Muninn

While the completion of his PhD thesis continues to elude him, my friend Jai has found some time to write about the current crisis at Columbia University’s MEALAC department (Middle East and South Asia) in the Columbia Spectator. Here is an article at The Nation to get you caught up on the crisis if you are interested. For views more hostile to MEALAC on this issue, you can the read the articles in The Sun and basically anything Robert KC Johnson has ever written about it over at Cliopatria.

Partly thanks to class assignments, I have recently started looking at some of the gender focused history of East Asia. I’m still only scratching the surface but I’ll share a few of my initial responses so far.

Last week for my Chosôn history class we watched Im Kwon-taek’s movie Sibaji, or The Surrogate Mother (Warning: the end is given away below). In this movie we are told the story of Ok-nyo, a poor country girl and hapless victim of yangban society who had her body “rented” out to bear a male heir for an elite family in return for ten patches of land. Ok-nyo’s mother, who also shares her daughter’s tragic history as a surrogate mother urges her to bear her suffering quietly, be obedient in performing her tasks, and above all, not to fall in love with the married man who would become her temporary paramour. This she is helpless to prevent and she even believes foolishly that after giving birth to a son, she will be allowed to see her son one last time before her return to the valley of her home.

The movie concludes with Ok-nyo’s suicide. As we see her dangling from the tree she hanged herself from, we are warned against the dark legacy of Korea’s desire for male heirs. If I was to plaster my own “moral of the story” sign at the end of the movie, I’m not sure that is exactly how I would put it (the subtitles I was reading weren’t that good so they may be partly at fault). There is more at stake than simply the desperate pursuit of having male successors. That said, the movie is certainly effective at mocking some of the aspects of the Chosôn period. There is an excellent scene in which Ok-nyo has a raunchy rendezvous with the yangban who has “rented” her in the bushes while we listen to a discussion among older scholars about the details of ancestor worship. The movie also shows all sorts of less confucian “superstitious” practices surrounding pregnancy.

When all is said and done, though, this movie is true “woman as victim” history. The spunky young country woman who is the movie’s protagonist loses all her individualist subjectivity as she is imprisoned in her lonely room as a “surrogate mother.” There is no “agency” whatsoever for Ok-nyo, except in her final act of defiant suicide and, perhaps, in her rebellious late night wanderings and secret viewing of some colorful masked dancers who mock yangban practices (perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie).

The movie and this view of history certainly laments male dominance in society, but only accomplishes this through the mobilization of pity. It is based on a portrayal of women as completely subjected and essentially passive victims in a game where men hold all the keys to power. In this way, history performs a continual reenactment of male dominance and female victimization. I am thus wholeheartedly sympathetic to an effort by a number of scholars of pre-modern Korea, China, and Japan who want to reach beyond this “script” and, “walk a fine line between highlighting the hegemonic power of structures and emphasizing women’s agency,” and who attempt to break down the temporally and conceptually uniform concepts of “Confucian” and “Woman.” (Ko, Dorothy, Haboush, Jahyun Kim, and Joan R. Piggott eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2) They do this by re-centering the discussion on the women themselves, their internal motives and perceptions, and by emphasizing the process of “negotiation” by which these power structures are formed and adjusted. Unfortunately, this is a task which faces huge obstacles, not the least in the history of the Yi dynasty, where my limited reading so far has done little to help me identify the ways in which women “negotiated” with these power structures in such a way which reveals anything but their own lack of power.
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You know that “Thousand Character Classic” you see in books about Japanese history (that is where I have seen it most, I guess it comes up in Korean and Chinese history as well). It was used as a basic text to teach children how to write Chinese characters.

I finally looked it up today to see exactly what it looks like. Ouch! While there are many basic and frequently used characters (in our own contemporary times) I can’t say that many of these 1,000 characters would have made the cut for teaching elementary school…

You can buy your own wall chart version of the classic here. And in case you want to know how to pronounce those characters in the Hakka dialect visit this site (Big-5 Encoding).

I assumed that there hasn’t been much written on early postwar political retribution in Denmark, even in Danish scholarly literature. I found some mention in secondary Danish materials, but usually in the last chapter of books talking about the occupation of Denmark during WWII.

That was before I discovered the over 800 page book by Ditlev Tamm Retsopgøret efter besættelsen complete with excellent bibliography, a chapter on sources, and chapters on every category I could imagine…It is mostly a legal history but my first look indicates he has touched on many of the other related issues I’m interested in. Now, to find the time to read it…

Tamm has written several other monographs and papers on similar topics, and even an introduction to Jorge Luis Borges! I will have to see if I can get in touch…but only after I have made my way through some of his work….ack! So much to read…

There is an excellent review by the rebel pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty in the LRB about Scott Soames two volume history of analytic philosophy (Soames’ response is here). Having come out of (and largely turned my back on) this tradition, I found it especially interesting.

I got the link from one of the best academic group blogs on the net, Crooked Timber, where the analytic philosopher Brian Weatherson concedes Rorty’s point in the review that Soames has underemphasized the importance of epistemological debates about correspondence theories of truth. Rorty’s own anti-correspondence pragmatism and interaction with “continental” philosophers outside the English-speaking world has made him unpopular, if not a total outcast. However, I think if anything it is admirable that he has maintained as much interaction with the world of analytic philosophers, with whom I find it more and more difficult to converse, the further I wander astray.

I think I snapped up one of the last in-stock Amazon copies of the wonderful Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese by Fang-yü Wang. We are using it in my class on 20th Century Chinese History Research Methods. It is essentially a class to help history students deal with Chinese documents and sources.

This wonderful little primer covers only 300 Chinese characters but has already helped me decipher all sorts of handwritten scribbles that painfully remind me of how far I have to go in Chinese and the reading of primary documents from China, Japan, and older documents from Korea.

I was so happy to see that such a book on Chinese handwriting even existed for English-speaking students of the Chinese language. Even the preface notes that up until its publication, “Perhaps the demand has never been great enough to stir anyone to what seems at the outset a hopeless task.”

The book was published in 1958 by Far Eastern Publications, a publishing company which no longer exists (some of its books are now available through Yale University Press). 1958 was a turbulent year in the relations between the US and China, and a year of military crisis for cross-straits relations between the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan. China launched a massive military bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu beginning in August. Things had been hot in the region for years though since the “first” Taiwan crisis of 1954-5. This was a time when Eisenhower famously declared publicly that the US was considering the use of nuclear weapons against China, “as you would use a bullet.”

It thus wasn’t that surprising for me to find this in the Preface to Chinese Cursive Script:

The Institute of Far Eastern Languages had been serving the needs of the U.S. Armed Forces for some years before a request was received that we provide instruction in the reading of cursive script such that might be used in informal personal communications.

I think this is a nice reminder (dated November 1958, Institute of Far Eastern Languages, Yale University) of the ways in which academic departments were often in very close relationships with governments and their militaries. These relationships continue to exist today but seldom advertise themselves in quite the same manner.