In this dissertation, I explore Wei shu historiography on the early Northern Wei imperial state, which was founded by the Tuoba Xianbei in the late fourth century C.E. In examining the Wei shu narrative of the Northern Wei founding, I illuminate not only the representation of cultural and imperial authority in the reigns of the early Northern Wei emperors, but also investigate historiography on the pre-imperial Tuoba past. I argue that the Wei shu narrative of Tuoba origins and ancestors is constructed from the perspective of the moment of the Northern Wei founding. Or, to view it the other way around, the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state by Tuoba Gui signifies the culmination of the Wei shu narrative on the early Tuoba. This narrative of the early Tuoba past is of course teleological: Essentially everything in this phase of Tuoba historiography leads up to the moment of the Northern Wei imperial founding, including genealogical descent from a son of Huangdi, who is represented as the Xianbei progenitor, in a remote northern wilderness; the continuous succession of Tuoba rulers that followed; and the journeys that brought the Tuoba out of the wilderness and toward the geographical center. In focusing on the account of the inaugural reign of Tuoba Gui, the Northern Wei founder, and the record of his ritual practice as emperor, I have discovered tensions in Wei shu historiography that I believe signal toward some of the actual cultural contestation that attended the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state. The Wei shu historiography on Buddhism in the early Northern Wei then, I argue, presents an alternative source of authority, one that stands outside both an imperial Han inheritance and a culturally Tuoba tradition.

The East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) is a major component in Asian climate. It is largely driven by climatic factors such as humidity, solar insolation and temperature. For at least 50 years the EASM has been studied extensively by scientists regarding its current strength. Models have been recreating past monsoon intensity as well as attempted to predict future intensity. As the monsoon undergoes changes, the climatic shifts responsible for them leave various traces behind; geochemical as well as biological, and these have been preserved and recorded in various locales on the planet. The most significant climatic change is the variation between glacial and interglacial periods which have been alternating for the last 2.6 million years and the EASM has changed in tune with the climate during this time. The EASM follows the δ18O-record in speleothems found in Eastern Asia as well as in ice cores from Greenland. Various geochemical and biological tracers seem to reflect these fluctuations in climate locally as well as globally over a 200 kyr period. The current intensity of the EASM seems to be one of decreasing strength, a phase that has persisted since the Holocene climatic optimum 8.5 kyr ago. Recently however a decrease in the East Asian Winter Monsoon has been confirmed, indicating an increase in EASM intensity. During the Holocene the EASM reached peak intensity during the Holocene climatic optimum but has fluctuated largely in tune with solar insolation. This is also true for the Eemian period although some events such as the mid-Eemian cooling show that factors other than solar insolation regulate monsoon intensity over large time periods. The future of the EASM seems to be one of increased strength due to climate change and models predict both increased wind speeds and an increasing occurrence of extreme precipitation despite decreasing solar insolation.

No description available.

This study is concerned with the behaviour of exchange rate movements focusing specifically on purchasing power parity (PPP) and the non-stationarity of real exchange rates, for a number of East Asian currencies during their recent floating periods. As one of the most important building blocks in international economies, PPP forms a core component of several models of exchange rate determination, and it is the most intensively tested hypothesis in open-economy macroeconomics. Nevertheless, in contrast to the relative abundance of research on the currencies of industrialised countries, very few studies on East Asian currencies have been carried out, leaving an important gap in the literature. Using recent advances in time series analysis, the results reveal for the East Asian countries that there existed long-run comovement between the nominal exchange rate and domestic and foreign price levels, but that the strict PPP condition claimed by the theory did not hold. This implied that any deviation from the PPP equilibrium was permanent and that there was little tendency for the real exchange rate to be mean reverting. Further investigation suggested that the real exchange rate was cointegrated with fundamentals, with most of the variables entering the cointegration vector significantly, suggesting that the movements of real exchange rate were driven by these factors. Investigating the dynamic paths of the real exchange rate and the long-run relationship (cointegrating relationship) in response to exogenous shocks also revealed that the real exchange rates did not revert to their pre-shock equilibrium, but that the long-run relationship did. It took, normally three to five years, for the real exchange rate to reach and settle down to a new equilibrium and even if the effect of shocks on the long-run relationship was transitory, the speed of convergence to the equilibrium was slow. The results also showed that the effects of shocks vary from one country to another. This meant that there was no universal panacea to deal with fluctuations in real exchange rates, as they were influenced by a country's natural endowment, stage in industrialisation, as well as monetary and exchange policies.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, March, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-52)

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, March, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-52)

Trier, University, Diss., 2003.

In this thesis, I have presented my translation of the novella Rakushō no goku (落照の獄) by Ono Fuyumi, preceded by a critical introduction. In this introduction, I have provided brief biographical information about the author, context for the story and its place in the Twelve Kingdoms series of novels, an analysis of the story's use of the death penalty as allegory, and an explanation for some of my choices in the translation. In my introduction, my main purpose was to present the author, who has written multiple best-selling, award-winning novels that have received both popular and critical acclaim, yet has received little notice abroad and even less scholarly attention both in and out of Japan, as a writer meriting further study. To this end, I have used my own translation of Rakushō no goku as a primary example of the depth and value of her work, presenting my reading of the conflict in Rakushō no goku as an oblique criticism of the death penalty in Japan, and attempting to tie the story into a longstanding literary tradition of using the fantastic as allegory in order to comment on and critique contemporary culture.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-84).

This thesis is a critical reflection on Vision Machine's North Sumatran film project, articulating a cinema practice that seeks to address a genocide that has barely been investigated. The primary footage comprises extensive interviews, re-enactments and dramatisations of the various practices and procedures that constituted the core of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide in Sumatra's plantation belt. The participants in these dramatisations and enactments are, for the most part, death squad leaders and members who participated in the killing. This data, comprising over 100 hours of video, constitute revelatory primary research into the history and operation of the Indonesian genocide. This research forms the historical context for the project, and is therefore summarised in the thesis. The reflection on the epistemological, cultural and historical status of these re-enactments constitutes the basis for the core argument of this thesis. To this day, in North Sumatra, the genocidaires remain largely in power. This fact transforms our film project into a unique laboratory for exploring the cultural politics of film, media and history within a context of victory and impunity. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which historical narrative - inevitably told by victors - becomes an instrument of terror within a spectral economy of terror. This project is both an intervention into this economy, as well as an analysis of its mechanisms and protocols. As such, the thesis comprises both completed films, extracts from works-in-progress and this writing, and lies at the intersection of the disparate fields of cinema studies, Indonesian area studies, trauma studies and film practice. This thesis proposes a theory of performativity, spectrality and genres of historical performance; specifically, it is argues that spectres are performatively conjured as the obscene to any symbolic performance - including both historical acts as well as their rehearsal and restaging in re-enactment, testimony, or dramatisation; such spectres constitute a power that may be claimed by the performer. This power interacts with actual structures of power, as well as processes that seek to record, circulate or excavate such historical performances, including our filmmaking process. In the case of this film project, perpetrators are lured by the apparatus of filmmaking into naming names and revealing routines of mass murder hitherto obscene to official histories, and they do so through dramatisations and re-enactments manifestly conditioned by the codes of film and television genres. This latter point reveals the complex ways in which remembrance is always already well-rehearsed, scripted and generic. Thus does the research excavate (by catalysing) perpetrators' performative use of film genres to conjure as a spectral force that which must remain obscene to the codes of genre. And thus does the research excavate (by miming) the way genre fashions historical narratives into instruments of terror. As perpetrators of the genocide name names and reveal secrets, the process by which they seek to claim and manifest their spectral power is short-circuited by the filmmaking process, which condenses a miasmic spectral into specific ghosts. By shorting one circuit, the filmmaking closes another through which the process of remembrance, working through and redemption may begin for survivors. From this emerges an understanding of both the filmmaking process and its products (i.e., the completed films) as filmic interventions into a spectral economy of terror. This thesis describes a film practice that is necessarily a social practice, at once producing works and doing work. Building on models of collective filmmaking developed by Jean Rouch and George Stoney, we incorporate experimental production techniques including spirit possession, re-narration, infiltration, and genre-based fiction filmmaking in order to define a new model for film production that the author has termed "archaeological performance". Moving beyond the interview-based approaches of Lanzmann and Ophüls, archaeological performance suggests a hybrid and interventionist form of cinema adequate to addressing a history whose very incoherence has served as an instrument of terror.