Social and political life on small subtropical islands is frequently shaped by the economic imperative of sustainable tourism development. In Okinawa, “ecotourism” promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. In this dissertation, I consider how new subjectivities are produced when host communities come to see themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist. I further explore how Okinawans’ sense of place and identity are transformed as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as “cherishable,” yet vulnerable resources. I present a case study of how local ecological knowledge moves inter-generationally (between Okinawan elders and youth) and cross-culturally (between Okinawan nature guides and international and mainland Japanese tourists, who are often also considered “foreign”). By tracing the formal and informal social networks through which specific attitudes, beliefs, and sensibilities about the environment are circulated and reproduced, I demonstrate how nature-based therapies marketed to tourists for stress relief and lifestyle rehabilitation (e.g., forest therapy, dolphin therapy, and coral “gardening”) also influence Okinawan attitudes toward health and wellness. These kinds of activities reconfigure human relationships with non-human animal species; creatures previously “good to eat” (Harris 1985) are now even better to heal. “Sustainability” in Okinawa always begins with the question of military bases. The ecotourism concept poses a compelling, if problematic, economic alternative to the expansion of US bases into northern Okinawa, the hub of environmentally oriented conservationist, educational, and tourist programs on the main island. My analysis of the ecological and cultural effects of sustaining the tourism industry in Okinawa speaks to small islands facing similar economic and environmental challenges in East Asia, the Caribbean, Oceania, and beyond. / Anthropology

What the future brings for Hong Kong and its residents had been urgently debated in local and global conversations during the period leading to the 'handover,' or, Hong Kong’s 'return' to China in 1997. My dissertation examines differing attempts by theatre practitioners to respond to these questions in the 1990's, and to inscribe new 'local-ethnographies' through performance life to rearticulate what could be said about the body and how it dwells in the city that is called, 'home.' "Changes: A City in Circulation," the first chapter, considers many differing conceptions of 'time' and 'space' which have affected how dwellers experience, and imagine Hong Kong as their "house" and "home." The second chapter, "His(her)stories: Ethnographies of the House and Body," discusses the excavating and editing of perceptions, experiences and memories for performative projects, and how difficult it has been to create 'local-ethnographies' of what it means to be a dweller in Hong Kong through any single historical interpretation. The third chapter, "Stretching the Limits: Between Bodies and Language" analyzes the instrumentality of the body and voice of performers, and how the body and voice have been key to stories that are told through performance life. "Traces of the Familiar: Between the Public and Private," the fourth chapter, looks at the interrelationship between 'self' and the 'body social,' and explores through what is staged, whether what is 'familiar' as well as 'unfamiliar' have been made 'sharable' as part of the personal stories, use of found objects, and the inhabitation of urban space that are relived and exhibited through performative projects. "Working with Human Material through Performative Work," the fifth chapter, examines the challenges to art being perceived as work, and how what is worked upon through performative laboring has been affected by, but in turn, has the potential to shape the relations of production of its times. As performance life continues to bring together those from disparate parts of the city together at least for a brief moment in time, the sixth chapter, "Dwelling Places: Somewhere Between the 'Outside' and 'Inside,'" is concerned with how my own participating, observing, researching, and writing could also be points of contact, as 'stranger' and 'friend,' 'outsider' and 'insider,' to those met through the borrowed spaces of theatre. My hope is that what is written is not an ending, but a beginning too to more entrances that could be shared, and further conversations that could be held. / Anthropology

Around the world, the number of air passengers has quintupled since 1980. During the same time, air traffic in the Pearl River Delta--the urban region that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou--has risen by a factor of 50. Scholars have typically studied that expansion by analyzing mega-projects like 'starchitect' passenger terminals and high-speed airport railways. Yet they have ignored the emergence of parallel transport systems designed to plug less privileged people and places into the infrastructure of global mobility. Cheaper, rattier, and more geographically diffuse, these networks cater to passengers whose movement across international borders is limited by their income, citizenship, or place of birth. These incipient air travelers, and the so-called "transborder" systems that they use, have radically reordered the cross-border flow of goods and people in the Pearl River Delta. Focusing on Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), the dissertation examines how the airport has been redesigned to accommodate larger and more diverse passenger flows. Tracing the movement of different types of passengers--the retiree, the toddler, the migrant worker--it demonstrates how each traveler’s trajectory is determined by intersecting political, logistical, and financial considerations. The dissertation also investigates a network of airport check-in terminals that allow passengers to fly through HKIA without applying for a Hong Kong visa. Located deep inside Mainland China, these "upstream" check-in facilities cater to passengers who have difficulty obtaining a visa; such as Chinese tourists with a rural hukou, or African businessmen. A sealed ferry transports passengers from Mainland China to HKIA, where they are shuttled via an underground train to their departure gate. Isolated from other passenger flows, upstream travelers thus technically never enter Hong Kong. Through interviews, photographs, and digital mapping techniques, Airport Urbanism documents how HKIA--as well as the boundary between Mainland China and Hong Kong--have been reconfigured to abet the global circulation of capital and labor. In so doing, the dissertation posits airport infrastructure as a useful lens for interpreting broader changes in the regulation of cross-border mobility and the spatial articulation of national frontiers.

Traditionally recognized as the first of the great Buddhist treasure revealers, Nyang-rel Nyima Özer (1124-1192) historiographically reconstructed the Imperium into a golden age of Tibetan Buddhism. An analysis of his two early biographies demonstrates that he was among the first to recall an unbroken series of preincarnations in real historical time, which was a crucial link that led to the ascension of concatenated reincarnates like the Karmapas and Dalai Lamas. For Nyang-rel, his past life as emperor Tri Song-détsen (d. 800) provided the teleological karmic basis for his life as a finder of the old texts and relics deemed "treasure." According to his biographies and the two narratives that are attributed to him, Nyang-rel’s treasures were uniformly material objects extracted via quite mundane methods, though the discovery of old manuscripts seems to have been only an initial step in a process of compilation, redaction and composition that resulted in their reintroduction. Allegedly among these treasures was the first complete biography of the eighth-century Tantrika, Padmasambhava, which later became renowned as The Copper Palace. Much of this narrative was incorporated into the history of Buddhism entitled Flower Nectar: The Essence of Honey that is also attributed to Nyang-rel. Based on a comparative analysis of available recensions, however, I propose three hypotheses as equally viable alternatives to what has been asserted concerning the composition of these two texts. First, Nyang-rel did not consider his biography of Padmasambhava to be a treasure, but the tradition later manufactured a recovery narrative and accompanying title that promoted it as such. Second, Nyang-rel did not compile the Flower Nectar history. Third, based on oral, textual and mnemonic fragments, Nyang-rel produced a narrative of Tri Song-détsen and Padmasambhava that others developed into The Copper Palace and Flower Nectar. In sum, Nyang-rel was a progenitor of some of the most definitive aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, yet these very innovations ensured that he would be eclipsed by later adepts who, in adopting his claims and methods, revealed new iterations of his scriptures and narratives. He thus remains one of the most influential yet unsung figures of the Tibetan renaissance.

In this dissertation, I examine the particular diaspora construction of the overseas Chinese in South Korea focusing on their educational practice, and looking at how it relates to and reflects their identities and subjectivities. The Chinese in Korea, or Korean huaqiaos, have no parallel in that they still retain Chinese (Taiwanese) nationality despite their over one hundred years of settlement in Korea, and in that most opt for full-time Chinese ethnic schooling with exclusively Taiwanese-administered curriculum and support. Different from the previous discussions arguing the nation-making role of the state-sponsored mass education through transmitting national culture and language, in a Chinese high school in Seoul, Korea, I observed that ethnic schooling worked to connect the scattering Chinese in Korea as a community by letting them share similar social, legal, and cultural conditions. Drawing on school documents, student writings, and interviews and discussions with ethnic Chinese students, teachers, parents, and related organization leaders, I elucidate the role of their ethnic education which is transforming as a strategy to deal with one of the most brutal social qualification-college entrance- in Korean society, and as a symbol through which they can remain Chinese diasporans. Students’ indifference to their schoolwork seems to defeat expectations of Chinese heritage transmission, or the making of allies for the ROC. This situation results from changes derived from the Taiwanese political changes against them, and also from the conviction passed down over generations about the futility of hard work due to their minority situation in Korea. Even being aware of their ethnic schools’ failure to properly educate their children in Chinese language and culture, almost all Korean huaqiaos keep sending their children there, unable to resist the immediate admissions advantage foreign high school graduates gain in entering Korean universities, and not wishing to be excluded from their own ethnic community by not attending the same ethnic schools. The way Korean huaqiaos deal with their ethnic education is a typical example revealing their collective characteristics they themselves talked about – “opportunistic”, “gossip-bound”, or “not stepping forward to act” - and I analyzed these self-defined particular Chineseness has been formed while they have gone through continuous unsteady socio-political processes. Through chapters that provide analyses of the historical Korea-China relationship, the context in which Chinese came to settle in Korea, and the ever-changing three-way relationship among Korea, Taiwan and mainland China, I discuss how Korean huaqiaos have formed and transformed their nationality, emotional and cultural belonging, and their unstable legal and social statuses as non-local nationals. This study on the atypical results of Chinese border-crossing and of ethnic education is based on three years of ethnographic field research in the Seoul Chinese High School and in other various social and cultural arenas of the Chinese community in Korea. And it offers a contextualized study of Chinese diaspora which contributes to debunking a generalized and reified imaginary of Chinese, and an ethnographic account of diaspora educational practice which also calls for a new concept of citizenship in this ever-globalizing era. / Anthropology

Sometime in the first half of the second millennium, the Pañjāb witnessed a literary transformation. This historical process enabled the people of the region to self-consciously augment and even supplant forms of knowledge that emerged out of Sanskritic and Persianate cultural practices with regional ones, a complex phenomenon that varied tremendously, based largely on the religious identity of the writers. The elite of Sikh, Islamic, and Hindu communities drove this innovation: all literary activity in the Pañjāb was supported almost exclusively by the centers of religion, rather than the royal court. This work stands in sharp contrast to the view that religion played no significant role in South Asia’s so-called “vernacularization.” The confluence of three major religious communities—and the distinct literary cultures that they produced—makes the Pañjāb an ideal ground to examine the complex nature of this literary transformation. While this work engages with premodern literary cultures broadly to understand the larger trends in literary production, the arguments presented are ultimately based on a careful reading of the literary worlds represented in four near-contemporaneous texts that are specific to each religious community—the shabads of the Sikh Gurū Nānak (1469-1539); the kāfīs attributed to the Muslim Ṣūfī Shāh Ḥusain (1538-99); the Hanumān Nāṭak (1623) of the Hirdai Rām Bhallā and the vāṇī of Bābā Lāl Dayāl (17th c.), both Hindū Vaiṣṇavas. The work highlights similarities and dramatic differences in literary production and circulation of discourses within material cultures that were shaped by self-conscious religious communities.

This dissertation analyzes how governance and community-based politics of claims in marginalized Muslim neighborhoods of Mumbai are continually reconfigured in relation to one another. By tracing this relationship, I problematize conceptualizations of governmental forms and community that don't adequately attend to their co-constitution in practice. More specifically, I examine the intersections between state practices and claims of belonging in Mumbai neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims who, impelled by regional economic inequalities, immigrated to the city from North India and other parts of the country. A large number of them traditionally belong to artisanal communities and are today engaged in the informal sector of the economy. I am interested in understanding how competing and converging claims are made to locality, urban space, labor, and caste in the interactions between these working-class Muslim communities and the state in a city that has become highly segregated along religious and regional lines. I argue that state and marginalized community in minoritized areas are not defined by independence and isolation, but by a relationship of co-generation marked by convergence and contradiction. My analysis of the interactions between community forms and state practices explores modes of laying claim to localizing forms of belonging with respect to urban space, public religiosity, histories of labor, kinship, and 'backward' caste politics. / Anthropology

Whaling is one of the longstanding environmental controversies that has sharply divided perceptions and allegiances on a global scale. Despite the international moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan remains one of the few nations that continues to hunt and consume whales for food under the name of “scientific research.” Yet, given the highly polarized and value-laden nature of this environmental controversy, Japan’s resolute pro-whaling stance appears puzzling for whaling has become an economically, socially, and politically insignificant industry within the country. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a Tokyo-based whaling company, my research explores why and how this marginal industry has survived today amidst fierce international criticism. In this dissertation, I investigate the process of institutionalization and forms of discursive practices by means of which state and industrial actors secure whaling and constrain environmentalist mobilizations. I examine the ways in which both formal and informal political networks are formed across political, bureaucratic, and corporate institutions. I situate this small-elite echelon of pro-whaling protagonists against a backdrop of wider ideological legitimizations, namely cultural and scientific discourses that shape public opinion and perception toward whaling in Japan. By closely examining their organizational and representative practices, this study illustrates how they acquire political power, material advantage, and legitimacy to continue scientific whaling as a state project in Japan. / Anthropology

In “Humanitarian Encounters in Post-Conflict Aceh, Indonesia,” I examine the humanitarian involvement in Aceh, Indonesia following two momentous events in Aceh’s history: the earthquake and tsunami on 26 December 2004 and the signing of the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that brought a tentative, peaceful settlement to the Free Aceh Movement’s (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) separatist insurgency against Indonesia on 15 August 2005. My research focuses on the international humanitarian engagement with Aceh’s peace process but frequently acknowledges the much larger and simultaneous tsunami recovery efforts along Aceh’s coasts that preceded and often overshadowed conflict recovery. Using ethnographic data based on five years working with four different international humanitarian organizations concerned with post-conflict recovery in Aceh, I address two main topics in my dissertation. The first is an insider’s perspective on the anthropology of humanitarianism. From one chapter to the next, I recreate and situate a particular humanitarian world’s relation to local structures of power and suffering that expands upon and complicates some of the prevailing debates in the anthropological literature on humanitarianism. From the unique vantage point within various humanitarian organizations, stories of Aceh’s post-conflict recovery filter through with selective and idiosyncratic ethnographic clarity. The accumulation of these stories reveals, by way of mosaic example, a logic of humanitarian intervention. The second topic I address in my dissertation is the story of Aceh’s peace process within the larger context of Indonesia’s post-New Order transition to democracy. I situate my data within a rapidly growing literature of insightful histories and critiques of Aceh’s conflict and subsequent transformations since the tsunami and the formal end of hostilities between GAM and Indonesian security forces. My focus on the ethnographic details in each chapter is set against some of the broadly taken-for-granted histories that have come to define Aceh’s recent successes and failures in its transition to peace. / Anthropology

This dissertation looks at an attempt in Buddhist history to theorize the role and status of the body as the prime focus of soteriological discourse. It studies a text titled Explanation of the Hidden Vajra Body (Rdo rje lus kyi sbas bshad), composed by Yang dgon pa Rgyal mtshan dpal (1213-1258). This work, drawing on a wide range of canonical tantric Buddhist scriptures and Indic and Tibetan commentaries, lays out in detail a Buddhist theory of embodiment that brings together the worldly realities of the body with their enlightened transformation. This dissertation analyzes the ways Yang dgon pa theorizes the body as the essential ground of the salvific path, and endeavors to provide a thematic guide to his rich and complex discussion of what the body is and does, from a tantric perspective. The thesis parses a key term, dngos po'i gnas lugs, that Yang dgon pa uses as an organizing principle in Explanation of the Hidden. If taken literally, the term means something like "the nature of things" or "the nature of material substance," but Yang dgon pa deployed the term specifically to refer to the nature of the human psychophysical organism, in its ordinary state. By way of this term, Yang dgon pa argues that the body itself makes enlightenment possible. In the course of this thesis, I consider the prior history of this category as it was gradually developed by a series of Bka' brgyud writers until it reached Yang dgon pa. Then, in light of this category, I explore Yang dgon pa's own vision of embodiment. This vision, I argue, reflects an attempt to refocus soteriological attention on the power of the body, over and above the mind, as the salient basis for non-dual knowing. Finally, I reflect upon the lasting contributions of Yang dgon pa's conception of the body to the ongoing exploration of such topics in the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist soteriology, as well as upon why some of the more radical elements of his thinking seem to have been eliminated in subsequent generations of his lineage.