How Asian Should Asian Law Be? – An Outsider’s View

Is there an Asian identity of Asian law, comparable to European identity and therefore similarly useful as a justification for unification projects? If so, what does it look like? And if so, does this make Asia more like Europe, or less so? Or is this question itself already a mere European projection? This chapter tries to address such questions. In particular, I look at a concrete project of Asian law unification—the Principles of Asian Comparative Law—and connect discussions about its Asian identity with four concepts of Asia. The first such concept is a European idea of Asia and Asian law, which defines a presumably homogeneous Asia on the basis of its level of difference from Europe. The next three concepts are concepts that emerged from Asian debates. Two off them explicitly invoke leadership of one country. A sinocentric concept of Asian law attempts to reinvigorate concepts from the time of Chinese dominance of East Asia prior to colonization. A Japanese concept of Pan-Asian law by contrast is built on Japanese modernization, which in turn was influenced by Europe. Finally, the idea of Asian values attempts to avoid leadership by any one country in favor of a truly Asian identity. None of these three chapters can fully avoid the central problems of the European projection: they are all defined by their relation to the West, and all of them invoke a relative degree of homogeneity as basis for identity. I close, therefore, with an alternative concept of Asia “as method” that attempts to overcome these two shortcomings and may offer a more promising path towards an idea of Asian law

On Decontextualization and Recontextualization in East Asian Cultural Interactions: Some Methodological Reflections

In the history of cultural interaction in East Asia, decontextualization and recontextualization can readily be observed in the exchanges of texts, people, and ideas among the different regions. When a text, person, or idea is transmitted from its home country into another country, it is first decontextualized and then recontextualized into the new cultural environment. These processes of decontextualization and recontextualization I refer to as "a contextual turn." The present paper discusses methodological problems involved in the study of decontextualization and recontextualization. Section 1 introduces the paper. Section 2 then clarifies that "East Asia" is not an abstract term ranging over the countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but rather refers to the dynamic, real process of concrete cultural interactions among these living cultures. On the dramatic stage of these interactions, China plays the role of the significant other to the many other actors. China is certainly not the sole conductor of the symphony of East Asia. Section 3 shows that the methodology of the history of ideas can be used when studying the phenomena of decontextualization. But one can easily become ensnared in what I call "the blind spot of textualism." Section 4 provides an analytic discussion of an effective methodology for studying recontextualization that involves looking at the concrete exchange of texts, people, and ideas against a specific historical background, and then highlighting the subjective emotions of the intermediate agents in these cultural exchanges as the agents navigate the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. This paper concludes by stressing that East Asian cultural interactions are dynamic processes and not static structures. Therefore, in our study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia, we must seek a dynamic equilibrium between textualism and contextualism, as well as between fact and value or emotion

Almost a proper Buddhist : the post-secular complexity of heritage Buddhist teen identity in Britain

This qualitative study explores how Buddhist affiliation relates to practice, how Buddhist teens define and experience their religious identity and which sociological paradigms are helpful in understanding the dynamics of Buddhist teen identity. Focus group methodology was used to examine attitudes to superstition, stereotypes, prejudice, religion and society, convictions, and friends for 65 heritage Buddhist teenagers from Britain. Shared identity was expressed in terms of spiritual teachers, eclecticism within the Buddhist tradition, Asian heritage, openness to the supernatural, relevance of Buddhism in the present day and temple-going. Practice rather than belief seemed to represent the operational difference between how Buddhist teens defined 'Buddhist' and 'proper Buddhist'. Buddhist teens experienced little negative prejudice on account of their religion but experienced being grouped with Buddhists of other ethnicities in others' eyes. Secularization, modernity, projection and especially post-secularism were found helpful as sociological paradigms for explaining various aspects of Buddhist teen identity

Wartime globalization in Asia, 1937-1945, conflicted connections and convergences

Given war's propensity for trampling over and demolishing borders—its literal, one might even say primordial, function as a motor of deterritorialization and reterritorialization—the scant scholarly attention paid to it as a globalizing force remains surprising. An extensive body of literature has responded to the complex role of globalization in the making, as well as the supposed unmaking, of conflict. Liberal economists and political theorists, in an intellectual lineage that dates back to the writings of the European Enlightenment, have made bold claims about global economic integration and the emergence of a ‘capitalist peace’. Critics of their arguments have pointed to the Western imperial violence which, from the mid-eighteenth century on, cleared the ground (and perhaps, more importantly, the seas) to make way for the so-called ‘free’ market world economy, a process which established several of those fundamental worldwide inequalities that have been perpetuated to this day. The hard evidence of a more recent past makes a mockery of the presumption that global capitalist enterprises such as Starbucks and McDonalds might bring about some kind of Big Mac and Frappuccino-mediated universal fraternity. Critical observers of globalization during the ‘Noughties’ (2000–2010) now recognize it as both one of the most interconnected decades in world history, and also one of the bloodiest.</jats:p