Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities. By Melissa J. Brown. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 333 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-520-23182-1.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 830-831
Author(s):  
J. Megan Greene

Taiwan's identity has been constructed and described in a variety of ways by politicians seeking to demonstrate that Taiwan either is or is not Chinese. Those who wish to prove Taiwan's Chineseness emphasize the dominance of Han culture and the lengthy relationship between China and Taiwan. Those who argue that Taiwan's identity is distinctly un-Chinese tend to focus on the influence of Aborigine culture and ancestry on the Han population, the influence of Japanese culture, and the fact that Taiwan has been politically separate from China for most of the 20th century. Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese? investigates the merits of these claims through ethnographic study. She offers an excellent analysis of the shifting identity of Taiwan's plains Aborigines, which she supplements with a comparative analysis of Tujia identity in China's Hubei province that demonstrates that Taiwan's identity shifts are not unique.Through ethnographic case studies and analysis of historical data, Brown concludes that Taiwan's plains Aborigines have undergone three identity shifts, from plains Aborigine to Han, in the first two cases, and from Han back to Aborigine in the last instance. Brown studies three foothills villages that by the early 1990s identified themselves as Han, but that had previously been Aborigine. She finds that because Qing economic and social policies had eroded boundaries between Han and plains Aborigines, these two groups already shared numerous cultural practices in the early 20th century. However, it was not until the Japanese banned footbinding, thus opening a range of new marriage options, that plains Aborigines began to take on Han identity, and to claim it on the basis of cultural similarity, rather than ancestry. Brown further finds that the impact of Aborigine culture on Han culture during this period was minimal, and that Han cultural practices supplanted Aborigine practices among those people who underwent the identity shift. In the late 20th century these same people underwent a second identity shift from Han back to Aborigine, one that was again spurred by changes in the political environment and one that, Brown argues, has been counter-productive to Taiwan's claims to uniqueness.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wahibah Twahir@Hj Tahir ◽  
Kamaruzzaman Yusof ◽  
Abu Hassan Abdul

The study aims to identify the development of the Islah and Tajdid movements in Malaya and the impact on Islamic education for women starting at the madrasah level to the high level in the late 20th century. This study discusses the movement of Islah and Tajdid which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in Malaya and analyzed the influence of thinking on Islamic women's education. This study was conducted using a qualitative study, where all data information from primary and secondary sources was scrutinized and analyzed by taking an inductive approach. The study found that the characters involved in this movement in Malaya since the very beginning of their return from their studies in Egypt have supported the thought of Sheikh Muhammad Abduh and Sheikh Rasyid Ridha in the case of women's education. They wrote and worked on publications through newspapers and magazines that voiced the importance of Muslim women to be given freedom of education to engage in society. In order to realize these thoughts and awareness, they also set up special madrasah for female students in Penang, Melaka and Singapore. The influence of their thinking has led to the awareness of the Malay community with the establishment of madrasah in the states of Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis, and Johor and opened the widest opportunities for female students to receive education. Until the Independence era of Malaya, these madrasah have expanded to whole land of Malay as the efforts and awareness of group of religionist that support the thinking of Islah and Tajdid. In 1952 Malaya Islamic College was established and followed by Yayasan Pengajian Tinggi Islam Kelantan (YPTIK) in 1956 as a result of this group's efforts. Women's students also have the opportunity to pursue higher levels of education until there is an Islamic women's education network between Malaysia, Indonesia and Egypt. At the end of the 20th century, Muslim women had succeeded in occupying various career fields, especially in Islamic education as teachers in schools, as a lecturer at higher learning centers that offering various fields of Islamic studies and as civil servants in government departments.


Author(s):  
Andrew McIntosh

This chapter explores one of American popular music’s most polarizing moments in the late 20th century, the ideological and aesthetic divide between East and West Coast hip hop cultural practices. In both public press and recorded music of the era, a persistent dialectic emerged, one where East Coast authenticity was contrasted against West Coast artifice. This chapter explores how, by rooting the identity of artists to their location, whether urban or suburban, such gestures served to create a distinction in the growing market for rap music in the 1990s. In addition to examining these professed differences, the chapter investigates underappreciated similarities in the origins of East and West Coast hip hop practices stemming from Jamaican Sound System culture.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Camelbeeck ◽  
Koen Van Noten ◽  
Thomas Lecocq ◽  
Marc Hendrickx

Abstract. Shallow, light to moderate magnitude earthquakes in stable continental regions can have a damaging impact on vulnerable surface constructions. In the coal area of the Hainaut province in Belgium, a century of shallow seismic activity occurred from the end of the 19th century until the late 20th century. This seismicity is the second largest source of seismic hazard in northwestern Europe, after the Lower Rhine Embayment. The present study synthesises the impact and damage caused by this unique shallow seismicity. Reviewing intensity data provided in official macroseismic surveys held by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, press reports, and contemporary scientific studies resulted in a complete macroseismic intensity dataset. The strong shaking of five seismic events with moment magnitudes Mw around 4.0, which occurred on 3 June 1911, 3 April 1949, 15 December 1965, 16 January 1966, and 28 March 1967, locally caused widespread moderate damage to buildings corresponding to maximum intensity VII in the EMS-98 scale. For 28 earthquakes, detailed macroseismic maps were created. Our study highlights the capability of shallow, small-magnitude earthquakes to generate damage. Subsequently, using the Hainaut intensity dataset, we modelled a new Hainaut intensity attenuation law and created relationships linking magnitude, epicentral intensity and focal depth. Using these relationships, we estimated the location and magnitude of pre-1985 earthquakes that occurred prior to deployment of the modern digital Belgian seismic network. Estimated focal depths allowed discriminating between two different types of earthquakes. Some events were very shallow, only a few hundred metres deep, suggesting a close link to mining activities. Other earthquakes, including the largest and most damaging events, occurred at depths greater than 2 km but no deeper than 6 km, which would exclude a direct relationship with mining, but yet still might imply a triggering causality. This work results in a new updated earthquake catalogue including 123 seismic events. Our attenuation modelling moreover suggests that current hazard maps overestimated ground motion levels in the Hainaut area due to the use of inadequate ground motion prediction equations. Our Hainaut attenuation model is hence useful to evaluate the potential impact of current and future, e.g. geothermal energy, projects in the Hainaut area and other regions with a similar geological configuration.


2021 ◽  

The academic study both of boys’ lives and of fatherhood has increased exponentially since the late 20th century, with both fields part of a wider expansion of masculinity studies, itself the product of a renewed focus on issues of gender and identity resulting from the rise of feminist studies in the closing decades of the 20th century. While some studies of fathering have paid attention to the topic of parenting boys, and a few of the growing number of studies of boys’ experiences have focused on relationships with fathers, research that brings the two topics together, exploring either fathers’ experience of raising sons, or boys’ relationships with their fathers, is a relatively new and developing field. This is by contrast with the situation in popular discourse, where a good deal of attention has focused on fathers and sons, often with a negative slant, viewing the so-called problem of boys (whether a supposed decline in educational achievement or a rise in antisocial behavior) as the result of father absence and a lack of positive male role models in the lives of boys in modern society. The topic of boys and fatherhood thus stands at the intersection of a number of important areas both of academic interest and of current policy debates and discourses, and this review seeks to include a cross section of those connected discussions from a range of intersecting disciplinary backgrounds. The primary focus is on aspects of boys’ relationships with their fathers, including the influence of those relationships on boys’ developing identities, and the role of fathers in responding to specific challenges in their sons’ lives. The emphasis on relationships complements the broader Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies article on “Fathers” (by Esther McDermott), which focuses on social and structural aspects of fatherhood, as well as its representations. Any review of the academic literature on boys and fatherhood cannot avoid the vexed question of absent fatherhood, which is covered by two sections here: the first attempting to present diverse perspectives on the impact on boys, and the second examining the related debate surrounding the supposed absence of male role models in boys’ lives. The final section reviews the literature on another contentious issue, young fatherhood, and includes a range of perspectives on the implications of boys themselves becoming fathers. Although Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies already includes a review of the literature on teenage fatherhood in the “Teenage Fathers” article (by Andrew M. Kiselica and Mark S. Kiselica), the primary focus there is North American, while the current review seeks both to expand the geographical scope and to reflect more-recent studies. An attempt has been made throughout this review to present a global perspective and to demonstrate the ways in which the issues under discussion play out for boys and their fathers from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 985
Author(s):  
Rita Ochoa

In 1998, the Lisbon Universal Exhibition—Expo’98—led to an urban regeneration process on Lisbon’s waterfront. Following the example of other cities, this event was a pretext for rethinking and replacing a depressed area and for reconnecting it with the Tagus river through the creation of a set of new spaces for common use along the water. It was promoted as a public art program, which can be considered quite innovative in the Portuguese context. In view of this framework, this article aims to debate the relationships between public art and the dynamics of urban regeneration at the end of the 20th century. For that, it will analyse: (1) Expo’98’s public art program, comparing its initial assumptions with the final results; and (2) the impact of this program, through the identification of the placement of public art before (1974–1998) and after (1999–2009) the event. Although most of the implemented works did not (intentionally) explore aspects of space integration nor issues of public space appropriation, Expo’98’s public art program originated a monumentalisation of Lisbon’s eastern riverfront, later extended to other waterfront areas. At the same time, it played an important role in the way of understanding the city and public space that decisively influenced subsequent policies and projects. It is concluded that public art had a significant role in urban processes in the late 20th century, which is quite evident in a discourse of urban art as space qualifier and as a means of economic and social development.


Author(s):  
Olga Rvacheva ◽  
Pierre Labrunie

Introduction. The paper deals with studying the formation of culture elements during the Cossacks revival process in the late 20th – early 21st centuries. The cultural pattern of a community is always changing. Cultural practices and traditions of the past get integrated into the modern social conditions, while new values and rituals assume the character of traditional ones. The topicality of the subject derives from the fact that the Cossack culture was subject to a dramatic transformation in the 20th century, while many elements of the culture were wiped out. The transmission of the cultural tradition was interrupted. The Cossacks revival in the late 20th century supposed a return to traditional historical forms. However, this task proved difficult because of the break in the transmission of the ethnic culture. The formation of the present-day Cossack cultural system supposed the selection of some elements of culture from the past and their integration into the new conditions as well as the creation of new forms of culture that would contribute to the cultural identification of the Cossacks. Methods and materials. Historiography has predominantly described the traditional forms of the Cossack culture. The issues of cultural construction were touched upon only occasionally. This paper applies the historical and chronological, historicalgenetic methods as well as the conception of socio-cultural construction. Analysis. During the Cossacks revival process its participants demonstrated a sharp increase of interest in the traditional forms of culture. The attempts at their integration into the present-day conditions led to the deformation of cultural forms. They lost their authenticity and transformed themselves into secondary forms of culture, thus cultural patterns of the modern Cossacks got changed. At the same time, new cultural traditions and norms were “invented”. Their function was to fix Cossacks identity and to show that the Cossacks do exist in the social life of the country. The adaptation of the traditions and historical elements of the Cossack socio-cultural system had its peculiarities. The traditions and elements were taken from different epochs and formed an arbitrary composition of different cultural phenomena. Traditions played an important role in the Cossacks revival process because they acted as cultural identification markers for the Cossack community. For that reason even new cultural practices were given the appearance of traditions. Results. In the late 20th – early 21st centuries the restoration of the Cossack culture was actually its construction. A number of trends can be traced in the process. They developed concurrently and contributed to the creation of new cultural milieu.


Author(s):  
Muh Saerozi

Islamization of Java becomes an actual topic of religious social research because the phenomena not only relate to religious discourse but also other aspects. This research focuses on the Islamization of the government center of Salatiga Central Java. The aims of this study are: to find the academic answer to why Islamization occurred in the government center of Salatiga in Central Java, to find out the Islamization process underway, to describe the dominant factors affecting Islamization, and to describe the impact of Islamization on religious life around the central government. The benefit of this research is to contribute the theories of Islamization of Government center of Java in the late of 20th century. This study is a descriptive research and causality analysis.  The events were limited to those of 1985 to 2018. The data were sourced from the archives, inscription, news, interviews, and literature. The results of the study found that the Islamization of the Salatiga government center was carried out because the infrastructure was still European patterned. The actualization of Muslim religiosity was not well supported by this infrastructure. The symbol of Islamization is the transformation of the villa on the west of the city square into a mosque. The Islamization was successful because of the symbiotic factors between political parties, rulers, scholars, Islamic universities, and religious organizations. There was no significant impact yet on the improvement of spiritual and social lives around the government center. This study enriches theories about the symbiotic relations of religions, politics, and social changes in Java in the late 20th century.


Author(s):  
Marguerite Nguyen

New Orleans has long been a city vital to the American imagination, known for its deep colonial and cultural history while, at the same time, evolving into the post-Katrina “city that care forgot.” Shaped by Spanish, French, and British imperialisms and situated at the edge of the American South, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean, New Orleans is a geography distinguished by transnational crosscurrents and intense meteorological activity; an economically and politically strategic port town, it is a below-sea-level city continuously vulnerable to environmental disaster. Typically neglected in dominant mappings of the city, however, are the area’s Pacific ties that have also helped to make New Orleans. Ever since the mid-19th century, various Asian and Asian American groups have populated southern Louisiana as immigrants, workers, traders, and refugees. After the Civil War, thousands of Chinese and Filipinos arrived in the region as a supposed replacement for slave labor. In the mid-20th century, the US government dispersed numerous Japanese Americans to the area after internment, while since the late 20th century, New Orleans has been home to one of the densest populations of Vietnam War refugees in the country. These migrations spurred the creation of ethnic enclaves and cultural practices that have directly and tangentially defined New Orleans, providing significant labor pools and offering illustrative narratives of post-disaster rebuilding. Given the region’s rich Pacific history and daily environmental vulnerability, engaging New Orleanian culture compels an Asian Americanist ecocritical approach, or one that engages the relationship among space, matter, culture, and critique, and attends to regional details as well as Pacific contexts. Some of the more prominent portrayals of Asian Louisiana, such as those by Lafcadio Hearn and Robert Olen Butler, have tended to exoticize their subject. By contrast, examining works by Bao Phi, An-My Lê, and Anna Kazumi Stahl reveals alternative ecologies of Louisiana that contribute to a stronger understanding of racial relations in the region, further specifies the Gulf Coast’s transnational dynamics, and foregrounds the value of Asian American studies for ecocriticism (and vice versa). These artists’ portrayals of disaster-oriented landscapes show how attention to overlooked Asian American ecologies reveals the fundamental spatial, economic, and environmental precariousness of our times for marginalized communities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Hansen

Postmodernism is a broad intellectual movement that has been changing the way people approach art, music, literature, politics, and philosophy since the late 20th century. This article addresses the impact of postmodern thinking on the practice of counseling and its relevance to counselors' approach to understanding clients and their world.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Reese

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism. The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological). A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?


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