Almanacs (tongshu in Chinese) were a ubiquitous feature of the social landscape in both China and the West from at least the seventeenth century onward, offering a rich topic for comparative analysis. They serve as a valuable index of popular beliefs, moral values, and cultural priorities. They also provide a window on the processes of social, political, and intellectual change in both environments. Using a comparative approach, this study tries to illustrate how the almanacs in both China and the West have mirrored their respective cultural environments and how the history of almanacs in both societies reflects the powerful changes brought about by the scientific and philosophical revolutions of seventeenth-century Europe. At the same time, it also seeks to show the limits of these revolutionary developments, the ways in which traditional beliefs and practices have persisted up to the present in each society, and the reasons for their persistence.

<p> The Sino-Indian relationship marked by mutual mistrust for the last six decades has seen definitive changes since the late 1980s. Though considerable issues remain unresolved, the two have begun establishing mechanisms to establish a certain level of trust that began with the visit of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing in 1988. The paper analyzes recent literature on this relationship and finds them predicting two outcomes primarily - either one where India admits Chinese supremacy and kowtows to it, or one that foresees increased clashes between the two. Neither outcome takes into account the complex association that the two nations are building guided by a series of frameworks, mechanisms and agreements. This paper posits that in the evolutionary arc of interstate relations, Sino-Indian relations have not reached a point where only one of the two options - cooperation and competition, will be chosen. This paper argues that economic interests of the two rising powers is behind the present behavior where the two are courting each other but at the same time, preparing for the other's rise. Both countries consider their economic identity to be primary and do not want to be distracted from the key national goal of economic development. They are particularly careful that their disagreements with each other do not come in the way of this goal. The paper analyzes the various frameworks and suggests that they are created with this end in consideration. Both India and China aim to continue collaboration in economic matters bilaterally or in international issues of mutual interest even when they don't see eye to eye on disputes left over from history. It is likely that competition will at times get the better of cooperation, driven by factors like strategic influence in the neighborhood, finding newer providers of energy as well as markets for their goods and services. But periodic flare-ups notwithstanding, in the absence of serious provocations, the two countries will avoid clashes that can escalate. The paper also analyzes certain black-swan events that might disturb the balancing act. Incidents like the death of the Dalai Lama creating a vacuum within the Tibetan leadership is one such scenario; a terrorist attack on India planned and executed form Pakistan like the one in Mumbai in 2008 is another. However, the presence of multiple bilateral platforms will continue to automatically insulate alternate channels of communication even in these situations. In conclusion, the paper suggests that as they grow, India and China will continue to engage each other at several levels, competing and cooperation, deterring and reassuring each other at once.</p>

<p> This dissertation traces how eugenics came to underpin discourses pertaining to free love, sex and reproduction in 1920s-1930s China. It shows the eugenic and evolutionist limits to radical or liberal intellectuals' understanding of the role of the individual in the pursuit of sex, free love and birth control. The study examines the scientific view of modernity embodied in eugenics, as well as the challenges to this vision based on humanism and sex aestheticism. Bertrand Russell's visit to China in 1920 with his lover Dora Black led to heated discussions surrounding free love and free divorce, where privacy, the eugenic idea of a "robust individual" and science were key. Meanwhile, translations and the reception of Ellen Key and Havelock Ellis's works on eugenics and love underpinned the reconciliation in Chinese liberal intellectuals' thought between individualism/evolutionary humanism and eugenics, particularly in their debates on sexual and emotional ethics in the 1920s. Margaret Sanger's visit to China in 1922 opened up a debate on the suitability of eugenic birth control to solve China's problems, such as overpopulation and venereal disease. By probing into her interactions with Chinese intellectuals in 1922, this study reveals how her eugenic ideas were received, as well as the political tensions regarding her birth control advocacy. The dissertation demonstrates that the sexual reproductive considerations that had been viewed in the 1920s as a problem of the relationship between the individual and nation/race/society, by the 1930s came to completely subordinate the role of the individual to national and racial regeneration concerns. Sanger's continued correspondence with Chinese medical professionals came to shape the birth control movement in the 1930s in more strictly eugenic terms. This research contends that eugenics was not only influential in discourse, but came to be implemented in practice in the fields of sex hygiene, birth control and VD regulation. The agency of pioneer female gynecologists in the 1930s is emphasized by examining how they brought eugenics in practice in their birth control clinics, how they localized global female experience and theories on birth control and hygiene, either through translation or through their attempts to reach working class women with contraceptive sex education. Lastly I argue that eugenics and social hygiene also functioned as a male oriented ideology in VD policies of various colonial powers: British, American, Japanese, and French as part of an economy of empire. By contrast Chinese Nationalist Hygiene Campaigns and female gynecologists' internalizing of eugenics focused on female health.</p>

<p> This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet. </p><p> My investigation of Sog bzlog pa's discourse on power objects shows how the genres of narrative, philosophy, and liturgy are related around such objects, each presenting them from a slightly different perspective. I illustrate how narratives depict power objects as central to the identity of Sog bzlog pa and his circle, mediating relations that are in turn social, political, religious, aesthetic, and economic in tone, and contributing to the authority of the persons involved. This flow of power between persons and objects, I demonstrate further, is connected to tensions over the sources of transformational power as rooted in either objects, or in the people instrumental in their ritual treatment or use. I show how this tension between objective and subjective power plays out in Sog bzlog pa's philosophical speculations about power objects and in his rituals featuring them. I also trace the persistence of this discourse after Sog bzlog pa's death in the seventeenth-century state-building activities of Tibet and Sikkim, and in the present day identity of Sikkim's Buddhist population. Power objects emerge as hybrid subject-object mediators, which variously embody, channel, and direct the flow of power and authority between persons, objects, communities, institutions, and the state, as they flow across boundaries and bind these in their tracks. Finally, I illustrate how this discourse of power objects both complicates and extends contemporary theoretical reflections on the relationships between objects, actions, persons, and meanings. </p>

<p> Decisions have both short and long-term consequences. Sometimes we cannot see the consequences and do not know the outcomes, but we take a step and make a choice. Some after-effects are irrevocable, and some are fixable. Some decisions affect us immediately and exclusively while others have consequences that are global. When we make decisions, we sometimes doubt our decisions and ask ourselves what might have happened if another choice was made. We make choices daily, small or great, for good or bad. After World War II, South Korean president Rhee Syngman put many alleged Communists in a rehabilitation program known as the National Guidance League. Many of them were executed between 1945 and 1953 to prevent them from joining the Communist north. Rhee's decision affected many families including my own. What we choose to do has intentional and unintentional consequences. Extreme choices produce dire consequences that can subsequently influence future generations and, on a larger scale, an entire nation for decades.</p>

<p> This thesis explores Japanese society through the lens of cultural hybridity and liminality to understand the shift towards nonconformity and hyper-individualism among post-postwar Japanese. This shift reflects an important point in Japan's transculturation process whereby post-postwar Japanese have developed a cultural hybridity of inbetweenness (liminality) juxtaposing their native Japaneseness (<i>wakon</i>) against their adopted Westernness (<i>y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i>). This <i> wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>kon </i> hybrid construct is posing a challenge to Japan's longstanding hybrid modernity philosophy of <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>sai</i> (Japanese spirit- Western things), which perpetuated the pre-modern core values and collectivist ethics of Japaneseness for nearly 150 years below its fa&ccedil;ade of Western modernity. The dilemma inherent in Japan's <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i> in-betweenness is foreshadowed in the pioneering works of Abe K<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>b<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span> and Murakami Haruki, who both illuminated the conflicting juxtaposition of the core values and ethics of Japaneseness (wakon) and <i>seken</i>-Other (the jury-surrounding- the-Self) against the pursuit of the individualist ethics of Westernness (y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon) and Selfhood (<i> shutaisei)</i> within their imaginaries. </p>

The aim of this thesis is to examine the concept of virtue ethics in Stanley Hauerwas's understanding of virtue and delineate how that contributes to his ethical reasoning and his comprehension of medical ethics. The first chapter focuses on the shift that occurred in moral theory under the stance of the Enlightenment that eroded the traditional idea of morality as the formation of the self, allowing space for new concepts that dismissed the importance of the agent in the ethical task of seeking the good. In the second chapter, the three main ideas (character, vision, and narrative) that make up Hauerwas' ethical theory are examined with a particular attention to the importance of agency in moral life. The third chapter describes how Hauerwas' medical ethics, informed by his moral theory based on character, vision, and narrative, is relevant to medical ethics. Hauerwas argues that because medicine is a form of human activity with internal goods and standards of excellence intrinsic to its practice, it requires taking into account the notion of agency in the healing relationship. Finally, in the last chapter the specific religious discourse of Hauerwas' ethics is discussed in relation to secular medical ethics. In other words, this thesis raises the question of whether the reduction of medical ethics to a set of principles, as it is mostly the case today, represents a suitable picture of the reality of moral life in medicine.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0557. Adviser: Thomas R. Conley. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 333-338) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, 2005. / (UnM)AAI3191721. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3782. Director: Chester Pach, Jr.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brandeis University, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3244415. Adviser: Eugene C. Black. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4658.