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The Ghost in the City

Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China

By Michele Matteini

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–99) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing’s Southern City. Over two decades, he became the favored artist of a cosmopolitan community of scholars...

The Brush of Insight

Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court

By Yael Rice

Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mughal court painters evolved from illustrators of manuscripts and albums to active mediators of imperial visionary experience, cultivating their patrons’ earthly and spiritual authority. Featuring...

Old Stacks, New Leaves

The Arts of the Book in South Asia

By Sonal Khullar

In the twenty-first century, debates on the future of books and print culture have intensified with the rise of digital technologies, and the contemporary art world has witnessed an explosion of interest in the book...

Chinese Autobiographical Writing

An Anthology of Personal Accounts

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, Ping Yao

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in...

Porcelain for the Emperor

Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China

By Kai Jun Chen

The exquisite ceramic ware produced at the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory at Jingdezhen in southern China functioned as a kind of visual propaganda for the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court. Porcelain for the Emperor charts the career...

Park Dae Sung

Ink Reimagined

By Sunglim Kim

Contemporary Korean artist Park Dae Sung (b. 1945) works in the traditional medium of ink painting while transforming familiar Korean landscapes with his modern and imaginative interpretations of the natural world. Park, who lost his...

A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry

An Anthology

By Michelle Yeh, Zhangbin Li, Frank Stewart

This volume—a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh’s 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry—brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of...

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant

Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

By Faizah Zakaria. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? The...

Spatial Dunhuang

Experiencing the Mogao Caves

By Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved...

Material Contradictions in Mao's China

By Jennifer Altehenger, Denise Y. Ho

The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to...

Lahore Cinema

Between Realism and Fable

By Iftikhar Dadi

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore,...

The Cultivated Forest

People and Woodlands in Asian History

By Ian M. Miller, Bradley Camp Davis, Brian Lander, John S. Lee

Forests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and Southeast Asia brings together case studies from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Sumatra to explore continuities in the...

Fixing the Image

Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh

By Jenna Grant

Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information...

Community Movements in Southeast Asia

An Anthropological Perspective of Assemblages

By Ryoko Nishii, Shigeharu Tanabe

Derived from the terms community and social movement, Shigeharu Tanabe’s concept of community movements is the process by which people create alternative communities, practices, and worlds that resist the influence and imposition of hegemonic political...

Heritage Drinks of Myanmar

By Luke J. Corbin. Photographs by Shwe Paw Mya Tin

Heritage Drinks of Myanmar takes the reader on an anthropological journey through emerald mountains and rust-red valleys to showcase some of the myriad alcoholic drinks made in this unique and fascinating country. In Myanmar, freshly...

Upland Geopolitics

Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush

By Michael B. Dwyer. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

In the twenty-first century, land deals in the Global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Transnational access to arable land in impoverished "land-rich" countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia highlights the...

Turning Land into Capital

Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

By Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, Michael B. Dwyer, K. Sivaramakrishnan

In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have rolled back "land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of Cold War–era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at...

The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön

A Woman of Power and Privilege

By Alison Melnick Dyer

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war,...

Governing Water in India

Inequality, Reform, and the State

By Leela Fernandes

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose...

Spawning Modern Fish

Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon

By Heather Anne Swanson. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of other places, as part of efforts...