scholarly journals Meeting East Asia

Poligrafi ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (93/94) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Helena Motoh

The current issue of Poligrafi focuses on this historical period and explores different aspects of the contact with East Asian religions at that time. The text by Chikako Shigemori Bučar focuses on the visits Alma Karlin made to the temples and shrines in Japan and the traces that remain of those visits in her work and her collection. Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik focuses on how Alma Karlin met with Chinese funerary rituals and mourning practices and how she interpreted them. In the third paper Byoung Yoong Kang provides a detailed reconstruction of the events behind an image in Alma Karlin’s collection that depicts a Korean funeral. In the fourth paper, Klara Hrvatin analyses Japanese musical instruments from the collection of Alma Karlin and their relation to religious music. The last paper, by Helena Motoh, talks about the many ways in which Confucian tradition was understood and interpreted in pre-WWII Slovenia.

Author(s):  
Emin Vagif Mammadov

The article is dedicated to the analysis of archeological excavation as a result of researches discovered in the Mingachevir conducted in the middle of the 20th century of the different type of underground burials of the ancient period. These burials are covered the significant historical period from the second half of the 1st millenium and the first century AD and are the important source of the scientific information on many issues of material and spiritual culture of the population of Caucasus Albania. Underground burials of the ancient period in the Mingachevir zone by the method of placing the deceased in them are divided into three types: 1) burials with a backbone stretched out on the back; 2) burials with a weakly crouched skeleton on the left or right side; 3) burials with a heavily crouched skeleton on the left or right side. The article gives a detailed analysis of all these three types of burials. The author of the article, along with a number of other researchers come to the conclusion that the first type of underground burial is considered to be innovation for the whole of the South Caucasus and its emergence is associated with the penetration of mobile tribes from the North Caucasus in particular the Scythian. Part of these Scythians finally settled in the Mingachevir zone and subsequently merged with the local population, which eventually leads to the appearance of a second type of underground burial in the form of underground graves with poorly crouched skeleton. The third type of underground burial of Mingachevir (Samunis) of the ancient period, namely burials with a heavily crouched skeleton belong to local autochthonous tribes, consolidation of which became the basis for the formation of the state of Caucasian Albania in the 4th – 3rd centuries BC. This type of underground burial has deep local roots and is based on centuries-old local funerary rituals.


Writing from a wide range of historical perspectives, contributors to the anthology shed new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial and postcolonial times in South and South-East Asia. In doing so, this anthology addresses an important gap in the global understanding of documentary discourses, practices, uses and styles. Based upon in-depth essays written by international authorities in the field and cutting-edge doctoral projects, this anthology is the first to encompass different periods, national contexts, subject matter and style in order to address important and also relatively little-known issues in colonial documentary film in the South and South-East Asian regions. This anthology is divided into three main thematic sections, each of which crosses national or geographical boundaries. The first section addresses issues of colonialism, late colonialism and independence. The second section looks at the use of the documentary film by missionaries and Christian evangelists, whilst the third explores the relation between documentary film, nationalism and representation.


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Matthew Hobson

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.


Author(s):  
Kent Roach

This chapter examines the distinct operational and ethical challenges that prosecutors face in national security and especially terrorism cases. The second part of this chapter focuses on the operational challenges that prosecutors face. These include demands for specialization that may be difficult to fulfill given the relative rarity of national security prosecutions; the availability of special investigative powers not normally available in other criminal cases; exceptionally broad and complex offenses; and the demands of federalism and international cooperation. The third part examines ethical and normative challenges that run throughout the many operational aspects of the prosecutorial role in national security cases. These include the challenges of ensuring that often exceptional national security laws are enforced in a manner consistent with the rule of law and human rights. There are also challenges of maintaining an appropriate balance between legitimate claims of secrecy and legitimate demands for disclosure and between maintaining prosecutorial independence and discretion while recognizing the whole of government and whole of society effects of the many difficult decisions that prosecutors must make in national security cases.


2019 ◽  

Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this trade picture. Throughout the book, multi-part trade structures are excavated; the presence of European powers within the Asian trade nexus features as part of this narrative. Visual goods are highlighted, including lacquerwares, paintings, prints, musical instruments, textiles, ivory sculptures, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian ceramic vessels. These essays underscore the significance of Asian industries producing multiples, and the rhetorical charge of these goods, shifting in meaning as they move. Everyday commodities are treated as well; for example, the trans-Pacific trade in contraband mercury, used in silver refinement, is spelled out in detail. Building reverberations between merchant networks, trade goods, and the look of the objects themselves, this richly-illustrated book brings to light the Asian trade engine powering the early modern visual cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the American colonies, and Europe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
B. Setiawan ◽  
Tri Mulyani Sunarharum

Of the many important events that occurred in the two decades of the 21st century, the process of accelerating urbanization—especially in third-world countries—became something quite phenomenal. It's never even happened before. In the early 2000s, only about 45 percent of the population in the third world lived in urban areas, by 2020 the number had reached about 55 percent. Between now and 2035 the percentage of the population living in urban areas will reach about 85 percent in developed countries. Meanwhile, in developing countries will reach about 65 percent. By 2035, it is also projected that about 80 percent of the world's urban population will live in developing countries' cities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Behnke ◽  
Diana Armbruster ◽  
Anja Strobel

Safeguarding the rights of minorities is crucial for just societies. However, there are conceivable situations were minority rights might seriously impede the rights of the majority. Favoring the minority in such cases constitutes a violation of utilitarian principles. To investigate the emotional, cognitive, and punitive responses of observers of such utilitarian rule transgressions, we conducted an online study with 1004 participants. Two moral scenarios (vaccine policy and epidemic) were rephrased in the third-party perspective. In both scenarios the protagonist opted against the utilitarian option which resulted in more fatalities in total, but avoided harm to a minority. The scenarios varied in whether the minority would have been harmed accidentally or deliberate. The majority of participants chose not to punish the scenarios’ protagonists at all. However, 30.5% judged that protecting the minority over the interests of the majority when only accidental harm would have occurred (vaccine policy) was worthy of punishment. In comparison, only 11.5% opted to punish a protagonist whose decision avoided deliberate harm to a minority at the cost of the majority (epidemic). Emotional responses and appropriateness ratings paralleled these results. Furthermore, complex personality × situation interactions revealed the influence of personality features, i.e., psychopathy, empathy, altruism, authoritarianism, need for cognition and faith in intuition, on participants’ responses. The results further underscore the need to consider the interaction of situational features and inter-individual differences in moral decisions and sense of justice.


Author(s):  
Chukwudi I. Nnamchi ◽  
Chukwunweike O. Okoye ◽  
Arinze L. Ezugwu

In this study changes in the alpha and glucoamylase activities of four different improved sorghum varieties were monitored over a 96-hour malting time to determine how the expression of the enzymes were affected by malting. Preliminary tests showed that SK5912 had the highest weight of 40 g/1000 grains and lowest malting loss of about 13%, while KSV 8 followed a weight of 36 g/1000 grains and the most malting loss of 22.6%. Enzyme results showed that the different sorghum varieties differed in their expression of the two of them across different malting regimes. However, all the varieties showed much higher expressions of glucoamylase than α-amylase at all the malting regime. Glucoamylase consistently showed its highest activities of over 71 U/ml across the four sorghum varieties after the first day of germination with variety SRNA giving the highest value slightly above 72 U/ml. The least glucoamylase activities were also given consistently across the four varieties by the unmalted raw grain. The highest α-amylase activities were generally shown across the four varieties after the third day of germination, with variety KSV 8 showing the highest value of about 14 U/ml. The control also gave the least α-amylase activities across all varieties with KSV8 giving the least. Considering the many important and multi-faceted roles that amylases are nowadays known to perform, the study of their expression dynamics in different plants and processes, one of which we report here, could help further the understanding of their characteristics and thus facilitate their maximal utilization.


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