Please read the abstract in the section, 00front, of this document / Dissertation (MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / MSc Agric / unrestricted

The study develops two significant arguments in relation to Pakistan’s socio-legal situation and analysis. First, it outlines and discusses the various prominent facets of the country’s legal architecture to formulate and present, what the thesis terms as, Pakistan’s Socio-Legal Tapestry. It considers the historical and conceptual trajectories of some of the multiple legal and normative structures that prevail in the country, their interplay and encounters, as well as their limitations and problems. It puts this socio-legal architecture at the heart of the examination, and by making the different constituents of the legal terrain explicit – components that include common law, Islamic law, colonial law, traditional law, legal ‘exteriority’ of tribal regions, and issues of ‘lawlessness’ – it makes the case for a holistic understanding of law as the necessary prerequisite to understanding the difficulties that that the country’s law, state and the wider society are faced with. The second significant argument of the study emerges from this expansion of the subject matter of (socio)legal analysis. It is argued that a shift in the understanding of what constitutes law in the context of Pakistan logically leads towards a (re)consideration of the lenses and narratives generally employed to examine it. The identification, examination and problematisation of these narratives – which include the dominant state-oriented legal narrative and the legal positivistic approach, the Islamic law narrative, legal pluralistic approach and the ascendant discourse on human rights – formulate the second substantive part of the study. It is argued that these Narratives of law differ in terms of how they perceive the context, identify their priorities, frame the problems and then propose solutions for their rectification. However, caught in a struggle to maintain their definitional consistencies, these narratives are only able to adopt a partial view of the picture and, owing to that, they generate contradictions that ultimately weaken their approach and proposed solutions. The purpose behind these two arguments is both to make a case for new avenues of context-specific legal analysis, as well as to create possibilities for it in the case of Pakistan. The problems that the country faces and the suffering that its people experience create an urgent need to recognise the deficiencies, both in our conceptualisation of law in this particular context, as well as the narratives, perspectives, theories and ideologies that we employ to approach it. This necessitates the search for alternative narratives for comprehending Pakistan’s socio-legal situation, to offer more nuanced approaches that might enable us to frame issues differently. This, I argue, is the most pressing task for those engaged in the analyses of legal, social and political spheres of Pakistan, and the necessary first step if our goal is the (re)formation of the legal and normative orders to make them more accountable to the people. By adopting the framework of colonialism and Coloniality to offer a different lens to understand Pakistan’s socio-legal peculiarities, the study presents one such attempt in this vein, with the purpose of initiating discussion and inviting critique.

Through analysis based on an empirical study of the Chinese criminal process, this thesis examines the underlying reasons that lead to a striking feature of criminal trials in China---the absence of witnesses. The Chinese criminal justice system routinely relies on official written dossiers to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. To investigate whether the constructed written evidence is truly reliable, participant observation and semi-structured interviews have been conducted to explore how these investigative dossiers are created, scrutinised and utilised at different stages of the criminal process. Themes that emerge in this study include the police's manipulation and fabrication of written statements, prosecutors' acceptance of, and even encouragement of, police malpractice in falsifying evidence, coerced prosecutorial interrogation in pursuit of a guilty plea, the pro forma trial process, predetermined judicial outcomes based on the official dossier produced and marginalised defence practice throughout the criminal process. Approaching the enquiry from an internal perspective of the legal institutions for the first time within empirical research, this study outlines the key issues with the Chinese criminal justice system through examination of the strategic inter-relationships between the key legal actors, the deep-seated legal culture embedded in legal actions and the structural injustices that follow. Positioning these findings within the Chinese socio-political context, this study reveals that the criminal justice system in China is not a precise truth-finding process, but serves as a State apparatus of social control. The criminal justice system has been structured through the Appraisal System, bureaucratic management, and the central value of collectivism in such a way as to maintain the stability of the authoritarian regime. None of China’s criminal justice institutions are capable of functioning independently to protect innocent individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. Thus, wrongful convictions should not be seen as aberrational or exceptional, but as an inevitable outcome of established deficiencies.

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I take the New Policies period (1068-1085) to be a critical juncture in Chinese history during which, for the first time, the Chinese state initiated systematic intervention into the market. This period witnessed the failure of plans to shape the collective action of bureaucrats and coordinate market actors through a host of organizing mechanisms. I explain why the policy makers in this historical process failed to incorporate and organize the ideas and interests of social actors, political elites and relevant bureaucracies into the state’s authoritative action. I argue that this failure was an outcome of the interaction between the political philosophy of the drafters of the New Policies and their historical context. In particular, it was a result of the incapacity of the drafters’ worldview to correctly explain and resolve unexpected problems in the policy environment, including the influence of political philosophies that were in fundamental conflict with the ideas of Wang Anshi, as well as the reaction of political elites to the New Policies, the rationales and behavioral modes of bureaucrats in financial markets and state monopolies, and unpredictable changes in the marketplace that bedeviled bureaucrats.

The dissertation examines the history of modern design in early 20th-century China. The emergent field of design looked to replace the specific cultural and historical references of visual art with an international language of geometry and abstraction. However, design practices also, encouraged extracting culturally unique visual forms by looking inward at a nation’s constructed past. The challenge of uniting these dual, and seemingly contradictory, goals was met in a collaborative book cover design project between Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s most influential modern writer, and Tao Yuanqing (1893-1929), a painter who transformed ancient motifs into a transnational vocabulary of modern design. As the title suggests, the dissertation provides a history of modern Chinese design in four chapters, with the Lu Xun-Tao Yuanqing collaboration at its core. The investigation begins with the moment of culmination, wherein Lu Xun and Tao Yuanqing’s intersubjective dynamic allowed for evocative yet inscrutable book cover designs to be created. In the new medium of design, the writer’s anxiety regarding the inadequacy of language converged with the artist’s desire for ambiguity in art. The critical analysis then moves back to earlier instances of design and examines how the history of design in China was inflected by the World Exposition, Japan, art education, and commercial art. The inquiry finally moves forward to the discussion of Tao Yuanqing’s art and design’s relationship with a range of discursive fields in aesthetics and literary criticism, including modern notions of beauty, childlikeness, empathy, the native soil movement, cosmopolitanism, symbolism, and ambiguity in art. This part reveals how Tao Yuanqing’s innovations ironically endorsed while simultaneously subverting contemporary interpretive efforts. / History of Art and Architecture

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain the culture of disobedience in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of the Japanese government’s control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China in the 1930s, and finally into the Pacific War. This dissertation sheds light on the underground culture of disobedience that became increasingly dominant in the Japanese armed forces, until it made the Pacific War possible. Using primary sources in five languages, it follows the Army’s culture of disobedience from its inception. By analyzing more than ten important incidents from 1860 to 1931, it shows how some basic “bugs” programmed into the Japanese system in the 1870s, born out of genuine attempts to cope with a chaotic and shifting reality, contributed to the development of military disobedience. The culture of disobedience became increasingly entrenched, making it difficult for the Japanese civilian and military leadership to cope with disobedient officers without paying a significant political price. However, every time the government failed to address the problem, it became more acute. Finally, disobedient military officers were able to significantly influence foreign policy, pushing Japan further towards international aggression, limitless expansion, and conflict with China, Britain and the United States. / History

This dissertation explores the medicinal use of poisons in China from the third to the tenth century, which is when the major outlines of Chinese toxicological thought took shape. Challenging a widespread view that contrasts the benign naturalness of Chinese herbal remedies with the dangerous side effects of Western synthetic drugs, my research highlights the centrality of poisons to the practice and theory of medicine in China. Chinese doctors regularly relied on a large number of substances that they recognized as toxic to combat sickness, and identified toxicity as the central pillar for the classification of drugs. I argue that the boundary between poisons and medicines was always hazy in medieval China; it was not the substance itself, but how it was used and experienced that mattered. To examine this crucial yet ignored feature of Chinese medicine, my dissertation develops the following themes. The first is that drugs in medieval China were not fixed entities with unique effects. The effect of a given substance—whether it healed as a medicine, or sickened or killed as a poison, or altered a person in myriad other ways—varied both with usage and with processing. Subsequently, Chinese doctors developed a variety of techniques (the dosage, the drug combination, and the drug preparation) to mitigate the toxicity of a poison while preserving its therapeutic potency. Secondly, I highlight the intimate relation between bodily experience and the understanding of poisons. By studying the alchemical practice of ingesting toxic minerals, I show that the violent bodily effects induced by these substances were often perceived as confirmations of efficacy rather than worrying signs of pathology. My third theme is the circulation of toxicological knowledge across geographical and social domains. I argue that standardized textual knowledge propagated by the state was fluidly transformed in practice, contingent upon the availability of pharmacological ingredients and the needs of local people. Finally, I turn to non-poisons, especially foods, in Chinese pharmacy, and identify a distinctive character of Chinese medicine—the ingestion of mild substances to nourish the body and prolong life. Chinese medicine thus developed through the interaction of two related, but distinct enterprises—the fight against sickness, and the quest for ever-enhanced vitality. / History of Science

This dissertation examines the life, work, and contexts of noted Urdu writer and Indian cultural critic Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991). By engaging in readings of Chughtai’s texts and contexts, this dissertation presents the first study of its kind, examining Indian secular thought through the lens of an Urdu literary figure. As such, this dissertation offers new perspectives on intersections between popular culture and political and religious thought in modern India through the lens of a celebrated literary figure whose legacy continues to be invoked. I argue that, at its core, Chughtai’s critique of society hinged upon the equality (barābarī) of all Indians. The primacy of “humanity” (insāniyat) over other identities was the keystone of her formation of the secular, and has roots in a tradition that can be termed Islamicate humanism. In the first chapter, “Sacred Duty: Ismat Chughtai’s Cosmopolitan Justice between Islam and the Secular,” I argue that, by rejecting the inferior status of women within Muslim legal codes, Chughtai pursued what she saw as moral equality to a more radical degree than the postcolonial Indian state, which enshrined separate codes of personal law based on religious community. Ultimately, the secular ideals of equality, autonomy and human dignity were the mainstays of her thought, without regard to whether these were pursued through “Islamic” means. In the next chapter, “The Personal is Political: Economic and Sexual Progress in Modern India,” I argue that Chughtai, unlike other members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, emphasized the link between hierarchical economic injustice and limitations on autonomous sexual choice. In the third chapter, “Reform, Education, and Woman as Subject,” I argue that in her writing, particularly the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr, Chughtai deployed narratives of education as foundational to the formation of an emancipated girl, one who liberates herself by rejecting the “old rules” (purānī qānūn). The fourth chapter, “The Many Lives of Urdu: Language, Progressive Literature and Nostalgia,” explores the fate of the Urdu language and Chughtai’s legacy in independent India. Ultimately, this project calls into question assumptions regarding what types of textual and human subjects are considered representatives of “Indo-Muslim Culture” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

My dissertation examines the post-1949 transformation of religious and organizational culture in rural Ruian County of the Wenzhou region, Zhejiang. It explores the diversified adaptation patterns adopted by rural religious organizations in order to preserve, reinvent and even expand themselves in the volatile sociopolitical environment of post-1949 China. Based on hitherto unexploited government documents collected from local state archives, memoirs, historical accounts of religious organizations, as well as extensive oral interviews with Ruian residents, I demonstrate that, rather than following a linear and uniform decline that conventional wisdom suggests, religious organizations took divergent paths in Ruian during the Maoist era. The level of religious activities in Ruian and many regions of Zhejiang exhibited fluctuations over time rather than a linear downward movement. The Maoist period, I argue, was both destructive and constructive for religion. By stripping religious organizations of their traditional leadership and economic foundation, Maoist campaigns inadvertently accelerated the organizational reinvention of Chinese religions. Even more far-reaching, the Cultural Revolution dramatically stimulated a quick rise of Protestantism vis-à-vis other religions and fundamentally reshaped the religious landscape in parts of China, making China no exception to the global trend of religious resurgence, despite its isolation at the time. Religion in today’s China and related phenomena, in particular the uneven distribution of religious revival, the development patterns of rural organizations, and state-religion relations, cannot be fully explained without reference to the Maoist legacy. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations