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How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe?
This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.
Traces of a Forgotten Ritual in Ancient Myths and Legends
Author:
The first book that deals with the territorial cults of early Japan by focusing on how such cults were founded in ownerless regions. Numerous ancient Japanese myths and legends are discussed to show that the typical founding ritual was a two-phase ritual that turned the territory into a horizontal microcosm, complete with its own ‘terrestrial heaven’ inhabited by local deities.
Reversing Mircea Eliade’s popular thesis, the author concludes that the concept of the human-made horizontal microcosm is not a reflection but the source of the religious concept of the macrocosm with gods dwelling high up in the sky.
The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Author:
This book examines the diverse prosody of compound nouns in Kansai Japanese, with a special focus on a class of compounds with particularly variable prosody, whose unique prosody is potentially endangered due to their structure and influence from Tokyo Japanese. These compounds serve as important evidence for recursion in prosodic structure in theories of the syntax-prosody interface, as they simultaneously resemble not only other compound words but also non-compound phrases, making them valuable test cases for compound prosodic structure. This book discusses potential reasons for these compounds' prosodic variabilty and what may condition their unique prosody, based on results from novel fieldwork. A unified account of compound prosody in Kansai and three other Japanese dialects is also presented.
Author:

Abstract

Texts from pre-imperial and early imperial China are replete with dietary information, regimens for nourishing the body and instructions on how not to soil its inner purity. Sources have far less to say about the body’s effluvia and the waste and muck that is shed and excreted by human and non-human animals. This article studies references to excreta and excretion in early China. It shows how human and animal faeces as well as the locus of excretion connoted both negative and positive spheres. Excreta were deemed noxious yet also beneficial, they were to be discarded yet also reused. Latrines were liminal zones, operating at the intersection of social propriety and physical and moral rejection. The process of excretion made the body vulnerable to external influences such as demonic illness, yet faecal matter of itself also had medicinal healing powers. In agriculture, matter exuded was matter used to fecundate and fertilize crops. The waste and human nightsoil that accumulated in the concealed domestic space of the latrine and pigpen ended up as sought-after produce infusing life into seeds, fields, and public productivity. By bringing together evidence across a range of textual and material sources – from latrines, to pigs, to a line in the Laozi 老子 and its commentaries – this article traces excretory experience and matter through its cycle from defecation to regeneration.

Open Access
In: East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine

Abstract

The Dutch neo-Calvinist mission (Zending) on Sumba in Indonesia, an area known for its Marapu ancestor religion, started in 1902. The independent Sumbanese church (Gereja Kristen Sumba, GKS) was established at the 1947 Synod. One century later, by 2002, two out of three inhabitants were Christian. The research question is whether the rise of a vital GKS was facilitated by education and ‘antithetical’ notions of freedom offered by neo-Calvinist Zending. The answer is that the Zending empowered Sumbanese Christians to decide for themselves whether to preserve traditional customs (adat), so they could build the GKS from the bottom up. This answer is based on archival material – including the unexplored archive of Rev. P.J. Lambooij – and on a dozen semi-structured interviews with Sumbanese spokespersons in 2006, 2016 and 2019. Macro-level explanations – capitalism, modernity, or colonialism – hardly appear to account for the transformation to Sumbanese Christianity.

Open Access
In: Exchange
Author:

Abstract

The novel Coming through Slaughter (1976), a story of a talented musician’s pursuit of real art and the true self, is based on Buddy Bolden, a jazz cornet player from New Orleans, Louisiana, in early twentieth-century America. Author Michael Ondaatje shows his originality in creating a ‘jazz novel’ that transcends the boundary between music and literature, in which three jazz-like features – collage, improvisation, and intersubjectivity – are embodied in characterization, theme presentation, and narration. By virtue of the unique free elements of jazz, Ondaatje maximizes the postmodern features of the novel and vividly depicts the complex subjectivity of the characters.

Open Access