WPS 216 Extracting Peasants from the Fields: Rushing for a Livelihood?

This paper explores why and how the peasant labour processes are being reconfigured in the Global South by contemporary rural and agrarian change, with particular focus on their incorporation into informal mining: the exchange of ploughs for picks. To address this question, it draws on recent scholarship that has problematised the classical understandings of agrarian …

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WPS 215 Religious Temple Management in China

In recent decades, there have been many research-based frameworks emphasizing sociological, psychological, behavioural and other theories of leadership.  However, there has been relatively little research on leadership and succession in religious organisations.  Similarly, while historians have written about the struggle for power within Christianity and Islam, much less is known about the Chinese religion and …

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WPS 214 Cyberzomia

This paper adopts the metaphor of a Southeast Asian Zomia to its Chinese cyber-urban variation, and assesses what we can learn from such a way of seeing. After introducing the reader to Zomia and its Cyber-urban counterpart, I provide a succinct status update on the cat-and-mouse game that is afoot on the Chinese Internet, clarify …

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Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited

A fresh approach to visualization practices in the sciences that considers novel forms of imaging technology and draws on recent theoretical perspectives on representation. Representation in Scientific Practice, published by the MIT Press in 1990, helped coalesce a long-standing interest in scientific visualization among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and remains a touchstone for …

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Asian Journal of Social Sciences – Special Focus: Muslim Religious Authority in Modern Asia (Vol. 42 Issue 5)

The social, economic, and political transformations of the past two centuries have been rapid and dramatic, resulting in complex reconfigurations of religious authority in many Muslim societies. These changes have involved not only the emergence of distinctly new profiles of leadership, but also the persistence and adaptation of the models established by the ulama of …

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WPS 213 Opiate of the Masses with Chinese Characteristics: Recent Chinese Scholarship on the Meaning and Future of Religion

This paper examines themes within Chinese theoretical scholarship on religion, from the dual perspectives of religious studies and Marxism. It focuses particularly on the three decades since the 1982 promulgation of “Basic Ideas and Policies Concerning Our Country’s Religious Question in the Socialist Era” marked a turn to an apparently more tolerant religion policy. Although …

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Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia

This volume brings together a range of critical studies that explore diverse ways in which processes of globalization pose new challenges and offer new opportunities for religious groups to propagate their beliefs in contemporary Asian contexts. Proselytizing tests the limits of religious pluralism, as it is a practice that exists on the border of tolerance …

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