This dissertation is about Shinra Myojin, a god of Silla that was worshipped in medieval Japanese Buddhism. It analyzes the various networks with which the deity was involved, namely, networks of Silla immigrants, Silla shrines and temples, and a variety of gods. Through examining the worship of Shinra Myojin from several different angles, each chapter has different, and yet related arguments. In the first chapter, I argue that the emergence of Shinra Myojin's cult can be fully understood when viewed within the context of the "East Asian Mediterranean" trade network, in which Silla merchants, immigrants, and Buddhist monks played a prominent role. In the second chapter, while focusing on a pivotal moment of the Shinra Myojin cult--a process of sedentarisation in which he changed from a sea deity into a mountain deity, I argue that Shinra Myojin was the central deity of Onjoji, as well as the entire Jimon tradition. The third chapter explains how the Japanese imaginaire of Silla was evolved, encoded and had effects in medieval Japan, and how Shinra Myojin functioned as a god of pestilence. Another pivotal point of Shinra Myojin's career was his mythological transformation from 'a god of Silla' to 'a god who conquered Silla.' In the last chapter, I analyze the visual representation of Shinra Myojin within this larger religious context, and argue that Shinra Myojin is best understood when we consider the deity in this network of other Silla-related deities, represented as an old man. The examination of Shinra Myojin's cult from an interdisciplinary angle serves as a gateway for exploring other understudied associations between medieval Japanese religiosity and those religious ideas and practices that were either continental in origin or were at least perceived to be so by medieval Japanese. My findings from interdisciplinary research contribute to elucidating those connections existing across the boundaries of religion, history, mythology, literature, and visual culture, all of which describes broader dynamics of East Asian religion as a whole.

This dissertation examines the ethnicization of Islam among a specific ethnic group in China, namely the Hui. It is based upon sixteen months of multi-sited fieldwork conducted in China's Henan Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region from 2010 to 2012. I argue that the particular ethno-imaginary of the Hui and their positioning vis-à-vis the Han majority - that they are both non-Han and more Han than the Han - are predicated upon a particular sexual economy. Islam is situated in an imagined dissymmetrical exchange of woman as that whose presumed truth can procure for the Hui the feminine "Han blood." The "nativization" of Islam among the Hui, i.e. its supposedly never complete "sinicization," occurs through the figure of the Han woman. In Part I of this dissertation, I trace the itinerary of this figure in both historiographical narratives of the Hui in the early twentieth century and the organizational variations of their contemporary life as Muslims in a swiftly-changing China. In Part II, I move to a more general level, and study two major institutions in the Chinese state's governance of ethnic difference, namely ethnic regional autonomy and ethnic cadre. I situate them within the socialist tradition and unpack their specificity in contrast to other political configurations in the governance of ethnic difference (e.g. liberal multiculturalism). I suggest that this socialist governance of difference is defined by a biopolitical logic, and argue that the link to sexuality that is intrinsic to the concept of biopolitics renders the Hui a particularly privileged site for exploring the complex relationship between the socialist politics of ethnicity and the socialist governance of sexuality.

This dissertation is a close study of a rice-producing region in the northeastern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi from 1890 to1912, centered on the leadership of local elites over agricultural development, social order, and political management of the countryside during a period of revolutionary change. In the context of fundamental transformations to the state, economy, and society, landlords and local officials assumed positions as intermediaries between village society and the prefectural and national governments, becoming the "middlemen of modernity" for rural Japan. Along with the celebrated projects of industrialization and the modernization of the military, agricultural development occupied a place of importance in the plans of the Meiji state (1868 to 1912), but it failed to attract the same commitment of government finances. With official intervention in farming improvement and rural villages limited to moral exhortations, it was local elites, not the national government, who assumed responsibility for the countryside. Miyagi provided a fertile ground for their activities, demonstrating the heightened need for improvement that came with the climactic and economic challenges endemic in northeastern Japan. The character of Miyagi leaders evolved over time, with changes to the rural economy in the 1870s, the local government system in the 1880s, and official interest in the organization of local society at the turn of the century pushing old elites out and drawing in new figures in their places. Unchanged, however, was the role of local actors as the principal architects of rural development. They set the course of agricultural improvement, determined its character, and linked farming in new ways with the central government. The processes of change often proved disruptive in village society, rekindling old conflicts and igniting new rivalries as different actors fought over the allocation of the costs and profits of expanded production. In the end, though, elites oversaw a transformation of farming and agricultural villages that was complete by the early years of the twentieth century.

This dissertation is based on field-work conducted at a khane-aman (home of peace) in Kabul in 2011-2012. In this dissertation, I have argued that the Afghan state vacillates between a rational-honorable mode and an unintelligible promiscuous mode. In its rational-honorable mode, the state institutes norms and regulations and develops institutional infrastructures for their implementation. The state also manifests another mode, which I am calling a promiscuous mode. To engage in promiscuity is to cater to the basest and most abject fantasies, to indulge in the regions of precariousness and vulnerability. This vacillation produces the Afghan state as both feared and desired, as transparent and opaque. Carnal punishments like flogging or stoning render present the distant force of the law into the context of everyday lives. Here the state takes on a different presence, a promiscuous one, in which the spectacular threat of violence is brought into the midst of the communal formations. Once the state institutes these punishments, it opens up the possibility of misplaced blames and wrongful retribution. It is in these realms of indecorum and solecism that the state reinvents and reveals itself.

“Communist Miscellany” is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork in Maoist China, examined through the institution of individual dossiers on Chinese subjects known as dang’an. Drawing upon an original sourcebase of deaccessioned archival dossiers, the project explores how the party-state bureaucracy fashioned an archive of Maoist society through scrupulous routines of investigative, clerical, and material labor. In Maoist China, one of the primary responsibilities of local bureaucratic units was to compile detailed individualized dossiers on party members, cadres, workers and students under their jurisdiction. The dossier constituted a master record of a subject's social identity, probing issues of class status, personal background, family relationships, political activities and attitudes. Broadly instituted in the 1950s on the basis of the Soviet model, the stated purpose of the dossier system was to inform staffing decisions for personnel management in the planned economy. However, in the Mao era, the dossier was widely deployed as a surveillance instrument, producing a living archive of “political and historical problems” among the people. For ordinary citizens, materials gathered through the dossier were the basis of crucial class labels and the grounds for political advancement. The paper-bound practices of the dossier informed the generic presentation of identity and evidence while supplying material for everyday political acts. This study of the dossier system engages current debates on bureaucratic culture, social surveillance, and archive in the PRC. A project of immense ambition, the dossier system straddled the imperatives of permanent revolution and socialist state-building to transcribe a record of Chinese society in the Maoist image. The continuous expansion of the dossier system over the Mao era gave rise to elaborate routines of file-keeping and paperwork as well as unexpected consequences of the bureaucratic will to knowledge. The bureaucratic tendency toward overaccumulation and excess in the production of dossier materials exposes the political and epistemic insecurities that drove social surveillance. The practical demands of the dossier system strained the ability of local bureaucrats to keep pace with requests for intelligence, shaping an approach to file-keeping that conceived its own distinctive forms of knowledge and incapacity.

This study examines the determinants of location choices of Asian immigrants in the US in 1990 and evaluates the effect of education and other quality of life variables as well as the traditional economic variables. The study builds upon similar works by Gallaway, Vedder and Shukla (1974) and Dunlevy and Gemery (1977) on the distribution of immigrant population in the 1900's. The findings show that the number of Asians in an area has significant positive effects on immigrant residence. This study also reveals a negative relation between unemployment levels and the number of immigrants locating to an area. The results provide support for a lagged adjustment process in affecting locational choice. However, there appears to be no significant relation between education spending and immigrant location to an area. / Graduation date: 1997

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Syracuse University, 2009. / "Publication number:AAT 3381582."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This paper is a critical reflection upon commonly found distortions in the representations of the lives of Canadian women of South Asian origin in the Vancouver Sun. The strategy adopted consists in presenting first, the views of three South Asian women activists who acted as collaborators and analyzed the constituted sample of articles; second, feminist anthropological readings are used to draw upon a theory of discourse which looks at news-products as active elements in the construction of reality. It is then argued that by focusing on a narrow range of topics, the prevalent media discourse encourages news readers to develop a homogenous perspective on Canadian women of South Asian origin. The depictions in the press suggest that not only are these women oppressed, but this oppression originates in elements of their own culture and assimilation is only possible by relinquishing these "oppressive" cultural traits. It is argued that the media reinforces the dominant patriarchal, racist and classist discourses prevailing in Canadian society.