The East Asian Studies Center’s Colloquium Series at Indiana University Bloomington brings together faculty from IU and other institutions to share current research with colleagues, students, and the general public in a relaxed environment. Light refreshments are generally provided at these noon talks, and guests are welcome to bring their own snacks or lunch.
*Also included below are the lectures from "Altars of Soil": Lectures on Chinese Prehistoric Rituals (AoS) and the Institute for Korean Studies Lecture Series (IKS)
The Ryukyuan peoples are indigenous to the Ryukyuan archipelago in Japan and are the largest ethnic minority group in Japan. Their indigenous languages, the Ryukyuan languages, are related to but also distinct from the Japanese language, and these languages present a considerable diversity among themselves.
All the Ryukyuan languages are currently classified as “endangered” due to a language shift from the Ryukyuan languages to Japanese. Most of the fluent speakers are in their 50s or older, and children are no longer learning these languages at home. There are ongoing community efforts that aim to maintain, preserve, and revitalize Ryukyuan languages in various parts of the Ryukyus. This talk will focus on the case of Yoronjima (Yoron Island) and highlight the community’s efforts to preserve Yunnufutuba (Yoron’s language) based on the preliminary data collected through interviews with community members.
Nozomi Tanaka is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She specializes in experimental linguistics and language acquisition and has worked on various languages of Asia and the Pacific, including Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Tagalog. Her newest line of research focuses on language maintenance and preservation in ethnic minority communities in Japan and in the US, including a Ryukyuan community on Yoronjima, Japan.
This talk will look at Japan's brutal conquest of Taiwan aboriginal lands in the early 20th century and its representation in Japanese cultural works. As the Japanese military force encountered fierce resistance by aboriginal groups, the aborigines came to be defined in Japanese discourse as savages who practiced "headhunting." Even as Japanese colonial administrators endeavored to stamp out this custom, they carefully preserved the figure of the "headhunter" to justify the violent subjugation of the savage "Other" and the imposition of a state of exception in aboriginal lands. Aboriginal resistance to the Japanese led to the 1930 Musha Incident, a bloody uprising against the colonial order in which 132 Japanese were killed. Paradoxically, late imperial writers, disillusioned with capitalist modernity, found much to admire and celebrate in aboriginal cultures. Just as an earlier generation of writers drew on global discourses on civilization to write tales of Japan's colonial conquests of savages, late imperial writers appropriated tropes of primitivism prevalent in Western literatures to address a critique of Japanese modernity.
Robert Tierney is a professor of modern Japanese literature and head of the East Asian Literature and Culture Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent publications include Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan's First Anti-Imperialist Movement (University of California Press, 2015); "Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Japan" (Shakespeare Quarterly 62(4), December 2011); and Tropics of Savagery: the Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (University of California Press, 2010). He is currently working on a translation of Nake Chōmin's One Year and a Half and a study on death writings in modern Japan.
This talk will discuss the origin, development, and significance of monumental and smaller fang ding 方鼎 (square or rectangular ding vessels). It will propose that the earliest bronze fang ding were modelled on wood vessels that were decorated or reinforced with strips of metal. It will also argue that although the ritual role of fang ding changed from the Erligang to the Yinxu periods of the Shang dynasty, the archeological evidence does not support the commonly accepted theory that monumental fangding signified kingship or royal power per se in either the early or late Shang periods. The primary significance of the square shape was most likely cosmological. Moreover, as the earliest square bronze vessels, they introduced a cosmological dualism into the forms of ritual bronzes, which then spread to other vessel types.
SarahAllan is Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Dartmouth College. She is also the Chair of the Society for the Study or Early China and the editor of its journal, Early China. Among other books, she is the author of The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China (1991) and co-author, with Li Xueqin and Qi Wenxin, of Oracle Bone Collections in Great Britain (1991). She iscurrently working on a book on "Art and Religion in China's Early Bronze Age," in collaboration with Han Ding 韓鼎 (Henan University)
Templestay for All: A Wellness Journey amid a Happiness Crisis in South Korea
by Kyoim Yun (University of Kansas)
Join via Zoom
*This series is presented by the Institute for Korean Studies and co-sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center
The bronze vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou periods of Chinese history seem always to have been used together in groups, as befits the various needs of a (more or less) ritual feasting event. Partway through the Western Zhou period, however, sets of near-identical bronze vessels became, if not commonplace, at least a recognized part of the archaeological record. Models of the history of Western Zhou ritual, including the “ritual revolution”/”ritual reform” argument, have sought reasons for this innovation in the changing demographics of elite lineages and the demarcation of relative status in ritual contexts. Though the logic of these suggestions is sound, they do not exhaust the possible explanations for the interest of individual users in bronze vessel sets. This presentation will look at groups of bronze vessels, including these graduated sets, through the narrative theory of collecting. Considering the visual and psychological effects of grouped objects, it will outline how bronze vessels could serve an editorial function in the depiction of lineage histories, bringing the distribution of tangible and intangible resources within lineages in line with each other in the process. On this basis, it will argue for the efficacy of bronze vessels in constructing and mediating between corporate and individual identities among Western Zhou elites.
Nick Vogt is Assistant Professor of Early Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington. His work explores the Western Zhou era (ca. 11th-8th c. BCE) as both historical milieu and cultural construct. Nick’s bookKingship, Ritual, and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China, which explores the royal ritual of that period based on contemporary bronze inscriptions, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a second monograph treating with the ideological, literary, and aesthetic concerns behind tales of Western Zhou history in both transmitted texts and ancient manuscripts.
12-1:15pm via Zoom (link coming soon)
*This series is presented by the East Asian Studies Center and co-sponsored by the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University.
*Please note this session is on WEDNESDAY See the flyer here!
ABOUT DR MICHAEL BROSE Michael Brose is a faculty in Central Eurasian Studies whose teaching, research and writing focus on two areas of Asian history, the social and political history of Mongol and Ming China, and the historic and contemporary position of Islam and the Chinese Muslim Hui community in China and wider East, Central and SE Asia.
ABOUT THE TALK The very existence of Chinese Muslim “Hui” as an official ethnic minority group in the PRC invites an examination of the idea “indigenous” since their two-fold identification with “Chinese” and “Muslim” embeds several points of contact and separation. First categorized by the Mongols as an administrative category in China, the Hui have suffered (or profited) from several re-definitions over time. They are now one of 10 groups of official Muslim “ethnic minority” groups recognized in the PRC, but their current identity status in China is just as idiosyncratic and dependent on the state’s meta-governance of population groups as in earlier eras, if not more so. Because Hui merges the racial/ethnic category “Chinese” with the religious category “Muslim” they occupy several categories at once and regardless of where they now live; Hui can be native/foreigner, unique citizenship/member of the global ummah. The existence of the Hui may in fact uniquely illustrate the problems associated with trying to define “indigenous” for any group of people. At a minimum, the Hui reveal ongoing tension between local and global that have not really changed all that much from the 14th century.
ABOUT THE TALK Since the 1980s, Taiwan’s democratization created conditions for an autonomous Indigenous social movement, which in turn led to new state institutions of indigeneity. In 2016, newly-elected DPP President Tsai Ing-wen even made an official apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples for 400 years of colonization and created the Presidential Office Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee. Such innovations contribute to wider understanding in Taiwan and abroad that the country has a history of Indigenous-settler relations comparable to Canada or the United States. Taiwan now legally recognizes sixteen Indigenous peoples.
Dr. Simon discuss ethnographic research in Truku and Sediq communities in Taiwan over two decades. Although institutions of indigeneity are often contested in local communities by cynical citizens, democracy also creates affordances for genuine Indigenous resurgence. This can be seen in the promotion of Indigenous language instruction, in artistic and scholarly production, but mostly in the lives of ordinary people. His research has focused on hunters and trappers as they affirm sovereignty over lost territory (albeit not always successfully) through the mundane practices of everyday life and a variety of political and legal tactics. He discuss ontologies of hunting, what they say to indigeneity, and their potential to animate Indigenous resurgence.
ABOUT DR. SCOTT SIMON Dr. Scott Simon (Ph.D., Anthropology, McGill University, 1998), from Fort Wayne, did his B.A. (1988) at Indiana University with a double major in East Asian Studies and Germanic Studies. While at IU, he studied Chinese at Hangzhou University and at the University of Hamburg, where he took his first anthropology classes. He continued his studies in anthropology with an M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) at McGill University in Montréal, where he learned French and did his first ethnographic research in a Taoist temple in Wenzhou.
His Ph.D. research project in Taiwan (1996-1998) was about the formation of Taiwanese national identity amidst Taiwan’s rapid post-war industrialization. He did post-doctoral research on Taipei women entrepreneurs. He has done ethnographic field research in Sediq and Truku indigenous communities of Taiwan since 2004, including over two years of residence in indigenous communities. He also did one year of research in 2017-18, at Osaka’s National Museum of Ethnology.
Dr. Simon is author of three books about Taiwan, among other academic publications. His main academic interests are human rights, indigenous-state relations and ecological anthropology. He is now finishing up a new monograph on indigeneity and Indigenous resurgence in Sediq and Truku communities.
12-1:15pm in GISB 2067
Flyer coming soon
Focusing on one of the archaeologically excavated silk diagrams (“tu” in Chinese) from the famous Mawangdui No. 3 Tomb (c. 168 BCE), the diagram of the Taiyi Incantation, this presentation is part of a larger research project that explores the cultural history of visual thinking in the Warring States and Qin-Han periods, investigating the dynamic interplay between text and image in the production and transmission of proto-scientific knowledge in early China. The text-image relationship has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry in literary studies and art history, in this study, instead I show that how correct understanding of that relationship can help us reconstructing the diagram and better understanding its nature and function. Diagrams played an important role in the production of technical manuals, the circulation and spread of knowledge among both the specialists and non-specialists in early China. The goal of this research project is to place the Mawangdui diagrams into the intellectual and art historical development of early China.
Guolong Lai is Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His research interests include early Chinese art and archaeology, Chinese paleography and excavated manuscripts, museology, collecting history and provenance studies, and cultural heritage conservation in modern China. He has worked at the National Museum of Chinese History in Beijing (now the National Museum of China), the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art in Washington DC, and received various fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Council of Learned Society, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2014-15), a Getty Scholar (2018-19) and a Visiting Fellow at the IKGF at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (2020-21). He is the author ofExcavating the Afterlife: The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion(2015), which won the Society for American Archaeology’s Honorable Mention-Book Award in the Scholarly Category (2016). He is the founding Associate Editor of the Zhejiang University Journal of Art and Archaeology(Hangzhou) and the associate editor of Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology(Hong Kong). He organized several conferences and symposiums both in China and the US and co-editedOccult Arts, Art History, and Cultural Exchange in Early China: A Festschrift for Professor Li Ling on His Seventieth Birthday(English and Chinese, 2021),New Philology and the Studies of Early China(Chinese, 2018),Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archeology: Vocabulary, Symbols, and Legacy(2018),Collectors, Collections, and Collecting Arts of China: Histories and Challenges(2014). Recently he co-translated William Baxter and Laurent Sagart’sOld Chinese: A New Reconstructioninto Chinese (Shanghai 2021).
12-1:15pm via Zoom (link coming soon)
*This series is presented by the East Asian Studies Center and co-sponsored by the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University.
Eveline Washul (Indiana University)
12-1:15pm in GISB 2067
Roslynn Ang (NYU Shanghai)
12-1:15pm in GISB 2067
Flyer coming soon!
In the spirit of collaboration and discussion across sub-disciplines that this lecture and workshop series aims to achieve, this talk proposes that a regionally-based approach to the study of early China may provide a fruitful framework for interweaving archaeological and textual sources. In arguing for this approach, I lay out my definition of what regionally-based work means theoretically in an early Chinese context, drawing on methods used in both regional archaeological survey in China as well as regional history from later periods. Then, taking my region of research interest—the middle Han River valley in northern Hubei—as a case study, I survey types of source materials that can and ought to be analyzed in order to construct a regionally-based history. I finish with a discussion of some of the major benefits and challenges of my approach as I currently see them.
GlendaChao is an Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Ursinus College. Her research focuses on the cultural history of the middle Han River valley and surrounding environs during the first millennium BCE. She is interested in interweaving archaeological and textual materials to write fresh narratives of the early China that point to potential new avenues of research on the history and archaeology of early empires, regionality in the ancient world, and the role of mortuary and daily rituals in the creation of local identities. She is also interested in the history of archaeology in China and its relationship with modern cultural memory and historical imagination. Her work has been published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Chu Culture and Early Development of the Middle Reaches of the Yangzi River(2020), and she is currently working on manuscripts about methods for approaching the study of first millennium BCE cemeteries in the Han River valley and the ethics of using unprovenienced archaeological materials in research about early China. Her book project focuses on the early regional history of the Xiang-Yi plain in northern Hubei; in this project, she seeks to explore the long-term processes by which this region became integrated (and also perhaps resisted integration) into the Qin and Han empires.
12-1:15pm via Zoom (link coming soon)
*This series is presented by the East Asian Studies Center and co-sponsored by the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University.
Past Speakers
Emily Wilcox (William & Mary)
Bruce Fulton (University of British Columbia) and Ju-Chan Fulton (translator of Korean literature)
Zhuoyi Wang (Hamilton College)
Avery Goldstein (University of Pennsylvania)
Lothar von Falkenhausen (UCLA)
Seo Young Park (Scripps College)
Hyun Ok Park (York University)
Jue Guo (Barnard College)
William H. Nienauser Jr. (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Johnathan Lipman (Stanford)
Paul Chang (Harvard University)
Yonjoo Cho (University of Texas at Tyler)
Gordon Matthews (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Sheena Greitens (University of Texas at Austin)
Jessica Li (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Dorthea Mladenova (Leipzig University)
Nozomi Tanaka (Indiana University)
Wenhao Diao (University of Arizona)
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (University of Missouri)
Minjeong Kim (San Diego State University)
Eunsil Oh (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Hilary Finchum-Sung (Seoul National University)
Darcy Paquet (Indiana University)
Jessica Li (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Yonjoo Cho (Indiana University)
Wenhao Diao (University of Arizona)
Levi McLaughlin (North Carolina State University)
Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Indiana University)
Kazuyo Nakamura (Indiana University)
Ping Li (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Agnes Sohn Jordan (Indiana University)
Heather Blair (Indiana University)
Byungdae Kim (Korean Ministry of Unification)
Jungwon Kim (Columbia University)
Pil Ho Kim (Ohio State University)
Ke-chin Hsia & Fei Hsien Wang (Indiana University)
Margaret Tillman (Purdue University)
Misumi Sadler (University of Illinois)
Sheldon Garon (Princeton University)
Ria Chae (Indiana University)
Ming-Chen Lo (University of California, Davis)
Tim Gitzen (Indiana University)
James Anderson (University of North Carolina)
Terry Jackson (Adrian College)
Nan Kim (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Lynn Struve (Indiana University)
Roald Maliangkay (Australia National University)
Young-Key Kim-Renaud (George Washington University)
Xiaoqing Diana Lin (Indiana University-Northwest)
Ding Xiang Warner (Cornell University)
Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto)
Christine Marran (University of Minnesota)
Todd Henry (University of California, San Diego)
Sally Hastings (Purdue University)
Jisoo Kim (George Washington University)
Edith Sarra (Indiana University)
Ken Liu (author)
Jessey J.C. Choo (Syracuse University)
Guojun Wang (Vanderbilt University)
Timothy Rich (Western Kentucky University)
Awi Mona (National Taiwan University & National Dong Hwa University)
Global and International Studies Building 355 North Jordan Avenue Bloomington, IN 47405-1105 (812) 855-3765 or (800) 441-3272 Fax: 812-855-7762 easc@indiana.edu
