The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

区域东亚与知识“东亚”

"东亚"既是一个空间性概念——即地理性、地域性的概念,又是一个时间性的概念——即历史性的和意识形态的概念。现代性的介入,使得"东亚"成为一个需要不断重新界定和检验的概念。区域东亚是知识"东亚"的理解和阐释对象,知识"东亚"是区域东亚在理论和知识上的抽象和提升。区域东亚在结构上具有封闭性、多元性的特征,在功能上又具有流变性和开放性的特征。知识"东亚"的命题集中反映了知识界的"中心-边缘"结构、各种知识背后的意识形态竞争和权力诉求。现代性和东亚的关系并不是一种单向度的"冲击-回应"关系,而是一种双向的相互建构的共生关系。     

The Pillars of “Mahathir's Islam”: Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamad's encounter with Islam remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981–2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a significant component of the former Malaysian prime minister's political repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as “Mahathir's Islam” can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous premiership. It argues that while Mahathir's engagement with Islam was fraught with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that affect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion. Mahathir's public representations of Islam – in particular, his championing of the individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active “theology of progress” – can thus provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

Makers of the west: National identity and occidentalism in the work of Fukuzawa yukichi and Ziya Gökalp

This article draws on the work of the Japanese Westerniser and nationalist Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Turkish nationalist and critical proponent of Westernisation, Ziya Gökalp, in order to understand the development and deployment of the idea of the West. It is shown that the relation between the ‘non‐West’ and West is not staged simply or purely in the form of a dualistic opposition by these men. Indeed, both my case studies evince the centrality of third or fourth categories that complicate but also sustain the stereotyping of the West. In particular, both Fukuzawa and Gokalp deploy a form of orientalism in which Asia is cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations. The article engages its findings with recent post‐colonial debates on Asian occidentalism.     

DWELLING WITHIN: THE INHABITED RUINS OF HISTORY1

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings. To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans‐dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness. Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co‐appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event‐horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

A reader in international relations and political theory

Jerusalem is the holy city for Leo Strauss. It is the symbol of Judaism; moreover it is a root of Western culture together with Athens. But it would be wrong to label Strauss' philosophical thought with such definitions as ‘Jewish philosophy’. Therefore it is surprising that many contemporary interpreters strive to find a confessional or religious foundation in Strauss' thought. On the contrary, many of Strauss's texts testify his choice in favour of Athens, i.e., of philosophy. Yet the choice of Athens does not imply a rejection of Jerusalem. Strauss is convinced that Jerusalem plays a central role in Western civilisation and considers the indifference to religion and the ideologisation of philosophy completed in the modern age as causes of Western crisis, i.e., of contemporary nihilism. Philosophy and religion are forced to live side by side (like philosophy and politics) because neither reason nor revelation can express the ultimate word on the good and the just, i.e., on truth.