Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best, and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet historically most Tibetans--both monastic and lay--have made meat a regular part of their diet. In this study of the place of vegetarianism within Tibetan religiosity, Geoffrey Barstow explores the tension between Buddhist ethics and Tibetan cultural norms to offer a novel perspective on the spiritual and social dimensions of meat eating.

Food of Sinful Demons...

In Resurrecting Nagasaki, Chad R. Diehl examines the reconstruction of Nagasaki City after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. Diehl illuminates the genesis of narratives surrounding the bombing by following the people and groups who contributed to the city's rise from the ashes and shaped its postwar image in Japan and the world. Municipal...

Focusing on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the century before the First Opium War, Li Chen highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West and foreign extraterritoriality in China.

A Qing law mandated that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for authenticating reincarnations.

Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China to demonstrate how defiance helped the state redefine its power. China's War on Smuggling traces how different regimes sought to police maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed, offering new insights into Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as...

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans' encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology's qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of...

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans' encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology's qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of...

In eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. In China's Philological Turn, Ori Sela foregrounds the polymath Qian Daxin to reconstruct the history of eighteenth-century Chinese learning and its long-lasting consequences.

Robert Tuck offers a groundbreaking study of the connections among traditional poetic genres, print media, and visions of national community in late nineteenth-century Japan. Structured around the work of Masaoka Shiki, Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals poetry's surprising yet fundamental role in emerging forms of media and national consciousness.