Elizabeth Rosen, "Somalis don't climb mountains: the commercializatio of Mount Everest," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2007, pp. 147-168.
What is it about the city that might make a person more inclined toward extreme and adventure sport? For one thing, the city is a place of enforced anonymity where it is difficult to stand out becuase of the sheer numbers of people. We use certain codes to identify others; one of these is the work someone engages in, but more and more, it is not their work, but their play which identifies and separates people from one another. (Turner and Ash 14)
A hobby such as mountain climbing identifies the hobbyist as unique and perhaps as a whole host of other things as well: brave, crazy, strong, "macho." Such identification can potentially be very helpful in an urban environment where "impression management" may be at work. "Impression management" is a theory which supposes that people are always fostering impressions of themselves and are concerned with their appearances because "it is on the basis of appearances that persons will formulate their definitions of the situation" (Karp, Stone, and Yoels 102). That is, we attempt to appear to be that which will "win recognition and approval from others" (102). This on-going process of defining one's public persona, evaluating others', and deciphering the resultant relationships which develop is even more necessary in an urban money culture that iterates the need to (e)valuate things (Karp, Stone, and Yoels 30). (151)
Daniel Black, "Wearing out racial discourse: Tokyo street fashion and race as style," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2009, pp. 239-256.
"a more comprehensive consideration of these media forms shows that the utilization of racialized features in the design of these characters is actually quite varied, different racial features being associated with a variety of styles and genres...rather than suggesting a singular idealization of one set of racial attributes, then, such a use of racialized bodies figures a set of varied racial significances that make their related physical features appropriate in particular circumstances for creating differing styles." (248)
"In discussing the popularity of foreign models in Japanese advertising, Millie R. Creighton argues that, in addition to the perception that white foreigners are the standard of attractiveness and the bodies for which fashionable clothes are designed, gaijin also are considered to have bodies more appropriate for certain kinds of behavior. Sexuality, individualism, and self-indulgence (all useful qualities when encoruaging consumption) can be represented by gaijin, who are associated with such qualities, rather than Japanese, in whom such behavior has traditionally been frowned upon. In addition, kissing and nudity - (248) considered inappropriate public behavior in Japan - are associated with foreign models ("Imaging the Other in Japanese Advertising Campaigns" 142-45 [in Occidentalism: Images of the West])." (p. 249)
Joseph Bosco, "Young people's ghost stories in Hong Kong," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2007, pp. 785-807.
"An anthropologist who must remain nameless) once said that even intellectuals do not know their culture's deep structure, and the more strongly they deny a hypothesis, the more sure one can be that the hypothesis touches on a fundamental culture opposition. Lévi-Strauss (Structural Anthropology, 273) made perhaps the infamous statement that conscious models are often poor explanations of social phenomena because 'they are not intend to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them." (p. 801)
Geoff Wade, "Engaging the South: Ming China and Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 51 (2008), pp. 578-638.
It directed me to Alexander Ong Eng Ann, "Contextualising the book-burning episode during the Ming invasion and occupation of Vietnam," in Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (eds.), Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: The Ming Factor (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2008). I want to read this but no copy found in HKALL.
Justin Livingstone, "Ambivalent imperialism: the missionary rhetoric of Robert Boyd,"Literature & Theology, 2009, pp. 1-27.
"Boyd was part of a joing Foreign Mission Committee with the Church of Scotland, which visited Manchuria after the troubles in 1935-36 and again after the war in 1945." (p. 2)
"A 'book' does not just consist of written words, but is surrounded by other elements - the work's materiality, style of presentation, place of publication and introductory notes - that constitute its meaning. Images too routinely operate as powerful components of the 'paratext'. The photograph, as Elizabeth Edwards contends, is not a simple 'truth-revealing' mechanism, but a site of potential manipulation and meaning-manufacture." (p. 10. E. Edwards, Introduction, in his Anthropology and Photography, p. 4)
Takashi Sue, "Revelations of a mission paragraphy: Zhu Changwen (1039-1098) and the compilation of local gazetteers in Northern Song China," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 52 (2009), pp. 57-84.
Not an unfamiliar topic for I also worked on a medieval gazetteer 荊州記 a few years ago. And it drew my attention to Joseph R. Dennis's thesis "Writing, publishing, and reading local histories in Ming China" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minesota, 2004).
Lisa Lau, "Re-Orientalism: the perpetration and development of Orientalism by orientals," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2009), pp. 571-590.
It "discusses the perpetration of Orientalism in the arean of contemporary South Asian literature in English: no longer an Orientalism propagated by Occidentals, but ironically enought, by Orientals, albeit by diasporic Orientals" (p. 571, abstract)
It drew my attention to the concept of "The Third World Cosmopolitans" suggested by the Indian scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee which is used to describe the category of Indian writers "who are globally visible, who are taught in postcolonial classrooms the world over, and who are hailed in the review pages of Western journals as interpreters and authentic voices of the non-Western world [who] hardly ever include a writer from India who does not write in English." (Mukherjee's The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (OUP, 2000)) (p. 574)
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