Women in politics: A global review

At the end of the 1970s, discrimination against women as political participants continues, but it is being challenged and, in some countries, steadily eroded. There are only eight countries in the world today in which national law excludes women from political processes that are open to men. While in most countries that have elections, women lag behind men in exercising the franchise; the tendency is for the difference in men's and women's voting rates to narrow over time in stable electoral systems. However, there is an enormous disparity between women's attainment of formal political equality and their real exercise of political power. The numbers of women in public office remains low in most countries; in very few do women fill even 10% of such positions. Yet there are scattered signs of improvement, with slowly rising numbers of women in elective and appointive offices. The real centers of political power are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, but the fact that women in most countries can enter the political contest on a routine basis is a sign that exclusion based on sex roles is diminishing.     

迷信与不信

<正>"迷信"在当今社会已经成为过街老鼠,简直就是愚昧、落后甚至罪恶的代名词。然而揆诸史乘我们发现,在历史长河中流淌不绝的"迷信",其意义绝非"愚昧"二字就能概括的。"迷信"的核心内容——鬼神观念,长期以来是古人认识和解释世界的一套知识体系,     

Backchannel Responses as Misleading Feedback in Intercultural Discourse

This study examined the relationship between the frequency of backchannel responses and listener recall scores in inter- and intra-cultural conversations. The nature of the study was a simulated physician–patient interaction. Participants were 40 Canadians and 40 Chinese who formed 40 dyads in four experimental conditions: Canadian physician/Canadian patient, Chinese physician/Chinese patient, Chinese physician/Canadian patient, and Canadian physician/Chinese patient. All conversations were video-taped and micro-analyzed. The data generated three intriguing findings. (1) There were significant positive correlations between backchannel responses and listener recall scores in the two intra-cultural groups, indicating that backchannel responses facilitated content communication. (2) There were significant negative correlations between backchannel responses and listener recall scores in the two inter-cultural groups, indicating that backchannel responses might have served as misleading feedback and caused mis-communication. (3) The Chinese/Chinese condition had the highest backchannel responses; the Canadian/Canadian condition had the lowest with the two inter-cultural groups in between. This finding provides support for the Communication Accommodation theory. Implications for verbal and nonverbal communication training in intercultural interactions were discussed.     

The changing faces of politics and repression in Malaysia

Abstract

For a long time popular music and aesthetics have been considered as mutually exclusive categories within the musicological discourse. Based on the predominance of idealistic autonomy aesthetics, the concept of the (musical) ‘work of art’, at its core, legitimised the exclusion of popular music from the realm of aesthetics. Since the concept of autonomy constituted the beauty of art as a sphere free from social functions and independent from interests of the culture industries, two antithetical strategies in researching pop music have recently emerged: on the one hand pop music has been described as art, on the other hand it has been considered as a cultural phenomenon solely explored through sociological approaches. This paper looks for an alternative way in order to overcome the dualisms of art and everyday life, aesthetics and society, without neglecting the inherent aesthetic dimension of popular music cultures or the processes of identity‐making of the involved people. For this purpose, concepts developed in theatre and ritual studies seem to be fruitful for describing pop music as ritual in social space (musicking), and in terms of an aesthetic of the performative. Based on participant observations and interviews, the paper discusses a rock concert that the Yoon Band from South Korea held in Germany. In view of the event character and of liminal and transformative processes within the performance, it gives an example of how Korean people in Germany negotiate their identities and draw national boundaries through actively participating in and through music. Thereby, the way popular music constitutes the diasporic community can be detected in the underlying social, symbolic, and sound patterns of the performance.     

The politics of national atonement and narrations of war

Abstract

In March 2007, Japan’s ‘national atonement project’ for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government‐established non‐governmental organization – the Asian Women’s Fund – has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project’s good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project’s negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women’s Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors’ claims for justice and compensation.     

Lost in TransNation: Tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization

Abstract

The 2003 film Lost in Translation has attracted both acclaim and critique concerning its representation of the urban imaginary of Tokyo. Examining both the film representation and the critical responses to the imaginary, this paper discusses how they illuminate some of the emerging issues that Tokyo and Japan face in the era of globalization, such as the loss of the idiosyncratic status of non‐Western modernity that Japan has long enjoyed; post‐(self)Orientalist cultural othering; and the transnational alliance of media and cultural industries in a global cultural economy of branding the nation through media and consumer cultures, all at the expense of the issue of intensifying migration and multicultural situations in the urban space. It will be suggested that both the film and Japanese critiques of the film are lost in the actuality of Tokyo (indeed, of Japan) and its populace, which is being radically transformed by intensifying transnational flows of people, capital, and media imagery.     

An integrative model of attitudes toward immigrants

The research tests an integrative model of attitudes toward immigrants. Underpinned by Integrated Threat Theory and the Instrumental Model of Group Conflict and incorporating aspects of the contact and multicultural hypotheses, the model proposes direct paths linking five latent variables: multicultural ideology, contact with immigrants, intergroup anxiety, perceived threat and attitudes toward immigrants. Data generated from a random telephone survey of 500 New Zealand households demonstrated a very good fit for the model. The latent personal (multicultural ideology) and situational (contact with immigrants) variables represented exogenous factors and were related to each other. More frequent intercultural contact led to decreased intergroup anxiety, which, in turn, predicted diminished perceptions of threat and more positive attitudes toward immigrants. At the same time, a second path from multicultural ideology led to decreased perceptions of threat and, in turn, to more positive attitudes toward immigrants. The advantages of an integrative approach to attitudes toward immigrants are discussed, and recommendations are made for future research.     

The politics and poetics of anthropological area studies in postwar Taiwan

In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within our culture without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. (Said 1989: 217)     

Magic monks and spirit mediums in the politics of Thai popular religion

In this article, I read the politics of popular religion in Thailand through the case studies of magic monks and spirit mediums, which have been traditional key actors in the popular religious domain and have maintained their lasting popularity in the country in the 1990s and 2000s. Positioning my argument in the context of the much‐criticized commercialization of Buddhism, I accentuate that magic monkhood and spirit mediumship have exhibited themselves as culturally defined channels of, and strategies for, individuals' religious self‐empowerment. In the politics of negotiating and contesting for their religious identities and selfhood, the continued popularity of magic monk and spirit medium has exposed the conventional practices and ideologies of class and gender relations, which apparently favour men over women and, thus, countered attempts by ordinary disciples and followers to move out of their socially marginalized positions in both religious and socioeconomic worlds. In other words, the politics of Thai popular religion point to the affirmation or negotiation of existing religious and socioeconomic structures, but never the resistance against them. The consensus voice in this terrain of everyday life's religious practices emphasizes strong desire and a quest for material wealth and mundane success more than anything else.     

Emotional energy and sub-cultural politics: alternative bands in post-1997 Hong Kong

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.     

Shifting spaces,frozen frames: trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India

Abstract

This paper is a comparative reading of two Malayalam films The Journey (Sancharram, 2004) and The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986) as representative of differing trajectories of queer politics in the Kerala public sphere. It uses an analysis of the representative strategies of these two films, to interrogate the limits of a universal language of sexual identity politics. The paper places the two films in the different historical contexts in which they are produced, and deploys a film from an earlier time period to problematize some of the assumptions of contemporary queer politics. For this purpose it undertakes a close reading of the cinematic codes of both these films, especially the spatial arrangements in the films. I argue that the location of Sancharram in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so enmeshed in setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of setting up a stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of Kerala. The process of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that attempts to set up a particular subject position as the queer subject position. It sets out to trouble the naturalized construction of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into the social sphere itself. The paper examines how some of the taken‐for‐granted assumptions of transnational queer politics, like the celebration of visible bodies, gets radically questioned when we turn to non‐metropolitan sites of analysis. It aims to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual politics, as activists struggle to coin strategies to articulate the political possibilities of non‐normative sexual practices in Kerala today.     

丧俗文书与生存者的信仰文化

<正>丧葬礼俗是人生礼俗的重要组成部分,是人生的终点。在中国传统的丧葬礼俗中,人们的基本思想之一,就是"不死其亲",即不把死去的人当成亡人,而是把其当成灵魂和肉体仍存在的"活人"(谢