Developing a Sense of Place through Minorities' Traditional Music in Contemporary China

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 81-92
Author(s):  
Ning Ying [宁颖]

Looking back over the past nearly 70 years since the People’s Republic of China was established, it seems that the meaning of ‘place’ has varied and changed, especially since the turn of the millennium. ‘Place’ usually refers to a specific geographical area, but it can also reference an imagined space – that is, a sense of place is assembled through experience, feeling, perception and identification. To date, Chinese scholars have paid more attention to the close relationship between traditional music and its locale, or the place in which its original owners resided, but there has been little research that moves beyond a geographical conceptualization. However, the dimensions of place in China are more complex when we consider ethnic minorities rather than the majority Han Chinese: minority musicians represent themselves through their music, while the central government emphasizes the integration of diverse cultures within the Chinese nation. Representations of place, and how these relate to music, therefore differ. This chapter examines, using Feld’s and Basso’s (1996) term, what the ‘sense of place’ is for minority musicians, and how within contemporary China musicians and the state have developed different ‘senses of place’.

Punjab has emerged as an important rice-producing state in the country. The state with 1.53 percent of the geographical area of the country produces more than 11 percent of total rice production in the country. The production of rice in Punjab increased more than 10 times due to an increase in area and yield. The growth of a rice crop at such a high rate over 20 years in Punjab is indeed a rare phenomenon in the history of agricultural development in the world. Due to extensive cultivation of rice in Punjab, the state has been over-exploiting the groundwater, more than its recharge. Most of the tube-well dominated districts of the state, witnessed the fall in water table more than 20 to 30 cm per year. To dispose of the paddy straw, the farmers of Punjab generally opt for burning it. This practice of burning of paddy straw besides nutrient loss is posing a serious problem for the public health and transportation system. Rice has now become a problematic crop for Punjab state due to its ill effects on its natural resources, that is, the water and soil environmental degradation. The Punjab Agricultural University experts and other committees estimated that the total groundwater recharge from all sources can sustain/support only 16-17 lakh ha of paddy in Punjab. The area under the crop increased to 29 lakh ha which was unsustainable in the long run. The area under rice in Punjab should be stabilized at 16-17 lakh ha and the remaining paddy area should be shifted to other crops like pulses, oilseeds, maize, fruits, and vegetables, etc. requiringless water, to achieve proper water balance. Thus diversification of some area from paddy is in the interest of Punjab farmers, State government and the Central government for long term food security on a sustainable basis.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Xiaoxuan Wang

This article explores critical shifts in the governance of religion amid massive urbanization and technological advances in contemporary China. Since the turn of the millennium, along with rapid urban transformation, the Chinese state has greatly expanded its reach into and surveillance of religious communities. At the same time, tensions between state initiatives and religious communities have come to the forefront of public attention. So far, scholarly attention has mostly focused on the repression of religious communities, especially Christians. The goal of this article is to highlight broader transitions in the ways religion is governed in China and to reflect on how these transitions should be understood alongside the government's social and political agendas. The advancement of technologies and the extension of the bureaucratic system to maintain control of a rapidly urbanizing society, I argue, have brought about a “technological turn” of secularism in China, which will have a far-reaching impact on religious life.


1976 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 734-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin A. Winckler

Professor Nathan's pungent essay raises important issues for the politics of development in general and for drawing comparative conclusions from the Chinese case in particular. His cleansing scepticism demolishes some positions which may be held by authors in the China field and reminds others that the unstated assumptions in their models need better articulation. However he goes too far. What needs to be re-established is that clear and modest formulations of short-term recurrence, interdependence among policies, and two-sided policy disagreement are not avoidable errors but indispensable heuristic devices in the conceptual repertoire of China watchers. In fact it would be a great disservice to stùdies of contemporary China and to comparative study of the Chinese case if Professor Nathan were allowed to succeed in his attempt to identify all such analyses with his reductio ad absurdum of some of them. Let us try to rescue the possibility of constructive social science modelling of the three principal issues Professor Nathan raises.


2021 ◽  

In recent political and constitutional history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographers, this book explores the layered and constantly changing meanings of territory in late medieval and early modern Europe before cartography and state formation turned boundaries and territories into more fixed (but still changeable) geographical entities. Its central thesis is that analysing the notion of territory in a premodern setting involves analysing territorial practices: practices that relate people and power to space(s). The book not only examines the construction and spatial structure of premodern territories but also explores their perception and representation through the use of a broad range of sources: from administrative texts to maps, from stained glass windows to chronicles.


2019 ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
Remigiusz Rosicki

The objective scope of the analysis performed in the text encompasses selected aspects of policy in its topological dimension. The space of policy is understood as both a theoretical construct (a policy field) and relations between the characteristics of political actors and their special kind of geographical co-existence. The following have been recognised as essential characteristics of policymaking: (1) electoral process and pluralism, (2) functioning of government, (3) political participation, (4) political culture and (5) civil liberties. These features can become an object of analysis in the assessment of democratic and authoritarian tendencies in selected countries. The text uses two statistical methods of multidimensional comparative analysis (Ward’s method and k-means method), apart from which use has been made of basic descriptive statistics and a comparative analysis of the values of the parameters of political characteristics. A selection of 40 European countries (EU-28 and 12 other countries) have been subjected to a statistical analysis according to the 2018 data. The main goal of the analysis is to connect facts and characteristics attributed to policy with a specific geographical area. In order to elaborate the objective scope of the research problem, the following research questions have been presented in the text: (1) Which of the characteristics of policy will determine the division of state entities according to a special type of clusters?, (2) Will political characteristics determine the division of particular state entities according to a special type of geographical division? The addressed research questions have been related to the hypotheses subjected to verification in the text.


Archeion ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 342-371
Author(s):  
Magdalena Wiśniewska-Drewniak

The Archival Science journal in the years 2011–2020 – an analysis of research papers Archival Science is currently the most important archive journal, published in English since 2001. The aim of this article is to analyse articles published in that journal in the years 2011–2020. Four types of issues were analysed: the authors’ affiliations, geographical characteristics of articles, research methods and the subject of the published texts. As a result, it was noted that authors of articles come mostly from English-speaking countries (which confirms the trend from the years 2001–2010, studied by Eric Ketelaar in 2010) and when the subject of an article focuses on a specific geographical area, it concerns English-speaking countries as well. It was observed that many research articles do not present specific research methods and those that do mention not only traditional methods, such as archival research and a literature review, but also methods characteristic of social sciences (e.g. an interview, observation, survey). Ten most popular subjects described in the analysed texts include: digital issues, the underprivileged, state archives and documentation, the history of archives, human rights, decolonisation, ethics, preparing archival materials, social archives, the profession of an archivist and documentation manager.


1995 ◽  
Vol 142 ◽  
pp. 487-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jae Ho Chung

Spatial aspects of power have been relatively neglected in the field of political science in general, with the notable exception of federalism. Many have argued that the study of political power has generally confined itself to the national level and paid scant attention to the interactions between the central government on the one hand and regional and local authorities on the other. Several tendencies have worked against the flourishing of political research on central-local government relations in the last three decades. First, in methodological terms, the “behavioural revolution” that swept the discipline caused a sudden premature end to the institutional analysis so crucial to central-local government relations. Secondly, in thematic terms, political scientists have been overly preoccupied with central-level processes of decision-making while neglecting the politics of central-local relations. Thirdly, in conceptual terms, the rise of “state” as an encompassing concept was facilitated largely at the expense of complex intra-governmental dynamics.


Author(s):  
Indrani Das ◽  
Sanjoy Das

Geocasting is a subset of conventional multicasting problem. Geocasting means to deliver a message or data to a specific geographical area. Routing refers to the activities necessary to route a message in its travel from source to the destination node. The routing of a message is very important and relatively difficult problems in the context of Ad-hoc Networks because nodes are moving very fast, network load or traffic patterns, and topology of the network is dynamical changes with time. In this chapter, different geocast routing mechanisms used in both Mobile Ad-hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. The authors have shown a strong and in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each protocol. For delivering geocast message, both the source and destination nodes use location information. The nodes determine their locations by using the Global Positioning System (GPS). They have presented a comprehensive comparative analysis of existing geocast routing protocols and proposed future direction in designing a new routing protocol addressing the problem.


Author(s):  
Yen-Han Lee ◽  
Timothy C. Chiang ◽  
Ching-Ti Liu ◽  
Yen-Chang Chang

Abstract Background China has undergone rapid Westernization and established dramatic social reforms since the early 21st century. However, health issues led to challenges in the lives of the Chinese residents. Western fast food and sweetened beverages, two food options associated with chronic diseases and obesity, have played key roles to alter adolescents’ dietary patterns. This study aims to examine the association between adolescents’ visits to Western fast food restaurants and sweetened beverage consumption. Methods Applying three waves of the China Health and Nutrition Study (CHNS) between 2006 and 2011 (n = 1063), we used generalized Poisson regression (GPR) to investigate the association between adolescents’ Western fast food restaurant visits and sweetened beverage consumption, as the popularity of fast food and sweetened beverages has skyrocketed among adolescents in contemporary China. A linear-by-linear association test was used as a trend test to study general patterns between sweetened beverage consumption and Western fast food restaurant visits. We adjusted all models with sweetened beverage consumption frequency, four food preferences (fast food, salty snacks, fruits and vegetables), school status, gross household income, provinces, rural/urban regions, age and gender. Results From the results of the trend test, frequent sweetened beverage consumption was highly associated with more Western fast food restaurant visits among Chinese adolescents in the three waves (p < 0.001). Furthermore, we observed that adolescents, who had less than monthly sweetened beverage consumption or did not drink them at all, had much less likelihood of visiting Western fast food restaurants (p < 0.05), compared with those daily consumers. Conclusion Adolescents’ sweetened beverage consumption was highly associated with Western fast food restaurant visits in contemporary China. Further actions are needed from the Chinese central government to create a healthier dietary environment for adolescents.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document