In Korean Studies, Confucianism often serves as a proxy for other sets of values perceived negatively, for example, through its association with patriarchy rather than feminism or with authoritarianism rather than freedom. Such binary stereotypes, repeated by many scholars, distort understandings of Confucianism and, by extension, produce a skewed image of Korea as a whole. This research aims to: (1) raise awareness of these binary stereotypes, (2) elucidate the underlying factors contributing to the stereotypical perception of Confucianism in Korean Studies, and (3) propose strategies for dismantling these stereotypes. To effectively deconstruct them, the first step provides an overview of how Confucianism has been portrayed in Korean Studies. To this end, we employ the online platform Voyant to analyse ten introductory texts on Confucianism in a Korean context. The findings from this analysis indicate that the essence of Confucianism is dynamic and that definitions of Confucianism are multivocal and often ambiguous. We argue that it is precisely this dynamic essence, multivocality and ambiguity that make Confucianism vulnerable to appropriation by stereotypes. At the same time, we contend that this very variability allows Korean Confucianism to adapt to new circumstances and thrive in an ever-changing world.
This study applies the notion of ‘boundary objects’ to cultural heritage studies, using as a case study Meige, the orally transmitted folk epics of the Chuxiong Yi people in Yunnan province, Southwest China. The study explores how Meige exemplifies interactive collaboration between diverse stakeholders—Yi communities, academic scholars, government agencies and industry professionals—in its preservation and revival within contemporary Chinese society and how these diverse partnerships cooperate to make the revival of Meige across three phases: canonisation, stage performance and social media dissemination. Treating Meige as a boundary object, this study examines how these partnerships collaborate effectively, leveraging their strengths to transfer and promote Meige sustainably. Via comprehensive qualitative research, this study incorporates archival analyses to examine Meige’s canonisation, virtual ethnography to observe Yi communities’ stage performance and daily music practices on social media, as well as fieldwork insights from Meige’s place of origin. It highlights the positive impact of stakeholders’ collaboration on Meige’s sustainability. Further, it identifies foundational issues to address, such as the lack of Meige heritage practitioners and the survival challenges faced by Meige heritage bearers, for critical long-term sustainability strategies.
This report from the field in the form of a photo essay explores the shifting religious landscape of Ketokha, a village in the Chhukha district of southwestern Bhutan. Historically, Buddhist and shamanic traditions coexisted in Ketokha, negotiating varied positions of power, influence and healing. The nejom (female medium) and pawo (male medium) played pivotal roles in ritually protecting the villagers’ health and prosperity until 2018, when, with infrastructure development and through modernist discourses, Buddhism became the dominant religion and mediumship was discontinued. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this transformation, marked by the decline of shamanic traditions and the establishment of a refashioned protective ritual called Aum Bogum as the primary marker of the community’s ritual identity. This report focuses on this ritual and the life story and perspectives of 94-year-old Tandin Om, the then oldest living nejom, and examines the laying to waste of the community’s archaic shamanic practices. Using insights of Discard Studies that treat waste as a system of symbolic classification and moral politics, this essay unpacks the marginalisation of elderly ritual practitioners as community elites propagate the adoption of what they consider a more progressive socio-religious order of Vajrayana Buddhism. The photographs document elements of these shifts, offering visual cues of Ketokha’s changing community and ritual lives.
This article explores how disaster-affected people respond to state-led disaster governance through the analytical concepts of solidarity and disaster citizenship. This form of governance consists of two aspects: 1) modernisation, involving resettlement for urbanisation and economic recovery as well as modern technology and infrastructure for risk prevention; and 2) moral state, manifested in the state’s demonstration of compassion and its demand of gratitude. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two flood-affected villages, I examine villagers’ responses to the state’s governing of public opinion, resettlement and recovery. The study reveals that villagers contested the government’s control of public opinion by forming communal opinions, resisted resettlement and remade places out of state-designed space for reconstruction in informal groups such as neighbourhoods and kin. Besides existing social ties, villagers built their solidarity with a shared sense of socioeconomic justice rooted in a long tradition of state-society interactions. Their solidarity was enhanced but also undermined by state-led disaster governance. Nonetheless, villagers reinforced and redefined their claims to entitlement and negotiated their autonomy. This article concludes that social practices and experiences of the villagers embody disaster citizenship in rural China through solidarity of informal groups negotiating post-disaster life on their own terms.
This study examines the phenomenon of xinghun–a marriage between a homosexual man and a homosexual woman–in contemporary China. Through a quantitative analysis of more than 60,000 dating profiles from the website Chinagayles.com, we examine the motivations and concerns of young gay people in China who seek this type of marriage. The analysis shows that desire for financial and social stability is an important reason for many to engage in xinghun. Concern for parents and a wish to make them happy features as a major topic, and many explicitly search for a partner with a traditional gender expression to satisfy heteronormative expectations. However, the analysis also shows that xinghun cannot only be understood as a response to pressure; some seek xinghun for personal connection and friendship or as a means to gain more freedom and autonomy. Further, there are significant gender differences in approaches to xinghun, seen most clearly in the question of whether or not to have children. Finally, a central methodological contribution of this study is that the simple procedure of extracting n-grams from a large corpus of Chinese text can provide a powerful analytical method.
Tibetan Studies has not followed the same trajectory in India that it has taken in the Global North. It has largely remained an exilic endeavour, with some support from the Indian state, and flourishes mainly in the form of Buddhist Studies. We use the term Tibetan Studies more as shorthand for the scholarly study of Tibet’s history, politics, geography, religion and cultural traditions as they might have unfolded in various spaces within India and not as an identifying term for an existing field. In this paper, we show that the course of Tibetan Studies in India has been affected by geopolitical relations between India and China and the refugee status of Tibetans. Because Tibetan Studies in India has developed primarily within the exile Tibetan spaces there, an essentialised construction of a homogenous Tibetan identity prevails, precluding a more holistic approach to the study of Tibetic peoples of the Himalayan region. While presenting an overview of the state of the field of Tibetan Studies in India, we also outline a possible direction for an integrated Tibet and Himalayan Studies, applicable particularly in the Indian context, that takes into account the changing empirical and geopolitical situation globally that necessitates a timely conceptual and practical intervention. It also considers the inclusive scope of Himalayan Studies to recover and restore long-overlooked historical and ethnographic material from the Tibetan borderlands, which include but are not limited to the Indian Himalayan or trans-Himalayan regions.
This article addresses the introduction of Buddhism to southern Africa in recent decades as part of the growing Chinese infrastructure on the continent. Based upon over thirty months of in-depth ethnographic research conducted at a Buddhist NGO in Central Namibia between 2021 and 2024, this arti- cle argues that, rather than serving as a source of spiritual inspiration and fulfilment, Buddhism in this context has become a form of (Chinese) infra- structure that enables and disables specific ways of acting, speaking and living among the Namibians who work at the NGO. It shows how Buddhism as a form of infrastructure slowly, subtly, yet surely becomes moored in the daily lives of the local people.
In recent decades, Buddhist sacred sites in India have become entangled in various soft power initiatives that have important religious and geopolitical im- plications in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on the concept of heritage diplomacy, this paper examines the geopolitics of Buddhism in contemporary India and how the infrastructure of Buddhist memory is central to development processes and civilisational discourses around Asia as an interlinked historical and geographic formation. In particular, it will examine different spheres of heritage influence in the Indian subcontinent and how they figure into state ideological interests and existing regional diplomatic ties, which includes building trade networks, financial aid and other strategic alliances designed to strengthen India’s image and standing in the region.
This paper analyses religious infrastructure projects of saintly and charismatic Buddhist monks as a process of state territorialisation in conflict- affected areas of southeast Myanmar. Amongst lay Karen Buddhists, infrastructure projects which are conceived in the name of ‘making religion’ (thathana pyu) and spreading the sāsana are widely seen as an expression of compassion, so that they can make merit and build a peaceful Buddhist polity. However, in some areas, these missionisation projects have also inflicted brutal violence on local communities—both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Drawing on a burgeoning anthropological literature that looks at religious works as a form of infrastructure, this paper explores projects of ‘making religion’ and demonstrates how they hold both enchanting and pernicious qualities for local people, when embedded in processes of state territorialisation. Coinciding with ongoing attempts by the Myanmar military to explicitly and actively missionise contested Karen territories, I argue that these projects can be understood as part of a broader nationalist project from the state to consolidate territorial control in restive parts of the country.
Since the late 2000s, anti-China sentiments have increased across Vietnam, with large public protests against China’s encroachment in the ‘South China Sea’ or the ‘East Sea’. Such sentiments have raised important questions about Vietnamese sovereignty and cultural identity . Among Buddhists, the ‘China’ question has motivated endeavours to construct a ‘Vietnamese’ Buddhism that maintains a critical distance from ‘Chinese’ religious influences. Based on extensive fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper examines Vietnamese Buddhism as a form of soft power, particularly its ability to shape public understanding of Vietnamese identity and geopolitics. In analysing a few initiatives linked to a prominent Buddhist temple in Ho Chi Minh City, including a Buddhist public health campaign to promote organ donations and the organisation of the United Nations Day of Vesak, I explicate the intense efforts by Buddhists to create a religious infrastructure aimed at broadening the scope of Buddhist influence on Vietnam’s public life and international diplomatic relationships. I argue that this emerging Buddhist infrastructure signals transformations within Vietnamese Buddhism as it becomes increasingly entangled with local and transnational socio-political concerns.
Martyrdom holds significant cultural and historical importance in Iranian culture. It has deep roots in Shia Islam, the predominant religion in Iran, and frequently appears in Iranians’ collective memory. The concept of martyrdom gained significant prominence during the Iran-Iraq War (1980 - 1988) when many Iranians, including soldiers and civilians, lost their lives while defending their country. The war led to a surge in a culture surrounding martyrdom, with commemorations, ceremonies and rituals that continue today. Years after the war, new conceptions of martyrdom appeared, and the traditional ones transformed. The latest uprisings in Iran in 2022, with the slogan ‘woman-life-freedom’, have spurred a lively discussion as to how to consider martyrdom nowadays. This article examines the concept of martyrdom, offering fresh interpretations influenced by generational shifts and the rise of social activism in the 2020s, which diverge from traditional revolutionary ideologies. Drawing from survey data and qualitative interviews, the research proposes a taxonomy of martyr categories.
This article analyses the durability of transregional Syrian Jewish merchant networks through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the centre of these trading networks shifted several times in response to economic transformations and political pressures. Migration patterns from Aleppo following the Ottoman collapse and the exodus after 1947 call for a modified conceptualisation of centres, peripheries and circulation from dominant approaches to merchant networks and circulation societies. Centres are generally thought of as the origin points of persons and goods – namely, women, religious specialists and collateral-free credit – which circulate exclusively within the network; peripheries are nodes which merely receive and depend on centres in these respects. I add to this by analysing central or critical nodes as those where different kinds of mobility intersected to inject new vitality into the networks. Peripheries are not only dependent nodes, but vital points of refuge and transition in times of duress. Furthermore, beyond persons and credit, the circulation of aesthetic and ethical standards, in addition to name values, has helped to maintain the integrity of the network in a period of geographic reconfiguration.
This article discusses migration of Bukharan Jews – an ethnic-religious minority in (post-)Soviet Central Asia – and the establishment of multi-confessional, multi-ethnic Central Asian diaspora in the city of Vienna, Austria. During the Cold War period, Vienna was transformed from being a major transit hub for Soviet Jews moving from the USSR to Israel, USA and other destinations to a site of the most numerous and prominent Bukharan Jewish diaspora in Europe. Using the concept of ‘migration infrastructure’, the article investigates the ways in which this transformation took place. Furthermore, it focuses on Jewish-Muslim interfaces, both in Soviet Uzbekistan and present-day diaspora, to document the ongoing, albeit changing, coexistence and collaboration across ethnic-religious boundaries that facilitate transnational migration. I argue that the Jewish infrastructure, which emerged in Vienna’s historically Jewish district of Leopoldstadt in the last decades, has also become a migrant infrastructure for the post-Soviet Tadjik-speaking Muslim migrants from Central Asia.
This article documents the migration of Afghanistan’s Sikh communities to Asia and Europe during the Cold War and its aftermath. It analyses these migratory trajectories both in the context of conflict in Afghanistan and the refugee flows it created as well as in relation to the long-term role of Afghan Sikhs in transregional trade. The article argues that exploring Sikh migration from Afghanistan through the twin analytical lenses of trade networks and the Cold War helps to illuminate a more complex range of identities and experiences than allowed for by a singular focus on their status as either ‘refugees’ or migrants from ‘the Global South’.
In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming the sites, turning them into museums and exhibition spaces and giving rise to thorough reform of the surrounding urban fabric. In this paper I trace the involved agents’ motivations to engage in historical reconstruction from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of important historical locations to boost city attraction values. In this way, I link these two unfolding projects in Nara and Nagasaki to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities exploit lost iconic localities and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense cultural-economic competition.
In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming the sites, turning them into museums and exhibition spaces and giving rise to thorough reform of the surrounding urban fabric. In this paper I trace the involved agents’ motivations to engage in historical reconstruction from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of important historical locations to boost city attraction values. In this way, I link these two unfolding projects in Nara and Nagasaki to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities exploit lost iconic localities and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense cultural-economic competition.
