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In recent years, debates over healthcare have accompanied rapid advances in technology, from the expansion of telehealth services to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics. In this book, Shawn Bender delves into the world of Japanese robots engineered for care. Care robots (kaigo robotto) emerged early in the 21st century, when roboticists began converting assembly line technologies into responsive machines for older adults and people with disabilities. These robots are meant to be felt and programmed to feel. While some greet them with enthusiasm, others fear that they might replace a fundamentally human task. Based on fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany, Bender traces the emergenc...
Ethnomusicological fieldwork has significantly changed since the end of the the 20th century. Ethnomusicology is in a critical moment that requires new perspecitves on fieldwork - perspectives that are not addressed in the standard guides to ethnomusicological or anthropological method. The focus in ethnomusicological writing and teaching has traditionally centered around analyses and ethnographic representations of musical cultures, rather than on the personal world of understanding, experience, knowing, and doing fieldwork. Shadows in the Field deliberately shifts the focus of ethnomusicology and of ethnography in general from representation (text) to experience (fieldwork). The "new field...
How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful "cultural positioning" and "cultural patronage," on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly "Chinese." Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of "political correctness" in the People’s Republic of China. Once known as "China’s Little Moscow," Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.
The Missionary’s Curse tells the story of a Chinese village that has been Catholic since the seventeenth century, drawing direct connections between its history, the globalizing church, and the nation. Harrison recounts the popular folk tales of merchants and peasants who once adopted Catholic rituals and teachings for their own purposes, only to find themselves in conflict with the orthodoxy of Franciscan missionaries arriving from Italy. The village’s long religious history, combined with the similarities between Chinese folk religion and Italian Catholicism, forces us to rethink the extreme violence committed in the area during the Boxer Uprising. The author also follows nineteenth ce...
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among taiko groups in Japan, 'Taiko Boom' explores the origins of taiko in the early postwar period and its popularization over the following decades of rapid economic growth in Japan's cities and countryside.
An illustrated, in-depth examintion of the avant-garde and politically radical Latino art of San Francisco's Mission District In The Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the "Mission School" by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, ...
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Louder and Faster is a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for twenty years, Deborah Wong has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American internment and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, Louder and Faster considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an antiracist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.
Exploring an array of captivating topics, from hybridized Buddhist music to AI singers, this book introduces Japanese music in the modern era. The twenty-five chapters show how cultural change from the late nineteenth century to the present day has had a profound impact on the Japanese musical landscape, including the recontextualization and transformation of traditional genres, and the widespread adoption of Western musical practices ranging from classical music to hip hop. The contributors offer representative case studies within the themes of Foundations, Heritage, Institutions, and Hybridities, examining both musical styles that originated in earlier times and distinctly localized or Japanized musical forms.
"Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities within a city. It is the story of two master-planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Ho Chi Minh City. The two developments that Erik Harms examines are examples of urban development projects known in Vietnam as 'New Urban Zones.' These programs, which were born in the early 1990s, are steadily reorganizing the urban landscape in cities across the country. For many Vietnamese, they are a symbol of the country's emergence into global modernity and post-socialist economic reforms. However, they are also sites of great contestation, sparking land disputes and controversies over how to compensate evicted residents. This is a vivid portrayal of urban reorganization along deeply human terms, which delves into the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of individuals grappling with the forces of privatization in a socialist country"--Provided by publisher.
This book is the first comparative study of media technologies in Japan and the two Koreas which illuminates the peculiar geopolitical relations between the three countries through their development and use of digital technologies, drawing from political economy, cultural studies, and technology studies.