (Bilderstreit) of the 8th and 9th centuries in the Byzantine empire and the subsequent development of an image theory that justified the already well established image cult. By deliberately adopting methodological approaches and terms that have been used for some time in Byzantine art history, relevant visual and textual evidence about the Buddhist tradition will be restructured and evaluated, pointing out similarities and dissimilarities. Anthropomorphic Buddha images and aniconic representations of the Buddha in India and China are compared; furthermore, an overview of the establishment of a Buddhist icon cult with image worship in China is given, discussing related phenomena like narratives about the First Image, the True Countenance, and miracle-working Divine Images. Against this background, Chinese aniconic tendencies and the image discourse within the Chinese Buddhist community around the time of the second Buddhist persecution (574-577) are explored, when rock inscriptions in Shandong province preferred the Buddha’s Golden Words to his image.
This paper is a based on an extensive study of the available textual and visual data on a collection of didactic paintings employed by the Manichaeans throughout the 1400-year history of their religion. Known as Mani's Picture or Picture-Book, these paintings were originally created in mid-third century Mesopotamia with direct involvement from Mani (216-276 CE) and remained preserved by being adapted to a wide variety of artistic and cultural norms as the religion spread across the Asian continent. The evidence on Manichaean didactic art fits well with the pan-Asiatic phenomenon of, what Victor Mair calls in his 1998 monograph, "picture-recitation," or "story-telling with images." Nevertheless, more than any other religion, the Manichaeans made use of images by attributing canonical status to them. This assured their preservation. By situating the Manichaean data in a broader art historical context, this lecture brings together evidence on the same phenomenon by other contemporaneous religious traditions (such as Eastern Christianity, Judaism, and most importantly Buddhism) in third-eighth century West Asia, eighth-twelfth century Central Asia and eighth-seventeenth century East Asia.
An international and transcultural process, the history of Japanese neutrality in the nineteenth century is marked by changing ideas of the international laws of war and the rights of neutrals among the western powers. The essay explores three points at which Japan's international history intersected with these developments in the meaning and practice of neutrality: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Sino-French conflict of 1884, and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Japan's working out a position of neutrality turns out to be one of many international and shifting attempts to construct neutrality in the nineteenth century.
Cultural objects move with increasing speed across regional and national boundaries resulting in an ever faster, volatile traffic in commodities, styles and information. This essay explores the resulting global cultural flows and networks that develop in these accelerated circumstances, creating often worrisome dynamics on a global and local level. The aim is to prepare the grounds for a new methodology that considers “the circulation of forms and the forms of circulation.” Such a methodology, which is based on the argument that histories shape geographies and not vice versa, is needed for a fruitful discussion of the conflicts and connections between the various "scapes" and forces.
The naked body occupies a prominent role in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. Addressing himself to his reader, the author expresses his desire for immediate self-representation with the idea of getting rid of his clothes. This undressing self-exhibition is not the only nudist scene in Montaigne’s writings. This contribution will explore two essays in which the bare body gains special importance, “De l’usage de se vestir” (I. 36) and “Des cannibales” (I. 31). Nudity proves to be not a simple sign of an original state of man before civilization, used by Montaigne to critique his own civilization in a cynic or enlightened matter. Rather, nudity is part of the complex process of constructing textual meaning in which Montaigne remains always aware of his own subjectivity and its uncertain constitution.
Both Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949) focus on the 1791 Hatian slave revolt, but the ways they tell that story could not be more different. This article analyzes the differences between the two novels as they are reflected in their representations of the insular space. Hugo describes Haiti as an isolated area that does not establish further contact either with other Caribbean islands or with the continents engaged in the conflict between African slaves and European colonialists. In contrast, Carpentier’s Haiti is a versatile scope of encounters that represents what the famous prologue of his novel calls the “real maravilloso”. In both novels, the island thus serves a poetic function: As they provide very different descriptions of the island in which their narratives take place, the novels represent also different images of literature itself. Whereas Hugo's text is conceived as a fragmentary one, the one of Carpentier is based on a web of dense intertextual connections.
Many of Miguel de Unamuno’s works probe the nature of reality and its boundaries within texts. This preoccupation with the control an author holds or loses over a text provides ample material for a deeper understanding of the complex prologic structure of his novel Niebla, including its various epitexts. This article contextualizes the ways in which the author approaches the reader and the positions that author and reader gain and switch regarding the medium. As the article shows, not only is it clear that the prologues are an integral part of the metafictional construct that Niebla is, but they are also apparent solutions that help explain the contradictions created when the authorship of the prologues turns out not to withstand the complexity of Unamuno's metafictional creation as a whole.
Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, two leading figures in post-war French literature and thought, both embark upon their respective projects from a state of semiotic alienation, encapsulated in the concept of écriture. Reality and language both appear governed by ideologically charged systems of signification; only the circumvention of this alienation may provide the means, however provisional, for any utterance to be able to reside beyond the given. Robbe-Grillet’s strategy consists of a return to the mute surface of things that seems to provide access to a reality prior to any imposition of meaning. Barthes’s strategy is more oblique. Despite his relentless critique of the alienating codes at work in quotidian and scientific discourses, his reflections on photography, which form a continual strand in his thinking, seem concerned with the conception of a non-coded access to reality, which photography appears capable of offering. In both cases, however, immediacy and meaning gradually reveal themselves as mutually exclusive. Robbe-Grillets Le miroir qui revient and Barthes’ La chambre claire, thus, both provide forms of discourse that try to negotiate this dilemma.
The Salvadorian writer Horacio Castellanos Moya belongs to a generation of Latin American novelists who draw on elements of the crime genre to deal with themes of violence and crime in their countries. This author of nine novels and several collections of short stories is concerned both with the violence of the past (such as the Salvadorian civil war) and with that of the present. Castellanos Moya has lived a number of countries and comes from a Salvadorian-Honduran family, which gives him a unique perspective from which he examines issues concerning other Central American countries as well as his own. This interview focuses primarily on his connection to crime fiction, but also investigates the many other levels in his literature and offers a broad overview of his work.
Although the word melancholy and the name of the Roman god Saturn are never explicitly mentioned in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), the film makes many visual and auditory references to them. This article shows and analyzes these iconographic references, i.e., the motifs and symbols that allude to this temperament and god in the film, and offers an interpretation of them in this new context. In order to do so, we will take into account some of the categories proposed by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl (1992) in their analysis of the copperplate engraving Melancolia I (1514) of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and add some relevant ones.
The history of modern painting is conventionally told following a trajectory from European artists like Manet, Cézanne through Picasso and artistic styles ranging from expressionism, surrealism, cubism, and other avant-garde movements and stylistic trends on to abstract expressionism. Art historians all over the world share this conventional narrative, although it is the uneasy confluence of several Western master narratives that largely exclude the artistic production evolving in processes of modernization elsewhere in the world. Consequently, painters fostering a modernist idiom for example in China, India, South-America or even Eastern Europe appeared - and still appear until today – if at all - as agents of a “belated modernity.” At best they are credited with the pursuit of an “alternative modernism,” which still harkens back to the Euro-American centre as its main reference point. More often, they are dismissed in art critical and historical accounts as derivative in their attempt to emulate this centre. I argue that in the age of economic, media and cultural globalization after the end of the Cold War, there still exists no critical approach to modernist painting that is effectively free of the Eurocentric and universalist master narrative of western modernism, even though a strongly multicultural art-critical, art historical and curatorial literature has developed that intends to look beyond western Europe and North America. It seems crucial to continue to engage the main trajectory and the entire institutional, critical, and historiographic apparatus that supports it, as outmoded and ideologically limited as they may seem, because they still underwrite the conditions under which modernist practices can appear as history. This paper collects and examines the approaches that are currently in use, in order to further conversation on the subject.
Despite the increased border-crossings and hybridities that characterize contemporary art in a globalizing world, there is a pronounced trend among contemporary Asian artists and the art professionals who promote them to deploy and reinscribe selected notions of "tradition" in an effort to carve out a distinct and marketable identity for their work in the transnational art market. While many contemporary Asian artists live and work between two, sometimes three, continents, often residing outside the country of their birth, they often still draw from a distinct repertoire of iconic cultural symbols from their "native" culture as a means of self-definition. Even the decidedly futuristic and technologized world of pop art fusions such as Takashi Murakami’s iconoclastic Superflat and Mariko Mori’s technicolor new-age spiritualism rest on a bedrock of these cultural forms. Such traditions, drawn from language, religion, aesthetics, and even sexual mores and erotica, are invoked to imbue contemporary practice with an aura of authenticity, while the traditions themselves are reconstructed within the transhistorical imagination of the contemporary. How does this complicate the age-old binary of tradition and modernity (or post-modernity) in our discussions of art in the 21st century? What does it reveal about the contemporary moment and the enduring power of what Bert Winther-Tamaki has called "artistic nationalism"? This paper will explore these questions and the various implications of the definition and deployment of so-called traditional cultural practices in contemporary Asian art.
This contribution introduces a series of articles that will appear in this and the following issues of Transcultural Studies under the title "Multi-Centred Modernisms—Reconfiguring Asian Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries".
pdf cover for issue 2010/1
The main objective of this work is the relationship between innovation and imitation as seen in the quotational use made of a canon. My interest is the seemingly contradictory relation between a canon that is fixed in wording and sometimes even in the way it is to be interpreted on the one hand, and on the other the volatility and ambiguity that is implied in what Garber terms the “quotable quote” (Garber 2003:17). I see quotation as the most important tool in bridging the gap between a static canon and a changing world. Without quotation the canon cannot and will not survive. Bridging the gap, however, entails changes to the quotation. Those changes, i.e. the different techniques used to accommodate an extant formulation into a new textual creation, are the objects of analysis of this work. By changing the interpretation or context, but also by ‘discovering’ the ‘true’ origin of a quotation, the meaning thereof can be redefined. Thus, neither the quotation nor its meaning is stable. However, although all parts constituting the definition of a quotation (formulation, author, source text or context) are prone to manipulation, yet quotations (and especially canonical quotations) possess authority. This authority, this power of persuasion quite paradoxically rises with every instance of quotation, though each instance of quoting might have changed the ‘original’, even if only a bit. Where, then, does this authority derive from? How does quotation affect the authority of the canon as a whole and of each article therein? I argue that quotation ‘classics’ are not made, they are quoted: It is the quoter and not the author of a text who wields the (democratic) power of choosing the ‘quotable’. The prescribed canon becomes the chosen classic. The focus of my dissertation is on the propagandistic use of (Mao) quotations in newspaper articles of People’s Daily since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In five case studies I illuminate the reciprocal influence between quotation and canon, between innovation and imitation in modern China. In a first chapter, I assay to situate my case studies in an historical, institutional and theoretical framework. The second chapter of my thesis comprises three shorter case studies analysing different lifecycles of quotations: the lifecycle of “Seek truth from facts (shishi qiushi)”, a Han dynasty quotation revived and successfully popularised by successive leaders of the Chinese Communist Party; the lifecycle of “Smash the Confucian shop (dadao kongjiadian)”, an ‘invented’ May Fourth quotation, and the lifecycle of “The working class has to lead everything (gongren jieji bixu lingdao yiqie)”, a short-lived Cultural Revolution quotation star. In these three case studies I ask how quotations are ‘made’, introduced into the discourse, repeated, duplicated, recycled, reconstructed, and extinguished. What differing meanings are given to the same quotation by usage in different contexts? I chose the image of a lifecycle, because I believe that quotations are not only used, manipulated, or stigmatised, but that they (can) possess a life of their own in people’s memory that is not easily altered or wiped out, but forces itself back into public discourse at unexpected moments in history. In Chapter 3, I discuss in detail how one single text of the canon, namely a 1941 speech of Mao Zedong entitled “Reform Our Study (gaizao women de xuexi)”, is excavated for quotations. This study may provide insights into the ‘selling’ or ‘popularisation’ of a canonical text. What sentences or sentence parts are chosen for later quotation? What policies can be and are legitimised by reference to the same authoritative source text? The fifth case study takes yet another perspective: it has been repeatedly claimed that anniversary articles of People’s Daily are interchangeable, that is they read the same every year. In respect of quotations, this statement implies that the choice of quotations when writing anniversary articles is at least limited. Hence, in my last study I attempt a close reading of May Fourth anniversary articles. How is the story of this movement – canonised in a 1939 article and enclosed in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong – retold every ten years? How are quotations employed to bridge the gap between the original movement of 1919, the normative history thereof written in 1939, and each subsequent ‘present’? How does the narrative and thus the canon change over time?
Computerbasierte Rekonstruktion der Tempel von Angkor in Kambodscha
Vom 9. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert errichteten die Baumeister der Khmer die gigantischen Tempelanlagen von Angkor im heutigen Königreich Kambodscha. Lange Zeit waren sie nahezu vergessen und vom Urwald überwuchert. Erst 1862 wurden sie von französischen Forschern „wiederentdeckt“. Seitdem bemüht man sich darum, die alten Bauwerke der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen, sie vor weiterem Zerfall zu retten oder zu rekonstruieren. Mit dabei auch Professor Hans Georg Bock und sein Team vom Interdisziplinären Zentrum für Wissenschaftliches Rechnen der Universität Heidelberg(IWR). Er sieht seine Aufgabe darin, die Forscher, die sich mit Angkor und seiner Vergangenheit beschäftigen, mit den Methoden des Wissenschaftlichen Rechnens zu unterstützen: beispielsweise durch die Anfertigung von Animationen aber auch durch die Entwicklung neuer Rechenmethoden, mit denen man die zerfallenen Bauwerke zumindest im Computer rekonstruieren kann. Mitarbeiter und Studierende des IWR sind gerade von einem Forschungsaufenthalt in Kambodscha zurückgekommen. Sie haben mit einem Spezialscanner die Grundlagen für ein neues Forschungsprojekt gelegt. Dabei wurden Steine einer Mauer vermessen, die bereits durchnumeriert waren, so dass man für jeden Stein die genaue Lage bestimmen konnte. Daraus soll eine Art 3-D-Puzzle entstehen, mit dem man auch die Steine anderer Tempelruinen zusammensetzen kann.
The paper deals with the unified three teachings, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, in the Rock Carvings from the Song time in the ancient Sichuan region.
"The Making of S.A.R.I." ist die Dokumentation der Entstehung des von Studenten entwickelten Radiomagazins "S.A.R.I. - Südasien regional informiert", das am Juli 2009 ausgestrahlt wurde. Das Magazin entstand im Rahmen des Workshops "Made in South Asia" der Abteilung Geschichte des Suedasien-Institus Heidelberg, in dem sich alles um "Identität in Südasien"und damit verknüpften Themen drehte.
Bilder und Medien beim Exzellencluster „Asien und Europa im globalen Kontext“ : Campus-TV berichtet von der ersten Jahrestagung des Clusters – Es ging auch um Bollywood und die Rolle des Internets. Im Rahmen der Exzellenzinitiative war die Universität Heidelberg mit dem Cluster „Asien und Europa im globalen Kontext“ erfolgreich. Rund 250 Wissenschaftler in mehr als 50 Teilprojekten arbeiten an dem Ziel, sich wandelnde Asymmetrien in kulturellen Austauschprozessen zwischen Asien zu Europa zu untersuchen. Jetzt ging der Cluster erstmals mit einer Jahrestag an die Öffentlichkeit. Unter dem Titel „Flows of Images“ befasste er sich mit dem Einfluss der Medien im Verhältnis Asien zu Europa. Für Professorin Christiane Brosius von der Universität Heidelberg sind gerade die Verbindungen zwischen Asien und Europa sehr wichtig. Damit beschäftigt sich der Cluster sowohl über die nationalen Grenzen als auch über die Fächergrenzen hinaus. Die zentralen Inhalte der ersten Jahrestagung des Clusters waren Bilder und Medien. Dabei ging es auch um Bollywood-Filme und die Rolle des Internets. So transportiert das Internet Bilder, die man in Asien bisher nicht kannte. Etwa Szenen voller Gewalt gegen Frauen, die sich getraut hatten, in einer Kleinstadt in Südindien in öffentliche Bars zu gehen. Sie waren Auslöser für die so genannte Pink Chaddy Campaign in Indien. Dabei wurde pinkfarbene Unterwäsche an einen streng konservativen Mann geschickt, der auf Grund seiner Reden für die modernen Frauen Indiens die Verantwortung für diese Gewalttaten trug. Am Beispiel Valentinstag zeigt Professorin Christiane Brosius, wie ein aus Europa importiertes Ritual in Indien für Aufsehen sorgt.
This dissertation examines the motivations, logic, and functions of media control in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rather than telling the history of media control in modern China, or giving a comprehensive account of the techniques employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the media, it investigates the origins of the CCP’s theoretical approach to the media, as well as the consequences of the resulting concepts for practical media work in the PRC. The first half of the thesis tracks the genesis of the Party’s media concept and reconstructs the conditions that contributed to its rise in the first half of the twentieth century; the chapters in the latter half follow this concept in its implementation through a number of case studies from the early 1950s through the late 1990s. Since the day of its founding, the CCP has placed great emphasis on questions of media and propaganda; after 1949 the party-state has claimed full control of the Chinese print, broadcast, and electronic media. Asking for the reasons behind this claim, I argue that it must be traced back to the Party’s desire to bring about the transformation of human consciousness and to create an environment conducive to this process, a utopian project informed as much by the Leninist version of Marxism as by Neo-Confucian ideas of education and state-society relations prevalent in the late imperial era. This project and its underlying fundamental assumptions have survived – in greatly transmuted form – to the present day and continue to inform the strict control of the Chinese media, even when such controls clash with other political and socio-economic interests of the Party-state. I propose to take the media as a variable to measure changes in the CCP’s approach to governance. The Party’s handling of the media serves as a mirror of state-society relations; consequently, the investigation into the media provides us with information on the CCP’s conceptions of governance under changing circumstances. I argue that over the past twenty years, the CCP has successfully altered and reinterpreted its vision of the state and its position therein; it has adopted a more flexible set of methods to achieve its fundamental political objectives. At the same time, however, the ultimate goals of the Party – originally formulated in Yan’an – have changed remarkably little.
Die Arbeit setzt sich kritisch mit der Gattung von kulturgeographischer Literatur in China auseinander. Insbesondere werden jene Texte analysiert, die sich auf alpine Kulturlandschaften beziehen. Die Editionsgeschichte der Texte ist ein wichtiges Indiz fur die Mechanik der Auseinandersetzung mit der naturlichen Umgebung im alten China; ihre Inhalte reflektieren einen erstaunlichen Wissensstand, welcher im Laufe der Zeit editionsgeschichtlich formalisiert und standardisiert wurde.
„Der lange Schatten des Ursprungs“ untersucht die Entstehung und den Wandel des Images und des Oeuvres von Dong Yuan (10. Jh.), der bis auf den heutigen Tag als einer der größten Maler Chinas gilt. Eine genaue Prüfung der Quellen vom 10. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert zeigt, wie nicht nur sein Ruhm erst im Lauf der Zeit entstand, sondern auch das ihm jeweils zugeschriebene Oeuvre. Eine Betrachtung der Rolle von Sammlungen in der chinesischen Kunstgeschichte erklärt, wie Originale, Kopien, Imitationen und Fälschungen sich über Rückkoppelungen mit dem jeweiligen Image des Malers zu historisch wechselnden Gestalten seines Werks zusammensetzen konnten. Flankiert von einer Methodendiskussion wird ein Phänomen enthüllt, auf das sich die moderne Kunstgeschichte durch unhinterfragte Kategorien und gelenkt durch Interessen des Kunstmarkts den Blick verstellt. Am Fall von Dong Yuan wird gezeigt, wie der Fetisch des Meisterwerks immer wieder zum Verschwinden von Originalen und zur Produktion von Fälschungen führt. In einer Analyse der spektakulären Debatte um das Bild „Flussufer“ (Metropolitan Museum, New York) werden die methodischen Grenzen und Aporien der modernen Kunstgeschichte aufgezeigt. Mit einer theoretischen Reflexion auf das Phänomen des Wandlungsleibs öffnet sich dann ein neuer Betrachtungshorizont, an dem hinter der Frage nach der Authentizität wieder das Enigma der Kunst aufblitzt.
Ausgrabungen in fernen Teilen der Welt haben immer etwas Faszinierendes. Laien denken meist an alte Gräber gefüllt mit Schätzen, während Forscher sich neue Erkenntnisse über längst vergangene Kulturen erhoffen. Besonders spannend wird es natürlich, wenn weitgehend unerforschtes Gebiet betreten wird. So wie jetzt im Jemen, wo Dr. Paul Yule vom Seminar für Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients der Universität Heidelberg die Stadt Zafar, die ehemalige Metropole des nahezu unbekannten Reiches Himyar, erforscht. Auf dem Media-Server aufgenommen im: Januar 2005 (Dauer: 5 Minuten, 17 Sekunden)
The unique collection of Qing Dynasty painted enamels bears wittness to an important cultural exchange between 18th century China and the West resulting in the establishment and exchange of a new art form. The essay explores the ambitious attempts of the Qing Dynasty emperors to surpass the technical achievements of the West and traces the influences of Western shapes and motives on Chinese enamels.
The Nationalist movement was the crucible in which relations between Hindus and Muslims in British India took shape. It defined the period in which the concept of a monolithic "Muslim community" solidified and in which "Hindu" and "Muslim" interests were supposedly set in contrary positions. Any attempt to comment on the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in modern India has to take into account the history of communal relations in this period as the nationalist agitation against the British gathered force. Recently Ashutosh Varshney published a work on Hindus and Muslims in India, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, that offered new insights into the nature of communal relations in modern India (Varshney 2002). Varshney analysed Hindu-Muslim riots since 1947 and proposed a series of arguments to explain the reasons behind communal conflict in modern India. I do not intend to review his work, rather I want to test his hypothesis that strong civic linkages between Hindus and Muslims are the main barriers to communal conflict and provide the best processes for the mediation of such conflict when it occurs. Varshney examined a number of Indian cities for the period 1947-1990 and combined research on communal conflict during that period with forays into the histories of the various communities concerned to substantiate his claims. Varshney's conclusions are compelling, but he does concentrate on the present and recent past, at the expense of a more in-depth analysis of the history of the communities - especially the Muslim communities - he dealt with. By discounting history to the extent that he does he has missed arguments that would help substantiate his account of the present and explain more fully the root causes of communal discord rather than simply correlating current trends. For example, Varshney argues that "vigorous associational life" is a much more effective constraint on "the polarising strategies of political elites" and discounts the impact of "everyday forms of engagement" on lessening communal conflict (Varshney 2002: 4). There are two obvious problems with these assertions. One is that it is debateable if elites always have a free hand in shaping communal relations, viz. the ability of Jinnah to undermine regional governments in the Punjab and Bengal where there had been impressive attempts to construct inter-communal accords and political parties. Another problem with this assertion is that "everyday forms of engagement" in an historical context occur in different social and cultural environments and consequently vary enormously in strength and ability to bolster communal accord. In this paper I will take some of the themes raised by Varshney and apply them to the two Muslim communities with which I am familiar, and with whom Varshney does not deal. In the process I hope that I can use the discipline of history as a more efficient tool than Varshney does to explain the nature of communal relations and to emphasise that historical variations in Hindu-Muslim relations (particularly in the area of everyday engagement and civic interaction) provide clues to present variations in relations between the two communities.