In this dissertation I provide a detailed analysis of the role played by the Tachikawa-ryu in the development of Japanese esoteric Buddhist doctrine during the medieval period (900-1200). In doing so, I seek to challenge currently held, inaccurate views of the role played by this tradition in the history of Japanese esoteric Buddhism and Japanese religion more generally. The Tachikawa-ryu, which has yet to receive sustained attention in English-language scholarship, began in the twelfth century and later came to be denounced as heretical by mainstream Buddhist institutions. The project will be divided into four sections: three of these will each focus on a different chronological stage in the development of the Tachikawa-ryu, while the introduction will address the portrayal of this tradition in twentieth-century scholarship.

Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war brought about tremendous suffering upon the lives of the Tamil civilian population in northern Sri Lanka. In May 2009, when the war ended, not a single civilian remained within the Vanni, the former rebel territory, as they had all been killed or displaced. More than one hundred thousand civilians were dead or disappeared and three hundred thousand survivors were held in so-called "transit camps" without freedom of movement. The data for this dissertation is based on extensive anthropological field research conducted in northern Sri Lanka during the last phase of the civil war and into its aftermath over a period of two and a half years between July 2007 and May 2010. It sets out to explain the experience of suffering among a Tamil Catholic fishing community, which, due to the war, had been displaced from its coastal home, Perunkalipattu in 1999, and has been relocated to the City of Santa Marta, an internal-refugee camp. Between July 2007 and May 2009, this community was part of the four hundred thousand Tamil civilians trapped in so-called "no-fire zones," where they suffered violence at the hands of the state as well as the rebels. This dissertation takes a unique approach to the exploration of the community's suffering by incorporating the effects of the war on the community's Catholic devotion and the possibility of healing of traumatic experiences of war through that devotion. The study thereby opens up a new field of anthropological investigation of displacement, social suffering, faith and healing. It contributes, among others, to the anthropology of violence, South Asia studies, and the anthropology of Christianity, and provides unique materials for anthropological reflection on ethnographic writing and the art of fieldwork.

The dissertation examines the cult of the goddess Haḍimbā that is located in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalaya (Himachal Pradesh). Massive transformations introduced in the region in recent years by means of better transportation systems, a developing capitalist economy, new technologies, and, most prominently, tourism have drastically affected life in the region and have destabilized traditional social and cultural patterns. These changes are engaged by the residents of the Kullu Valley in various ways that are informed and oriented by their traditional worldview and ritual system. The main chapters of the dissertation present and analyze three separate yet interrelated spaces that constitute a veritable theater of change. In these spaces, in which Haḍimbā figures prominently, the identity of the goddess, the rituals performed in her honor, and the powers she is believed to possess are constantly negotiated and refashioned: practitioners foreground Haḍimbā's identity as a Mahābhārata demoness instead of equating her solely with the Purāṇic Durgā (ch. 1); they justify, protect, and increasingly offer her bloody buffalo sacrifices despite criticisms leveled against this practice by outsiders (ch. 2); and they uphold their views concerning the ability of their goddess to control local weather patterns, even as the climate is changing and competing paradigms offer new theories in this regard (ch. 3). It is in this sense—in light of these massive renegotiations of Haḍimbā's character—that she is "becoming herself." Concurrently, it is not only the goddess' but her devotees' identity that is being negotiated and refashioned. Taken as a whole, the choices made by local people in these three spaces reveal their attempt to recast their marginality, the magnitude of which they have only recently begun to realize. They do so by pursuing new frameworks of reference that aim to challenge, if not subvert, the hegemonic narratives that are promoted in the region by outside forces. Thus, by highlighting Haḍimbā's Mahābhārata associations they offer a new kind of epic frame for national and religious identity; by insisting on the performance of animal sacrifice they invert and celebrate what is elsewhere considered a backward and illegitimate act; and by retaining their belief in the control of their goddess over her territory they defend their own agency and find a legitimate place for themselves and their way of life at the pan-Indian and global table. At the same time, the dissertation shows that local religious beliefs and practices do not remain untouched by these external pan-Indian and global paradigms and that in the interaction between them a new a hybrid worldview is being formed.

The village of Halebid, in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, was once a city called Dorasamudra, capital of the Hoysala dynasty from the mid-11th to mid-14th centuries. Although the site is home to more than twenty temples and temple ruins, as well as the fragmentary remains of a fort wall and palace compound, the place name "Halebid" today is nearly synonymous with a single monument: the lavishly sculptural Hoysalesvara temple. This expansive, double-shrine temple would have been a dominant feature of the Hoysala capital from the time of its construction around 1120 C.E., but the near monopoly it has over the site in both popular and academic circles has caused other buildings to be overlooked. This focus on the Hoysalesvara temple has also isolated the building from its surroundings, obscuring its relationship to other features of the historical city. In this dissertation I develop a fuller understanding of the Hoysala capital and its temples by expanding the scope of inquiry to include the whole city. Taking the archaeological material and published inscriptions of the entire site into account, I consider the ways in which a selection of Dorasamudra's temples relate to one another and to other features of their surrounding landscape. This site-contextualized study provides insight into the relevance of the temples' spatial and sculptural forms, ritual purposes, and patrons' goals. Comparison with monuments at other sites reveals that many temples of Dorasamudra contributed to the city's prestige through their distinctive visual properties or their association with important deities or authoritative institutions. In addition to offering new perspectives on individual temples of the Hoysala capital, this study provides a greater understanding of the social and architectural characteristics of distinct neighborhoods, routes of access to specific temples and throughout the city, and a dynamic urban landscape that would have been visually and spatially altered with each new construction.

This dissertation examines the United States's elite news media's hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? This study draws from two bodies of scholarship that are analogous, yet rarely linked together. The first is on hegemony and the U.S. news media's relationship with American society and the government. This includes scholarship on indexing and cascading; agenda building and agenda setting; framing; and reporting during conflict. The second is on the American news media's relationship with the world, and nationalism as a fixed phenomenon in international news. This includes examining the different kinds of press systems that exist globally, and how they interact with each other. Afghanistan and Pakistan's media systems have expanded dramatically since being freed in 2002 and they struggle daily with making sense of the volatility that comes with the U.S.-led Afghanistan war. Through 64 qualitative, in-depth interviews with Afghan, American and Pakistani journalists, this study explores the sociology of news inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and how the American news narrative is received there. There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of migrant labor, development, and gender among Malaiyaha ("Hill Country") Tamil tea plantation residents in contemporary Sri Lanka. It draws on one year of field research (2008-2009) conducted during state emergency rule in Sri Lanka amongst Malaiyaha Tamil plantation residents, migrant laborers, and community members responding to histories of dislocation and ethnic marginalization. Based on ethnographic observations, detailed life histories, and collaborative dialogue, it explores how Malaiyaha Tamils reconstitute what it means to be a political minority in an insecure Sri Lankan economy and state by 1) employing dignity-enabling strategies of survival through ritual practices and storytelling; 2) abandoning income-generating options on the plantations to ensure financial security; and 3) seeking radical alternatives to traditional development through employment of rights-based ideologies and networks of solidarity in and beyond Sri Lanka. Attending to these three spheres of collective practice--plantation life, migrant labor experience, and human development--this dissertation examines how Malaiyaha Tamils actively challenge historical representations of bonded labor and political voicelessness in order to rewrite their representative canon in Sri Lanka. At the center of each pragmatic site is the Malaiyaha Tamil woman. Focusing particularly on the female worker, I present emerging gender relations and experiences in group life, transnational labor mobilization, and development work that pose radical and deliberate alternatives to economic marginalization and capitalist plantation production in Sri Lanka. Negotiating their place within patriarchal structures on the plantation and in civil society, Malaiyaha Tamil women present themselves in ways that sharply contrast the expert narratives of their experiences, which are composed for public recognition and consumption. Interceding this transmission of knowledge, their stories actively transform plantation development discourses in Sri Lanka and resituate their practices within the more enabling frame of transnational feminism and solidarity. Addressing lacunas in South Asian, social science, and humanities literature on Malaiyaha Tamil women, this dissertation contributes lived content on previously unrecorded women's experiences and complicates former accounts of the woman worker in Sri Lanka. Informing this project is the relationship among community, vulnerability, and reproduction. How are forms of Malaiyaha Tamil development and membership, when increasingly opened up to the realm of the political, made at once vulnerable and generative in their attempts to gain a sense of security and belonging in Sri Lanka? What do practices of cultural reconfiguration and solidarity-building reveal about the persistence of community as an affective term and the woman worker's position in global movements of transnational feminism and migrant labor? Each chapter focuses on this relationship in the context of the final months and aftermath of civil war in Sri Lanka, and I engage the work of political theorists, Sri Lankan historians, and development scholars to argue for a more productive way of thinking about communities in crisis. I argue that community is the continual mental exercise of self-refinement and a mode in which Malaiyaha Tamils address insecurities of a closed past with intentional practices of fixing belief in an open present. This enabling perspective allows us to account for the realities of social investment, movement, and network-building that Malaiyaha Tamils experience in Sri Lanka. By analyzing the contradictions and legacy of seizing Malaiyaha Tamil plantation experience in Sri Lankan history and scholarship, this dissertation seeks to envision the Sri Lankan woman worker as a global subject with transformative possibilities for her community and nation and contribute to the anthropologies of development, labor, and gender in South Asia.

This study examines how a critical high technology industry in China, the semiconductor industry, advanced from being an isolated, centrally planned industry in the mid 1980s to being an important participant in the competitive global semiconductor industry after 2000. The research examines the most important trends, projects, and enterprises in China, with attention to China's global partners and China's rapidly growing role in the world economy. In the 1990s, semiconductor enterprises in China proactively made key structural changes and global linkages that set the stage for the industry's growth after 2000. The study thus provides an industry level assessment of how reforms and technological upgrading occurred in contemporary China, including the degree and character of so-called state led development. This research also shows that the development of this high technology industry had direct and positive effects on China's larger business environment and trade policies. Finally, this study compares the development of the semiconductor industry in China with its development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, identifying differences in national approaches and the effects of the global information revolution.

This dissertation investigates the close connection between poetry and prayer in South Asia by studying the history of Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras) in Kashmir. It offers a broad introduction to the history and general features of the stotra genre, and it charts the course of these literary hymns in Kashmir from the ninth century to the present. Historically, Kashmir was one of the most dynamic and influential centers of Sanskrit learning and literary production in South Asia. This dissertation focuses on a number of innovative texts from this region, such as Ksemaraja's eleventh-century commentaries and Sahib Kaul's seventeenth-century hymns, which have received little scholarly attention. In particular, it offers the first study in any European language of the Stutikusumanjali, a major work of religious literature dedicated to the god Siva and one of the only extant witnesses to the trajectory of Sanskrit literary culture in fourteenth-century Kashmir. This dissertation also contributes to the study of Saivism by examining the ways that Saiva poets have integrated the traditions of Sanskrit literature (kavya) and poetics (alankarasastra), theology (especially non-dualism), and Saiva worship and devotion. It argues for the diverse configurations of Saiva bhakti expressed and explored in these literary hymns and the challenges they present for standard interpretations of Hindu bhakti. More broadly, this study of stotras from Kashmir offers new perspectives on the history and vitality of prayer in South Asia and its complex relationships to poetry and poetics.

This dissertation explores highly influential constructions of the past at a key turning point in Chinese history by mapping out what I term a poetics of memory in the more than four hundred poems written by Du Fu (712-770) during his two-year stay in the remote town of Kuizhou (modern Fengjie). A survivor of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion (756-763), which transformed Tang Dynasty (618-906) politics and culture, Du Fu was among the first to write in the twilight of the Chinese medieval period. His most prescient anticipation of mid-Tang concerns was his restless preoccupation with memory and its mediations, which drove his prolific output in Kuizhou. For Du Fu, memory held the promise of salvaging and creatively reimagining personal, social, and cultural identities under conditions of displacement and sweeping social change. The poetics of his late work is characterized by an acute attentiveness to the material supports--monuments, rituals, images, and texts--that enabled and structured connections to the past. The organization of the study attempts to capture the range of Du Fu's engagement with memory's frameworks and media. It begins by examining commemorative poems that read Kuizhou's historical memory in local landmarks, decoding and rhetorically emulating great deeds of classical exemplars. The second chapter explores the shifting boundaries Du Fu draws between the customs of Kuizhou's local people and the orthodox ritual practices that defined his identity as a scholar-official. This is followed by an interlude that discusses poems on housework, in which domesticating projects spur reflection on poetry's capacity to create cultural value through commemoration. Chapter three turns to poems on paintings, arguing that for Du Fu painted images served as a vital support for memory of pre-rebellion court society, and that in writing on them he both drew upon and redefined a medieval visual aesthetic of craft and pictorial illusionism. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the rhetoric of narrative autobiographical poems, traditionally approached as non-figurative factual records, in order to elucidate Du Fu's retrospective construction of a self. A picture thus emerges of a body of work in which memory, mediated through material objects and practices, functioned to envision and rebuild frameworks of identity in an age of upheaval and transition. This study will contribute to a more critical understanding of a major poet, of the representation and uses of memory in traditional Chinese poetry, and of the emergence of new forms of expression and literati identity in late medieval China.

This dissertation explores a series of debates about “humanism” (hyumŏnijŭm, indojuŭi) in late colonial Korea, postcolonial North Korea, and postcolonial South Korea. The majority of the existing scholarship on Korean cultural and intellectual history divides the twentieth century along dual fault lines of colonial and postcolonial, North and South, telling a story structured by its seemingly irreconcilable fractures and oppositions. In contrast, my research challenges this vision, showing not only how writers on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel continued to engage in both direct and indirect dialogue with their colleagues on the other side of the peninsula but also how they did so by returning to a set of discussions from the colonial 1930s: a set of discussions, framed in relation to contemporary ones in France, Japan, and the Soviet Union, about the value of “humanism” as a means of rethinking binaries of political Right and Left and the relationship between the disciplines. One of the first studies to bring literature and thought from both sides of the peninsula together in a joint narrative, this dissertation offers an alternative account both of what national division meant in Korea during this period and of how Korean writers contested and re-imagined it by drawing upon transnational flows of texts and ideas. In chapter one, I describe the emergence of “humanism” (hyumŏnijŭm) as a keyword in the mid 1930s literary criticism of the writer Kim Osŏng. Although Kim took up the term in response to its contemporary usage in the French and Japanese literary domains, his definition of it was drawn equally from a dialectical anthropology first formulated within the publishing sphere of the Korean new religion, Ch'ŏndogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way), where Kim began his career. Describing how this dialectical anthropology internalized an analytic of contradictions inside the human, I show how Kim's visions of “humanism” not only defined the human in terms of its divisions but also called for a form of disciplinary practice capable of mediating between them. Connecting these visions to contemporary debates about socialist realism and the specificity of literary practice, I show how they laid the groundwork for a self-reflexive turn in fiction writing in the years following the breakup of the Korean proletarian literature movement. In chapter two, I offer a revisionist history of “humanism” in early Cold War South Korea. In particular, I show how critics attempting to re-suture literature to political engagement in support of the ongoing war effort looked back to the past for precedents. Reclaiming the term “active humanism” from the 1930s, these writers found their model in the antifascist “actionism” of André Malraux and they contrasted it, in turn, with the dual forms of “mechanism” found in capitalism and communism. Even as wartime hostilities continued, then, “humanism” came to be linked not only to political mobilization but also – and quite counterintuitively – to a rejection of the “two worlds” system altogether. Finally, I explore how wartime depictions of “friendly fire” and the wartime advent of a UN-sponsored book import program set the stage for postwar discussions of existentialism, Marx as philosopher, and the problem of a “third way” beyond the Cold War binary. In chapter three, I explore a roughly contemporaneous period in North Korea, tracing the emergence of an alternative formulation of the “humanist” imaginary in 1950s literature and criticism. Replacing the earlier term hyumŏnijŭm with that of indojuŭi, North Korean writers of this period used the trope of “humanism” to tie together two interrelated lines of discourse and argumentation: the first concerned itself with the ethics of community and responsibility, often recurring to the ethical demand to be, become, or act like a “human being”; the second concerned itself with literary method and called for the replacement of “mechanical” depictions of processes of production with a reemphasis on human “personality.” Compatible as they were, the concatenation of these two lines of discourse, I argue, nevertheless produced an unexpected outcome: a proliferation of texts, increasingly inward-looking, self-reflexive, and self-critical, focused on the “becoming human” of writers themselves. The effect, then, was not the extinction or erasure of the self but rather its seemingly endless discursive expansion. The road to the “communist new human” here circled back through the individual. In chapter four, I bring the narratives from the previous two chapters together to show how writers in North and South Korea both moved to reclaim aspects of Korean tradition in the late 1950s. First, I show how the critic Ŏm Hosŏk used the Gorky-influenced imaginary of “proletarian humanism” in order to reshape the bounds of the “progressive” past in colonial-era Korean literature. Then I show how this reshaping worked in tandem with a parallel process of excavating the deeper, classical past. Next, I turn to South Korea, taking the early history of PEN-Korea as a point of departure for exploring how writers and critics debated the meaning of nation, nature, and tradition in relation to contemporary imaginations of “world literature” and historical “resistance.” Finally, I conclude with poetry of the April Revolution in the South, showing how the above discussions set the groundwork for a specific way of figuring these events. In chapter five, I turn to the early 1960s in order to tell a connected history of literary production in North and South Korea. Moving beyond the comparative framework of earlier chapters, I here show how the events of the April Revolution of 1960 in South Korea opened up a space for exchange across the thirty-eighth parallel. Although it is often assumed that the physical rigidity of national division has also prevented texts and other media from cross the thirty-eighth parallel, I show that this is not quite true. I begin by describing North Korean reactions to the April Revolution and then show their influence on two interrelated phenomena: the production of texts directed at colleagues in the South; and the reading and interpretation of South Korean texts in the North. I then turn to the South in order to explore the opposite trajectory. In particular, I focus on how discussions of literary purges in the North opened up a new space for discussion of the other side of the peninsula, and I suggest the importance of this development for a new literary and critical imagination in the mid 1960s.