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TheNewsletter 57 Summer 2011
The David Collection was founded in 1945 by C. L. David as a private museum in his townhouse in the center of Copenhagen, Denmark.
When 5000 Asia scholars meet: The AAS-ICAS Joint Conference in Honolulu.
The social benefits expected from academia are generally identified as belonging to three broad categories: research, education and contribution to wider society. Universities and higher education institutions are meant to operate within these fields. However, evaluating the current state of academia according to these criteria reveals a somewhat disturbing phenomenon. It seems that an increased pressure to produce peer-reviewed articles creates an unbalanced emphasis on the research criterion at the expense of the other two. More fatally, the pressure to produce articles has turned academia into a rat race; the fundamental structure of academic behaviour has been changed, resulting in a self-defeating and counter-productive pattern.
Elkins, James. 2010. Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 208 pages, ISBN 978 962 209 000 2 (hardback)
In this book Elkins reveals a train of thought about art history in general and provides us with a daring and provocative exercise in understanding the way in which we see Chinese or any other unfamiliar art form: mainly as a subject incorporated in our own western art history. Elkins builds his argument around his study of a large number of leading writings about Chinese art by western art historians during the major part of the twentieth century. While providing us with ample quotations from these books, he notices the presumptions and blind spots that form an intrinsic part of the western art historical method itself. His razor-sharp dissection of the problem shows an open-minded and agile search for a better way to deal with the art of other cultures in a serious and thoughtful manner.
Rebecca E. Karl, 2010 Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A concise history. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 208 pages, ISBN 978 0 8223 4795 8 (paperback)
If Mao Zedong were to catch a glimpse of present day China, he would surely turn in his grave, except for the inconvenient fact that he doesn't have one. Indeed, his embalmed body is today one of the major tourist highlights in Tiananmen Square. Not only has China embraced state led capitalist-style economic growth, but Mao himself, as kitsch and commodity, 'floods the consumer market', as Professor Rebecca Karl puts it in her excellent new biography. These days 'CCP' could just as easily stand for the Chinese Capitalist Party, rather than the Chinese Communist Party.
Whittaker, Andrea (ed.). 2010. Abortion in Asia: local dilemmas, global politics. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, xii + 253 pages ISBN 978 1 84545 734 1 (hardback)
In the 1960s and 1970s in Thailand, I had the privilege of breaking out of the ivory tower sprung from my bourgeois roots and associate instead with monks recruited among the poor and intensely involved with women who had fallen to the bottom of the pile. In a steeply hierarchical society, they taught me to see life from the bottom up, and even as I could never participate in their experiences, I learned to sympathise with the logic of a hand-to-mouth existence in which my views didn’t hold.
Andrew N. Weintraub, 2010. Dangdut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. 258pp + iv, ISBN 978 0 19 539567 9 (paperback)
Until recently, studies of Indonesian pop culture invariably dealt with the state. The formation of modern pop culture coincided with the New Order (1966-1998) fostered by the economic growth and development that the regime oversaw. Once it was established that the New Order was an authoritarian regime, the state was taken to be the determining institution in the production and regulation of culture.
Goss, Jon and Wesley-Smith, Terence (eds), 2010. Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 248 pages. ISBN 978 0 8248 3321 3 (paperback).
This collected volume off ers fascinating insights and contentions in regard to studying and teaching about Asia and the Pacifi c. At its heart is a discussion about area studies within global transformations in the fl ow of capital and people, the rise of new political centers, and intense cultural exchanges and identity claims. Specifi cally, its essays critically engage the social, intellectual and institutional contexts within which knowledge about an area is produced.
Is Naypyidaw, Myanmar's new administrative capital, becoming a "Legoland"? The military regime moved all ministries there in 2005 while it was still under construction. And after building replicas of the Shwedagon, the country’s most sacred pagoda, and the Mahamuni, the country’s most venerated Buddha image, there are now rumours that the military regime will erect there a replica of the famous golden boulder located at Kyaikhtiyo, a most sacred place for Burmese Buddhists. More than just a fortress located in the country’s geographical centre, the military regime appears to be turning the new capital into a microcosm of the realm they control.
Center for Vietnamese Studies, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abteilung für Oralchirurgie und zahnärztliche Röntgenologie, Charité, Berlin, Germany
The global betel chewing community stands at around 600 million. Nguyên Xuân Hiên recently mapped this community, based on on-the-spot, up-to-date observations and surveys during the last decade, and on a review of literature from the last half century. His and Peter A. Reichart’s research categorizes the global betel chewing community into two groups: autochthon and allochthon/ migrant betel chewers. It also shows that Laos is an integral part of the global betel chewing area and in this article, Nguyễn and Reichart shed light on the little-known betel chewing customs of this landlocked nation.
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