The Liao dynasty, founded by the Khitans who originated from the northeast corner of Manchuria, is often characterized by its women's exceptional political authority and high social standing. This dissertation investigates various activities of the Khitan aristocratic women, particularly the imperial women, in the public realms, such as politics, military, and court ceremonies. In addition to Chinese official dynastic histories, this study utilizes archaeological data obtained largely from excavation reports of the Liao tombs that produced female occupants. This dissertation is intended to reconstruct as concrete picture of their lives as possible by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. In doing so, it seeks to explain how and why the Khitan women of the Liao dynasty were granted such high social prestige and political power. It also contemplates on the question whether the Khitans were assimilated by the Chinese culture by the late dynastic period. The first part of this study is focused on analyzing the patterns of the Khitan imperial marriage and their traditional inheritance practices in the context of the consolidation of the empire. The Liao imperial clan, the Yelu, maintained an exclusive marriage alliance with another ruling clan, the Xiao, which produced all of the Liao empresses during the entire dynastic period. This marriage alliance, devised to ensure their monopoly of power, eventually worked for the advantage of the Xiao women, as well as their clansmen who dominated the Liao political power. Women's conspicuous participation in various public affairs was deeply rooted in the Khitan tribal tradition. The Khitans lacked the Chinese concept of segregation of gender roles and the Khitan women were employed at the court in the capacity of a religious professional (shaman) or even as a military commander. The observation of the mortuary practices of the Khitan suggests that they remained attached to their cultural traditions until the late dynastic period. This can be attested by the discovery of the unique Khitan funerary paraphernalia, such as gold masks and metal burial suits, and the evidence of animal sacrifices in their tombs.

<p>A central question in aesthetics is whether aesthetic judgment is subjective or objective. Existing approaches to answering this question have been unsatisfying because they begin with the assumption of an individual observer that must then be communalized through the introduction of a transcendent object or the transcendental reason of the subject. </p><p> Rather than introduce a vertical transcendence to account for the ideal observer, I propose an alternative account based on the anthropology of the Japanese philosopher W<p style="font-variant: small-caps">ATSUJI</p> Tetsur&omacr;. According to Watsuji, human existence is a movement of double negation whereby we negate our emptiness in order to individuate ourselves and we negate our individuality in order to form communal wholes. Human beings are empty of independent existence, and thus open to create ideal aesthetic subjects in historically and regionally situated communal contexts. </p><p> I propose an account of aesthetic experience as a double negation in which we negate our surroundings in order to create a sense of psychical distance and negate our ordinary selves in order to dissolve into the background of primordial unity. I examine aesthetic normativity and find that the subject of aesthetics is active and plural rather than passive and individual. Aesthetic judgment and taste are, respectively, individual and communal moments in the process of double negation. Artistic evolution is a process by which the context of artist, artwork, and audience develop into a meaningful historical milieu. Genius is the ability to make public one&rsquo;s private values through the creation of objects that can travel beyond their original contexts and create new contexts around them. Such an ability is the result of a double negation played out between the genius and critical receptivity. </p><p> Extended examples taken from Noh theater, Japanese linked verse, tea ceremony, and <i>The Tale of Genji</i> are also used to illustrate my arguments. </p>

<p> Kabir, the weaver-poet, has continued to permeate many facets of Indian society since his life in the fifteenth century. The poetry attributed to him is a large body of work existing in oral, print, recording, and other forms that encompasses much more today than what Kabir said in his lifetime. Between the biting social criticisms and intimate devotional messages, the poetry bridges many ideological gaps, ensuring its longevity. Through fieldwork across India, I came to understand Kabir as a musical tradition, rooted in poetry, that continually renews its sonic character to speak to new generations while maintaining a heterogeneous variety of styles (folk, classical, semi-classical, and more). Predominantly studied previously as a text-based tradition, a focus on the range of musical styles and content that Kabir encompasses enables us to understand its popularity across religious, socioeconomic, and generational divisions and provides insights into Kabir's place in today's North Indian society.</p>

<p> My research uses a case study of Hemudu culture (7,000-5,000 BP) in eastern China to explore technological constraints of earth-working implements as a factor to explain the prolonged processes towards Neolithic agricultural land use and sedentary settlements. </p><p> Early Hemudu populations lived in small villages and cultivated rice in the lowlands. They employed earth-working implements made from water buffalo scapulae; however, these implements were replaced with stone variants after 6,000 BP. These phenomena invited the following questions: (1) how did bone earth-working implements become a tradition and persist until 6,000 BP; (2) why was use of these artifacts replaced by use of stone spades; and (3) how did the choices of earth-working implements affect land use? Following ideas from Human Behavioral Ecology, Dual-Inheritance Theory, and Behavioral Archaeology, I examined bone implements' use contexts, raw material availability and procurement, costs and benefits in manufacture, techno-functional performance characteristics, and the Hemudu people's social learning strategies. These investigations involved soil science, bone and stone technologies, use-wear analysis, and zooarchaeology, along with many controlled experiments. Multiple sources of evidence led to the conclusion that the early adoption of bone spades was encouraged by scapulae's convenient morphology and acquisition, and they fulfilled the functional needs at the beginning of Kuahuqiao (8,200-7000 BP) and Hemudu exploitation of lowland environments. Frequency-dependent bias helped ensure the persistence of bone spades in Hemudu even when raw material became scarce and other artifacts would have provided marginal functional advantages. This tradition imposed significant technical and conceptual constraints that inhibited the communities from adopting other forms of agriculture and settlement construction. </p><p> My research has broad implications to archaeological theories and methods for studying technological choices and our understanding of the pathways to agriculture and sedentism. It shows that although Human Behavioral Ecology and Dual-Inheritance Theory are useful for studying and interpreting technological choices, applying the framework proposed by Behavioral Archaeology helped lead to a stronger argument. Many of the analytical tools that I developed in this project can be used to investigate relevant questions in other times and cultures. My experimental designs can also be used as templates in future research.</p>

<p> This dissertation is a study of the development of a relatively new musical instrument in traditional South Indian classical music known as the <i> kanjira,</i> a diminutive single-headed frame drum with a single pair of jingles. Iconographic studies and published accounts detail much of the instrument's history, which involved transculturation and diffusion from North India to South India. Organological and ethnographic studies show that significant change has occurred as the tradition migrated. Musical and cultural analyses detail the intricacies of the musical performance practice and semiotic representations incorporating zoomorphic and other kinds of icons from nature and Hinduism. Contextual analyses further explain issues having to do with continuity and culture change as the <i>kanjira</i> tradition was renewed during its diffusion from North Indian folk and court music circles into South Indian Carnatic music. Within the traditional hierarchy of Carnatic music and with the onset of modernization, social pressures manifested that resulted in <i> kanjira</i> performers adapting to new internationalized contexts that brought about further change. Drawing on my fieldwork as well as historical and electronic sources, this dissertation documents the intersection of these modernizing cultural factors and the <i>kanjira</i>'s complex development in the relatively conservative musical hierarchy of South Indian classical music, as well as its continuing musical evolution beyond the borders of India. </p>

<p> This dissertation is a series of textual case studies on nontraditional sources for <i>li</i>[special characters omitted]"calendro-astronomy" circa 250 BCE - 250 CE: (1) the silk manuscript guide to military planetary astronomy/astrology <i>Wuxing zhan</i>[special chracters omitted] (168 BCE), (2) excavated calendars and state <i>li</i> manuals, and (3) the <i>Jin shu</i>'s [special characters omitted] record of the debate surrounding a failed attempt at li reform in 226 CE. This selection affords us a number of unique cross sections through the astral sciences. Balancing transmitted with excavated sources, I emphasize realia and their perspective on era technical knowledge, the formats in which it was produced and consumed, and its transmission and practice beyond an elite court-centered context. In addition to the three elements of <i>li</i>--calendrics, eclipses, and planetary astronomy--my selection draws together the broad array of astral sciences, exploring distinctions in genre, sociology, and epistemology between, for example, mathematical astronomy, hemerology, and omenology, and the (tortuous) processes by which knowledge moved between them. Each chapter also juxtaposes the normative descriptions of manual literature with products of practice&mdash;tables, calendars, and test results&mdash;to reflect upon the distance between them and, thus, the limitations of the former as historical testimony. Across these cross sections, my study focuses on the question of empiricism and progress. I foreground these topics <i>not</i> because they define twentieth-century notions of science but because, as I argue, they define early imperial notions of <i>li</i>&mdash;a point that our twenty-first-century aversion to positivism and Whig history tends to obscure. To this end, I catalog the conceptual vocabulary of observation and testing, submit empirical practices to mathematical and sociological analysis, and, most importantly, explore the formation and function of legend&mdash;the histories of science that early imperial actors wrote and recounted in their own day. </p><p> As it stands, the dissertation has four body chapters. Chapter 1 provides a history and sociology of the astral sciences in the Han, covering the sources, legend, and conceptual vocabulary of <i>li</i>, the history of Han li from the perspective of both ideas and institutional reforms, and a survey of participants' backgrounds, motivations, education, and epistemological contentions. Chapter 2 examines how the Wuxing zhan manuscript segregates and conflates distinct genres of planetary models, then sketches the subsequent history of these genres, showing how, despite seemingly opposite orientations to reality, actors gradually rewrote and reassessed (crude) hemerology-based omenological (<i>tianwen</i>[special characters omitted]) models through the lens of progress made in mathematical (<i>li</i>) ones. Chapter 3 explores a similar gulf that opened between astronomy and calendrics in this period, as well as the gulf between imperial ideology&mdash;within which the calendar was the premier symbol of cosmo-ritual dominion&mdash;and the actualities of the production, distribution, and use of calendars in a manuscript culture. Lastly, chapter 4 analyzes the two epistemic strategies at the center of (the <i>Jin shu</i>'s take on) the circa 226 CE court debate on <i>li</i>: the quantitative determination of "tightness" (accuracy) of lunisolar and planetary models through competitive testing, and the contestation of claims through the deployment of precedence from the history of the field.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Sociology, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4635. Adviser: Maurice Garnier.

abstract: Research in foreign language (FL) acquisition has shown that connectives, a key linguistic element contributing to cohesion and sentence complexity, pose a great challenge for FL learners at all proficiency levels. In spite of the importance of connectives in foreign language acquisition, little research has been conducted to explore how connectives are taught and presented in foreign language classrooms and textbooks. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the presentation and introduction of connectives as well as the pedagogical activities provided for learning connectives in Chinese textbooks for novice to intermediate FL learners. To achieve the purpose of the study, three different sets of widely-used Chinese textbooks were selected and compared. The results show that while the amount of coverage varies greatly among the three sets of textbook, the sequence of presenting connectives in each series of textbooks closely follows the ranks suggested in the HSK Grading Standards and Grammar Outline (HSK is the shortened form for Chinese Proficiency Test). As for the activities, although all three textbooks claim to adopt a communicative approach to FL teaching, they differ considerably in the type of activities provided. In addition, it is evident that more traditional form-focused exercises are included in those textbooks than meaning-focused communicative tasks. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Asian Languages and Civilizations 2015

<p> This paper is about locating the meaning of a series of games known as the <i>Dark Souls</i> series in relation to contemporary social conditions in Japan. I argue that the game should be thought of as an emblem of the current cultural zeitgeist, in a similar way one might identify something like Jack Kerouac&rsquo;s <i>The Dharma Bums</i> as an emblem of the counter cultural 60s. I argue that the <i>Dark Souls</i> series expresses in allegorical form an anxiety about living in a time where the meaning of our everyday actions and even society itself has become significantly destabilized. It does this through a fractured approach to story-telling, that is interspersed with Buddhist metaphysics and wrapped up in macabre, gothic aesthetic depicting the last gasping breath of a once great kingdom. This expression of contemporary social anxiety is connected to the discourse of postmodernity in Japan. Through looking at these games as a feedback loop between text, environment and ludic system, I connect the main conceptual motifs that structure the games as a whole with Osawa Masachi&rsquo;s concept of the post-fictional era and Hiroki Azuma&rsquo;s definition of the otaku. </p><p>

<p> My dissertation explores a cultural history of the body as reflected in meditative and therapeutic forms of the Chinese martial arts in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Precursors of the more familiar present-day <i> taijiquan</i> <b>[special characters omitted]</b> and <i> qigong</i> <b>[special characters omitted],</b> these forms of martial arts techniques focus on the inward cultivation of <i>qi</i> <b> [special characters omitted]</b> and other apparently ineffable energies of the body. They revolve around the harnessing of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; or <i>neigong</i> <b>[special characters omitted].</b> These notions of a strength derived from an invisible, intangible, yet embodied <i> qi</i> came to represent a significant counterweight to sports, exercise science, the Physical Culture movement, physiology, and other Western ideas of muscularity and the body that were being imported into China at the time. </p><p> What role would such competing discourses of the body play in shaping contemporary ideas of embodiment? How would it raise the stakes in an era already ideologically charged with the intertwined issues of nationalism and imperialism, and so-called scientific modernity and indigenous tradition? This study is an inquiry into the epistemological and ontological ramifications of the idea of <i>neigong</i> internal strength, tracing the popular spread of the idea and its impact in late Qing and Republican China vernacular discourse. I pay particular attention to how the notion of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; might shed light on thinking about the body in the period. Using the notion of <i>neigong</i> as a lens, this project examines the claims of the internal forms of Chinese martial arts, and the cultural work that these claims perform in the context of late Qing and Republican China. I locate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the key formative period when the idea first found popular conceptual purchase, and explore how the notion of <i>neigong</i> internal strength became increasingly steeped in the cultural politics of the time.</p><p> Considering the Chinese internal martial arts not only as a form of bodily practice but also as a mode of cultural production, in which a particular way of regarding 'the body' came to be established in Chinese vernacular culture, may additionally yield rich theoretical fodder. How might such claims about a different kind of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; revisit or disrupt modernist assumptions about the body? The project highlights the neglected significance of the internal martial arts as a narrative of the Chinese body. More broadly, it suggests fresh avenues for scholarship on the body, in showing how these other-bodily "ways of knowing" took on meaning in the period and beyond.</p>