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South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons™
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Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
Painting Stories And Filming Change, Coralynn V. Davis
Painting Stories And Filming Change, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Contributions to Books
Mithila Art has helped illuminate various aspects of the relationship between gendered Maithil social roles and Maithil women’s narratives in connection with a feminist participatory action research project conducted primarily in 2016-2017 in and around the northern Bihari town of Madhubani. While participatory action research philosophically and methodologically attends to process as much as product, Mithila Art played a role in the process and product of making a documentary film and in our capacity to understand and communicate with varied audiences about shifting Maithil gender norms. The research and filmic project provided insight into the complex relationship among the stories …
Skeptical Buddhism As Provenance And Project, James Mark Shields
Skeptical Buddhism As Provenance And Project, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
The past century and a half has seen various attempts in both Asia and the West to reform or re-conceptualize Buddhism by adding a simple, often provocative, qualifier. This paper examines some of the links between “secular,” “critical,” “sceptical,” and “radical” Buddhism in order to ascertain possibilities in thinking Buddhism anew as a 21st-century “project” with philosophical, ethical, and political resonance. In particular, I am motivated by the question of whether “sceptical” Buddhism can coexist with Buddhist praxis, conceived as an engaged response to the suffering of sentient beings in a globalized and neoliberal industrial capitalist world order. Let …
Living The Bhagavad Gita At Gandhi's Ashrams, Karline Mclain
Living The Bhagavad Gita At Gandhi's Ashrams, Karline Mclain
Faculty Journal Articles
The Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical Hindu scripture in which the god Krishna imparts lessons to the warrior prince Arjuna about sacred duty (dharma) and the path to spiritual liberation (moksha). This classical scripture has had a long and active interpretive life, and by the 19th century it had come to be regarded as a core text, if not the core text, of Hinduism. During the colonial period, interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita considered the relevance of Krishna’s lessons to Arjuna in the context of British colonial rule. While some Indians read a call to arms into their interpretation of …
Book Review: Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills (Kirin Narayan), Coralynn V. Davis
Book Review: Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills (Kirin Narayan), Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
No abstract provided.
Nature And Human Flourishing In The Laws Of Manu And The Daodejing, Qijing Zheng
Nature And Human Flourishing In The Laws Of Manu And The Daodejing, Qijing Zheng
Honors Theses
By comparing the interpretation of dharma in the ancient Indian Laws of Manu (Manusmṛti) with the concepts of dao in the Chinese classic, Daodejing, this thesis discusses that, despite the plausible perception that the former represents despotic, hierarchical governance while the latter promotes freedom (and even anarchy), the two texts in fact share a similar envision of human flourishing through the following of one's nature, as well as a foundational belief that both laws and political ideals emerge from nature.
Shirdi Sai Baba As Guru And God: Narasimhaswami’S Vision Of The Samartha Sadguru, Karline Mclain
Shirdi Sai Baba As Guru And God: Narasimhaswami’S Vision Of The Samartha Sadguru, Karline Mclain
Faculty Journal Articles
B. V. Narasimhaswami (1874–1956) never met Shirdi Sai Baba face to face, for he arrived in Shirdi eighteen years after Sai Baba’s death in 1918. However, the overwhelming sense of loving union he experienced in Shirdi convinced him that Sai Baba was still accessible from beyond the grave. For the remaining years of his life he worked relentlessly to spread Sai Baba’s name throughout India. This article examines the tension between inclusion and exclusion in Narasimhaswami’s interpretation of Sai Baba. Narasimhaswami believed that Sai Baba was a divinized guru with two interconnected missions: The spiritual uplift of individuals and the …
Strategic Deployments Of "Sisterhood" And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Strategic Deployments Of "Sisterhood" And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Strategic Deployments Of "Sisterhood" And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women's Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Strategic Deployments Of "Sisterhood" And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women's Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Introduction To Against Harmony: Radical Buddhism In Thought And Practice, James Mark Shields
Introduction To Against Harmony: Radical Buddhism In Thought And Practice, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
No abstract provided.
Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …
Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields
Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis
Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …
Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis
Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation …
Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis
Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …
'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis
'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …
Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken …