Landscapes and Communities on the Pacific Rim: From Asia to the Pacific Northwest PDF Download

Author: Karen K. Gaul
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315500965
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
These essays offer a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study of the ways in which communities of people understand and inhabit their environments. They examine and compare human/environmental interactions in communities across the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Rim, and Asia.

Author: Charles Bancroft Cushman
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9780765621580
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

View

Book Description
What does Congress do? How does it do it? Why is it such a complicated institution? This concise primer offers students and general readers a brief and systematic introduction to Congress and the role it plays in the US political system. Drawing on his experience as a former Congressional staff member, the author explores the different political natures of the House and Senate, examines Congress's interaction with other branches of the Federal government, and looks ahead to the domestic and foreign challenges that are likely to drive the Congressional agenda for decades to come. The book provides revealing insights into the sometimes-contradictory Congressional responsibilities of representation and lawmaking; oversight and appropriation; and managing and organizing the government. It includes a case study (on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security) that sheds light on Congress's often-complicated procedures. The book also includes boxed features on Congressional action - highlighting such topics as file sharing and student loans - that show students how Congress's work affects their lives. Chapter-ending lists of web resources add to the book's usefulness.

Author: Karen Thornber
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472028146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 688

View

Book Description
East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Karen Laura Thornber calls ecoambiguity—the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.

Author: Philip West
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317461037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
In contrast to the many books that use military, diplomatic, and historic language in analyzing the Korean War, this book takes a cultural approach that emphasizes the human dimension of the war, an approach that especially features Korean voices. There are chapters on Korean art on the war, translations into English of Korean poetry by Korean soldiers, and American soldier poetry on the war. There is a photographic essay on the war by combat journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Max Desfor. Another chapter includes and analyzes songs on the Korean War - Korean, American, and Chinese - that illuminate the many complex memories of the war. There is a discussion of Korean films on the war and a chapter on Korean War POWs and their contested memories. More than any other nonfiction book on the war, this one shows us the human face of tragedy for Americans, Chinese, and most especially Koreans. June 2000 was the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War; this moving volume is intended as a commemoration of it.

Author: Adam D. Tyson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136958622
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

View

Book Description
This book examines the dynamic process of political transition and indigenous (adat) revival in newly decentralized Indonesia. The political transition in May 1998 set the stage for the passing of Indonesia’s framework decentralization laws. These laws include both political and technocratic efforts to devolve authority from the centre (Jakarta) to the peripheries. Contrary to expectations, enhanced public participation often takes the form of adat revivalism - a deliberate, highly contested and contingent process linked to intensified political struggles throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The author argues adat is aligned with struggles for recognition and remedial rights, including the right to autonomous governance and land. It cannot be understood in isolation, nor can it be separated from the wider world. Based on original fieldwork and using case studies from Sulawesi to illustrate the key arguments, this book provides an overview of the key analytical concepts and a concise review of relevant stages in Indonesian history. It considers struggles for rights and recognition, focusing on regulatory processes and institutional control. Finally, Tyson examines land disputes and resource conflicts. Regional and local conflicts often coalesce around forms of ethnic representation, which are constantly being renegotiated, along with resource allocations and entitlements, and efforts to preserve or reinvent cultural identities. This will be valuable reading for students and researchers in Political Studies, Development Studies, Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies and Politics.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253041
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

View

Book Description
Since in the current global environmental and climate crisis East Asia will play a major role in negotiating solutions, it is vital to understand East Asian cultural variations in approaching and solving environmental challenges in the past, present, and future. The interdisciplinary volume Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia. The Challenge of Climate Change, edited by Carmen Meinert, explores how cultural patterns and ideas have shaped a specific understanding of nature, how local and regional cultures develop(ed) coping strategies to adapt to environmental and climatic changes in the past and in the present and how various institutions and representatives might introduce their ideas and agendas in future environmental and climate policies on national levels and in international negotiating systems.

Author: Jamie Davidson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134118201
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 398

View

Book Description
The Indonesian term adat means ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, and carries connotations of sedate order and harmony. Yet in recent years it has suddenly become associated with activism, protest and violence. This book investigates the revival of adat in Indonesian politics, identifying its origins, the historical factors that have conditioned it and the reasons behind its recent blossoming. It considers whether the adat revival is a constructive contribution to Indonesia’s new political pluralism or a divisive, dangerous and reactionary force, and examines the implications for the development of democracy, human rights, civility and political stability. The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics provides detailed coverage of the growing significance of adat in Indonesian politics. It is an important resource for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary Indonesian political landscape.

Author: John Parham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108107680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 736

View

Book Description
In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.

Author: Louise Westling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107029929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

View

Book Description
This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.

Author: Laura Nenzi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

View

Book Description
In the Edo period (1600–1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century—which saw the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing—textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed not a few commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons of the past, some among these erudite commoners saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in the pages of their travel diaries. The chapters in Part One, “Re-creating Spaces,” introduce the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. Laura Nenzi shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. In Part Two, “Re-creating Identities,” we see how, in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, in Part Three, “Purchasing Re-creation,” Nenzi looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.