Cycle de conférences : Current Research on East Asia

Thursday september 12th

Moderator : Gilles Guiheux

Xinyuan Zhang
Yokohama National University

The Political Economy of Soybean in East Asia

Abstract : East Asia is the region with the most ancient history of soybean cultivation and consumption. In this lecture, I will discuss the changes in soybean demand in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China, since the 1960s from the perspective of food regimes. By comparing the trade structures of soybeans in these East Asian countries, I will elucidate the factors and historical developments that led China to become the world’s largest importer of soybeans. This comprehensive analysis will also provide insights into the dynamic interplay of local and global economic forces shaping the global agri-food system.

Thursday september 26th

Moderator : Ken Daimaru

Naoko Shimazu
University of Tokyo

Visualising Diplomacy in Cold War Asia

Abstract : What does privileging visual sources mean in studying diplomacy and diplomatic history? How do we do this? In this presentation, I share my collaborative experience in leading an interdisciplinary team of scholars (historians, international relations, art historian, media studies, photojournalist) to consider what it means to engage meaningfully with visual materials as a key to unlocking some of the explicit and implicit symbolic meanings embedded in them. Examples are drawn from the forthcoming edited volume, Cold War Asia: A Visual History of Global Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press), including Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Yugoslavia, among others.

Thursday october 10th

Moderator : Marie Gibert-Flutre

Sebastian RUMSBY
Université de Birmingham

Topic: “Aspirations to move up Vietnam’s social ladder: from religious transformation to transnational migration”

Abstract: The ‘will to improve’ is arguably the ideology of international development and is rooted in the modernist belief in progress. In late socialist Vietnam, this will to improve has become a hegemonic aspiration for upward social mobility, shared by very different groups of people and leading to varied outcomes. This lecture explores how the thirst for development is manifested in two cases, based on ethnographic fieldwork: (1) Christianisation of the Hmong ethnic minority in the Northern highlands, and (2) irregular labour migration from North-Central Vietnam to Europe. By comparing the similar and divergent experiences of these two marginalised groups within Vietnam’s broader socio-economic transformations, we can gain a greater understanding of the nature of forces driving change in contemporary Vietnamese society.

Thursday december 5th

Moderator : Marie Gibert-Flutre

Edyta ROSZKO
Research professor in Social Anthropology, Chr. Michelsen Institute

Topic: “Vietnamese and Chinese fisheries and militia in the common maritime space of the South China sea”

Oceans have always been arenas of crime, poaching, drugs and human trafficking. When such violations occur on fishing boats, they fall under the rubric of “fisheries crime”. Political scientists and economists have tended to assume that these criminal fishers simply abandon their legal occupation and take up illegal practices, labelled “transnational organized fisheries crime” by the United Nations. On the other hand, some scholars have also argued that fishers in the South China Sea are simply responding to regulations, non-enforcement of regulations and incentives. Such present-centric approaches both obscure the modalities of fishers’ embodied skills and knowledge and their motivations, and downplay the inter-ethnic networks that connected different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting the spike in maritime trespass in (and out of) the South China Sea, this lecture combines ethnography and historiography to show how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, or smuggler. It discusses how fishers’ practices reflect wider interconnections between modern, state-supported, and technology-driven fisheries with older pre-nation-state patterns of mobility and knowledge accumulated through generations, producing new forms of versatility that operate under the states’ radars.

Thursday january 30th

Moderator : Marianne Simon-Oikawa

Rosina BUCKLAND
Curator of Japanese Collections, British Museum

Topic: “The splendor of modernity: towards a history of Meiji arts”

The arts of the Meiji era demonstrate technical brilliance, innovation and enduring beauty during a period of tumultuous change and global engagement. Diverse and sophisticated practices of art production encountered new techniques, expectations, markets and concepts over a fifty-year span. Yet the study of Meiji art has lagged behind that of other periods, due to the slanted perception that foreign influence diluted the supposed ‘authenticity’ of Japanese art. The author’s new publication represents the first textbook in English on the subject, exploring the development of distinctively Japanese artistic practices that incorporated new stimuli from overseas, while dispelling assumptions of artistic decline and highlighting continuities.

Thursday, march 6th

Moderator : Béatrice L’Haridon

Kelsey GRANGER
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Topic: “Domestic Innovators: Women’s Contributions to the Material Life of Tang China”

This talk focuses on the overlooked contributions women made to two striking domestic developments: the widespread keeping of pet animals and the proliferation of chair-sitting. By the Song period, chairs and pets were commonplace domestic trappings in elite households for the first time in Chinese history. Starting from an intriguing ceramic housed in the Metropolitan Museum, this talk explores how fashionable women of the Tang capitals centuries earlier contributed to these innovations. Incorporating tomb iconography, ceramics, paintings, and female-authored poems, this talk reveals that women’s innovations, despite being largely unrecorded in texts, can still be gleaned through material culture.

Thursday, march 20th

Moderator : Florence Galmiche

Thursday, june 5th

Moderator : Gilles Guiheux

Carles BRASO BROGGI
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Topic: The “Sisan” (四三) plan for gaining production capacity in artificial fibers and chemical fertilizers: China’s purchase of petrochemical technology in Europe, 1972-1979.

In January 1972, Gu Xiulian of the State Planning Commission tasked Chen Jinhua with drafting a memorandum to address two of China’s pressing issues: the scarcity of cloth and food. The resulting memorandum outlined a total investment of $4.3 billion USD, based on the importation of technology from capitalist countries for the production of synthetic fibers and chemical fertilizers, earning it the nickname “Sisan” or “Four-Three.” This talk seeks to examine the planning and implementation of this project during the 1970s.