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This book involves collection of papers primarily focused on the origin and development of Chinese civilization in the concept of archaeological context from the 6000 BCE to 1300 BCE through archaeological cultural perspectives. It systematically illustrates the prehistoric cultural history of China at the period from Neolithic to the early Bronze Age during 20000-1300 BCE, composing not only the proper region around the Central Plain but also the margin areas mainly in the west, and examines the cultural relationship and exchanges nationally and internationally through thousand years of advancing social complexity in geographical and temporal genealogies. It introduces three prehistoric stages for the course of Chinese Civilization Development; the three major Civilization Development Models during the Chalcolithic period; how environmental changes and warfare functioned as the part of mechanism to make civilization evolve; the Bronze Age Revolution from the West; and the critical evaluation of the characteristics belonging to Chinese Civilization and the review of ancient legendary histories and legends through the archaeological perspectives. This book is essential reading for all those wanting more information about the foundations of Chinese history and civilization through archaeological studies.

While many of us may strive to locate a sense of identity and belonging expressed via a home or ancestral homeland; today, however, this connection is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward identification. This collection aims at mapping narratives or artwork of home/homeland that present shared, private, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place, especially in the context of today's migrations and upheavals, along with alarming degrees of increased nativism, racism, and anti-Asian violence. This volume includes papers by artists, filmmakers, and comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in Asian diaspora studies, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies.

This book explores the multifaceted dimensions of the Girmitya diaspora and post-memory. The intersections of dis/re-location and memory have always been a focus of scholarly interest and the volume envisages the roots of migration and culture, life stories, narratives, and personal anecdotes. It further accentuates Girmitiya struggles, politics of displacement, relationships with the homeland and host land, oral traditions, repercussions, and retention of the archival sites. The cross-examination of memories helps in building a framework to study the varied experiences of the Girmitiya community. In this volume, through a blend of historical and scholarly discourse, we embark on a journey to unearth the layers of meaning embedded within the Girmitya experience. The tales of Girmitya migration amplifies marginalized voices and illuminates the enduring resilience. By chronicling the experiences of the indentured migration, we pay homage to the pioneers, recognize the intricacy of their toils, and commemorate the continuing legacy.

This book talks about “Human Spirit and its Manifestations: A ‘Civilizational'Perspective”, “Image and Expectations: China from the Perspective of the ‘Other'Lecture Series”, “Civilization Communication and Mutual Enrichment”, and “Civilizational Problems: A Cavalier Perspective”. Civilization is a kind of spiritual achievements with a holistic feature that is structural but not easy to see thoroughly in culture. This determines that “dialogue among civilizations” is not only a continuous and holistic cultural exchange activity, but also a material and spiritual exchange activity in different fields. With the growth of international peace power represented by China, the cultural exchanges and mutual learning activities among all ethnic groups in the world will be further promoted at a new height and breadth. The academic research on “dialogue among civilizations” followed in this book will also contribute to the arrival of this era. This book is suitable for general readers and scholars who are interested in Chinese culture, Chinese civilization, cultural exchanges, and mutual enrichment.

This handbook offers an updated and comprehensive presentation of knowledge on Korean modern and contemporary food history. It covers the changes in food availability, nutrition, and the health status of Koreans, and the Korean food industry's development from the late period of Joseon dynasty in the mid-19th century, to the present. This period includes the severe poverty and food shortage of the Joseon dynasty, followed by the Japanese invasion, Independence and the South-North division, the Korean war, and rapid industrial development. The influence of national and international environments and political changes during the last 150 years on the Korean food security and the nutritional situation of the people is demarcated. In doing so, the author makes novel suggestions on possible contributions to alleviate the world food crisis in the future. Relevant to food historians and food scientists, and East Asian studies scholars with a particular interest in Korean culture and history,this is a pioneering work that elucidates the driving forces for the development and betterment of Korean society—through food acquisition.

This timely and ambitious volume - a product of close research collaboration with the United Nations Multi-Country Office for Micronesia - is conceived as a holistic “journey” across various domains of progress in a region that, despite fundamental common traits, remains vast and diverse. Pacific island countries and territories (PICTs) have (too) often been identified with elements of vulnerability, whether these be social, economic, or environmental in nature. While these factors cannot be overlooked, this volume aims to showcase not only the long-standing and emerging challenges but, perhaps more importantly, the opportunities, the resilience, the resourcefulness, and the ambition that local socioeconomic development patterns in the Pacific already encompass. Beyond PICTs themselves, we hope that the analyses collected in this book will contribute to highlighting the global significance of the human–nature nexus in the current Anthropocene. Often captured in the concept of “small islands, big oceans”, the importance of the region and its islands and peoples transcends the geographical remoteness and small size of many PICTs.

This book explores the status of women representation in management in Indian industries. Recognizing that women managers are facing barriers in achieving top level of management positions in industries, it adopts unique methodology of involving men and women managers as respondents to understand the key issues of gender diversity, glass ceiling, glass walls, glass cliffs, and gender inequality in the Indian corporate scenario. The book, via its six chapters, explores these key issues through the lens of feminist theories under four dimensions – personal, work, organisational and social – and contains an extensive literature review to understand the root causes of these issues. Secondly, it discusses a pilot study conducted to understand the perspectives about career growth of women managers. Outcome of this pilot study works towards conceptualising factors under four dimensions, mentioned above, influencing women participation in management, and to develop survey tools for further quantitative study. Thirdly, for the empirical analysis, the book employs exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify factors under each of these four dimensions; and structure of the relationship between factors and women representation in management is confirmed by the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). This book is beneficial for several stakeholders as it is a multidimensional study. It is useful for the undergraduate and post graduate students and research scholars of management, social sciences (such as economics, gender studies, psychology, political sciences, sociology etc), law, medicine, and engineering. Apart from this, it is also useful for corporate executives, decision makers of corporate governance, women elected representatives, administrators, development practitioners, teachers, legal experts, international agencies like UN who are working on women empowerment, and all those agencies working towards meeting SDG5 goal.

This book investigates the ways in which new developments in areas of language teaching practice, such as policy-making, planning, methodology and the use of educational technology are locally adopted, adapted, initiated, and implemented in Vietnam and Cambodia. The region is responding to a large number of significant challenges, including large-scale education reforms, the effects of globalisation and the need for lifelong learning, as well as concerns about the quality of its language education system. By looking at the drivers, stakeholders, obstacles and affordances in one particular regional context, the authors examine how processes of change occur. This will help anyone involved in language development, from curriculum reform to materials development, and from programme evaluation to the setting of assessment standards. The book will be of particular interest to those involved in managing change in language education that attempts to mediate between global trends and local needs, as well as students and scholars working in language education, applied linguistics and related fields.

This book investigates all facets of Chinese tourism in a single destination, and its fascinating rise and evolution. It provides an overview of the first two decades of twenty-first century Chinese tourism in Australia, covering the early days, when Chinese tourism was mainly guided package tours with tourists visiting standard iconic sites, and its evolution into more individualistic tourism, with younger tourists seeking out sites of particular interest. Many of these ‘new sites'are places where self-photography has particular merit, chosen in part because they are colourful, and images are distributed in real time to communicate with others and enhance social status. This quest for distinctiveness and colour has contributed to creating a distinctly Chinese tourist geography of Australia, analysed here in relation to conventional tourism geographies. The book takes a deliberately chronological approach to focus on the speed of change, discussing the more exciting and active'new tourism'in ways that integrate qualitative and quantitative research, and provide a basis for international comparison and discussion of key emerging themes in tourism studies.

This book presents an in-depth analysis of Howard Goldblatt's translation of Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (L&D). It explores how Goldblatt translates the original novel under the influence of three major manipulative powers: poetics, ideology and patronage, as well as his own subjectivity (translator subjectivity), to achieve his objectives as a literary translator. The author analyses both the translation and its paratext to gain a more complete understanding of Goldblatt's accomplishments, and examines how Goldblatt rewrites the original text under the influence of various patronage factors, such as the original author, publisher, editor, market expectancy, literary collaborator, and the target reader. This book provides a comprehensive picture of the production, reception and dissemination of Goldblatt's translation, exposing the motivations behind his translation in full measure, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature and Literary Studies, and Chinese Culture and Literature.

This book uses contemporary continental philosophy to develop an alternative theory of the superhero to the one currently offered by the comic book industry and comic book studies. Studying superheroes from South Asian pop culture, this book questions the definition of the superhero and the allegedly sacrosanct nature of its origin and identity in comic books. This book looks at the superhero as a performative figure and explores how the superheroic imagination opens up diverse modes of creative thinking. Superheroes studied in this book include Narayan Debnath's Bantul the Great (comics), Premendra Mitra's Ghanashyam Das or Ghanada (Tall Tale), Satyajit Ray's Professor Trilokeswar Shonku (science fiction/fantasy fiction), and one of the nine gems of Emperor Akbar's court, Raja Birbar or Birbal (mediaeval Indian history). By virtue of perpetual reconfiguration of its elements, the book argues, the concept of the superhero makes itself ‘always new'and it is always already ‘open onto elsewhere'.

This book, first of its kind in the Indian context, brings together both a theoretical understanding of various aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand-up comedy, and case studies of various forms of stand-up comedy in India. This volume is interdisciplinary wherein the contributors raise pertinent issues about the role of stand-up comedy in India in contemporary times. With an increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form, stand-up comedy in India cannot be ignored anymore. The book includes chapters on Indian stand-up comedy related to the themes of: interrogating the term ‘Indian stand-up comedy'; historical lineage of stand-up in India; the politics of language and laughter; ‘charged humour'vs ‘safe'/profitable comedy; stand-up comics as parrhesiastes, performance of the self and comic personas; comedy and other forms of artistic expression; laughter clubs, urbanism and stand-up comedy; surveillance, censorship and trolling; the economy of production and consumption of stand-up comedy and the ‘silences'and limitations in the contemporary form of stand-up in India.

This book provides an insight into the complex entanglements between African countries and India, China, and South Korea from multidisciplinary perspectives connecting approaches from cultural, anthropological, literary, and music studies and art history. The three parts present a regional focus, namely Africa-India, Africa-South Korea, and Africa-China while the single contributions speak to each other and offer complementary insights. At the same time, the chapters also link across the regional realms as they deal with similar topics, such as travelling music genres. In part I, for Pombo material culture is the starting point to investigate the connections between the islands of the Indian Ocean and India by questioning the construction of memory. It highlights various aspects of the multilayered history of connections between Africa, the islands, and India. Part II gathers contributions that are complimentary to each other and therefore contribute to the understanding of the complex entanglements in area studies. Part III (Africa-South Korea) explores the impact of African-American arts and artists on South Korea's popular culture as well as the changing perception of artists of African descent in visual popular culture. It shows the impact of Korean content in South Africa.

This book interprets the concepts, philosophies and cultural traditions of lunli (roughly construed as “relationships and rationality”) from the perspective and domain of ‘dialogue civilization.'On the conceptual level, it expounds the common reference and different tenets of the Chinese lunli and the Western “ethic”, exploring the characteristics of lunli and'ethic'in civilization history, considering notably the difference between unification of family and state and division of the two at the embryonic stage of civilization. The book draws on the lunli-oriented culture and religion-based culture to demonstrate the difference between Chinese lunli and Western “ethic” in their respective top design and ultimate care, by exploring the issue “What the world would be like, if there were no lunli” for the Chinese and “What the world would be like, if there were no God” for westerners. Since lunli is the most prominent feature of “being Chinese”, or the most symbolic and interpretative Chinese cultural concept, this pivot provides a key introduction for Western readers not only to the concept itself, but also to modern day Chinese culture.

This book explores the postcolonial discourse and decolonization processes in modern Kazakhstan and beyond. It pays particular attention to such areas as national and religious identity, language, literature, and historical narratives. Despite the fact that the post-colonial theory initially emerged in other regions of the world, it has increasingly been applied in the scholarship on Central Asia. Exploring recent debates on post-coloniality in Kazakhstan, this book is an attempt to bring together two bodies of scholarly literature: scholarship on culture and society in post-Soviet Central Asia and research on post-colonial theory. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Eurasian studies as well as researchers and students of post-colonialism in various contexts beyond Eurasia.