Global Food Research Colloquium - Fertilizer Use in China: Why Is It So High, and What Can Be Done to Reduce It?
2016-05-17 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | ZHG 102
Global Food Research Colloquium
Fertilizer Use in China: Why Is It So High, and What Can Be Done to Reduce It?

Professor David Abler, Ph.D., Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics and Demography, Penn State University

Tuesday, 17.05.2016, 16:15 to 17:45
ZHG 102

On Tuesday, May 17th David Abler will present his research on fertilizer use in China in the Global Food Research Colloquium. The Colloquium has been organized by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development as a joint event with the Agricultural Economics Seminar.

China’s rates of agricultural fertilizer use per hectare are among the highest in the world, and fertilizer is a major contributor to water pollution, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions in China. Several explanations have been put forward for the high rates of fertilizer use in China, most of which do not stand up to close scrutiny. A number of pilot programs offering farmers information, technical assistance, and/or incentives to reduce fertilizer use have been tried, almost all of which have failed. This paper surveys these explanations and programs, identifies key unanswered research questions about fertilizer use in China, and offers programmatic suggestions for reducing fertilizer use based on the experience of other countries.

Find out more about Göttingen University Global Agri-Food Systems program and events on http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/191858.html

CeMEAS Lecture: Beyond Modernity - Understanding Change in Qing China (1644 – 1911)
2016-05-20 12:15 - 14:00 (Europe/Paris) | Verfügungsgebäude, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen
CeMEAS Lecture
Beyond Modernity: Understanding Change in Qing China (1644 – 1911)
Friday, May 20, 2016, 12:15 VG 2.101
Prof. Margherita Zanasi
Director of Asian Studies, Department of History at Louisiana State University
This lecture explores the limits of adopting a modernization approach to the study of economic change in Qing China. Recent works have successfully “decentered” developmental determinism by questioning both the uniqueness of the European experience and the imposition on non-Western countries of derivative chronologies of modernity. They have especially focused on tracing the existence in China of those elements that characterized the modernization experience in Europe, above all the introduction of pro-market and pro-consumption policies. This approach, however, had the unintended consequence of keeping the historical narrative focused on the European experience, overshadowing elements that played a uniquely important role in China, such as population growth.
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, under mounting pressure from population growth, pro-market and pro-consumption ideas and policies that had culminated in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1711 –1799) began to lose favor. This reversal marked the beginning of the uneasy relationship with the free market that came to characterize modern China. In China, therefore, the fortunes of laissez faire thought and policies followed a very different path than in Europe. They emerged almost a hundred year earlier and came later to be considered unsuitable to face newly emerging problems. In China, modernity actually arrived in the form of an increasingly interventionist state.

Image: By tanakawho, Behind the bars, CC BY-NC 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/dYqAgS
Design: CeMEAS

Globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Environmental Impacts on China
2016-06-03 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin) | Seminar Room (Room No. 13.122), Library of the Institute for International Law and European Law, MZG (“Blauer Turm”), 13th Floor
Guest Lecture
Globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Environmental Impacts on China
Maoliang Bu, PhD, Associate Professor, Nanjing University, School of Business
Friday, June 3, 2 pm
Seminar Room (Room No. 13.122), Library of the Institute for International Law and European Law, MZG (“Blauer Turm”), 13th Floor

We kindly invite you to this week’s lecture by Maoliang Bu, jointly organized by the Institute for International Law and European Law, Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies and CeMEAS!
The presentation consists of a couple of papers on China’s environmental issues from the perspective of globalization and corporate social responsibility. Some interesting questions include: Is China a pollution haven of foreign direct investment? Do multinational enterprises race to bottom in China? Does corporate social responsibility play a role? How is the evolvement of pollution industry flight across regions in China?

Guest Lecture: 近代以來中國佛教的基本狀況與未來展望 Basic Situation and Future Prospects of Chinese Buddhism since the Modern Times
2016-06-06 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | VG 4.104
Guest Lecture
近代以來中國佛教的基本狀況與未來展望
普 慧, 國家教育部人文社會科學重點研究基地四川大學中國俗文化研究中心
Monday, June 6, 2016 · 4 pm (c.t.) · VG 4.104

Basic Situation and Future Prospects of Chinese Buddhism since the Modern Times
Pu Hui, Centre for Chinese Folk Cultural Studies of Sichuan University, Key Research Base of Humanities & Social Science of National Ministry of Education

佛教從公元1世紀傳入中國，歷經2000年，已經完全成爲中國傳統文化的重要組成部分，在中國漢文化以及一些主要的少數民族文化中，發揮了重要的作用。人們的社會生活、精神生活都充斥著佛教內容。無論是上層的知識精英，還是下層的黎民百姓，都離不開佛教信仰的指導。
走向近代時的佛教，已經是老態龍鍾，步履蹣跚，一副衰氣。伴隨著近代民族革命和民主革命的興起，中國佛教也開始懲治教內腐敗，力圖復興、光大佛法，以適應社會急變之需。然而，20世紀的中國，戰亂頻仍，內憂外患，民族救亡和國家振興成爲主題。意識形態的加強，政治氛圍的濃郁，把佛教的生存空間擠壓到了瀕臨倒閉的境地。佛教的精神指南作用下滑爲民間神祇的功利主義的心理安慰。20世紀直至今天的30多年裡，佛教迅速復興，力求適應新的社會變革。
中國佛教的前世、今生以及未來將如何行進呢？她還能有新的活力嗎？演講者將提出自己的觀點。

Image: By Mi..chael, CC BY-NC 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/hF5j9v
Design: CeMEAS

Guest Lecture: The Making of Merchants - War, Local Government, and Commercial Organization in Chongqing from 1750 to 1950
2016-06-08 12:15 - 13:45 (Europe/Paris) | Oec. 1.162
Guest Lecture
The Making of Merchants – War, Local Government, and Commercial Organization in Chongqing from 1750 to 1950
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 · 12:15 pm · Oec 1.162
Prof. Maura Dykstra
Caltech Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
This lecture explores the formation, development, and expansion of merchant groups in the inland commercial center of Chongqing from the Qianlong period to the end of the Republican era. It demonstrates how Sichuan’s profile as a military base provided an urgent demand and special conditions for commercial organization at the local level. It illustrates how provincial and local institutions created an opportunity for the emergence of merchant groups whose relationship to the state grew both closer and more complicated over time. In conclusion, this paper argues that the wartime mobilization of merchant groups in the 1930s and 1940s was the climax of two centuries of local state-building.
Picture: 渝城图section4, kindly provided by the speaker

Guest Lecture: Revolution Comes to East: colonial modernity, national subjectivity and subaltern everydayness
2016-06-13 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | KWZ 0.602
Guest Lecture
Revolution Comes to East: Colonial Modernity, National Subjectivity and Subaltern Everydayness
Monday, June 13, 2016 · 6pm (c.t.) KWZ 0.602
Prof. Jie-Hyun Lim
Sogang University

Asianization, Africanization or Latin Americanization of Marxism involves more than a mere transposition of Marxian ideas to non-European countries. When revolution came to East, events contradicted the ideology. The Bolshevik revolution seemed to deny Marx’s famous dictum of ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ Based on a divergent mode of capitalist development from the ‘West’, the Russian revolution represented ‘a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.’
However, revolution in Russia was not a derivative one wherein the historical authenticity of the Marxian revolution in the developed capitalist countries is tested. Viewed from entangled histories of capitalism, colonialism, nationalism and socialism as competing visions of the global modernity, the Bolshevik revolution was the field of political contests of those competing visions. As the development of the global socialism showed in the twentieth century, socialism was not consequent to capitalism but constitutive of it. Confronting subaltern everydayness, all that solid division of the revolution and counterrevolution, and colonial modernity and national subjectivity melts into the air. This is to trace the socialist revolution moving to East from the combined optic of the global modernity and local everydayness with a spatial stress on Asia.

Guest Lecture: Kafka in China - Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers der Moderne
2016-06-15 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris) | Käte-Hamburger-Weg 6, KHW 0.111
Guest Lecture
Kafka in China – Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers der Moderne
Prof. Dr. Ren Weidong, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Wednesday, June 15, 2 pm, Käte-Hamburger-Weg 6, KHW 0.111
Die Rezeption Kafkas als eines Autors der modernen deutschsprachigen Literatur und der literarischen Moderne überhaupt erfolgt in China vor dem Hintergrund der Auseinandersetzung mit der “westlichen” und der eigenen literarischen Moderne.
Mein Vortrag zeichnet die Rezeptionsgeschichte Kafkas in China seit der Öffnungspolitik 1978 nach und deckt die Dispositionen auf, an die auch die chinesische Rezeption der westlichen literarischen Moderne insgesamt anschließt. Kafkas Werk provoziert ein neues ästhetisches Bewusstsein und verlangt eine aktive Anteilnahme des Lesers. Die Beschäftigung mit seinem Werk fordert die konventionellen Normen der chinesischen literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschung heraus und stellt den mit einem traditionellen Realismus vertrauten Leser vor neue Aufgaben. So ist die Geschichte der Kafka-Rezeption auch ein Spiegelbild des Wandels von literarischen Normen, ästhetischem Bewusstsein, dem Erwartungshorizont und der Entwicklung der Literaturforschung in China überhaupt.
Please note that this event will be held in German.

Guest Lecture: Buddhismus im Heutigen China
2016-06-15 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | VG 3.108
Guest Lecture
Buddhismus im Heutigen China
Prof. Dr. Li Xuetao, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Wednesday, June 15, 4 pm, VG 3.108
Vom 22. bis 23. April 2016 fand die nationale Religionskonferenz in Beijing statt, an der Vertreter verschiedener Religionen teilnahmen. Auf dieser Konferenz hielt der chinesische Staatspräsident Xi Jinping eine wichtige Rede. Meister Xuecheng, Präsident der Vereinigung der Buddhisten Chinas, war bei der Konferenz ebenfalls anwesend. Der Buddhismus hat seinen Ursprung im alten Indien. Nach seiner Einführung in China vor etwa 2000 Jahren entwickelt er sich weiter und hat seither große Beiträge für die chinesische Kultur geleistet. Der Grund, warum der Buddhismus festen Fuß in China fassen konnte, liegt darin, dass er sich dem kulturellen Umfeld Chinas angepasst hat. Im Referat will Li über die Entwicklung des Buddhismus in China nach der Gründung der Volksrepublik im Jahr 1949 sprechen. Welches Schicksal hat der Buddhismus in der atheistischen Gesellschaft? Und spielt der Buddhismus weiterhin eine Rolle zur Reinigung des menschlichen Geistes in einer kommerzialisierten Gesellschaft, wie wir sie heute vielerorts erleben?
Please note that this event will be held in German.

Guest Lecture and Roundtable Discussion - Prof. Prasenjit Duara
2016-06-22 18:00 - 2016-06-23 11:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
Guest Lecture and Roundtable Discussion
Sustainability and the Crisis of Transcendence: The Long View from Asia
Public Lecture by Prof. Dr. Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
Wednesday June 22, 18:00-20:00 0.602 KWZ
The rise of Asia and China in particular has been accompanied by the need to project a new, more just vision of the world that is not simply a new hegemony. Many Chinese intellectuals have sought to find inspiration in their historical and transcendent universalisms such as ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia). The paper is an effort to think through
the conceptual and political framework for understanding transcendence in post-Western modernity. Historically, universalisms have been the source of ideals, principles and ethics. Modern universalisms – developed from Kant to Marx – are apparently in retreat, yielding to nationalism and consumerism.Yet the physical salvation of the world is of greatest urgency and becoming, in some quarters, the transcendent goal of our times. It will, however, need to transcend exclusive national sovereignty for its realization. The role of transnational civil society and NGOs as much as quasi-governmental and transnational agencies, are crucial for this realization. Older approaches of dialogical transcendence may furnish us with useful methodologies of linking the personal, the community, the environment and the world.
Regionalizing the Global, Globalizing the Regional: An interdisciplinary conversation
Thursday June 23, 9:15-11:00
0.602 KWZ (please note the new venue!)
Roundtable discussion with

Prof. Dr. Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
Prof. Dr. Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen
Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja, Centre for Modern Indian Studies
Prof. Dr. Matthias Koenig, Institute for Sociology
Prof. Dr. Srirupa Roy, Centre for Modern Indian Studies
Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmeier, Centre for Modern East Asian Studies

Transregional Studies at Göttingen
Presented by the Forum for Transregional and Global Studies, CETREN, CeMIS, CeMEAS, Academic Confucius-Institute & the Center for Theory of Culture and Society (ZTMK)

CeMEAS Lecture: The Realization of One Belt One Road?
2016-06-29 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | Oec 1.163, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3, Göttingen, 37073, Germany
CeMEAS Lecture
The Realization of One Belt One Road?
Wednesday June 29, 2016 · 4 pm (c.t.) · Oec 1.163
Dr. Chun-Yi Lee, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Nottingham
The One Belt One Road (OBOR) project initiated by the President Xi Jing Ping, took shape in March 2015. It is envisaged to connect vibrant East Asia and developed Europe via Silk Road Economic Belt, linking China with European countries via the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Its ultimate goal is to facilitate the trade and investment in Euroasia and promote economic growth.
The first step is to build upon necessarily infrastructure to facilitate the logistic trafficking, enormous financial input is required for the initial infrastructure construction. The aim of OBOR, therefore is to build networks of connectivity. It has to be noted that the geographical connections of ‘belt’ and ‘road’ are multiple. Two routes for silk road routes, namely 21st Century maritime Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road Continental extension, three main corridors embedded in Silk Road Economic belt, respectively are Northern corridor, Central corridor and Southern corridor, Two main railway routes are Silk Rout trains and Trans-Siberian Railway. This corridor is extremely challenge not only because Xinjiang has already been troublous extremist segregation part. Most importantly, what exactly the infrastructure that China intends to invest/build up from Xinjiang to Central Asian countries? This presentation therefore aims to analyse how realistic China can implement the multiple belts and roads project.

Image: By Jacopo, Crossroads, CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/HeCACA
Design: CeMEAS

Guest Lecture: Common Elements of an Axial Age? Comparative Perspectives on Ancient China and Ancient Egypt
2016-07-06 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
Guest Lecture
Common Elements of an Axial Age? Comparative Perspectives on Ancient China and Ancient Egypt
Wednesday July 6, 2016 · 4 pm (c.t.) · KWZ 0.608
Prof. Mu-Chou Poo, Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
In this lecture Prof. Poo re-examines the theory of the Axial Age by first investigating the case of China, situating the findings in the context of the on-going scholarly discussions on the idea of the Axial Age as proposed by Jaspers and expounded by subsequent generations of scholars. A comparison with the case of ancient Egypt will then follow, examining burial custom of ancient Egypt and the associated funerary texts. This lecture essentially holds that the concept of the Axial Age, a philosophical interpretation of certain historical phenomena found in a number of early civilizations, should not be seen as a “historical rule” or “evolutionary rule” in the development of the history of mankind. The concept might be a useful starting point to engage in the comparative study of civilizations, but it also has the problem of favoring certain cultural traits in selected civilizations, and ignoring some other parts and aspects of human history if we wish to see humanity as really a united one.

Image: By Pulpolux !!!, Central Axis, CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/CXm48
Design: CeMEAS

Guest Lecture: Chinese Humanities in the Global Era
2016-07-06 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
Guest Lecture
Chinese Humanities in the Global Era
Wednesday July 6, 2016 · 6 pm (c.t.) · KWZ 0.602
Prof. Hsiung Ping-Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Term “Humanities” is often used in reference to disciplinary academic humanities: a modern, institutional subject. That its development is usually a product (or byproduct) of cultural politics in nation-building can be taken for granted. In the case of China, however, the long and complicated civilization evidenced before the modern era—since Neolithic times, with literary texts that date back thousands of years—presents us with the particular problem of deciding whether “national” is the best and most representative designation for the evolution of Chinese humanities as a disciplinary subject or for the cultural heritage behind it. The developmental phases of Chinese humanities provide us with a good tool for considering the nature of “national” humanities in an era that is increasingly global. The fact that “Chinese” humanistic studies are the product of an ancient civilization has also given them an undeniable regional quality, which explains why they continue to exhibit characteristics that appear to be more broadly “East Asian.” In crises or opportunities involving Chinese academic and public humanities, therefore, the interplay of this national and intrinsically regional character may help scholars to address the complex yet fundamental questions behind the assumption that any humanities can be labeled as national or regional in this global era.

Image: By Kevin Doncaster, Marbles, CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/ChipsX
Design: CeMEAS

Gastvortrag: Ein Postkolonialer Denker avant la lettre? Takeuchi Yoshimi, sein Asianismus und die Kritik an der Moderne
2016-07-07 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
Gastvortrag
Ein Postkolonialer Denker avant la lettre? Takeuchi Yoshimi, sein Asianismus und die Kritik an der Moderne
Thursday July 7, 2016 · 6 pm (c.t.) · KWZ 3.701
Prof. Viren Murthy, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In den 1980er Jahren begann eine zentrale Auseinandersetzung zwischen Marxisten und postkolonialen Theoretikern. Letztere kritisierten den Marxismus als eurozentrisch. Ihrer Meinung nach sahen Marxisten die europäische Geschichte als universell gültig und nutzten daher das europäische Entwicklungsmodell um Asien zu erklären. So verwendeten die Marxisten Kategorien wie Sklavengesellschaft und Feudalismus, um die chinesische, japanische und indische Geschichte zu interpretieren. In dieser Hinsicht erscheint der bekannte japanische Intellektuelle Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) als postkolonialer Denker avant la lettre. In seiner Beschäftigung mit chinesischen Autoren und Politikern wie etwa Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen und Mao Zedong kritisiert Takeuchi Kategorien wie Ost und West und entwickelt dadurch eine neue politische Sicht von Asien. Seiner Meinung nach wurde der Orient durch den Imperialismus erschaffen und daher als weniger fortschrittlich beurteilt als der Okzident. Intellektuelle im Orient setzen diese Wertung voraus, obwohl sie gegen den Westen kämpfen, denn in der Dialektik der 4.-Mai-Bewegung in China oder in der japanischen Meiji-Restauration kämpften chinesische und japanische Intellektuelle gegen den Imperialismus. In diesen Bewegungen verleugneten die Intellektuellen jedoch ihre eigene Kultur, die sie als ein Hindernis für die Modernisierung sahen. Takeuchi lieferte hier eine neue Interpretation mit seiner Kritik an Ost und West.
Takeuchi machte seinen Standpunkt durch seine eigene Auslegung von Lu Xun deutlich. Lu Xun ist der bekannteste moderne Schriftsteller in China und war nach den 1930er Jahren in China als Verteidiger der Modernisierung bekannt. Als Takeuchis berühmtes Buch über Lu Xun 1944 erschien war er wahrscheinlich einer der ersten, der Lu Xun als Kritiker der Moderne, oder zumindest als einen der Moderne gegenüber zwiegespaltenen Denker, einschätzte. Heutzutage ist eine solche Interpretation weit verbreitet. Der chinesische Neulinke Wang Hui hat beispielsweise in den späten 1980er Jahren eine ähnliche Interpretation von Lu Xun entwickelt. Dank des Einflusses subalterner und postkolonialer Studien in den 1990er Jahren haben Japanologen und wie Sinologen Takeuchi Yoshimi und seine Lu-Xun-Interpretation wiederentdeckt. In seinem Buch Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West (2004) versucht Richard Calichman Takeuchi philosophisch auszulegen und Takeuchis Begriff von Gefühl bzw. Passivität auf Basis der Thesen von Derrida und Jean-Luc Nancy zu erklären.
Christian Uhls Wer War Takeuchis Lu Xun hingegen versucht Takeuchi von einer historischen Seite anzugehen und erklärt, wie Takeuchi einige Begriffe und auch den theoretischen Rahmen von Nishida Kitaro verwendet. Ich versuche diese beiden Methoden weiterzuentwickeln, konzentriere mich aber mehr auf die die Bedingungen der Interpretation Takeuchis sowie darauf, wie solche Bedingungen mit den globalen Phänomenen des Kapitalismus und Imperialismus verknüpft sind. Takeuchi versucht nämlich hier alternative Arten von Transzendenz zu entdecken und konstruiert durch eine literarische bzw. religiöse Transzendenz seine politische Vision. Seiner Meinung nach ist eine solche politische Transzendenz von einer eurozentrischen Perspektive aus nicht zu finden. Die politische Vision, die Takeuchi in China und Asien findet, basiert auf einer anderen Art, die Politik, Religion und Literatur verbindet. In diesem Vortrag beabsichtige ich, Takeuchis politische Ansicht von Asien bzw. seine Auslegung von Lu Xuns politischer Ansicht in einer Theorie des Kapitalismus zu begründen. Es ist bekannt, daß Okawa Shumei Religion und Politik verbunden hat. Takeuchi versucht sich jedoch an dem Projekt, Politik, Religion und Literatur zu verknüpfen. Dieses Vorgehen ist mit der Suche nach einer Welt jenseits des Kapitalismus verbunden. Es ist zudem sein eigener Versuch, eine neue sozialistische Politik zu schaffen. Wir können seinen Versuch postkolonial nennen, aber trotzdem gibt es auch eine hegelianische Dimension, weil Takeuchi danach strebt, durch die Vermittlung Asiens westliche Ideale wie Freiheit und Egalität auf einer höheren Ebene zu realisieren.

Image: By guercio, it depends on the cage you are in CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/6ctyJd
Poster Design: CeMEAS

Guest Lecture: Floating Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors in North China Plain
2016-07-08 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris) | KWZ, Heinrich Düker Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
Guest Lecture
Floating Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors in North China Plain: Boat-dwelling Fisherpeople’s Mobile Pantheon and Ancestral Hall
Friday July 8, 2016 · 2 pm (c.t.) · KWZ 0.610
Ching-chih Lin
Graduate Institute of Religious Studies, National Chengchi University
This talk focuses on how environmental change transformed the religious culture by examining the floating community of boat-dwelling fisherpeople in freshwater in North China. These mobile, isolated boat people adapted to a boat-dwelling lifestyle, organized aquatic social groups, and created innovative religious practices and beliefs in order to maintain their relationships with spirits and ancestors, as well as dispersed lineage members, given that they had no fixed base on land to build temples, ancestral shrines or tombs. These boat dwellers were displaced from their land-based estates and became environmental refugees during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More than hundred thousands of boat-dwellers moved back and forth via interconnected waterways among lakes and Grand Canal in North Jiangsu, Southwest Shandong, and the Huai River valleys of Anhui. The isolation of the boat people protected their unique religious activities from the anti-religious campaigns of the twentieth century. Their ritual tradition Duangu Ceremony was granted the status of National Intangible Cultural Heritage by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China in 2011.
Some significant elements and structures of religious belief and practice of boat people, namely their ancestral worship and central rituals for deities, remained unchanged, transcending differences in occupation, social status, and environment for centuries. With the assistance of ritualists within the floating community, these boat people endeavored to continue their genealogies and maintain ancestor worship, practices that were equally important to farmers. These shared components can help us rethink core elements and structures of Chinese popular culture, previously based on farmers’ experiences, and discern which features are the most significant in Chinese popular religion and how and why they play such vital roles. More importantly, core cultural elements have been resilient and resistant to environmental change.
Image: By Lawrence Siu, the grand canal, CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/4jAW6,

Summer School Göttingen SPIRIT 2016. "Beyond the City Limits: Rethinking New Religiosities in Asia."
2016-07-18 08:00 - 2016-07-22 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
Summer School
Summer School Göttingen SPIRIT 2016. “Beyond the City Limits: Rethinking New Religiosities in Asia.”
18-22 July 2016. University of Göttingen, Germany
Göttingen Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (GISCA), Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) & Centre for Modern East Asian Studies (CeMEAS)
Theme
With the rapid urbanization across Asia, with new cityscapes, glittering skyscrapers, shopping malls, globalized forms of consumption it is easy to assume that cities are the primary sites for the production of the new. Indeed, urbanity is often used as a synonym for modernity and Asian futures would appear to be increasingly urban. The study of religion is no exception, and emergent trends, practices and movements are often implicitly or explicitly connected with the city. For example, new religious movements are commonly treated as distinctly urban phenomena that reflect middle class sensibilities and subjectivities, concerns and consumption patterns. Moreover, the rise of new religious forms is often understood as coming at the expense of the rural, as when village mediumship practices are seen to give way to urban spirit cults, or when so-called “forest monasteries” in Thailand increasingly find themselves in urban or peri-urban zones.
But if cities are the future, is the country then the past? Does the focus on cities as sites of “the new” ignore the complex ways rural contexts, settings and imaginaries are implicated and contribute to contemporary religious practice? And to what extent does the notion of “urban religion” implicitly depend on its “others”? Does it reproduce the urban/rural distinction as one of the “great divides” (Latour 1993) that have been central to the experience of modernity? In truth, it is increasingly difficult to sustain sharp distinctions between rural and urban. Across Asia, increased mobility especially patterns of rural/urban migration and the spread of communications and transport technologies connect urban and rural settings like never before improved education rates have seen the rise of an increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan and politically engaged rural population. Yet nationalist constructions of identity and modernizing discourses across Asia have at once denigrated the rural, “the peasantry”, as backwards and in need of “development” while at the same time valorizing them as embodying traditional values and the essence of national identities. Religion is similarly implicated in such discourses, at times standing for the “other” of modernity, at others functioning as the locus of ethnic or national identities.
Yet so-called urban and rural religious practices do not constitute two opposed spheres of activity but are interconnected in various ways. Indeed, it is frequently the very notion of an opposition between city and country that facilitates interactions and networks that traverse urban and rural contexts. For example, urban religious institutions may recruit ritual specialists from the countryside because they are seen to have retained “correct” knowledge and techniques that urban practitioners have lost (Davis 2016), or city dwellers may see rural settings as sites of spiritual potential and seek out sites of pilgrimage, of refuge or retreat.
This Summer School takes up these issues and asks how the study of contemporary religious life in Asia can benefit from “thinking beyond the city”, whether “the city” is understood as a spatial entity, a site of enquiry, or as an analytical category. It will call into question many of the assumptions that go along with the study of urban religiosity and will attempt to bring “the urban” explicitly into relationship with its various “others” – such as the “rural”, “hinterland”, “periphery”, or “village”. Central questions include: How do patterns of pilgrimage, travel and tourism, or the circulation of religious symbols or objects connect “urban” and “rural”? How do religious networks and practices help particular actors – such as rural/urban migrants – to negotiate tensions between their rural and urban lives? How do notions of nostalgia and pastness figure in projects of urban religio-spiritual renewal? How do dialectics of religion, secularity and rationality play out in rural/urban spaces? And to what extent does the notion of an urban/rural divide itself inform religious practices and imaginaries? A final avenue of questioning focuses on the hierarchization of city and country and the relative superiority and agency attributed to the former. Just as postcolonial and critical theory have
challenged discourses that contrast a dynamic and active occident with a relatively static, passive orient, the Summer School will critically examine the manner in which similar distinctions between city and country have inflected the study of religion in Asia. It will ask how “provincializing” the city can lead to new insights and approaches that can reveal blindspots and draw attention to power differentials in Asian societies. The purpose would be to challenge the processes of othering that assign a relatively passive or reactive role for the countryside and to instead draw attention to the agency of rural actors, to alternative imaginaries of the future, and to ask what role religion plays in specifically rural modernities.
The summer school thus invites participants to engage with, and develop, their own work through an exploration of the way religion and spirituality intersect with three key themes: (1) traversing and transcending the rural/urban divide; (2) the city and its “others”; (3) provincializing the city. A range of international speakers has been invited whose collective expertise connects questions of rural/urban religiosities and critical engagements with the category of “the city” in contemporary Asia. An innovative approach of this Summer School is to include both scholars who work on religion and those do not but whose research aims to critically engage with the category of “the city”. This combination of perspectives is expected to produce stimulating exchange and novel insights.
Speakers will include:

Prof. Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
Prof. Ursula Rao, Leipzig University
Prof. Christina Schwenkel, UC Riverside
Prof. Julia Huang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (tentative)
Dr. Radhika Gupta, Göttingen University

Prof. Herzfeld will provide a public keynote as well as a general workshop on successful thesis writing. Podium discussions and morning lectures will provide theoretical frames and ethnographic snapshots from diverse Asian contexts. In addition, students will participate in small working and reading groups moderated and mentored by each of the invited speakers over the course of the School. Mandatory readings for these sessions will be shared in advance. Participants will have the opportunity to introduce their own work in working groups, to connect their research to each of the three theme blocs, in order to develop new ideas and learn new approaches for their own work.
Highlights of the cultural program include:

A visit to the historic Bodenwerder synagogue from 1825, which was translocated to Göttingen in 2006 to find out about the transformation of religious sites in a local context.
A city tour, including guided tours of historically significant cemeteries.

About the organizers
GISCA, CEMIS and CeMEAS are key institutions building research, network and outreach capacities in the study of religions at Göttingen Research campus (GRC). Bringing together scholars in the social sciences and humanities for inter-disciplinary dialogue, they in particular foster an appreciation of regional diversity and intra- and cross-regional entanglements in Asia. With GISCA’s expertise in the anthropology of Southeast Asia and CEMIS and CeMEAS core competence in South and East Asia respectively, these centers complement each other, join creative forces and pool their excellent academic networks to organize this Summer School.
Contact
Karin Klenke at karin.klenke@cemis.uni-goettingen.de
https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/531996.html

Lecture Series: What’s Religious about a Dead Body? Cadaver Donations in Taiwan
2016-07-25 16:15 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum (KWZ)
CeMEAS lecture:
What’s Religious about a Dead Body? Cadaver Donations in Taiwan
Monday July 25, 2016 · 4 pm (c.t.) · KWZ 0.610
Prof. C. Julia Huang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan/VisitingScholar, The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University
Drawing from ethnographies, in this lecture Prof. Huang will explore the phenomenon of a recent “surge” of cadaver donations for medical purposes in Taiwan. The setting is a university founded by Tzu Chi (Ciji), a charismatic movement that runs one of the largest charities of Chinese Buddhism in the world. Since Tzu Chi founded its medical school in 1994, the total number of donors for whole body donation for medical education has increased from one in 1995 to over 34,000 in 2013. To what extent is this increase of willed bodies a religious phenomenon? What is religious about the dead body? In this lecture, Prof. Huang will analyze her ethnographies with different approaches to religion, in hope that her work will shed light on the shifting concept of religion in a modern and multicultural context.
Image: By University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, Anatomical diagram of the human skeleton (rear view), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/huDYbS
Design: CeMEAS

The Rule of Law in the PRC Workshop
2016-10-05 | Library of the Institute of International and European Law Blauer Turm, 13th Floor, Lecture room , Room Nr. 13.122, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 5, 37073 Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Workshop
The Rule of Law in the People’s Republic of China: Statements, Realities and Insights (Göttingen, October 5, 2016)
October 5, 2016 · Blauer Turm, 13th Floor, Room 13.122
Library of the Institute of International and European LawPlatz der Göttinger Sieben 5, 37073 Göttingen
Program
Participants & Abstracts
Papers
Useful Information

The Rule of Law in the People’s Republic of China: Statements, Realities, and New Perspectives
Organizer: German-Chinese Institute of Law
Co-organizer: Centre for Modern East Asian Studies
Much has been said and written about the rule of law in the People’s Republic of China. As the issue has recently been put on the reformist agenda again, a review is warranted, including a reality check. Also, there is a need to explore, whether new analytical approaches may offer a better understanding about these developments.
The CeMEAS workshop will bring together experts in the field to reflect on the reform agenda as discussed at the fourth plenary session of the CPC Central committee in 2014 and look into the details of developments in one of the most significant areas of the rule of law, which is criminal law. In the sense of a reality check, the workshop will also address current measures against lawyers, activists and the legal profession more generally.
The workshop furthermore aims at breaking new ground in the analytical understanding of the developments. It will address an issue, which so far has been largely neglected in the academic analysis and which is the role of the Communist Party in promoting the rule of law.
Furthermore, the workshop will see and discuss social science methods of assessing the level of the rule of law by means of indicators and rankings.
Also, the workshop aims at exploring new perspectives in seeing rule of law developments in the people’s republic of china in comparative perspective. So far, such developments have been often analysed and criticised from a Western point of view. The workshop will explore, whether other perspectives may be taken into account in comparative work.
Lastly, the workshop will address the international dimensions of the rule of law in the People’s Republic of China in taking into it consideration, that country is both the subject to but also an actor in the United Nations rule of law and human rights activities.

Lecture: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
2016-11-01 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Verfügungsgebäude 3.101, University of Goettingen, Goettingen, 37073, Germany
CeMEAS Lecture Series:
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016 · 6 pm, VG 3.101
Yuen Yuen Ang, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan

Please pay attention: this Lecture is cancelled.

Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. What explains this amazing metamorphosis?
Was it because China possessed basic growth factors like cheap labor? Was it bureaucratic incentives to promote growth? The use of incremental reforms? Or historical legacies? Existing accounts each highlight a different piece of the grand puzzle of China’s great transformation. Yet none can explain how the other pieces aggregated to remake an entire political economy within the span of a single generation.
Yuen Yuen Ang presents a fresh, synthetic account of development that systematically traces the coevolution of markets and institutions. Her approach reveals a surprising finding: China escaped the poverty trap by first building markets with weak institutions—that is, institutions that defy norms of good governance. This sequence of development is found in other geographic and temporal settings, including late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria.
Bio
Yuen Yuen Ang is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, is released by Cornell University Press in September 2016, and included in its political economy series. She is a recipient of the Eldersveld Prize for outstanding research contributions from the University of Michigan’s Department of Political Science, two Early Career Fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a global essay prize on “The Future of Development Assistance” from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ang’s scholarship integrates the study of development, complex systems, and Chinese political economy.
Image by: Horia Varlan, Old key chain in the shape of a small Earth globe, CC BY-SA 2.0,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4270078348/sizes/sq/

Film Cycle: Food is People's Heaven
2016-11-02 - 2017-01-25
Film Series:
Food is People’s Heaven
民以食为天
Wedensday, 4pm (c.t.)
KWZ 1.601
Lecturer: Katja Pessl

The Film Series at the Department of East Asian Studies provides an engaging and flexible study experience, intended to introduce students to a wide scope of East Asian films. Each semester features a specific topic with 6-7 screenings and provides ample opportunity for participants to discover, analyze and argue about film. Our screenings are followed by a moderated discussion and all students are welcome to participate!
In this semester’s film cycle we will focus on the deep-rooted connections between food and society. Through critical examination of the cultural and social significance of food we will engage with the history, art, production and consumption of food and its representation in film and cinematic language within greater China and beyond.
Program:
02.11.2016 A Bite of China: Gifts from Nature / The Story of Staple Foods 舌尖上的中国: 自然的馈赠 / 主食的故事 (2012)
16.11.2016 Eat Drink Man Woman 饮食男女 (1994)
30.11.2016 The Search for General Tso 寻找左宗棠 (2014)
14.12.2016 The Rice Bomber 白米炸弹客 (2014)
11.01.2017 The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World 世界最大的中国餐馆 (2008)
25.01.2017 The God of Cookery 食神 (1996)
Picture: Jevgeni Zotov, Baozi, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/eeWa4L
