David Max Moerman's Books

Realms of Literacy

Early Japan and the History of Writing

By: David B. Lurie

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Realms of Literacy

Early Japan and the History of Writing

By: David B. Lurie

In the world history of writing, Japan presents an unusually detailed record of transition to literacy. Extant materials attest to the social, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of the advent of writing and reading, from the earliest appearance of imported artifacts with Chinese inscriptions in the first century BCE, through the production of texts within the Japanese archipelago in the fifth century, to the widespread literacies and the simultaneous rise of a full-fledged state in the late seventh and eighth centuries. David B. Lurie explores the complex processes of adaptation and invention that defined the early Japanese transition from orality to textuality. Drawing on archaeological and archival sources varying in content, style, and medium, this book highlights the diverse modes and uses of writing that coexisted in a variety of configurations among different social groups. It offers new perspectives on the pragmatic contexts and varied natures of multiple simultaneous literacies, the relations between languages and systems of inscription, and the aesthetic dimensions of writing. Lurie’s investigation into the textual practices of early Japan illuminates not only the cultural history of East Asia but also the broader comparative history of writing and literacy in the ancient world.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

538

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684175089

ISBN 13

9781684175086

Opium and the Limits of EmpireOpium and the Limits of Empire

Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850

By: David Anthony Bello

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Opium and the Limits of EmpireOpium and the Limits of Empire

Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850

By: David Anthony Bello

The British opium trade along China’s seacoast has come to symbolize China’s century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narrative, opium is the primary medium through which China encountered the economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Opium, however, was not a Sino–British problem confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, an empire-wide crisis, and its spread among an ethnically diverse populace created regionally and culturally distinct problems of control for the Qing state. This book examines the crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators. The study of prohibition also permits a more comprehensive and accurate observation of the economics and criminology of opium. The Qing drug traffic involved the domestic production, distribution, and consumption of opium. A balanced examination of the opium market and state anti-drug policy in terms of prohibition reveals the importance of the empire’s landlocked western frontier regions, which were the domestic production centers, in what has previously been considered an essentially coastal problem.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

397

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684174058

ISBN 13

9781684174058

Spectacle and Sacrifice

The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China

By: David Johnson

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Spectacle and Sacrifice

The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China

By: David Johnson

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

418

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684174880

ISBN 13

9781684174881

Writing Violence

The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature

By: David C. Atherton

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Writing Violence

The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature

By: David C. Atherton

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. David C. Atherton offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern popular literature and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence—one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors—he connects concepts of form and formalization across the aesthetic and social spheres. Atherton shows how the formal features of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Through careful readings of works by the major writers Asai Ryōi, Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ueda Akinari, and Santō Kyōden, Writing Violence reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world—and in seeing it anew.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

192

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231558961

ISBN 13

9780231558969

Japan's Imperial Underworlds

Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire

By: David R. Ambaras

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Japan's Imperial Underworlds

Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire

By: David R. Ambaras

This major new study uses vivid accounts of encounters between Chinese and Japanese people living at the margins of empire to elucidate Sino-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter explores mobility in East Asia through the histories of often ignored categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, 'abducted' women and a female pirate. These stories reveal the shared experiences of the border populations of Japan and China and show how they fundamentally shaped the territorial boundaries that defined Japan's imperial world and continue to inform present-day views of China. From Meiji-era treaty ports to the Taiwan Strait, South China, and French Indochina, the movements of people in marginal locations not only destabilized the state's policing of geographical borders and social boundaries, but also stimulated fantasies of furthering imperial power.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

301

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108572065

ISBN 13

9781108572064

From Outcasts to Emperors: Shingon Ritsu and the Mañjuśrī Cult in Medieval Japan

By: David Quinter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

From Outcasts to Emperors: Shingon Ritsu and the Mañjuśrī Cult in Medieval Japan

By: David Quinter

In From Outcasts to Emperors, David Quinter illuminates the Shingon Ritsu movement founded by the charismatic monk Eison (1201–90) at Saidaiji in Nara, Japan. The book’s focus on Eison and his disciples’ involvement in the cult of Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva reveals their innovative synthesis of Shingon esotericism, Buddhist discipline (Ritsu; Sk. vinaya), icon and temple construction, and social welfare activities as the cult embraced a spectrum of supporters, from outcasts to warrior and imperial rulers. In so doing, the book redresses typical portrayals of “Kamakura Buddhism” that cast Eison and other Nara Buddhist leaders merely as conservative reformers, rather than creative innovators, amid the dynamic religious and social changes of medieval Japan.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

354

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004294597

ISBN 13

9789004294592

Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku

By: David J. Gundry

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku

By: David J. Gundry

The first monograph published in English on Ihara Saikaku’s fiction, David J. Gundry’s lucid, compelling study examines the tension reflected in key works by Edo-period Japan’s leading writer of ‘floating world’ literature between the official societal hierarchy dictated by the Tokugawa shogunate’s hereditary status-group system and the era’s de facto, fluid, wealth-based social hierarchy. The book’s nuanced, theoretically engaged explorations of Saikaku’s narratives’ uses of irony and parody demonstrate how these often function to undermine their own narrators' intermittent moralizing. Gundry also analyzes these texts’ depiction of the fleeting pleasures of love, sex, wealth and consumerism as Buddhistic object lessons in the illusory nature of phenomenal reality, the mastery of which leads to a sort of enlightenment.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

314

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004344314

ISBN 13

9789004344310

Fraud

By: David Rakoff

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Fraud

By: David Rakoff

A frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine, Outside, Salon, and GQ, and a regular on Public Radio International's "This American Life,"David Rakoff's debut collection of essays is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and take-your-breath-away poignant. David Rakoff is a fish out of water. Whether he finds himself on assignment climbing Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire — donning a pair of Timberlands for his trek, only to realize with horror that "the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in." — sitting quietly impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window...for a month, or musing on the unique predicament of being undetectably Canadian in New York City ("...what's more spicy than being Canadian, I ask you?"), Rakoff has a gift for exposing life's humour and pathos. Fraud takes us places even we didn't know we wanted to go: expeditions as varied as a search for elves in Iceland, a foray into soap opera acting, or contemplating the gin-soaked olive at the bottom of a martini glass. With the sharpest of eyes, David Rakoff explores the odd and ordinary events of life, spotting what is unique, funny and absurd in the world around him. But for all its razor-sharp wit and snarky humor, Fraud is also, ultimately, an object lesson in not taking life, or oneself, too seriously.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

241

Publisher

Anchor Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385674007

ISBN 13

9780385674003

Culture, Courtiers, and Competition

The Ming Court (1368–1644)

By: David M. Robinson

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Culture, Courtiers, and Competition

The Ming Court (1368–1644)

By: David M. Robinson

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction. The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

475

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684174740

ISBN 13

9781684174744

Localities at the Center

Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing

By: Richard David Belsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Localities at the Center

Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing

By: Richard David Belsky

Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that hindered the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, native-place lodges fostered a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms in the early 20th century.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

346

Publisher

Harvard Univ Asia Center

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674019563

ISBN 13

9780674019560

A Sense of Place

The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan

By: David Spafford

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

A Sense of Place

The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan

By: David Spafford

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kantō region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete locales, where struggles over land rights played out alongside debates about the meaning of ties between families and their holdings. Spafford also provides the first historical account in English of medieval castle building and the castellan revolution of the late fifteenth century, which militarized the countryside and radically transformed the exercise of authority over territory. Simultaneously, the book reinforces a sense of the eastern elite’s anxieties and priorities, detailing how, in their relation to land and place, local elites displayed a preference for past precedent and inherited wisdom. Even amidst the changes wrought by war, this inclination, although quite at odds with their conventional reputation for ruthless pragmatism and forward thinking, prevailed.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

346

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684175364

ISBN 13

9781684175369

Hippocrates' Shadow

By: David H. Newman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Hippocrates' Shadow

By: David H. Newman

Aclear-sighted, heartfelt, and humane story of the needless tests and treatments that cripple healthcare....as a guide to good medicine, it may help us get back to the essence of what good doctors do: be with patients in healing." —Samuel Shem, M.D., author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place In Hippocrates’ Shadow, Dr. David H. Newman upends our understanding of the doctor-patient relationship and offers a new paradigm of honesty and communication. He sees a disregard for the healing power of the bond that originated with Hippocrates, and, ultimately, a disconnect between doctors and their oath to"do no harm." Exposing the patterns of secrecy and habit in modern medicine’s carefully protected subculture, Dr. Newman argues that doctors and patients cling to tradition and yield to demands for pills or tests. Citing fascinating studies that show why antibiotics for sore throats are almost always unnecessary; how cough syrup is rarely more effective than a sugar pill; and why CPR is violent, invasive—and almost always futile, this thought-provoking book cuts to the heart of what really works, and what doesn’t, in medicine.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

274

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1416551549

ISBN 13

9781416551546

Arabic Medicine in China

Tradition, Innovation, and Change

By: Paul David Buell,Eugene N. Anderson

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Arabic Medicine in China

Tradition, Innovation, and Change

By: Paul David Buell,Eugene N. Anderson

The Huihui Yaofang was an encyclopaedia of Near Eastern medicine compiled under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty for the benefit of themselves and Chinese medical establishments. We translate the surviving material and context it in the history and ethnobiology of the medicine described.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

1005

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004447288

ISBN 13

9789004447288

Cold War Anthropology

The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology

By: David H. Price

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Cold War Anthropology

The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology

By: David H. Price

In Cold War Anthropology, David H. Price offers a provocative account of the profound influence that the American security state has had on the field of anthropology since the Second World War. Using a wealth of information unearthed in CIA, FBI, and military records, he maps out the intricate connections between academia and the intelligence community and the strategic use of anthropological research to further the goals of the American military complex. The rise of area studies programs, funded both openly and covertly by government agencies, encouraged anthropologists to produce work that had intellectual value within the field while also shaping global counterinsurgency and development programs that furthered America’s Cold War objectives. Ultimately, the moral issues raised by these activities prompted the American Anthropological Association to establish its first ethics code. Price concludes by comparing Cold War-era anthropology to the anthropological expertise deployed by the military in the post-9/11 era.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

296

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822374382

ISBN 13

9780822374381

Book's by David Max Moerman

Realms of Literacy

Realms of Literacy

Opium and the Limits of EmpireOpium and the Limits of Empire

Opium and the Limits of EmpireOpium and the Limits of Empire

Spectacle and Sacrifice

Spectacle and Sacrifice

Writing Violence

Writing Violence

Japan's Imperial Underworlds

Japan's Imperial Underworlds

From Outcasts to Emperors: Shingon Ritsu and the Mañjuśrī Cult in Medieval Japan

From Outcasts to Emperors: Shingon Ritsu and the Mañjuśrī Cult in Medieval Japan

Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku

Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku

Fraud

Fraud

Culture, Courtiers, and Competition

Culture, Courtiers, and Competition

Localities at the Center

Localities at the Center

A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place

Hippocrates' Shadow

Hippocrates' Shadow

Arabic Medicine in China

Arabic Medicine in China

Cold War Anthropology

Cold War Anthropology

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email