Bøker utgitt av Harvard University, Asia Center

Through research into Daoist ritual in history and as it survives today, Andersen shows that the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way, and consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

Aesthetic Life is a study of modern Japan, engaging the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Based on the author's thesis, issued under the title: Subaltern speak: imperial multiplicities in Japan's empire and post-war colonialisms ( Ph. D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2011).

This book examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny, focusing on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms.

Drawing on vernacular Vietnamese and classical Chinese sources, Ang identifies the different ways two leading statesmen of the time employed literature to transform the frontier region. This book captures a historical moment of overlapping visions, frustrated schemes, and contested desires on the Mekong plains.

"For over a century, voting has been a surprisingly common political activity in China. This book re-examines China's experiments with elections from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history"--Provided by publisher.

Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century in the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group's social and cultural values.

Tian, or Heaven, had been used in China since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god. Examining excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han-dynasty artisans transformed various notions of Heaven-as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky-into pictorial entities, not by what they looked at, but by what they looked into.

Tang poetic culture was based on hand-copied manuscripts and oral performance. This study aims to engage the textual realities of medieval literature by shedding light on the material lives of poems during the Tang, from their initial oral or written instantiation through their often lengthy and twisted paths of circulation.

Founded in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) was a premier academy of its time. Miles examines the discourse that portrayed it as having radically altered Guangzhou literati culture. He argues that the academy's location embedded it in social settings that determined who used its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.

Korean Buddhists, despite living under colonial rule, reconfigured sacred objects, festivals, urban temples, propagation-and even their own identities-to modernize and elevate Korean Buddhism. By focusing on six case studies, this book highlights the centrality of transnational relationships in the transformation of colonial Korean Buddhism.

The Mongol conquest of north China inflicted terrible destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. Jinping Wang recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese people adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their conquerors to create a drastically new social order.

In the first comprehensive study of Guo Moruo in English, Pu Wang explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer, Mao Zedong's last poetic interlocutor, a Marxist historian, president of China's Academy of Sciences, and translator of Goethe's Faust.

Chieko Nakajima tells the story of China's unfolding modernity, exploring changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. She explains how local customs fashioned and constrained public health and, in turn, how hygienic modernity helped shape local cultures and behavior.

In the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, Sarah Schneewind places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of "public opinion" in late imperial China, and illuminates Ming thought and politics.

China and India have been powerfully shaped by both transnational and subnational forces. Beyond Regimes explores local and global influences as they play out in the contemporary era with a focus on four intersecting topics: labor relations; legal reform and rights protest; public goods provision; and transnational migration and investment.

Ya Zuo places Shen Gua (1031 1095) on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Her study provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of diversity in Chinese thinking.

By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel.

Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals' visions of national rejuvenation. Mingwei Song combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman.

Halle O'Neal unpacks jeweled pagoda mandala paintings and their revolutionary entwining of word and image to reveal crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art-including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

Give and Take offers a new history of government in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), one that focuses on ordinary subjects: merchants, artisans, villagers, and people at the margins of society. Maren Ehlers explores how high and low people negotiated and collaborated with each other as they addressed the problem of poverty in early modern Japan.

Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation, which was introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century. Anne Reinhardt illuminates both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China's experience, its continuities with colonialism, and its links to global processes.

Suyoung Son examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation.

Building for Oil is a historical account of the oil town of Daqing in northeastern China during the formative years of the People's Republic and describes Daqing's rise and fall as a national model city. Hou Li traces the roots of the Chinese socialist state and its early industrialization and modernization policies.

Li Mengyang (1473-1530) was a scholar-official who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. Chang Woei Ong situates Li's quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty.

Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era-including Wu Zhao, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan'er-within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

Anna Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why religious practitioners affiliated with different religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism's teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations.

Movements of people-through migration, exile, and diaspora-are central to understanding power relationships in Japan 900-1400. But what of more literary moves: texts with abrupt genre leaps or poetic figures that flatten distances? Terry Kawashima examines what happens when both types of tropes-literal travels and literary shifts-coexist.

By the late eleventh century the Song court no longer dominated production of information about itself. Hilde De Weert demonstrates how the growing involvement of the literati in publishing such information altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the Chinese imperial period.