No description available.

<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> Cinderella stories are one of the most popular fairy tales in the world. At the same time, they are most stigmatized by people for describing a weak and passive female protagonist. To discover possible explanations for this continuing popularity of Cinderella stories, I chose to analyze the Kongjwi Patjwi story, one of the Cinderella tales in Korea. The Kongjwi Patjwi story is one of the well-known folktales in Korea that has been adapted for children since the beginning of the 20th century. Since the Kongjwi Patjwi story is not familiar to many western people, I first analyze two of the folklore versions of Kongjwi Patjwi to prove that this story is also one kind of Cinderella tale. Both of them have the "innocent, persecuted heroine" theme, which is one of the most distinctive features of Cinderella tales. In one version, the plot follows almost exactly the same trajectory as European Cinderella tales in that it has the lost shoe motif and marriage with the Prince. The biggest difference between the Korean Cinderella and other Cinderella stories is that there is another plot in the Korean Cinderella story as the passive protagonist matures and becomes an independent woman. In some of the adapted fairy tale versions for children, this plot does not appear and the Korean Cinderella becomes another passive girl who is rescued by her Prince Charming. One of the reasons for this change is that the mothers, the buyers of the children's books, want the "Prince Charming's rescue" plot because they find that it is hard to become an independent woman in Korean society. To accommodate the consumers' wants and needs, publishers intentionally change the plots with passive protagonists. The folklore version of Kongjwi Patjwi actually suggests a more independent and mature female character which would be a good role model for many young boys and girls.</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>

No description available.

No description available.

<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>

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1977. / Bibliography: leaves 168-184. / Microfiche. / vi, 184 leaves

There is some evidence suggesting that the rate of breastfeeding initiation is lower among particular ethnic or cultural groups who have immigrated to Canada and South Asian women comprise one of these groups. Given the evidence that breastfeeding is important in promoting infant health and maternal health, it is important to understand factors that influence breastfeeding initiation among South Asian immigrant women. This descriptive exploratory study investigated the following research question: What are South Asian women's perceptions about the social, socio-economic, personal and acculturation factors that influence their initiation of breastfeeding? The study explored factors that could influence the initiation of breastfeeding among primiparous South Asian immigrant women who have immigrated to Canada. It was informed in part by the conceptual framework used by Kong and Lee (2004), whose study investigated factors that influenced 252 first-time mothers in their decision-making about whether or not to breastfeed. A convenience sample of 15 subjects was interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide with 10 questions. Data were transcribed and analyzed using inductive constant comparative analysis. The following themes emerged: the representation of breastfeeding, vicarious learning about breastfeeding, family influences, spiritual connection, breaking with tradition, resisting the moral mandate, deferring to medical authority, transition to work and cultural mores. With respect to the findings, implications are discussed for nursing research, theory and education.