...This introductory chapter discusses the cultural narratives of Burma's Theravada Buddhist engagement with modernity. These cultural narratives reveal genealogies of hegemony and subjugation, patronage and resistance, and power and loss. One such genealogy narrates the state's patronage of Buddhist...

... is challenged by modernity. Consequently, Theravada emerges as a religious example of attempts to avoid change. However, according to the teaching of the Buddha himself, change is one of the three characteristics of reality. All constructed phenomena are subject to it. It is very unlikely that the leaders...

...This chapter examines how single women live within the dilemma of choice. Singles are at the center of contradictions in Japan and the social movement that is stretching the limits of compatibility with the societal rules. Experiencing both the chaos and the flexibility of late modernity, they feel...

... modernity, as well as their struggles with contradictions: external contradictions between historical and global influences in Japan, and internal contradictions between women's desires to actualize an independent self in the spirit of late modernity and their wish for inclusion in the changing relations...

... remain interconnected with the emergence of an urban corporeal modernity, the destabilization of gender roles, and ultimately the place of Mongols on the Euro-Asian social and ethnic continuum. It challenges the limitations of functionalist explanations that analyze anti-Chinese sentiments in Mongolia...

...This chapter argues that Sinophobia in Mongolia is largely the outcome of a lack of contact and knowledge, and that its dynamics are intricately tied to the emergence of modernity. Using a Lacanian interpretation, it explains how the figure of China in contemporary Mongolian culture acts...

...This chapter examines the role of Sinophobia as a vector for ideas of modernity and as a sense of Mongolian communitas. More specifically, it considers the power of the anti-Chinese discourse as a policing tool in Mongolia and in relation to performativity. Despite the considerable...

..., it discusses the ways that women and gay men were not easily accommodated within the national project. It considers how pictures of emancipated women are turned into symbols of the state and icons of modernity that become fetishized. It looks at the routine mobilization of female bodies for the collective good...

...The author reflects on his return to Kragur in 2008 and how the village has become part of the modern world. He first shares his views about electricity and other modern amenities in Kragur as well as their benefits to local residents and admits that many of the things he likes about Kragur...

... considers the verge of modernity, emphasis is placed on both the continuity and the break between the verge and what comes after in terms of polygynous sexuality, including the status of the qing aesthetic. Thus the chapter considers what changes have occurred within this time period, what...

... Meiji, Mori and Baba each developed a theory: Mori concluded that the Japanese language was not unified enough to support the modern nation, and he proposed as a remedy adopting English as a national language; Baba refuted Mori, warning that the adoption of English would destroy the unity...

... imperialism in Asia. The act of studying abroad is here examined as a deep-seated psychic dynamic overdetermined by a colonial modernity that was hinged specifically on the imagination of transpacific movement, in which each departure and arrival was charged with complex feelings and thoughts. Tracking his...

... demographic change experimental Buddhism individualism memorial rituals modernity occupation postwar Perry Matthew C Commodore priests Buddhist religion “religion á la carte ” religiosity restructuring social change social media Sprickard James temples Buddhist benefits spiritual funerals...

...This book examines the ways in which modernity and colonialism intersected in the formation of a cultural empire in East Asia. Using an interdisciplinary and multitextual approach, it investigates the social and cultural experiences of individuals living in this cultural sphere that was created...

... concerning the metropole and the colonies in terms of class, gender, and the unequal access to modernity, as well as the role played by sexual and maternal bodies in the colonial assimilative discourse. They articulated their complicated relationship with the colony of Taiwan through their biological...

... enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about...

..., and willing culprits of imperialist, capitalist, and Western modernity. It links the debate over the dress and comportment of the khit hsan thu as well as the discourse on the contentious feminine figure to the colonial politics of masculinity. Buddhist Burmese consumerism fashion...

...This concluding chapter reviews that the book has examined the complexities of colonialism and modernity in Burma by focusing on the women of the khit kala. It has considered how the modern woman, including the housewife-and-mother and the fashionable khit hsan thu...

...This book explores literature, film, critical discourses, and intellectual development in contemporary China, with particular emphasis on the cultural problematics of unevenness in China's pursuit of modernity in the postsocialist period. It investigates Chinese literary and cinematic practices...

...This chapter examines uneven modernity in postsocialist China using a critical framework of a dialectical understanding of unevenness that looks at different theoretical schools. In retrospect, the history of the postsocialist China is characterized by policies of unevenness. Behind all...