The Social Impact of Economic Growth

Editors Susanna Price and Kathryn Robinson explore the social aspects of Chinese economic growth in their soon-to-be-published book, Making a Difference? Social Assessment Policy and Praxis and its Emergence in China. Following, Susanna Price offers further insight into the book’s origins and the impact the book may have on the field of Asian development studies.

 

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Why did we write this book?

 

We are all familiar with the striking, sometimes wildly exaggerated, news headlines on China’s rapid economic growth, its geo-political consequences and – perhaps less frequently − the possible flow-on implications for liberal democratic governance. We felt that such headlines, focusing on growth, overshadowed an alternative narrative, on the social dimensions of that growth and transformation. It came down to a simple wish: we wanted to tell a different China story that reflected our own experience and practice.

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Ruins of a Religion: ‘The Polynesian Iconoclasm’ in Photos

In his recently published book, The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power, Jeffrey Sissons explains the ten-year period during which Hawaiians, Tahitians, and other South Pacific island societies almost completely destroyed their religious temples and god figures. Later, the native religion and its symbols were replaced by the Christian religion, and the churches and laws that accompanied it. Below, the author shares the significance of the book’s cover, followed by images from the book, photos taken by the author’s son, Hugo.

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for June

Anthropology in Action
Volume 21, Issue 1
This is a special issue on Applied and Social Anthropology, Arts and Health.

Asia Pacific World
Volume 5, Issue 1
In this first issue of Volume 5, we have chosen to begin with two keynote presentations from the fourth IAAPS Annual Conference.

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 9, Issue 1
This issue focuses on conceptual changes and political struggles around citizenship related to the challenges of Europeanization, as well as both migration and immigration after WWII.

German Politics & Society
Volume 32, Issue 2
This special issue is titled The 2013 Bundestag Election (Part 1). 

Journeys
Volume 15, Issue 1
This journal explores travel as a practice and travel writing as a genre, reflecting the rich diversity of travel and journeys as social and cultural practices as well as their significance as metaphorical processes.

Learning and Teaching
Volume 7, Issue 1
This special issue is titled Collusion, Complicity and Resistance: Theorising Academics, the University and the Neoliberal Marketplace.

Social Analysis
Volume 58, Issue 2
This journal encourages contributions that break away from the disciplinary bounds of anthropology and suggest innovative ways of challenging hegemonic paradigms through analysis based in original empirical research.

 

A Celebration of Asian-Pacific Heritage

In 1992, a bill was signed into law designating May as Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. According to the Asian-Pacific Heritage website, “The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869.” Commemorate this month with the following selection of Asia-Pacific titles, and view the complete list here.

 

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Asia Pacific World

The Journal of the International Association for Asia Pacific Studies

Chief Editor: Malcolm J.M. Cooper, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU)

Published on behalf of the International Association for Asia Pacific Studies Continue reading “A Celebration of Asian-Pacific Heritage”

Policy-Tracing Up, Down, Sideways

In an excerpt from the Introduction of A Policy Travelogue: Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada, published in September, Catherine Kingfisher explains just how she came to be interested in the subject of welfare policy, and its existence as a living, working idea.

 

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My interest in tracing policy began in the summer of 2000, when I was writing grant applications to work with welfare mothers in southern Alberta, where I had recently moved from Aotearoa/New Zealand. I discovered that in the early 1990s the Alberta provincial government of premier Ralph Klein, in the process of reforming its governing structures and welfare systems, had been heavily influenced by Roger Douglas, the former Finance Minister of New Zealand.

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The Life of Policy in Canada and New Zealand

Policies have their own lives, and these lives are not “a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical,” puts forth Catherine Kingfisher in her volume, A Policy Travelogue: Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada, published in September. Following is an excerpt from the monograph’s Introduction in which the author sets the scene for her discussion of how policy lives within welfare reform in two distinct countries.

 

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I use the frames of translation and assemblage to gain insight into a range of policy-related phenomena in particular spaces and contexts of occurrence. First, I explore the transformation of objects as they are translated from one philosophical and political framework—Keynesianism—into another—neoliberalism. Brodie (2002:100) points out in this regard that the privatization characteristic of neoliberalism: “[i]nvolves much more than simply removing things from one sector and placing them in another….the thing moved is itself transformed into something quite different. Objects become differently understood and regulated.”

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for November

Israel Studies Review
Volume 28, Issue 2
This collection of articles aims to rethink the concepts of family and familism in Israel today and analyze the changes that are taking place.

Projections
Volume 7,
Issue 2

This issue of Projections highlights the complexity of the intersection of movies and mind by integrating established traditions of analyzing media aesthetics with current research into perception, cognition and emotion.

Cambridge Anthropology
Volume 31, Issue 2
This issue features articles covering a broad spectrum of topics.

International Journal of Social Quality
Volume 3, Issue 1
The articles included in this issue of IJSQ touch on different aspects of the “sustainable growth” issue.

Asia Pacific World
Volume 4, Issue 2
The general articles cover a wide range of topics but all grew out of presentations made at IAAPS conferences,with two from the original conference in 2010, and three from the 2011 conference.

Journeys
Volume 14, Issue 2
This special issue is titled: Shaping Strangers in Early Modern English Travel Writing. The articles consider how various strangers were presented and represented in English travel writing, whether their “strangeness” be one of physical, religious, geographical, or national difference, and, simultaneously, the slippage between different kinds of strangeness.

German Politics & Society
Volume 31, Issue 3
This issue comprises articles covering a range of topics. It also features a forum section and a book reviews section.

A Reflection on ‘Japanese Tourism’

Carolin Funck and Malcolm Cooper’s Japanese Tourism: Spaces, Places and Structures, published this month, explains the nuances of Japanese tourism, both by the Japanese and within Japan by tourists from around the world. Below, the editors recall what drew them to this fascinating field of study, how the field has changed since they started writing, and how they predict it will continue to change in the future.

 

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Berghahn Books: When were you drawn to the study of Japanese tourism? What inspired your love of your subject?

 

Malcolm Cooper: The lack of a readily available text that brought together the several elements of Japanese tourism and chronicled its form and function over the years when I first started to teach this subject more than 10 years ago.

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Aloha to Beginnings: Writing ‘Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation’

A talk-story, or mo`olelo, is an informal and traditionally Hawaiian way of sharing stories to preserve them for posterity. In The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation, to be published this month, author Judith Schachter pairs these informal conversations with fieldwork observations to give readers a view into the island culture post-U.S. annexation. Below she shares the story of her beginning in Hawai`i, and how her work took root. 

 

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My work in Hawai`i began “in small,” with the idea of adding a chapter to my book on American kinship, family, and adoption. I intended to see what happened to Polynesian customs when the U.S. brought its legal system to the Pacific Island state.

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