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To address the language shift and potential loss of ethnic languages and regional dialects in China, and to explore the dynamics of multilingualism among ethnic minority students in rural areas, this ethnographic study examined the language use, functions, and ideologies of two Miao students and two Dong students attending a suburban boarding middle school in Jinping County, Guizhou Province. These students, known as Liushou Ertong, live with grandparents and siblings in villages while their parents work in large coastal cities for better job opportunities and higher incomes. The students possess rich linguistic repertoires, being able to speak Putonghua (Mandarin, the medium of instruction at school), Jinpinghua (the regional Han Chinese dialect), Miao or Dong (their ethnic languages), and English (an important subject at school) with varying proficiency. Given the importance of school interactions in shaping the students’ multilingualism, the study investigated their language use and functions at school, as well as their language ideologies toward Putonghua, Jinpinghua, Miao, Dong, and English.Based on participant observations over six months, three rounds of individual interviews, and collected written, painted, and electronic artifacts over two years, the study found the following:(A) The four students predominantly used Putonghua in both formal and informal settings at school, sometimes using Jinpinghua. Ethnic languages were only used informally within small co-ethnic groups, and English was seldom used outside of English class. In addition, the two Dong students occasionally helped their Dong history teacher, Mr. W, by translating his expressions from the Dong language to Putonghua for their classmates. Another noteworthy observation is that the Dong students, despite having limited exposure to Jinpinghua prior to attending middle school, gradually acquired this dialect through interactions with their peers.(B) The students used language varieties other than Putonghua primarily to fulfill communicative, interpersonal, and metalinguistic functions, with subfunctions under each category.(C) The students held consistent ideologies toward Putonghua and English, viewing Putonghua as the formal language most important for their future careers and as a gentle and polite language. They found it easier due to having fewer tones compared to Miao, Dong, and Jinpinghua. English was considered the most difficult due to limited exposure and was seen as irrelevant to their future beyond examinations. They exhibited inconsistency in their language ideologies toward Jinpinghua and ethnic languages, particularly regarding their importance and linguistic variations.The study also involved a cross-group analysis between the Miao and Dong students, identifying that Dong students maintained a higher level of proficiency and confidence in their ethnic language while acknowledging significant linguistic variations within them. Practical implications for policymakers and educators working with ethnic minority children in rural China, as well as research implications for scholars in this field are also provided.

This dissertation aims to shed light on why literati and scholar-officials developed an increased interest in theater from the mid-sixteenth century onward (aka, the late Ming dynasty). A substantial body of scholarship has examined late Ming literati’s embrace of playwriting, but further research is needed to delineate the cultural mechanics of this “theatrical turn.” In this dissertation, I will approach this process through the lens of cross-genre interactions. Specifically, I will explore in what ways theater came to inform other cultural practices in everyday literati life, and vice versa.Examining the life writings of three late Ming literati, who were active during the Wanli reign (r. 1573-1620), this study shows how they employed different rhetoric, performative, and perceptual aspects of theatricality to innovate other existing literary forms. While being part of a highly interactive community of theater aficionados, they each chose a distinct literary genre other than theater as their primary medium to recall and record their theatrical experiences. The core analysis of this study centers around the multidirectional generic interplay between theater and the three literary genres they chose to write in respectively: poetry, diary, and preface. The chapters focus on how different aspects of theatricality informed traditional genres through the lenses of the construction of multiple points-of-view, the perception of time, and the presentation of bodily experience. At the same time, I examine these heterogenous genres as different forms of “life writing” to foreground how literati writers’ were remarkably attentive to everyday life. My analysis reveals theater’s impact on literati’s literary responses to their everyday lives by way of innovative generic interplay.I do not treat “genre” as a static category, but as a malleable expressive vehicle that was transformed in the very process of being adapted to the new subject of theater. Moreover, adopting “genre repertoire” as an analytical lens, I focus on the individual subjectivity and creativity of these elite men to fashion inventive modes of remembrance through distinct intermediations of different genres. Although the diverse writing practices examined in my study were linked to the textual form on the page, their inter-generic entanglement with theater and each other enlarged the boundaries of literary media. As my study demonstrates, it was late Ming literati’s experience with theatricality that provided a source of inspiration for their respective literary innovations.Last but not least, this dissertation also enters into dialogue with a wide range of studies that focus on the convergence between theater and religion. Despite their shared spiritual pursuits, the three literati, all lay Buddhists, nevertheless adopted dissimilar strategies to deal with the religion-theater dyad. My close attention to genre in this study also attests to the flexibility of literary writing as an intermediary agent to address potential tensions between religion, theater, and everyday life.

Abstract: Language and music are integral to human cognition and emotion, distinguishing our species. Despite the pervasive presence of music, its pedagogical value in the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) remains underexplored. This dissertation explores the potential of music in Chinese language pedagogy by addressing two key research questions: (1) Why must foreign language learning extend beyond the cognitive to integrate both cognitive and emotive aspects? Or, why is creating shared experiences essential for learning to communicate with and participate in another culture? (2) How can music facilitate the integration of cognitive and emotive aspects, leading to the creation of shared experiences?Grounded in an extensive literature review of the evolutionary trajectories, neurobiological and physiological features, and semiotic systematicity of language and music, this study advocates for the integration of music and all related activities—collectively termed “musicking”—into the CFL curriculum via the Performed Culture Approach (PCA) framework. This integration is crucial and timely, facilitating the creation of shared experiences that link cognitive and emotive aspects of learning. Moreover, this integration enhances interpersonal and intercultural communication and fosters a deeper level of intercultural awareness, understanding, and recognition.This study comprises five chapters. Chapter One delves into the evolutionary history of music and language, comparing their communicative functions. Chapter Two examines the physiological underpinnings of music’s key mechanisms and features, such as entrainment, embodiment, and emotions. Chapter Three analyzes the semiotic function of music, emphasizing its role in social contexts and its parallels with language throughout evolutionary history. Chapter Four addresses the necessity of incorporating music into the PCA within contemporary CFL education.Chapter Five, titled “Chinese Songs as a Gateway to the Chinese World,” details a pedagogical material development project. It provides learners with a comprehensive anthology and learning materials, featuring over 40 vocal and instrumental pieces from Chinese history. The chapter includes supplemental materials such as readings, exercises, narratives, and a variety of performances, designed to offer an immersive and engaging learning experience. This initiative seeks to enhance learners’ advanced proficiency in the Chinese language, especially at poetic and aesthetic levels, while simultaneously fostering cultural awareness and appreciation of the target culture through music.

Legato is essential to Western classical singing, in as much as this singing is centered on the sonority and rhythm of words and the demonstration of a cultivated, sustained vocalism. Some Chinese regional dialects retain phonation characteristics from ancient Chinese dialects, which can significantly improve legato and sound quality in singing.The musical appreciation of ancient Chinese poetry – commonly used in modern Chinese art song – is made difficult by the seemingly stark contrast between ancient and modern Chinese spoken language. The present study takes advantage of a wide range of disciplines, including Chinese literature, linguistics, musicology, voice science, and physiology, to explore the value of ancient dialect as an integral aspect of performance practice in modern Chinese art song, and as a tool to assist with the physical demands of singing including the particular difficulties of legato. A comparative analysis will delve into the phonology of ancient Chinese poetry, exploring the character of Mandarin, ancient, and regional dialects, and examining the differences between modern and ancient Chinese words, with a focus on pronunciation. The study of ancient language helps to address the challenge of non-legato singing in Mandarin by identifying new possibilities in both composition and interpretation of art song, as will be discussed in relation to two songs: “Song of the Yue Boatman” and “Night Mooring at Maple Bridge.” In so doing, this comparison aims to uncover potential folk and regional influences for future development of Chinese art songs.

Taiwan is known for having some of the most advanced LGBT rights and vibrant LGBT culture in East Asia. Communities of queer women, from the birth of T-po bar culture in the 1960s to the feminist movements of the 1990s to the present day, have played a key role in the development of LGBT Taiwan. This thesis examines the language use of queer women in contemporary Taiwan, examining how they use labels to construct individual and group identity and the beliefs they hold about queer women’s language use. This thesis surveyed 84 queer women from across Taiwan. Though labels such as tongxinglian “homosexual” and tongzhi “comrade” were used by a large proportion of respondents, no single label emerged as a unifying umbrella for queer women’s identities. Respondents were generally ambivalent towards labels: follow-up interviews with seven survey respondents revealed that participants used labels in their own speech, but did not report using them to refer to themselves when not directly asked. Some participants associated label usage with queer people who identified more actively with their sexual orientations and engaged to a greater extent with the LGBT community. All interview participants reported revealing their sexual orientations to some people in their lives, though not all reported directly coming out. Participants instead utilized strategies of directness and indirectness and decided strategically whether and to what extent to identify themselves with the queer community when expressing their sexual orientations.The survey also revealed weaker stereotypes about queer women’s language than men’s: though some respondents believed queer women to speak in a more masculine way and have differences in tone and intonation, respondents generally relied on a shared cultural lexicon to identify other queer women.

Japan’s culture is often oversimplified into east and west. In the east is the Kantō region, home of Tokyo, the sprawling megacity of the future and a symbolic center for modern Japanese national identity. In the western Kansai region is Kyoto, the ancient, cultural capital and cradle for Japanese civilization. Yet, a third, lesser recognized urban space is situated geographically and symbolically between the Kantō and Kansai regions. The Chūkyō Metropolitan Area, centered on the city of Nagoya in western Aichi prefecture, is home to over 10 million Japanese, the third largest metropolitan area in Japan, known as the "middle capital" since the Meiji Period (1868-1912). With the rise of a modern and urban Japanese nation-state, Nagoya's political and economic institutions faced unique challenges in positioning the city as a nationally and internationally significant place with discrete regional culture. This thesis argues that in order to create an independent urban identity in opposition to Tokyo’s prescribed national culture, or an east-west binary, modern Nagoya’s branding insists upon a connection to historic symbols of perceived local heritage, specifically Nagoya Castle and the kinshachi. In addition to utilizing these symbols, Nagoya’s tourism industry calls upon perceived rituals of the past, like dialect and cuisine, to brand tradition as modernity and market the city as a unique cultural destination.

This thesis argues for the training of volunteer instructors working in Japanese language and culture classrooms across Japan to become able use a performance-based pedagogical approach with the aim of improving the overall linguistic and cultural competency of foreign-born residents living in Japan in the interest of having them become full and equal participant members of their local communities. The pedagogical approach supported in this thesis seeks to directly connect the methods being practiced in Japanese language and culture classrooms in local communities to the ultimate aims of helping foreign-born residents become participant members of their communities as stated by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), among others (MIC, 2020; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), 2023; Agency for Cultural Affairs (ACA), 2019). To accomplish this, this thesis will offer a model for a specific training workshop in which volunteer instructors can be introduced to and given example models of a performance-based approach to acquiring linguistic and cultural competency based off of the Performed-Culture Approach (PCA) (Walker & Noda, 2000), and in which volunteer instructors can be given opportunities to practice participating in performance-based lessons themselves, gaining first-hand experience and receiving detailed feedback from a presenter experienced in this pedagogical approach. The performance-based pedagogical approach proposed here aims specifically to address the underlying cultural and social assumptions of the learner and aims to afford interactional opportunities between the learners and instructors, which is understood to be necessary for their socialization into the local ways of behaving and communicating. Through lessons based around identifying the underlying elements of context (see Appendix A) that inform proficient speakers in combination with active emulation of video models, volunteer instructors will help the learners to recognize, practice, and execute the culturally specific ways that intentions are conveyed and understood within Japanese language, culture, and society.By equipping volunteer instructors with the ability to conduct performance-based lessons, this thesis aims to supply volunteer instructors with a pedagogical approach appropriate to the learners' environment, while directly connecting the skills being practiced in the classroom, and listed in the "can-do" goals being put forward as an educational standard by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) with authentic video models being made available online (MEXT, 2023), which can be presented and rehearsed for performance inside and outside of the classroom. Through the workshop proposed here, volunteer instructors should become able to coach learners in their rehearsals and performances with the intention of not only developing automaticity and fluency, but also fostering the learner's ability to generalize social aspects of communication by adjusting various elements of the model context appropriately throughout a variety of target interactions relevant to their daily lives. Volunteers will also be made aware of the necessity and value of regular ad hoc interactions with learners within the zone of proximal development (Haught, 2019, pp.81-82), which will serve as important opportunities for self-transformation in both the learners and the instructors via the process of socialization. This socialization works not only to help the learners adjust to Japanese ways of being and doing, but also to afford the volunteer instructors insights into the alternative perspectives and experiences of the foreign-born residents, thereby working to socialize them into multicultural environments and increasing the pool of cross-cultural understanding within the local community. For volunteers to become able to lead classes in this way, in addition to presenting the basic outline of performance-based lessons, the workshops will be aimed at helping volunteer instructors to identify and elicit specific elements of the context presented in video models and also for them to become able to help learners understand how these elements affect the model interactions, and thus how the learners should adjust their own performances to correspond to changes in the elements of context. Furthermore, volunteer instructors will be made aware of how these interactions are extremely valuable in opening conversations regarding the differences and similarities between local ways of conveying one's intentions, thoughts, and feelings, and those (equally valid) ways of doing so in the various languages and cultures of origin from which the foreign-born residents come. In this way, these workshops will aim to simultaneously socialize foreign-born learners into local Japanese ways of communicating while also socializing instructors into multicultural spaces, allowing them to become assets to the efforts toward building an inclusive society in which all constituents may participate to the fullest of their potential and ability.

James Clifford’s Art-Culture System, first published in 1988, establishes a clear differentiation between “tourist art,” and artworks worthy of the museum through a semiotic square of authenticity and multiplicity. Through this system, Clifford delineates the criteria by which Western art historians, critics, and curators ascribe value to different kinds of objects. This thesis deploys Clifford’s Art-Culture System as a framework for examining the work of Ainu artists trained in tourist villages whose oeuvres oscillate between the categories of “tourist art” and “fine art” in a way that problematizes clear distinctions between the two. Of particular interestare Bikky Sunazawa (1931-1989) and Fujito Takeki (1934-2018), both woodcarvers raised in Asahikawa who began working in the tourist industry to support their families at young ages. However, while both artists challenge the categories of Clifford’s system, they do so in markedly different ways: Bikky produced modernist sculptures for museum exhibition that were devoid of overtly Ainu symbology alongside smaller carvings for the tourist industry, while Fujito remained devoted to the basic practices of Ainu tourist woodcarving throughout his life but has risen to prominence in the broader Japanese art world because of the unique ways in which he has elevated particular motifs, most notably that of the bear. By using these two artists to problematize reflexive categorization of artworks along a hierarchal scale—with “tourist art” at the bottom and “fine art” at the top—this thesis will advocate for new ways of thinking about the Ainu tourist village as a place of legitimate, culturally-specific education for Ainu themselves rather than as a mere ludic space for the enjoyment of outsiders.

While scholars from a wide range of disciplines have analyzed thematic development, iconography, narrative, characterization, and animation style of Japanese anime, the music of anime programs is largely ignored or trivialized. This dissertation fills the gap in critical intercultural communication and media studies research by examining original anime soundtracks and their roles as narrative devices. Anime is explored as a site of global cultural resistance, while maintaining articulations of gender and cultural ideals in their stories and reflected in the lyrics of their theme songs.Employing critical intercultural communication, critical media studies, Affect Theory, with textual analysis and rhetorical criticism, this dissertation analyzes how music is intrinsic to the narrative and an expression of cultural values in anime. Analysis focuses on Hibike! Euphonium (2015-present) by Tatsuya Ishihara and Naoko Yamada, from the studio of Kyoto Animation, a slice-of-life drama involving the coming-of-age stories of high schoolers in a competitive concert band, and Vivi -Furōraito Aizu Songu- (2021) by Tappei Nagatsuki and Eiji Umehara, produced by Wit Studio, which follows an autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmed to entertain humans with her voice, and who discovers her humanity through music while trying to save the world from destruction. Each anime illustrates how musical scores, lyrics, and instrumentation are incorporated into narratives of gender, agency, culture, and humanity. The dissertation also analyzes compositional style, structure, instrumentation, and lyrics encoded with hegemonic messages and constructions of gendered, raced, and cultural distinctions. It provides a critical analysis of how music is used as a narrative tool in media and communication studies involving anime and how the rhetorical messages encoded in texts, via lyrics and instrumentation, are forms of intercultural communication of Japanese anime viewed by a Western audience.

The study focuses on the shifting socioeconomic and cultural practices of street vending in Solo City, Indonesia, in response to structuring the global economy and culture. The dissertation seeks to answer the research questions: (1) How did street vending socioeconomic and cultural practices shift in Solo City from the 1980s to the early 2020s? (2) How has the changing cultural landscape of Solo City changed from the 1980s to the early 2020s concerning street vending? (3) How does American global cultural influence affect Solo City's spatiotemporal cultural landscape from the 1980s to the early 2020s? (4) How does Solo City negotiate with American global cultural influence in everyday-life cultural street vending practices from the 1980s to the early 2020s? I employ Burawoy's extended case method in this qualitative transnational American studies project by immersing myself into the field to delve within the context of the study and collect primary data from fieldwork—field observation and interviews—and personal narratives. The secondary data are artifacts, such as historical archives, statistical data, regulations, spatial mapping, news, social media posts, and so on, concerning street vending in Solo over time. I view the diffusion process of the global norm as friction (Tsing, 2005) between aspirations within global connections. Therefore, the study critically examines stories of the continuous reproduction of habitus (Bourdieu, 2013) as represented by shifting practices of sociocultural and political-economic activities committed by stakeholders and actors in street vending in Solo. The findings demonstrate that street vending socioeconomic and cultural practices in Solo City persist despite the shifting values affected by the modern capitalist economy. Street vendors constantly negotiate with local, national, and global structuring in such spatiotemporal politics, whether through formalization or strategizing the spatiotemporal gaps of left-over space and temporal other.

This dissertation evaluates the impact of reclusive monks (tonseisō) on medieval Japanese Buddhism. It combines archival and archaeological evidence to analyze the relationship between recluses and local society. I argue that reclusion was a social activity that involved interaction with people of all walks of life. To support this argument, I focus on places of reclusion – called bessho, or “separate places” – as sites for both reclusive and social practice. I begin with a historiographical approach to bessho. Rather than a type of temple institution, bessho evoked rhetorical distance. As places distant from monasteries and cities, bessho afforded both isolation and opportunities for recluses to interact with people of various social backgrounds. Turning to three case studies, I first show how materials from votive burial deposits from Mount Kurama illustrate a vibrant community of local infantrymen who engaged in ritual burial alongside reclusive monks. I then turn to the example of the reclusive monk Sainen and his hermitage, Daihizanji, from which he ministered to and incorporated the interests of agricultural families in Hanase bessho. The final chapter examines the Ōhara bessho, a center for reclusive monks, woodsmen, and charcoal kiln workers that became a cradle for the interaction between Buddhist practice and economic production. These examples demonstrate how places of reclusion saw a negotiation of Buddhism with medieval social life. The conclusion discusses how these case studies compel a reinterpretation of the ways in which Buddhism became a religion for the medieval Japanese populace and raises some directions for future research.

This dissertation explores the Chinese manuscripts of East Syriac Christianity, also known as the Church of the East, during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) in China. Originating within the Sassanian Empire and driven by doctrinal disputes, this Christian tradition embarked on a journey eastward, eventually reaching Tang China via the Silk Road by the 7th century. Referred to as Jingjiao 景教 (Luminous Teaching) in Chinese, this form of Christianity took root within the cosmopolitan landscape of Tang China. By carefully analyzing the six Jingjiao texts discovered in Dunhuang, this dissertation sheds light on the missionary activities and theological adaptation of the Jingjiao community in Tang China. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation investigates how Jingjiao missionaries, amidst dominant religious traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in Tang China, borrowed from Chinese religious vocabulary to convey Christian teachings effectively. An evolutionary trajectory can be discerned in the Jingjiao texts, from early Tang documents characterized by biblical content to late Tang manuscripts exhibiting a strong synthesis with Chinese religious thought. The authenticity of these texts, particularly the early Tang manuscripts, is scrutinized in light of contemporary scholarly debates, with arguments for their genuineness grounded in textual analysis and historical context. This dissertation employs a comparative framework and draws on theories of translation studies and Paul Ricoeur’s theory of “threefold mimesis” to examine the intricate interplay between East Syriac Christianity and Chinese religious traditions during the Tang dynasty in China. Recognizing the necessity of understanding both the Chinese religious context and the East Syriac context, this study aims to elucidate how Jingjiao texts make the East Syriac theology intelligible to a Chinese audience while also preserving its Christian core. Chapter 1 investigates the Early Tang Christian text Discourse on the One God (Yishenlun 一神論), focusing on two terms—zhongxing 種性 (seed nature) and wuyin 五蔭 (five aggregates)—and their East Syriac theological implications such as the emphasis on human potentiality and the pedagogical and salvific purpose of the humanity of Christ. Chapter 2 analyzes the late Tang Jingjiao text Book on Mysterious Peace and Joy (Zhixuan anle jing 志玄安樂經), exploring its key passages through both Chinese Buddhist and East Syriac ascetic lenses. Chapter 3 provides a comprehensive overview of theological themes in extant Jingjiao texts, highlighting such themes as the transcendence of God, Christ’s redemptive role, and ascetic practices. Chapter 4 incorporates archaeological findings of the Tang Jingjiao community and discusses its ascetic practices and distinct Sogdian influences. Ultimately, this dissertation illuminates the complex interplay between East Syriac Christianity and Chinese religious traditions, underscoring the resilience and adaptability of the Jingjiao community in propagating its faith within the diverse cultural milieu of Tang China.

This thesis and professional project aims to showcase the value of Japanese-composed trombone repertoire to American classical music, a field that is currently dominated by works composed in Europe and the United States. The professional project includes a series of three professionally produced videos of selected repertoire and a digital catalog of Japanese-composed pieces. The videos provide a public platform for this genre and target an American audience. The research sheds light on the cultural and musical nuances of Japanese classical repertoire and showcases works that diverge from traditional Western compositions while embodying Japan's deep cultural heritage and modernization. The chosen repertoire includes compositions by Megumi Kanda, Utako Yuza, and Keiko Takashima. These works highlight the unique elements of Japanese classical music. The objective of this thesis is to increase visibility and accessibility to Japanese-composed works and to ultimately increase their study and performance by American trombonists. The research narrative explores the context of classical music education in the United States and the development of classical music in Japan. The lack of diversity of repertoire in American higher education and the barriers to accessing Japanese classical music repertoire is also highlighted. Expanding the curriculum to include Japanese classical music would introduce new musical elements and cultural diversity. By promoting inclusivity and diversity within the classical music community, this thesis advocates for a broader understanding of musical traditions and encourages trombonists to embrace a more international perspective in their repertoire selection and performance.

We live in an expert society: citizens and leaders alike depend on scientists and experts to judge, interpret, and frame questions of public importance. Yet we have not fully grappled with how the expanded authority of scientists and experts affects the political authority that underlies the relationship between the state and its citizens. Experts rarely have the formal power to directly make political decisions, but their public authority has expanded to such a degree that they influence politics in myriad ways. In moments of crisis—such as during the COVID-19 pandemic whose after-effects are still impacting global politics—the authority of scientists and experts can even seem to exceed that of political leaders. Understanding the sources and nature of the authority that scientists and experts exercise in society is essential for making sense of contemporary politics. This dissertation addresses questions of scientific authority in politics by reframing classic social theories of science and applying them to a novel set of empirical investigations of China. While most theoretical discussions assume the authority of science is rooted in the impersonal procedures, norms, and institutions associated with Weberian legal-rational bureaucracy, I instead argue that science can be highly charismatic. I use the lens of scientific charisma to analyze how citizens, experts, and the state interact in China. Through a mixed-methods social scientific investigation of public health crises, propaganda campaigns about scientists, and public attitudes toward scientific authority, I detail Party-state efforts to simultaneously promote and limit the potential charisma of scientists in society. I show how the Party increasingly casts contemporary scientists in roles similar to those of Party cadres, which I connect to a longstanding quest to merge political loyalty and technical knowledge—to combine “red” and “expert” in the Party lexicon. To the extent that such a merger is plausible, I argue, it rests on the areas of overlap between scientific charisma and the charismatic core of the Party’s political authority. Taken as a whole, the dissertation contributes both an alternative theoretical approach to thinking about the authority of expertise in contemporary mass politics and new empirical analyses of state-society relations and political authority in China. Chapter 1 lays out a vision for understanding the politics of expertise as a series of overlapping authority relationships between states, scientists, and citizens. Chapter 2 reinterprets the political and sociological theories of Max Weber to identify the possibility of a latent charisma within scientific authority. Chapter 3 applies the concept of scientific charisma to contemporary China through a study of Dr. Zhong Nanshan during the 2003 SARS and 2020 COVID-19 pandemics, highlighting the rise and fall of his heroic public image. Chapter 4 explores the Party’s vision of the ideal Chinese scientist through an analysis of the ongoing “Spirit of Scientists” campaign. Chapter 5 introduces and analyzes a survey experiment to test how the authority of experts—and of claims to science more generally—affect compliance with public health measures among citizens. Chapter 6 extends the scope of the project beyond mainland China through a case study of the politics of scientific advising during the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. It shows how different views of science, rather than partisanship, drove internal cleavages around policy choices. It also adds to the themes analyzed in the preceding chapters by highlighting the unique role of the media and social media in connecting citizens, experts, and the state. Chapter 7 concludes by outlining the study’s overall contributions and potential avenues for future research.

Western-style painting (yōga) represents a seminal movement in modern Japanese art. As Japan opened up to the world in the Meiji period (1868–1912) and pursued a modernization program inspired by the industrialized nations of the West, its artists looked to Europe for new artistic paradigms. A number of Meiji painters studied under European artists and transposed European media and techniques to Japan, successfully establishing Western-style painting as a national school of art alongside neo-traditional painting (nihonga). While nihonga has been well studied by Japanese and Euro-American scholars however, yōga has lacked serious scholarly attention outside of Japan due to the paucity of artworks in international collections and historic reservations about the artistic value of its culturally indeterminate form. As such, yōga has largely been excised from the history of modern art in the West, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the development of Japanese modernism and the globalization of oil painting. My dissertation examines the formation of yōga as a radically new artistic practice and discourse in the Meiji period through an assessment of the oeuvre of Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), an eminent figure in the Japanese art world who is celebrated as the “father of modern Japanese Western-style painting.” I posit that Kuroda, who lived and worked in France and Japan, was an intercultural figure whose hybrid oeuvre constituted a dynamic negotiation of stylistic and cultural disjunctions in the quest to found a new school of modern art. Although Japanese scholars have done much to document and interpret Kuroda’s work within its local context, my dissertation brings a new range of methodologies to bear on his career that reveal the rich multivalence and global reach of his painting. Against the background of the artist’s own writings and a consideration of contemporary socio-cultural conditions in both Japan and Europe, my dissertation re-examines Kuroda’s oeuvre through a series of case studies including Portrait of a Woman (Kitchen), Lakeside, Talk on Ancient Romance, and Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment. Focusing on Kuroda’s career, which fundamentally shaped the course of oil painting in Japan, this dissertation elucidates yōga’s implication in a wide range of artistic discourses and modes at the end of the nineteenth century, from artists’ fraught negotiation of the modern self to the status of the human body in fine art. Furthermore, by revealing the fecundity of Kuroda’s hybrid identity and artistic vision, this dissertation challenges paradigms that continue to dictate the canon of modern art history and hinder our appreciation of intercultural phenomena today, including Eurocentrism and Orientalism.

This dissertation is an ethnography of Tokyo’s neighborhood Jimbocho, the center of the used book market in Japan, famous for its bookstores, publishing houses, and literary bars. I ask why it is that in the 21st century when Tokyo real estate values have soared and digital marketplaces vie with physical ones, this traditional form of book-selling community endures in the city center. Through participant observation, this dissertation examines social networks weaved through trade, a mutual passion for books between booksellers and collectors, and communal care of Jimbocho as a shared marketplace. Based on two and a half years of fieldwork in a bookstore, I provide an ethnographic account of book circulation through members-only professional auctions, specialized bookstores, and textual transmission. This anthropological dissertation explores the culture of curation of the material and textual past in the market for used and antiquarian books. I focus on a complex ethics of care surrounding the sale and circulation of texts, which I argue shapes the neighborhood, its social networks, and its economy. To theorize these attachments through labor, I propose tying together disparate concepts of labor, such as immaterial, affective, and manual, based on what they are oriented towards: in this case, preserving and caring for books. I suggest calling this the work/labor of care, understanding care as a relationship of moral and ethical oblication. In Jimbocho, this work/labor of care creates a link between certain pasts and uncertain futures and contributes to the continuation of the neighborhood.

In the 2023 annual meeting of China’s parliament, Chinese President Xi made it clear to his political leaders and the world that he was preparing for war. This should come as no surprise after analysis of China's grand strategy points clearly to the intent to surpass the U.S. as the premier global superpower in all respects. China has been building towards this goal for years through untraditional methods of warfare, forcing the national security community to reevaluate its own strategy and assess the Chinese threat through a different lens. This thesis seeks to address one specific area in which China has been successfully undermining U.S. interests through an untraditional yet effective method, economic warfare. With a 2022 GDP of 18.1 trillion dollars and the figure rising year upon year, China’s mammoth economy can no longer be pushed under the political rug by U.S. decision-makers and this paper evaluates the current and future implications of this reality and provides considerations for a path forward that emphasizes the need for responses rooted in a deep understanding of the enemy that protects U.S. interests from the immediate threat and potential conflicts to come.

Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing minority groups in the U.S. due to immigration – so why don’t we hear more of their stories in electoral politics? Ninety percent of Asian Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants, which is an identity that can and often does influence political participation and motivation for both voters and candidates. Recent theories look directly at linked fate, which posits that individuals who share a group identity, usually a racial or ethnic minority identity, also share a sense that anything that affects another member of the group, impacts them all. This research seeks to use this theory as a framework to observe how Asian American candidates’ campaigns in the state of Virginia message on their generational immigrant identities. The case studies suggest that first-generation immigrants are more likely to present their personal immigrant stories to voters, while second-generation message on theirs relative to their issue platforms. They also suggest that more Asian American candidates, regardless of generational immigrant status, message more on that identity when running in a district that contains an Asian enclave. As Asian Americans’ political participation continues to increase and different generations of immigrants will also be increasingly represented, their distinctive campaigning strategies and approach to their immigrant identities can add to the sparse literature on Asian American candidate behavior and open new avenues of research into the nuanced ways in which generational immigrant identity shapes that behavior.

Asian American men may have body image concerns related to masculinity expectations, attraction ideals, negative body image, and drive for Western masculinity (Liao et al., 2020). Adherence to masculine norms may be rooted in expectations, cultural norms, and gender roles emphasized in Asian households (Ai et al., 2021; Chang & Subramaniam, 2008; Kramer et al., 2002; Lipson et al., 1996; Liu & Iwamoto, 2006). The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between conformity to Western masculinity norms, body dissatisfaction, and depression among Asian and Asian American men. Data were collected from 150 Asian and Asian-American men living in the United States (M age = 32.03 years, SD = 9.40; range = 18 to 64 years). Participants identified their ethnic background as Chinese (28.7%), followed by Korean (14.0%), Vietnamese (13.3%), Indian (12.7%), Filipino (12.0%), Multiethnic (8.7%), Japanese (4.0%), Other (4.0%), Bangladeshi (2.0%), and Lao (0.7%). Results indicated that conformity to the Winning and Violence masculinity norms were not significantly correlated with depression, whereas conformity to the Playboy and Self-Reliance masculinity norms were significantly positively correlated with depression. Despite winning masculine norm conformity not being related to depression, the results of this study indicated that male body dissatisfaction mediated the relationship between Winning masculine norm conformity and depression. Potential explanations and implications of this study are discussed, and directions for future research are presented.

The Indo-Pacific is a key focal point of U.S.-China competition due to its geographical, economic, and military significance. China is using political warfare to achieve its strategic goals in the region, influencing other nations to align with its interests. Economic coercion is a key tool of this warfare. This is evident in the Pacific Islands, among America’s treaty allies, in Southeast Asia, and in South Asia. To prove itself the superior partner, maintain access to key points of land, and keep the Indo-Pacific open for trade, the U.S. must counter China’s activities. This can be achieved via a stronger economic strategy, deeper engagement with allies and partners, exposure of China’s illicit activities, and the development of a true grand strategy.

This dissertation is an exercise in historiographical exegesis to explore the dynamics of the evolving reconstruction of the lives and afterlives of Nguyễn Huệ 阮惠 (1753-1792) and Nguyễn Ánh 阮暎 (1762-1820) who dominated the histories of the last thirty years of the eighteenth century in Vietnam. It seeks to understand the discursive dynamics behind the articulation of historical truth claims as new stories about the dueling portraits of these two men get continually retold over the past two centuries. This search for usable pasts in the service of an inventive narrative of political legitimation has unfolded through a pivotal shift in historiographical paradigms from traditional Confucian to modern nationalist and Marxist modes. As dynastic founders Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh offered different solutions to the historical legacy of their predecessor: the Lê 棃 dynasty (1428-1789) with its tension-filled history of regional conflict through three centuries of alternating wars and peace. Their localized regiocentric solutions for self-fashioning dynastic legitimization in the nineteenth century were subsequently derailed by the supranational westerncentric impact of French colonialism, which induced a nationalistic backlash in the twentieth century. This reactive reassertion of a local tradition had been transformed by new varieties of nationalism and would be bifurcated by competing regional identities and visions of victorious destinies during the Vietnam War. This dissertation brings attention back to the centrality of region and regionalism in that historiographical process to understand the necessity of regiocentrism as a deep structure in the process of discursive and identity formation through the inventive manipulation of collective memory. Through six phases over nearly two centuries, the lives and afterlives of these two protagonists alternatingly took center stage in a story of cyclical rise and fall within a linear narrative progression from the Việt Nam state to the Vietnamese nation. The story of modern Vietnam cannot be fully understood except in the context of residual regional strains through the alternative solutions that Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh brought to the legacy of Đại Việt. Retracing the evolution of their dueling portraits provides a key to understanding the regiocentric deep structure of modern Vietnamese historiography. Instead of “rescuing history from the nation” (Duara) or moving “beyond histories of nation and region” (Taylor) this dissertation dissects the persistent search for narrative coherence through these heuristic devices. This exercise provides a cautionary reminder about the historicity of dynasty and nation and their ensuing varieties of historiography as epistemic and ideological constructs. A better understanding of the underlying deep structure of regiocentrism can bring us a new appreciation for and reappraisal of a fluctuating southern turn/return against the predominant northern pull in Vietnamese historiography. The story of the dueling portraits of Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh attests to the multiplicity and contingency of historiographical truth claims, to the rise and fall, and indeed the reinvention, of new icons for different places and times, in war and in peace. Insights into this process of discursive formation can therefore enrich our understanding of Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh not only as agents and products of their time but also as crystallizing catalysts for new meanings for times to come.

This dissertation conducts an investigation into how South Vietnameseness is seen, felt, and embodied through performances of South Vietnamese partying and sense-making, and reconsiders the existence of South Vietnam beyond the emblematic western tropes of the Vietnam War. I explore the ways in which the elusive South Vietnamese identity has been historically constituted and affectively conjured and recognized today, moving us away from the war-linked rhetoric to one that focuses on the sociocultural landscape of transnational South Vietnam, which includes the ever-growing diasporic community living in the West. I deploy the understanding of performance in its broadest and most expansive definition to incorporate hostess bar culture, karaoke street acts, and domestic drinking practices in Saigon, and view these partying events as expressions of South Vietnamese pleasure and nodes of sensing South Vietnameseness. Drawing from close examinations of auto-ethnographic case studies, I illustrate how examining these embodied sites of party and pleasure urges a reconsideration of the orientalized views of South Vietnam and its people. The project forwards a post-national framework to reconstitute the history of the Southeast Asian nation that is intrinsically tied to ideas of nostalgia, affect, identity-formation, and belonging. Acknowledging the existing scholarship on Vietnam and the legacy it holds in the fields of American history, Southeast Asian sociopolitics, and critical ethnic and refugee studies, the interdisciplinary project examines the cultural landscape of South Vietnam in order to explicate how partying and its manifestation of pleasure are at the center of understanding the sociocultural dynamics of South Vietnam and its transnational citizens.

Despite Korea’s success in cultural export and industrial development, why did Korean animation fail to attract a domestic or global audience after massive state and corporate support? Why did Korean animation, one of the pioneer industries of globalization, collapse in the transition to neoliberalism and remain at the level of labor-intensive outsourcing while the rest of the Korean wave of popular culture took off? That is, why did state-led development and global outsourcing, two opposing strategies, reach the same dead end?To answer these questions, this thesis traces the history of Korean animation from the colonial era to the present. Each chapter highlights important animated works that are representative of a Korean historical epoch and discusses both their production and aesthetic qualities. As an industrial art, animation not only follows the history of Korean economic development but reflects on it aesthetically. This dissertation argues that while each period gave birth to animation that aspired to represent the nation, the limits of capitalist development quashed each attempt. Theorizing Korean animation as encompassing South Korea, North Korea, the international diaspora of Koreans, and the labor of Korean people in global animation production, this dissertation asks three theoretical questions: what are some of the absences in animation theory filled by the addition of transnational Korean animation? What does the experience of Korean animation tell us about the evolution of global manufacturing based on labor arbitrage? How do we tell the history of outsourced commodities from the perspective of those who make them? Through these questions, this dissertation argues for the centrality of Korea to theorizing the general nature of global monopoly capitalism. Chapter one introduces the fundamental theoretical issues imminent to Korean animation. Chapters two, three, and four go through history in chronological order, starting with the many potentially first Korean animations in the post-war period, then the era of Japanese industrial mimicry, and finally the Asian financial crisis. Chapter five discusses the concept of outsourcing going back to the Japanese colonial era up to the 1980s. Chapter six explores the history and ideology of North Korean animation. Chapter seven discusses Korean animation today and the possibilities and limits of webtoon based animation. Finally, chapter eight concludes with a retelling of Korean animation’s history through The Simpsons.

While narratives of sacrifice, sorrow, and suffering at the hands of colonizing forces have profoundly shaped Korean historical consciousness, particularly in the 20th century, their everyday manifestations in contemporary South Korea have received limited critical attention. This dissertation delves into the mundane affective experiences associated with historical trauma, examining Korean shamanism, the work of contemporary dancemaker Eun-Me Ahn, street protests of the seventies using madangguk, and the diasporic circulation of Korean culinary culture. I employ performance studies, which facilitate innovative theorizations of the ordinary and ingrained aspects within the domain of the unseen and unspoken, alongside affect theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, ethnic studies, and Indigenous theories, to offer analytical perspectives grounded in the Korean semantics and aesthetics. I bring together concepts such as han (sorrow), heung (joy), and jeong (care) as an affective triad in Introduction chapter to unveil the intricate affective layers contained within each performance practice studied in the following chapters. This contribution helps establish a generative critical practice in South Korea, thereby fostering novel modes of perception that can bring further insights to other postcolonial communities. Throughout the dissertation, I explore the questions: What defines Korean indigeneity, beyond institutionalized notions of tradition and culture, and how can it be addressed and identified? What emerges when we examine a community’s cultural affect and what we might term its historical unconscious through the lens of performance studies? How does the Korean cultural unconscious create productive dialogues with experiences from other cultures and ethnic groups? Commencing with an examination of Korean shamanism as the roots of Korean performance ontology, each chapter broadens the scope of inquiry. It begins by identifying the persistent influence of shamanic traditions in contemporary dance, proceeds to critically evaluate the constraints of performative engagement within the political context, and concludes by suggesting potential avenues for transnational connections through the inclusion of the Korean diaspora in the discourse.

Previous scholarship on Cold War Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China often employs one of two analytic frameworks: a Cold War paradigm that presupposes an ideological divide between capitalist modernity in Taiwan and Hong Kong and socialist modernity in China, or a postcolonial approach that frames one of these regions as both subject to and resistant against colonial domination. This study argues that both frameworks are insufficient. Instead, it introduces the concept of Sinophone Cold War humanisms to reexamine cultural contestations with structures of power in Cold War Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, focusing on their relationship to authoritarianism, exile, and proletarianism. Sinophone articulations of Cold War humanism can be viewed as two interrelated processes: first, transcultural negotiations with global discourses of humanism and anti-humanism that critique Western-centric ideals, offering standpoints that transcend the Cold War's ideological binary; second, complicity with Han cultural nationalism, which represses already marginalized cultural communities under Cold War regimes, as well as the alternative humanistic engagements that emerge in these communities as forms of cultural resistance. While a global humanist formation during this period redefined humanism as praxis rather than abstract ideals, particularly in its conceptualization of decolonial humanism in Africa and the Caribbean and debates on Marxist humanism in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, these discourses have largely overlooked the complexity of Cold War humanisms in the Sinophone world. Through the lens of humanism, this study reinterprets philosophical writings (New Confucianism and Maoism), literary genres (anti-Communist, modernist, “scar” literature), and cinematic forms (Healthy Realist, martial arts, minority nationality films) - that have often been dismissed as either state propaganda or nonpolitical escapism - by reframing them as sites of cultural contestations with authoritarianism in Kuomintang-ruled Taiwan, exilic conditions in British Hong Kong, and proletarian ideals in Maoist and post-Mao China. In moving beyond an area studies mode of knowledge production, the study repositions these cultural texts within a global matrix of human praxis. By contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of humanism in global Cold War cultures, it also sheds light on new approaches to decolonization in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and beyond.

This dissertation examines the history of videogames in Japan through the lens of time, conceived in two ways. First, it considers time as intrinsic to video game design in terms of tempo and rhythm. Second, it analyzes time as an extrinsic, socially constructed matrix in which play must find a suitable context with regard to other developmental, educational, and productive functions impinging on players. My research argues for approaching digital play time in its design and social narratives as a significant political frontier to videogames, one that is formed dialectically between the flowing times of designed play, and social efforts to contain it. These politics have particularly crystalized around the playing child or youth, a polysemic figure within the adult imaginary. Concern about the meanings of this child and their play time constellated a wide network of adult actors, including policymakers, police authorities, pedagogues, parents, social and cultural critics, as well as game designers and industry insiders. The widespread debates between these social agents have hinged upon the in/compatibility of digital play with the existing organization of time, drawing videogames into an uneasy relationship with the expanding adult administration of children’s lives. The dissertation opens with a consideration of how game designers themselves approach the temporality of the medium. Through expert interviews, I show that designers professionally active between the late 1970s and early 1990s conceptualized videogame time through the notion of rhythm, of tempos and excitations and relaxations of intensity to produce what I term “durational appeal”—the ability of games to hold the player’s attention over long spans of time. I subsequently trace how designed durational appeal emerges discursively in the three situated contexts of early gaming history. First, I look to the interstitial times of play that portable games inhabited through the Nintendo Game & Watch (1980-1985) series, arguing that the situation of these devices in moments-in-between other areas of life gave digital play a predefined, and contained, place. Second, I analyze the emergence of arcades in public space towards the end of the 1970s, paying particular attention to how the legal regime around entertainment configured the spatial and temporal borders around mechanical and, later, digital play. Finally, I turn to the process of domesticating digital play, to consider how the Nintendo Family Computer (1983) foregrounded concerns around children’s play time. I conclude by suggesting that this focus on the changing times and places of play can help further not only game studies in Japan, but also in the East Asian and transpacific regions as well.

This dissertation is a history of religion on the “peripheries” of the modern Chinese state, the Japanese wartime empire, and the Tibetan Geluk Buddhist world. Using a transnational history approach, the project uses multilingual source materials collected from archives located in China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States and challenges traditional disciplinary categories in postwar Religious Studies and Area Studies. Focusing on interwar Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, an understudied region within the postwar academic disciplines of Buddhist Studies and Areas Studies, my dissertation explores the history of transnational Buddhist networks in the region that both supported and challenged the nation-building and empire-building efforts of modern China and Japan (1912-1949). The specific temporal scope of this project is between the fall of China’s multi-ethnic Qing Empire in 1912, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists and their Republican government to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. This period also saw the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. During this period, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, the continental regions of Northeast Asia and the “frontiers” of the Qing Empire, became the new “borderlands” that both the modern Chinese Nationalist Republican State and the expanding Japanese Empire competed to take control of. The two regions were administratively disciplined through the laws of Republican China (albeit often nominally) and effectively occupied by Japanese settler colonization as well as military and industrial annexation. Both regions also eventually saw the births of two modern states, the states of Mengjiang United Autonomous Government (1939-1945) and Manchukuo (1931-1945), although both are often referred to as “puppet states” of the Japanese Empire. At the same time, local Buddhists, both monastic and lay, in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria positioned themselves differently and beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the modern nation and empire. Using Buddhist networks connecting Manchuria in the East to Tibet in the West that have existed since the eighteenth century, Buddhists negotiated agency and mobility in this volatile interwar period marked with various crises of modernity. In this dissertation, I identify three types of Buddhist networks operating in early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, namely, 1) a transregional Inner and East Asian monastic and intellectual network formed in the Qing period, 2) border-crossing Buddhist networks informed by old lineages in Inner Asia and new patronage in modern China that responded to Buddhist sacred geography, historiography, and apocalyptic time, and 3) transnational networks paved by Japanese Buddhists and Mongol monks that promoted an Esoteric Buddhist Pan-Asianism in the Japanese wartime empire. I argue that these Buddhist networks not only engaged in various overlapping nation-building and empire-building projects in the interwar geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia, but they offered cross-border access to Buddhist and non-Buddhist individuals to exercise agency and mobility to extend and maintain landscapes of their own that challenged the spatial-temporal orders of the modern nation-states and empires.

This dissertation examines the tantric thought and writings of the Bengali master Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (Tib. Jowo Jé; Jo bo rje, 982–1054), one of the most important figures of the later transmission of Buddhism (tenpa chidar; bstan pa phyi dar), the “renaissance” of Buddhism in Tibet. Atiśa is best known for composing works such as the Lamp for the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathapradīpa; Byang chub lam gyi sgron ma), which presented the exoteric Buddhist path (Sūtrayāna) in a concise, synoptic format. Such works formed the basis for the “stages of the path” (lam rim) tradition, which was central to the Kadam (bka’ gdams) school, founded by Atiśa’s disciple, Dromtönpa (’Brom ston pa; 1004–1064). The Lamp, however, also forbade monastics from practicing the higher classes of tantra (Mantrayāna or Vajrayāna), specifically the yoganiruttaratantras, due to their antinomian, transgressive practices. As a result, Atiśa came to be considered a doctrinally orthodox monastic reformer, but this belied the fact that he was also a prolific author of works on the tantric vehicle. While his tantric works have received scant attention within either traditional or modern Buddhist scholarship, works such as the Vajra Song of the Vajra Seat (Vajrāsana Vajragīti; Rdo rje gdan gyi rdo rje’i glu) and the Song of Conduct (Caryāgīti; Spyod pa’i glu) reveal Atiśa’s fluency in the doctrines of the yoganiruttaratantras and yoginītantras, presenting an entirely different image from the ostensibly conservative reformer of Buddhism. These works also reveal Atiśa’s indebtedness to the great adepts (mahāsiddha) of India as well a deep resonance with the meditative traditions of the great seal (mahāmudrā). These connections suggest a figure who was far more comfortable with antinomian tantric traditions than has previously been assumed. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some of the historical, religious, and sectarian factors in the marginalization of tantric works in traditional portrayals of Atiśa. It looks first at the scholarly precedents for his ideas in Indic commentaries from between the ninth and eleventh centuries, examining how Buddhist authors wrote treatises grappling with the transgressive sexual elements of yoganiruttaratantras such as the Guhyasamāja Tantra and Cakrasaṃvara Tantra within a wider Buddhist context. It then considers the religious and political currents in western Tibet during the later transmission, where reformist voices, such as Lha Lama Yeshé Ö (Lha bla ma ye shes ’od, 947–1019/1024) sought to halt what they saw as mistaken tantric practices and to purge false Tibetan tantric traditions. Following this, it engages in an analysis of several texts by Atiśa, including the Vajra Song and Song of Conduct, which reveal his largely unexplored views on the yoganiruttaratantras, including their erotic practices. Finally, it examines ways that works such as the Book of Kadam (Bka’ gdams glegs bam) posthumously imagined Atiśa as a “reformer,” marginalized his yoganiruttaratantra writings, and promoted the relatively tame “four Kadam deities” (bka’ gdams lha bzhi) as the principal Kadam tantric tradition.

This dissertation delves into the formation of legal identities among commoners in China’s earliest empires, focusing on the transitional period from the fourth century BCE to the first century CE. It seeks to contextualize the interest of early Chinese philosophers in self and identity within broader social engineering projects initiated by the early states. It examines how the ancient Chinese states constructed and tracked identity through administrative devices, creating a rudimentary version of a “status credit system.” Analyzing recently unearthed documents including birth registries, passports, “wanted” posters, and funerary relocation documents, my work particularly highlights the experiences of underprivileged groups, which recent archaeological discoveries have depicted in unprecedented detail. Examining a diverse array of such groups, including petty officials, slaves, and convict laborers, I seek to complicate the relatively static models of social stratification of this period, paying special attention to how legal punishments and various administrative devices shaped identity, status, and relationship to the state. My dissertation proposes a framework that views status as a form of currency, emphasizing the fluidity of social mobility and the fungibility of merits and debts within the social order.This dissertation is structured in four chapters, each focusing on a certain group or an aspect of identity and status in early imperial China. Chapter 1 traces the formation of legal and administrative identity from the late Warring States period to the Han Dynasty, examining the bureaucratic drive to identify and categorize the population. This process, detailed in various registers and local census documents, involved gathering comprehensive information, and materially transformed individuals, integrating them into the state’s legal and administrative framework. Chapter 2 contextualizes commentaries on the term “jiaren” (lit. “family member”) to consider family relationships in early imperial China and to reflect on the status of domestic servants in Chinese history. Chapter 3 traces the pre-history of hereditary occupations, emphasizing the role of occupations in the shaping of identity and social status. Chapter 4 explores how ranks of honor served as status credits, influencing social hierarchy and defining one’s merit and debt to the state. These chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the various mechanisms and factors influencing social mobility and status change, from legal punishments, occupational roles, and the ranks of honor system.

This dissertation employs a landscape-focused approach to examine practical craft objects, fine art, and architecture coated with Jōbōji lacquer that date from the late nineteenth century to the early 2000s. I address lacquered objects made from “Jōbōji lacquer” tree sap tapped from East Asian lacquer tree (Toxicodendron vernicifluum) forests in a remote, mountainous area of northern Japan that I refer to as the “Jōbōji lacquer landscape,” centered in the town of Jōbōji. I examine the dynamic expansions and contractions of Jōbōji lacquer as it is planted, harvested, purified, and rematerialized as craft objects and architectural complexes that serve as visual and material indicators of the modern Japanese nation-state. This landscape approach discloses site-specific responses to a shifting world of craft production; it reveals an ongoing struggle for survival—social, cultural, and biomaterial—of lacquer craft and the specific forest, community, and artisanal practices of Jōbōji. This struggle arose in the face of industrial modernity and its challenge to the value of the “handmade” and “traditional” crafts, mass-production of plastic wares that lowered demand for lacquerware, and the nation-state’s campaign to establish a national art canon and history, as well as a national aesthetics. I show how Meiji period (1868-1912) Jōbōji lacquer artisans conjoined the techniques and designs of Jōbōji lacquer with a nationalized lacquer tradition known as maki-e (“sprinkled picture”) in response to the technique’s promulgation by the Artists for the Imperial Household System, the Tokyo School of the Arts, and International Expositions in the 1880s and 1890s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jōbōji lacquerware appears in magazines, periodicals, and exhibitions formulated by advocates of the Folk Crafts Movement (Mingei Undō), demonstrating how the aesthetic qualities of Jōbōji lacquer—simple designs, practicality, and the lively technique of urushi-e (“lacquer pictures”)—embodied the mingei theorist and collector Yanagi Muneyoshi’s (1889-1961) ideals of the “People’s Art.” In the postwar period, artists such as Koseki Rokuhei (1918-2011) utilized Jōbōji lacquer to execute the traditional maki-e lacquer technique, creating abstract sculptural forms that reveal the possibilities of lacquer material as a medium capable of abstract visual expression in the realm of contemporary “craft art” (kōgei bijutsu). Finally, the use of Jōbōji lacquer in the restoration of the exterior of the Yōmeimon (“Gate of Illuminating Sun”) at the Nikkō Tōshōgū shrine-temple complex—designated as a National Treasure and UNESCO World Heritage Site—points to the growing sense of national pride associated with the tapping of “authentic” Japanese lacquer, and demonstrates how the efforts lacquer sap collectors are now oriented toward national and global cultural heritage preservation and restoration.

This dissertation adopts an ethnographic approach to understand the complex political relations between Taiwan and mainland China, focusing on how sound and audio communication have been central in maintaining continuous dialogue across the Taiwan Strait even amidst political tensions and communication restrictions. It demonstrates that throughout 75 years of cross-strait history, people in Taiwan and mainland China have continuously found ways to speak and listen to one another. Since the Kuomintang government’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War, communication across the Taiwan Strait has been heavily restricted. Both Taiwan and mainland China’s governments maintained highly regulated media environments through the 1980s, and mainland China’s Great Firewall continues to impose strict controls on online communication today. Amidst this restricted environment, people have mobilized various audio communication technologies—from loudspeakers and radio broadcasts to social media and videogames—to project a steady stream of sound across the Taiwan Strait. While discussions of cross-strait politics often emphasize formal diplomatic negotiations and political tension, this research instead centers sound and voice communication as distinct perspectives through which to explore how individuals communicate beliefs and navigate differences as they go about their daily lives. A recurring theme in this dissertation is the concept of regulatory latency, which describes how the development and implementation of regulatory mechanisms often lag behind those of communication technologies. This latency leads to unregulated gaps that can be temporarily leveraged by individuals for open exchange in highly restricted media environments. I build on the concept of regulatory latency to demonstrate that since the 1950s, individuals in Taiwan and mainland China have continuously employed audio technologies to communicate outside of the bounds of the latest government regulations. I start with loudspeakers, which were used from the 1950s on both sides of the Taiwan Strait not only to transmit cross-strait propaganda, but also for informal exchange. Radio broadcasts similarly provided a rare space for cross-strait exchange; I specifically focus on the transitional period from the late 1980s through the early 2000s during which Taiwanese radio hosts and mainland Chinese listeners formed sustained relationships through multimedia exchanges surrounding these broadcasts. Analyzing these exchanges encourages a reconceptualization of broadcast radio as multimedia and multidirectional, while also revealing shifts in what I call the cross-strait socio-political imaginary. More recently, I consider online exchanges through a case study of the briefly popular audio social media app Clubhouse. I highlight how Clubhouse users engaged in live voice communication to escape the “echo chambers” that are common on contemporary social media, forming affective connections and empathizing with people whose beliefs differ from their own. I also explore live-voice communication in online videogames. In contrast to associations of videogames with the promotion of violence, I demonstrate how informal, relaxed interactions in the context of online play provide a site through which Taiwanese and mainland Chinese gamers can collectively confront cultural, linguistic, and political differences. Taken together, these case studies reveal situations in which individuals find ways to communicate despite restrictions, navigating their differences by speaking and listening to one another.

The Japanese unconvicted (pre-judicial) detention system has recently become an object of scrutiny of international news media coverage, political activism, and social science scholarship alike, primarily due to its imposition of conditions and utilization of techniques deemed inhumane by these sources. Although Japanese criminal law explicitly secures a range of rights and protections on behalf of arrestees, criminal suspects in Japan are habitually detained in police custody and subjected to sensory deprivation, social isolation, restriction of access to legal counsel, and coercive interrogation tactics throughout the period between arrest and indictment. According to recent studies, it is precisely within this gap between policy and practice that utter suspension of constitutional rights and virtually indefinite extension of the pre-conviction detention period is rendered possible in the circumstance of suspicion of criminal infraction, reinforcing Michel Foucault’s claim that “an inner tendency of the whole system [emerges] in the ambiguity between the form of the law and the actual application of the law.” Despite the critical tenor characteristic of more recent scholarship on the topic, the Japanese criminal justice system has been lauded as a global exemplar of security, efficiency, and impartiality in prior studies. Such favorable appraisal of the Japanese justice system is reflected also in public opinion; despite widespread knowledge of existing pre-conviction detention practices and their recent global exposure, there remains among the Japanese populace a strikingly high approval rate of police and prosecutorial action. These three tensions—between criminal law and its material application, between the polarized conclusions reached in late 20th and early 21st-century studies, and between international censure and domestic support—constitute the core of the ethnographic conundrum explored in this project, an ethnographic exploration of the unconvicted detention (miketsu shobun) system in contemporary Japan.

This study discusses the origins and development of the South China Sea dispute. It briefly analyzes the overlapping maritime claims, their justifications and legal aspects, and key clashes between the actors across the second half of the 20th century. It uses a historical perspective to assess the present-day conflict. The study discusses the impact of international agreements, national policies, claimants' domestic factors, and external influences connected to the geopolitical situation of the period to determine how they influenced the dispute. The analysis reveals that amidst more pressing global events, the South China Sea issue was frequently overlooked by the international community, and coupled with the region's volatile environment, the dispute escalated gradually. This process further accelerated from the mid-20th century onward. While activities of the involved states in the late 20th century show they often prioritize self-interest over the risks of conflict exacerbation, their policymaking was and remains largely determined by domestic nationalist pressure and issues of political legitimacy. Meanwhile, the role of the US in the region is significant. However, it brings contradictory results. International agreements have had mixed effects on the conflict as well. The most recent 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established clearer rules than its predecessor. However, it lacks enforcement mechanisms to regulate the conflict. Moreover, it indirectly enabled the South China Sea nations to assert excessive and largely intractable claims. This study concludes that, given the limited effectiveness of international law and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), along with China's rise and the United States' countering activities, the region will likely remain turbulent, and the dispute might escalate further. It is suggested that claimant states increase multilateral cooperation and combat domestic nationalist pressures by justifying it as a necessary response to the environmental crisis of the sea, which indeed slowly started to affect numerous nationals' livelihoods.

This dissertation analyzes power dynamics within K-pop fandom(s)—a term encompassing fans within and beyond Korea—and examines how these dynamics contribute to nuanced perceptions of authenticity. Situated at the intersection of Media Studies, Area Studies, Gender Studies, Digital Humanities, and Ethnomusicology, this project employs online and offline ethnographic methods. By gathering insights from fans and professionals, my dissertation exemplifies a humanistic social science arguing for a nuanced understanding of cultural phenomena. In contrast to the dominant framework of the “Korean Wave,” which leverages K-pop's global popularity for nationalist ends and risks exoticizing Korean popular culture by often omitting the national context, this research project uses a combination of global and national perspectives as its main theoretical framework. It argues that the various perceptions of K-pop within its fandom(s) converge toward an imaginary concept of what “authentic” K-pop is. Utilizing its interdisciplinary framework, my ambition is to assert K-pop as a legitimate object of study within Korean Studies.

This thesis will examine the presence of Jay Chou’s China Wind (Zhongguofeng), a term describing a style of Chinese popular music that incorporates Chinese elements, in the PRC during the first decade of the 21st century. Despite the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ceaselessly implemented strategies in attempts to subvert the fact that songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan dominated the mainland’s popular music space at this time, Jay Chou, who is from Taiwan, surprisingly received their endorsement. This thesis will attempt to answer why the aforementioned phenomenon occurred and simultaneously answer why Jay Chou’s China Wind is tremendously popular in the PRC. Rather than regarding the CCP’s strategies as a complete failure against songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this thesis argues that Jay Chou’s China Wind style is fundamentally different from those songs in terms of ideology. From there, this thesis argues that Jay Chou’s China Wind style is in accordance with both the CCP’s ideological agenda and PRC consumers’ tastes and desires from the perspectives of gender, nationalism, and modernization. Lastly, this thesis argues that Jay Chou’s China Wind allows the PRC government and consumers to form a symbiotic, rather than antagonistic, relationship.

This study is to look at what could be the impact of the hybrid cultures' inflow on the literary venations of Shanghai writers, as shown by the non-indigenous traits of "modernity'' in the writings of Zhang Ailing. The author examines some of the earlier works of Zhang Ailing, including “Aloeswood Incense: The First Blazier,” “Jasmine Tea” and “Love.” Borrowing an angle from scholarship on the Sci-Fi, hybrid features in Lu Xun’s "Iron House" and "A Mad Man’s Diary," the study furthers the investigation on these works, which the author believes have manifested the repetition feature of rewriting and reinterpretation. It argues that the thread has been given via the writer’s repetitious emphasis on a claustrophobically confining ambience of quiet horror and terror, parallel to the drastic social changes occurring in Shanghai. The writer’s ability to “spellbind” the readers to a logically-structured enclosure, akin to a form of “grotesqueness” seen in both the influx of western Gothic literatures and the bedrock Chinese modern literature, has been bestowed by this parallel as the essential fabric of the text.

Nestled in the heart of Little Tokyo, the Los Angeles Koyasan Buddhist Temple offers a monthly performance of the Goma fire ritual for the benefit of members and visitors alike. The practice of the Goma ceremony employs an elaborate ritual structure that utilizes the communal performance of visualizations, postures and chants in order to grant the practitioner's wishes and empower them to realize enlightenment. How do the visual, spatial and material elements of the Goma ceremony at Koyasan Los Angeles cultivate the independent participation of the temple laity in accordance with the Shingon practice of attaining enlightenment within the human body? In this thesis I will argue that the temple’s vibrant imagery, ritual choreography and sonic arrangements, as experienced in the Goma ceremony, mediate the somatic experience of the practitioner in order to evoke the experience of enlightenment. Rather than focusing on the experience of the priests’ administration of the Goma ritual, attention will be drawn towards the practice of the individual worshiper during the ceremony. The individual act of chanting, bowing, visualizing, smelling and touching the various components of the Goma ritual space reaffirms the nature of Shingon Buddhist art as a practical tool of worship.

This interdisciplinary project adopts a critical humanist methodology to revive the overlooked narrative of the Chongqing Heavy Bombing. Through an examination of documentaries crafted by Chinese-American women, a Chinese novel addressing the bombing, and an English novel, along with a Japanese animated film depicting the Japanese experience of WWII, this study explores diverse perspectives that transcend national and cultural boundaries. Drawing upon the insights of eminent scholars such as Emanuel Levinas, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kandice Chuh, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, and others, and navigating a spectrum of mediums and narrative forms, this research endeavors to think within and beyond Area Studies, connecting it with Asian American Studies to help extricate the field from the trap of self-referentiality. Most importantly, this inquiry seeks to actively contribute to the recovery of obscured historical accounts and advocates for an ethical framework unrestrained by the inherent limitations of human perception and imagination. By doing so, it aspires to cultivate ethical responsibility within the global context shared by humanity.

This dissertation comprises three papers that examine why people engage in activism after experiencing unanticipated family loss and how their activism endures in the long term. South Korea provides a compelling context where victims’ families affected by various disasters collaborate in activism, expanding our understanding of participation in social movements. Their collective actions deviate from typical predictors of participation in social movements: they have little or no prior experience in activism, no preexisting connection to mobilizing structures, and no prospective benefits or incentives to gain. On the contrary, the material, emotional, and physical costs of participation are extremely high. Using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participant observation, this project examines how bereaved families’ activism begins and sustains over time.Part 1 examines their involvement from a processual perspective and demonstrates that families affected by varying disasters undergo similar stages. These entail disillusioning experiences in which their previously-held trust in the state and society is shattered. Family members need to conduct self-investigation into their incidents, during which they find allies and broaden their perspectives on the structural causes of their losses. Through this process, families reinterpret the cause of their loss from personal misfortune to a systemic failure and join broader social movements to rectify the flawed system. Central in this process are the families’ emotions, which evolve from personal grief to social obligation. Part 2 illustrates three situational emotions that emerge as circumstances unfold in the aftermath of losses: a sense of guilt, gratitude, and obligation. Initially, bereaved families grapple with guilt for having neglected societal problems in the past and become determined to address the systemic causes. As they engage in collective actions, support from allies heightens a sense of gratitude, fueling further engagement. Lastly, a sense of obligation toward the public to forestall similar incidents sustains the families’ involvement in activism, from which derives what I refer to as the victims' sense of social indebtedness. Bereaved families’ intent to atone for their guilt, repay the support they have received, and fulfill their duties helps prolong their engagement. Part 3 examines the consequence of prolonged endurance through the lens of gender. Focusing on the grassroots activism carried out largely by mothers of the Sewol Ferry victims in their local community, this paper demonstrates how their once-undervalued grassroots activities sustain their activism despite declining political momentum. Many mothers’ commitment to labor-intensive, interactive activities through developing various skill sets and volunteering was initially considered auxiliary. However, over time, these activities played a crucial role in sustaining and redirecting their activism, resulting in the shift of organizational leadership.

This dissertation examines the meanings and feelings of Maoist and post-Mao China through rural cultural practices and productions. Against the backdrop of urban-rural inequalities in twentieth and twenty-first-century China, as well as the uncertain future of agrarian societies worldwide, I reveal why the rural matters through literary and cinematic narratives of rural matters. My study takes a historically contingent approach to explore how cultural forms reflect upon and respond to social contents, challenging the urban-centered mentality regarding questions of modernity and crisis in Chinese studies. The stories of rural China, informed by varying ideological persuasions and cultural institutions, have oscillated between tales of success and crisis throughout the twentieth century and since, with the figure of the peasant alternately portrayed as a progressive vanguard or a conservative laggard. My study moves beyond this binary abstraction to explore rural issues as historical formations and emotional processes. In doing so, it reveals the contingencies in aesthetic framings that at once elucidate allegorical meanings and exude structures of feeling. Taking “rural matters” as the analytical node where social, epistemic, aesthetic, and affective issues are constructed and contested, this project makes three key contributions to interdisciplinary Chinese studies and broader humanistic inquiries. First, by foregrounding agrarian society vis-à-vis the interpellation of global capitalism, it enriches the growing body of scholarship on combined and uneven development. Second, by approaching realism as both a conceptual framework and a cultural form, this study accentuates Chinese articulations for exploring the global revival and rediscovery of realism. Third, it contextualizes affect studies within the sensorium and material conditions of rural China.In four chapters, I explore the complex processes of knowledge formation and emotional fluctuation in rural China through a diversity of media and genres, including fiction, film, popular magazines, and folk performances. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 scrutinize the shifting discourses on subjectivity and morality across the Mao/post-Mao divide. Highlighting the dialectic of cultural form and social content, I investigate how Chinese realists navigate between critical orientations and utopian impulses. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the contingencies and contradictions in the transformation of rural storytelling, addressing the potential and limitation of elite-folk coordination during the dynamic processes of transmedial borrowing, adaptation, and revision. Together, with each chapter historicizing an epistemological node pertaining to rurality—namely revolution, migration, justice, and folk—my project grapples with the structures of feeling that manifest as “obsessions with rural China.” By analyzing cultural formulations and social sentiments in the Maoist and post-Mao countryside, I argue that the rural form of the reform era not only mediates China’s marketization but also carries the birthmark of Chinese socialist realism. As such, my dissertation conceptualizes and contextualizes Chinese rurality both within and against capitalist modernity, reterritorializing the rural for envisioning alternatives to the current developmental impasse in China and beyond.

Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), a prominent Chinese writer, holds a significant place in the annals of modern Chinese literature and pro-democracy movements due to his notable contributions. Consequently, his visual representations have been continuously reimagined by various groups for diverse purposes, making him a celebrated paragon in modern Chinese art. In the post-2010 era of Chinese social media, Lu Xun-themed memes created by Chinese youth gained popularity, leading to the emergence of Lu Xun-themed cultural creative commodities. These cultural creative commodities transitioned into tangible art pieces through traditional art institutions, indicating the Chinese youth’s fascination with reimagining Lu Xun’s visual representations on social media platforms and generating a cycle of virtual and physical depictions. Previous studies have primarily focused on textual exchanges among internet users, neglecting the widespread artistic representations of Lu Xun-themed on Chinese social media platforms and the reason behind their creation and appeal among young audiences. In this thesis, I argue the contemporary societal challenges faced by Chinese youth with Lu Xun’s new visual representations as a powerful social commentary in the internet age.

Co-living, an emerging living arrangement embraced by Chinese youth in urban areas, embodies self-determination, sharing, communication, and intimacy among residents. Through extensive year-long ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two co-living houses in Shanghai, this dissertation illuminates the collective lifestyle established by residents and the challenges they encountered. Residents devised democratic mechanisms for discussing collective affairs, fostered quasi-familial intimacy, and organized public activities in shared spaces to cultivate social connections. The co-living experience is shadowed by gender conflicts, state surveillance, and national risks like the lockdown during COVID-19, and residents collectively navigate these challenges. Through the exploration of co-living life in urban China, I argue that the collectivity co-living residents established is underscoring the collective coping mechanisms inherent in co-living amidst the material and psychological pressures of urban life, including soaring housing costs and social isolation. Here, the collective life serves as a tool for pursuing individual interests. Such interplay between collective life and individual interests sheds light on a special re-embedment mechanism of the individualization process amongst Chinese youth, highlighting the concept of "collective individualization" within Chinese society. This study argues that Chinese youth engage in co-living as a strategic response to societal pressures, representing a unique re-embedding mechanism amidst the broader process of individualization. Unlike a return to socialist collectivism or complete atomization, co-living reflects an intricate interplay between individual agency and cultural norms. This phenomenon demonstrates a nuanced pathway of individualization deeply rooted in Chinese culture and society. Furthermore, this research enriches the understanding of co-living practices by elucidating their complex interaction with local cultural norms such as family dynamics, gender relations, and youth culture in the Chinese context.