This workshop explores similarities and differences evident in cosmological and social structures across East Asia (principally China), Southeast Asia into Eastern Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.
Principal workshop personnel are anthropologists (Barnes, Damon, Digim’Rina, Küchler, Ma, Palmer, Wang and Zhang[F]), some with archaeological backgrounds (Rowlands), classical students of Chinese culture (Dorofeeva-Litchmann) and historians (Dean, Love and Zhang[EC]).
The workshop’s historical contours follow the Austronesian expansion out of southeastern China, now Fujian Province, over the last 6000 years, with Ma and Zhang[F] taking some of these relationships west toward India. However, the geometrical forms that underlie the living practices in this area are not just historical issues or relics: they form fundamental patterns for social life.
A portion of the workshop will consider Kenneth Dean’s work which traces contemporary transformations between people, and ideas and practices, moving between Fujian Province and the Southeast Asia, centered by contemporary Singapore. And over the last 5-10 years, interaction among Damon, Ma, Rowlands and Wang brought to life comparative understandings of current Melanesian and Chinese practices: these have to do with chaotic images and conceived relations between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth.’ Both of these are widely distributed in the region, organized as it is by varying relationships to water. Their significance is in how they function, not where they came from.
In relationship to her Melanesian and Polynesian ethnographic background Küchler writes as if she has picked up and elaborated on Damon’s use of Dorofeeva-Litchmann’s explication of structures embedded in fundamental Chinese historical cosmologies (principally concerned with explicating the Shanhaijing). Deep historical relationships form a backbone of our inquiries. Yet enduring relations through time and across space make this workshop’s focus a matter of present-day interest.
The workshop addresses the continuities and discontinuities in how peoples with Asian-Pacific backgrounds make their worlds operable.