Blockchain Papers

Nguyễn Mậu Bá Đăng, Nguyễn Khánh An, Ngô Thái Hưng

This study aims to identify the price spillover effects between decentralized finance (DeFi) and the stocks of Vietnamese commercial banks using a quantile spillover index model (τ) during the period 2018–2025. The results indicate that the connectedness between DeFi and commercial bank stocks is insignificant under stable market conditions (τ = 0.50), but becomes stronger during bearish (τ = 0.05) and bullish (τ = 0.95) market conditions. Notably, DeFi acts as a recipient of shock spillovers from commercial bank stocks across all three market conditions. Furthermore, the time-varying spillover analysis reveals that the connection between DeFi and commercial bank stocks intensifies during periods of high financial market volatility. These findings serve as an important source of information for investors and policymakers amid the ongoing digital transformation of Vietnam’s banking sector.

Hosung Shim

Transforming Inner Mongolia, by Yi Wang, examines the long-term process of Chinese expansion into Inner Mongolia during the Qing period, which Wang describes as internal colonialization or, in Owen Lattimore's words, secondary imperialism (209, 249). Wang successfully contextualizes the Chinese colonization of Inner Mongolia on local, regional, national, and global levels by utilizing a wide range of Chinese and European sources. The book begins with a summary of the geography, environment, and history of the Mongolian steppe and then discusses various changes that the Qing's territorial expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced or reinforced in the steppe region. Although the Qing officially prohibited the Chinese from entering the Mongolian steppe, its need to maintain various imperial apparatuses, as well as increasing population pressure and ecological crises in North China, drove Chinese farmers to travel outside the Great Wall. The growing presence of Chinese on the steppe—especially in today's Inner Mongolia—compelled the Qing to expand the Chinese-style administrative system north of the Great Wall, giving rise to what Wang calls “dual administrative system” (41–46). As a result, Inner Mongolia witnessed the coexistence of, as well as conflict between, the decentralized Mongol aristocracy and the centralized Chinese bureaucracy.In the second chapter, Wang examines the penetration and expansion of Chinese commerce into the Mongolian steppe. The Qing not only gave Chinese merchants direct access to Mongolia, but it also established a series of politico-military mechanisms—the postal relay system, frontier guard post system, and the institution of annual rotation of Mongol princes and high lamas—to sustain imperial control over the region. Given the cash-poor Mongolian economy, however, it was unviable for the Mongols to meet these official obligations. In this situation, Chinese merchants—most prominently those from Shanxi Province—drew partnership contracts with local Mongol authorities and took on the role of financial intermediary to facilitate the fulfillment of these duties. These developments made the Mongols economically dependent on Chinese merchants while increasingly incorporating Mongolia into the silver-based market system of China proper.The third chapter discusses the processes and ramifications of Chinese migration, settlement, and cultivation in Inner Mongolia. Chinese cultivation would have devastating impacts on the fragile environment of the steppe, causing land degradation and desertification. The ever-expanding Chinese presence also threatened the livelihood of ordinary herders and challenged the authority of local Mongol rulers, eventually leading to ethnic conflicts between Mongols and Chinese. The surge in the Chinese population also necessitated the transplantation of Chinese-style centralized administrative units to the steppe to oversee fiscal and judicial affairs related to Chinese migrants, which in turn encroached upon the autonomy of Mongol banners. Last, Chinese agricultural expansion shifted practical land ownership from Mongols to Chinese migrants, thereby fostering the commodification and privatization of Mongol lands.Chapter 4 explores the rise of a highly commercialized, capital-intensive, and market-oriented rural economy, which resembled agrarian capitalism, in the Hetao region on the northern bend of the Yellow River. From the early 1800s, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs known as “land merchants” (dishang) advanced into Hetao, where they acquired lands from the Mongols, developed elaborate irrigation systems, and established large-scale managerial farms using wage labor. In doing so, the land merchants mobilized large amounts of capital, technical expertise, land, and labor through a sophisticated shareholding system. They also participated in long-distance trade and handicraft industries. These activities increasingly integrated Hetao into the larger regional and global economic system. Wang points out that the existence of such domestically financed and organized developments—however short-lived—counters the conventional view that China, incapable of initiating transformative changes on its own, kept repeating the long-term pattern of smallholder farming and “involutionary” growth.The fifth chapter investigates the expansion of the Catholic Church in Inner Mongolia by focusing on the proselytizing activities of missionaries from the Belgian Catholic order named the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Since the 1860s, a series of rebellions, natural disasters, and famines in North China offered the missionaries favorable conditions to penetrate Inner Mongolia. To attract new converts, most of whom were land-poor and famine-stricken Chinese farmers, the missionaries adopted an evangelical strategy of acquiring Mongol pasturelands and converting them into farmland. The missionaries were also often entangled in land disputes with Mongols, Manchu and Chinese local officials, and Chinese land merchants. During the Boxer Rebellion, these disputes often erupted into violence, for which Mongols came to owe tremendous indemnities. To pay off the huge reparations, many Mongol banners had to resort to land cession, which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the church in Inner Mongolia and stimulated the increasingly Sinicized and centralizing Qing state to penetrate the steppe region.The sixth chapter examines the land reclamation campaign conducted in Inner Mongolia by the centralizing and modernizing late Qing state. From the 1860s, two major challenges brought on by foreign imperialism—the worsening financial crisis and imminent security predicament in Mongolia—gave rise to a significant cognitive shift among high Qing officials concerning the Mongolian steppe, which was now conceptualized as an untapped source of revenue and a locus of strategic defense. In the wake of the launch of the New Policies reforms, the Qing court appointed Yigu, a high-ranking Manchu official, as imperial commissioner to oversee land reclamation in Inner Mongolia, which was considered a way to finance the reform programs and to counter foreign influences on the northern frontiers. By imposing a standardized procedure of land survey, registration, and taxation, Yigu also aimed to retrieve Mongol lands for official taxation, abrogate the Mongols’ hereditary land rights, and transfer the ownership of Mongol lands to the Qing state. As a result, Chinese-style centralized bureaucratic units proliferated in Inner Mongolia. After the fall of the Qing, these developments would facilitate Inner Mongolia's integration into the centralized administrative system of the homogenizing Chinese nation-state.In the end, Wang argues that the historical process of Chinese migration and colonization in Inner Mongolia played a critical role in China's modern transition from a multiethnic empire to a centralizing and homogenizing nation-state. The author also eloquently proves that the development of Chinese colonization on the steppe originated from a set of endogenous socioeconomic transformations well before the impacts from the West forced the Qing to pursue modernization and national integration. Nonetheless, several misconceptions about the history of the steppe are intermittently spotted. For example, the author writes as if the Mongols had not been organized into territorial units before the Qing conquest (27, 37). Recent scholarship, however, points out that territoriality has been ever-present on the steppe.1 Wang also continues to use the term “tribe” to describe traditional Mongol society (26–27, 30–31, 63). Yet a group of scholars has recently challenged the terminology and concept of “tribe,” at least in the context of Mongol history.2 Moreover, the transcription system used for Mongolian words is sometimes inconsistent. Last, this research would have been more nuanced if the author had refrained from characterizing Han Chinese as the “core” and various non-Han peoples as the “periphery.” From the perspective of Qing imperial history, at least during the first half of the empire, the Mongols were not peripheral people. These minor issues, however, do not reduce the overall value of this excellent research. Given that “the PRC government has continued the policy of large-scale Chinese migration and state-sponsored development schemes in Inner Mongolia since the late Qing period and carried these initiatives forward with a forcefulness and efficiency as never seen before” (263), particularly in this time of China's hard-line state policies toward its Inner Asian minorities, Wang's book deserves to be read widely.

Michael Austin, Rachel Meibos Helps

In the 1924 Relief Society General Conference, board member Rosannah Cannon Irvine gave a brief address to introduce Relief Society members to the 1924–25 literature course. At the time, the Relief Society was in the middle of a multiyear survey of great American authors. Alice Louise Reynolds—BYU's first female professor and the founder of the university's literature department—had designed and written these lessons for a Relief Society course based on her own university teaching experience. The course was created, Irvine explained, so that “every woman in our Church, no matter how restricted her advantages, no matter how remote her environment, can have at least a smattering of what our boys and girls are getting in college.” She felt that all women needed and deserved to have the experience of stretching their minds by reading and discussing the best literature that has ever been written. “Mothers lie awake nights planning ways and means to send children to college,” she continued. “If refinement and culture and education are necessary to the younger generation, they are just as necessary to us. The few years’ difference in our ages makes very little difference to us in the vast ages of time and eternity, and our children are proud of us in our effort to gain a knowledge of what they are studying.”1Like many of the women in her audience, Irvine had grown up in a religious environment that prized both literature and education. She turned seventeen during the same month that Orson F. Whitney gave his famous “Home Literature” speech in which he complained that Mormons “are popularly supposed to be enemies of education, despisers of learning, haters of books and schools”—and admonished young Latter-day Saints to read the world's great classics and create their own literary movement in response. To do this, he reasoned, Mormons would need to study and understand the great literary tradition that they hoped to contribute to.2 “Literature means learning,” he continued, “and it is from the ‘best books’ we are told to seek it,” he proclaimed, emphasizing that the best books meant “history, poetry, philosophy, art and science, languages, government—all truth in fact, wherever found.”3Whitney's address articulated an expansive view of Mormonism—a view that drove both the home literature movement that began in the late nineteenth century and the curricular innovations in many of the church's auxiliaries that followed in the early years of the twentieth century. We see this expansive view in initiatives like the traveling library program that the YLMIA started in 1902 and in the annual reading course that the YMMIA began in 1906.4 And we see it very clearly in the Relief Society literature course that lasted from 1914 through 1970 and introduced Relief Society members to hundreds of authors and thousands of literary works. For women like Rosannah Irvine and her colleagues on the Relief Society general board, reading great literature was a logical extension of Mormon doctrine as expressed in the Thirteenth Article of Faith. To be faithful to their own religious beliefs, she reasoned, Latter-day Saints must “accept the good and the beautiful, and the praiseworthy and the virtuous, wherever we find it in life.”5The expansive view of the gospel that drove these programs has always been part of the Mormon tradition. But so has its opposite: the reductive view that because Mormonism encompasses all truth, then the truth and the value of any proposition lies in the extent to which it supports current religious orthodoxy. Rather than expanding one's understanding of the gospel to encompass history, philosophy, and poetry, this view shrinks history, art, poetry, and everything into proofs of a narrow set of religious propositions. For most of its existence, the Relief Society's literature curriculum was a battleground between these two views of the gospel—the first represented by the architects of the program and many of those who oversaw it, and the second represented by the various iterations of the correlation movement and other external interventions that ultimately determined the shape of the curriculum.The first wave of what Latter-day Saints would later call “priesthood correlation” began in the last years of the nineteenth century when the church began to centralize its publications and instructional materials. Before this time, most of the auxiliary publications were private ventures, and most curricular matters were in the hands of stake auxiliary leaders. By 1902, almost all of the church's auxiliaries had an official magazine that published centralized lessons for the entire church.6 Only the Relief Society held on to locally planned lessons and a privately owned, quasi-official publication: the Woman's Exponent—an eight-page newspaper published twice a month from June 1872 through January 1900 and monthly thereafter. Emmeline B. Wells, the longtime editor of the Exponent who became the general Relief Society president in 1910, felt strongly that the individual stakes should develop Relief Society lessons and that the Exponent should continue to be its sole publication.7Wells's position became increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of a churchwide push for curricular standardization. In 1913, apostle David O. McKay led the first church Correlation Committee that included representatives from all the auxiliaries. Church leaders charged the committee to (1) prevent “unnecessary and undesirable duplication of work in the various auxiliary organizations,” and (2) select “suitable dates for the holding of stake meetings.”8 The committee, which included future general Relief Society presidents Clarissa Williams and Amy Brown Lyman, “successfully prodded the Relief Society general board to change its educational program and implement a unified course of study.”9 Other board members had been pushing this change for years, including Susa Young Gates, who wrote (but apparently did not send) a letter to Joseph F. Smith complaining about Wells's intransigence on this issue and offering to resign from the board.10In 1913, the Correlation Committee directed each auxiliary to create standardized central curricula that did not duplicate each other's work.11 The Woman's Exponent published its final issue in February 1914. In 1915, the Relief Society Magazine began its fifty-five-year run with Susa Young Gates as its first editor. During the transition year of 1914, the Relief Society Board distributed thirteen thousand free copies of Gates's edited thirty-two-page Relief Society Guide, supplemented by a monthly sixteen-page, ad-supported Relief Society Bulletin.12 The 1914 Bulletin unveiled an ambitious new Relief Society curriculum with six topics to be studied over four weeks each month: current events, genealogy, home ethics, home gardening, literature, and art. The publication allocated more time each month for the literary lessons than for any of the other topics, and over the course of the year, members of the Relief Society read and discussed the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, aided by a series of lessons that Gates created and published in the Bulletin.13While the Correlation Committee provided the impetus to standardize the curriculum, the choice to make literature one of the standard subjects likely reflected another concern. By 1914, literary clubs were among the most popular and well-organized women's organizations both nationally and in Utah.14 Many LDS women participated in organizations such as the Reapers’ Club (1892), which “featured discussions of literature, political science, and current events,” and the Authors’ Club (1893), which “focused on great authors and their works.”15 When church auxiliaries first began to standardize their curricula at the turn of the century, President Joseph F. Smith penned an editorial in the Improvement Era urging the church's organizations to fill the needs that some members saw in these external organizations: There is no call for individuals to organize clubs, or special gatherings in social, educational, or national capacity, in order to express wishes or desires for reforms that can always be expressed in the organizations that already in the There is to do in the general Church to fill all to all and to develop the of the is necessary to organizations individual by the Church to and and is not in the of members of the Relief Society general board, including Susa Young Gates and Amy Brown Lyman, had participated in these literary the early women to make the part of the Relief Society curriculum to Mormons in remote to experience the they in great literature and to prevent women in from the church for the Relief Society Bulletin became the Relief Society Magazine in 1915, it the curriculum with a of the years, the literature lessons and Gates's own The of as the literary of the magazine in and a series of lessons written by Mormon and of literature professor time with lessons for the of each month during The literature lessons in and to make for work in the of the In the monthly literature lessons and the literature curriculum became the monthly lessons in and to a of Relief Society that from through Louise was the the first of Relief Society literary She was the first woman to other than and at Young She the literature and in she became the first woman at and the second woman in to the of the in the of when she was years She studied for two years at the of and at the of in the of at and began curriculum for the Relief Society in and was to the Relief Society general board, and as editor of the Relief Society in She became the editor in which her to to a position at and she wrote most of the lessons from through first set of literary lessons for an entire year to a literary She followed these lessons up with two years of lessons about first year about LDS and the second about from the tradition. through she created an course on American literature that introduced to of American who would have to her audience, such as one of the American of the late twentieth century and the the lessons from American literature to a literature that included and American six Mormon women had or national and who were at the of the Mormon home literature The final of this published in was which the of an woman who her that her has been on In a published in at from through her at this in her of as it the of a that Alice Louise was for including she to the Magazine both her as a and and her to the LDS She would have no in among Mormon women about the and by over as the editor in she began to the of two two in January she to be as the of the And in the board that Alice Louise had as the editor to to teaching at Before as with her and in the to create the lessons for the course. was followed by a in and who wrote the course in and the of the at who wrote the lessons from When her the board to the lessons from through he in of he had the lessons for the course on the a longtime professor of at the of one of wrote the from Alice Louise and her the literature lessons their most expansive The for the lessons from and who were their the of studied in the women's clubs of the were that the value of reading for its own such as of and in lessons did not from literature to religious when they did so in or was that the literature and articulated a for the course in her 1924 that the value of literature the and of the the that lie at the of all that we to be most in our and us to understand more this that we have to it is one of the most and subjects that we can she it is the study for church lessons because it us to and to for the of the the Relief Society's and as like university as their make with in their created the and to read a to the of Amy Brown Lyman, who became the general Relief Society president in of oversaw the curriculum with was a at the of In church leaders her to on the Relief Society general She the curriculum from the very She the Relief Society's best in the and that in were a part of the Relief Society She was a later the of Alice in the Relief Society lessons and felt strongly about the of the than any of her had in her with church She had a with church president as more with first who the correlation of the In the of all of the auxiliaries and a the of that directed the to and the work of the to on gospel and not and directed the Relief Society to their to of and In the Relief Society was more Relief Society is the to the of in on work for the of he is the to it the to it the to all The social, and educational must be to other with the entire Relief Society curriculum from and other general the literature lessons a lessons were by the they represented the of that The course that it the as and did not up matters which would be in a religious one of the in the course and through the Relief Society was The which was based on the of the which in as the of likely had in when he wrote to in of that is that those who are lessons for our Church have of a knowledge of which they not to is almost to that they have ever into our own Church or in June of with a of the lessons in need of To the the general education turned to who had just as an professor at The of in the do not the that expressed in a letter to that have been in over a during many years of in Relief Society than was over the literature lessons the we into the for and she did understand the she he had a understanding of the Church so she felt that not some of the we had last the the about what those have in a that his lessons have been by the Committee and that they the lessons be very and free from our Committee to was in of letter that it had been in at least of was about of into Church and he set up a committee of general to and all auxiliary lessons they be The committee was by Joseph Smith and included B. and In a letter to these four general the of the charged to that in a church publication to that it and gospel to these all in the church should the set or be with the of the free from any of and free from the of the knowledge and have their they must to so in and as to to that with the of the which must be expressed and not to by the for the of books or lessons for by any of the organizations be with and by written and lessons are to the of those who or such must have they are by any of the organizations of the letter no to a that would read all and make to the The of these would be to these little that the of the literature lessons would have to change to a new would no be to study literature because it was or The expansive view of Mormonism that saw all truth as part of the gospel gave to the reductive view that all knowledge by the extent to which it be to current The letter not have been on this knowledge it be so set as to the The study of other religious can be in the church for the of and the truth of the and the of the other of the And and be with great and and for the sole of that when supports the Committee on the Relief Society In the was on the of the the literature was on the and the as on the of for the first time in the of the each with its in a and all of the authors were The literature lessons would continue for another years and would continue to find and ways to introduce Relief Society to the classics of with a of was a member of the Relief Society general a new were not by a member of the Relief Society or by any other to create lessons on literature in and he designed and wrote a course in its Literature” for the who was the president of the wrote a course on the literature of the and for the at the of the Relief Society board, to a course on of the Latter-day The first of this published in with literature during the of Joseph The second with the literature of the and was in who as a when became the general Relief Society a letter that have in such a as makes it to change the of our literature study course for that the change was by a need to to the Committee that the literature lessons more religious in the for the that the board in getting literature lessons by the in of the education that it has been necessary to change the literature course for and the literature committee had been to a new course. She O. of the literature committee, to its The committee a or course on great as of from all over the who had various of President that as of be a more for the course and that it would be necessary to make of authors and books to with Latter-day some was expressed as to such a course would be by the Church it was that great have many of our own Church leaders and that a great many of our leaders had expressed a to study great course through more iterations during the planning In that the literature committee in with a course on as of which it would be to She a course “Literature as to develop a they an for a to a literature which was and the board set to find a first for so they president to a from the professor a at studied Alice who he later as a on his education. she was great and and great the she became the most of literature lessons in the Relief Society curriculum that wrote all of the lessons from through February a of years and individual more than of the literature course created in the twentieth century. correlation push into the with the of David O. McKay to the church had a than did in lessons the as he were a set of survey his lessons through the of a set of designed for in such followed his on literature with a course on in to and of his literature lessons into that were in a and at the to that members of the church from the to for a of and gospel from to February a survey of American literature just as and just as as his survey of And it had just as an which all were to and on American literature was in the when most saw it as to literature and of in the had the first American literature at in the late But it had been part of the Relief Society curriculum from the very with the first year of the literature course reading the Autobiography of Benjamin and with Alice lessons from many of the same authors and topics that in the years, a series of literature and the for of in and American as this on they like in The were and the reading for each course was both and In the for studied of The of and with of by and and a by would be a difficult for an in American was in a Relief Society with and with little in and some members of the board for new ways to their to the most in the of the Relief Society's literature the early the Relief Society board had that the literature lessons were not Alice a member of the board and the of president the of the with she had as an the that he gave to in their first that in the the lessons had on literary or on the of with on authors and their for the most the women in the had not that had two that would make the more and more for was that the be on the literature than on or the of authors. The other was that the should be that copies be for the women to have and to that the church was that a of choice be and to the Relief Society with both and with his weeks this she on of the board to he would be to develop the program he had and an of literature that would be published by the church for in all Relief Society he his as a and the board The was the of the curriculum and that the Relief Society literature lessons from through the of the Relief Society Magazine in of the lessons began in the issue of the Relief Society with the in late of the same was from the that the would for two the lessons on topics than authors or literary and each or brief from works. The authors the than the literature the of the and most topics for For the was over two lessons in and and four by by of the by and of by and in the as by by and by that the church published and to these and to an of than had In June the entire had been and a letter from the that The committee the and to the of literature than LDS and they complained that the authors literary than gospel see in this course which is and LDS and which to the gospel of so in all that was to in a letter to “If the is as as the letter to then is a it to be was By it had already thousand and the course was for a second and a and up a of for in the and The final in from all had a special as and and the on in the second and the of the Correlation Committee for Before February all of the lessons the and as through and the lessons into topics like and of in and the of the lessons the of in to and the and such topics as the and of discussing the later expressed at the of by the Correlation In January wrote a letter to complaining about the to have been very he wrote to between a reading committee that a need to the women of the Church that or be and a reading that urging us that face and make us In the same he on to reading committee to be of and all which are the of us one of literature to work which is and was more about the to because they to the because a of a based on and had been in and of the to its the the of the of the and of the Relief Society literature curriculum not because of or because these lessons did not the needs of the church with more members of the than The literature program was created for women in the American at a time when for women were almost on literature and on the of the American middle church in an with the literature lessons were those into the and work for The entire Relief Society curriculum was in when both the Improvement Era and the Relief Society Magazine their and were into the the church's sole magazine for from through Relief Society's literature curriculum in the of in between the first and second of of the were no and were as that the correlation of 1970 and in some refinement lessons did literary topics, they included art, and about other In the refinement were from the curriculum for the same that the literature lessons were a At that time, Relief Society general president did not the needs of The lessons were difficult to and many such as the literature and poetry, to other the other of the Relief Society curriculum in the twentieth century, the literature are of their time and be of When they began in 1914, the of Latter-day Saints in or very to was a educational or The church was the of teaching literature, or most other to who from the When the literature lessons in the Church of of Latter-day Saints was a had and and for education. no to in literature that were difficult to no in the Mormon and did not gospel in more than years, and by authors from other religious by some who were not as that have religious by or The architects of the Relief Society curriculum had an expansive view of saw it as a of all truth, the work of and as a part of as the of Joseph Smith or the And the curriculum that they created for a than any curricular in the church's lessons us of that we should not for most of the twentieth century, a of Latter-day Saints saw literature as a part of the of

Alex Trahan

This paper combines novel archival research with a re-reading of the existing documentary record to reframe and investigate "the POW/MIA issue" as an ideological phenomenon. Prior research on the POW/MIA issue, or the widespread, persistent belief that US prisoners of war were secretly held in Vietnamese custody for years after the official 1973 prisoner swap, treats its persistence as the outcome of voluntarist factors like fraud and gullibility or the energy and innovation of grassroots activists. In contrast, this thesis argues that the issue's persistence in American political discourse is an artifact of the US national security state's ideological functions. It accomplishes this argument by first casting the National League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia as an ideological state apparatus, then demonstrating that the League modeled a specific kind of state-sanctioned POW/MIA subjectivity organized through the feeling I call autonomic certainty, or the use of intense feeling as proof in-and-of-itself. The POW/MIA activism of Ann Fischer, a rank-and-file League member from Madison, WI, stands as an example of autonomic certainty in action. Ann's brother, US Marine Richard W. Fischer, was declared MIA in Vietnam in 1968, sending members of the Fischer family into a years-long quest to prove he was alive in captivity. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense withheld convincing wartime evidence that Richard Fischer was killed and buried on the day he disappeared. This thesis is the first piece of POW/MIA literature to stake its claims with DOD case files relating to a POW/MIA.

Radoslav Yordanov

In 1957, Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk fled to a monastery near Angkor Wat to become a monk. As it turned out, this was just a maneuver aimed at proving his indispensability rather a fulfilment of his lasting monastic vows. Within a fortnight, he was back in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, launching an attack on his political enemies within the Democrat Party, pitting soldiers against party leaders. He then initiated new elections and won 99 percent of the vote against the only rival party, the socialist Pracheachon. The Communists, realizing that they could not compete against the omnipotent Sangkum, decided to go underground. This is just one episode in Sihanouk's long political biography, but it provides an excellent outlet to understanding this complex political figure, who did not shy from engaging in long-winded, controversial moves in pursuit of Cambodia's independence.Sihanouk's political career, known for its remarkable longevity, spanned eight decades, undergoing myriad transformations. The “Prince of Light” of the 1940s turned into the “Prince of Darkness” in the late 1960s, to borrow Milton E. Osborne's apt metaphors in his Sihanouk Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). But Sihanouk's career did not end there. He came back to the Cambodian throne in the 1990s as the King Father and eventually departed the scene in the 2010s as the progenitor of a whole nation. Sihanouk's diplomatic initiatives, which were as convoluted and imaginative as his domestic political antics, bemused his counterparts from Washington to Delhi and Moscow to Beijing. Seeing Sihanouk as the political figure at the center of a proud kingdom, defending its right for existence while surrounded by inimical neighbors and the great powers is the interpretative vignette and point of departure for this study.Although William J. Rust's Eisenhower & Cambodia pays intellectual homage to the motivations underpinning the political life of one of the most recognizable monarchs of the twentieth century, it is not intended as yet another biography of Sihanouk. Instead, this diplomatic history of U.S.-Cambodian relations during the Eisenhower administration completes Rust's examination of U.S.-Indochina relations prior to the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam, following up on his research into U.S. policy toward Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s. The book offers the fullest coverage to date of the back-and-forth between Washington and Phnom Penh in the 1950s. Rust rightly understands, however, that a nuanced contextual reading of those relations would be impossible without delving into Sihanouk's image as “a great man in a small country” as seen by U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh and Saigon, U.S. State Department officials, and two U.S. presidents—Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the center of the story, and John F. Kennedy on its fringes. Additionally, Rust convincingly employs center-periphery Cold War optics, which helps to situate the book as a comprehensive case study, portraying the uneasy search for mutually acceptable terms of engagement between the great powers and their smaller local counterparts, limited by their own interests and agendas.The center-periphery framework puts the story into an international context, explaining the mismatch between the two sides’ expectations of each other. Seen from Washington, the small, formerly French-ruled Cambodia was just a dot on the world map, sitting very low on the U.S. national security agenda. Seen from Phnom Penh, the world seemed an appendage to all social and political problems plaguing the old and proud Khmer empire in its present territorial incarnation. U.S. officials saw Cambodia's internal politics through an anti-Communist lens, a view that, for Cambodian leaders, bore little resemblance to the country's real problems. On the other hand, Sihanouk's obsession with Cambodia's territorial integrity vis-à-vis its neighbors Thailand and South Vietnam rubbed up against U.S. diplomatic calculations regarding regional allies.By outlining the ebb and flow of Washington's relations with Phnom Penh during the Eisenhower years, Rust focuses on both covert and overt channels, demonstrating that the former permeated into the latter, hindering it as a result. Rust's event-driven account shows that the difficult relationships of U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh—from Robert McClintock through Carl Strom to William Trimble—followed a recurring pattern. Despite different personalities, managerial styles, and degrees of local knowledge, all U.S. envoys invariably clashed with Sihanouk's idiosyncratic persona. As a State Department's Bureau of Research and Intelligence desk officer noted, Sihanouk was “volatile, vain, egotistical and sensitive” (p. 6). In Phnom Penh, opinions were not much at odds with Ambassador McClintock, who eventually made fun of Sihanouk by referring to him as “Snooky” (p. 93). These characterizations resemble earlier observations of the Cambodian leader's complex mixture of personality traits, as exhaustively detailed by Ross Marlay and Clark Neher in Patriots and Tyrants: Ten Asian Leaders (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): “Depending upon the situation, Sihanouk can be charming, tenacious, revengeful, ebullient, stubborn, wily, intolerant, megalomaniacal, autocratic, shill, or playful” (p. 151).In line with the book's subtitle, the other conspicuous themes in Rust's account are the U.S. government tendency to play “footsie” with Sihanouk's non-Communist rivals and the “doctrine of plausible denial.” Rust convincingly shows that covert actions affecting Cambodia's internal political affairs proved to be, as with the Laotian case in 1958–1960, counterproductive in advancing U.S. anti-Communist goals (p. 3). The book suggests that the failure of the 1959 Dap Chhuon Plot against Sihanouk and the ensuing rebuff of U.S. involvement in the coup irreversibly damaged U.S. relations with the Cambodian ruler but also further strengthened Eisenhower's “dubious legacy of relying heavily on” the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “to remove worrisome national leaders” (p. 252).In the prologue, which reads as an epilogue, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Relations and former Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Roger Hilsman, Jr., speaking with President Kennedy, claimed that during the “Eisenhower administration the CIA ‘did things the State Department didn't know about’” (p. 2). This quotation may serve as an excellent tag line for the book, whetting the reader's appetite, but the subsequent development of the narrative falls flat, failing to provide concrete documentary proof. Those who have had the chance to wade through the released CIA papers of the period will hardly be surprised by this. Instead, by weaving a detailed narrative based on conjecture, memoirs, and oral histories, Rust paints a nuanced story of clandestine U.S. assistance to rebel leader Sơn Ngọc Thành and his Khmer Serei militia against Sihanouk. However, as Rust notes, scholars’ diverging views about the degree of U.S. involvement in the Dap Chhoun affair cannot be adjudicated without more “enlightened declassification of fifty-five-year-old government documents” (p. 183). This gap, however, does not prevent Rust from offering yet another case showing the relationship, or lack thereof, between U.S. overt and covert involvement in distant local actors at the crossroads between the Communist bloc and the “free world.” The Cambodian case thus puts in context other U.S. clandestine operations in the region in the 1950s, such as those in Laos and Indonesia, which would indeed need further documentary evidence.Another important theme in the book is Sihanouk's treatment of neutrality in the increasingly polarized international relations of the early Cold War. For U.S. officials, questions about Sihanouk's neutrality and nationalism were intertwined. Local considerations meant that Cambodia's national interest did not coincide with U.S. interests in the region, and, in Machiavellian fashion, the Cambodian leader took a principled approach toward accepting aid on a no-strings-attached-basis as he sought to preserve his country's neutrality. As Rust demonstrates, this approach did not meet with approval in Washington, especially when local overtures were being made by Communist China. The Eisenhower administration was unimpressed with Sihanouk's “indifference to the global ideological struggle between the ‘communist bloc’ and the ‘free world’” (p. 4). Sihanouk believed that an orientation toward either of the blocs equated to submissiveness and that such a posture would contradict Cambodia's linkage of its neutrality with foreign non-interference in its domestic affairs. In McClintock's words, Cambodian neutrality was “primarily an expression of the country's intense nationalism.” Cambodia, in the American diplomat's view, therefore sought to protect independence “by judiciously balancing Eastern and Western influence” (p. 111). This, as Rust points out, served domestic purposes, as “[p]oliticians on the left and right unanimously endorsed Sihanouk's policy of neutrality” (p. 111).Rust argues that the United States overplayed the salience of Communist ideology in international relations while downplaying the history, people, and politics of individual states. U.S. officials in the 1950s tended to reduce the complexity of relations within and among foreign countries to a zero-sum game in which a country was either lost to or won from an international Communist conspiracy efficiently directed by the Soviet Union (p. 18). This challenged Phnom Penh's overarching security concerns, which had developed independent of global Cold War imperatives and were instead focused on the local rivalry with Saigon and Bangkok. The Eisenhower administration's reluctance to oppose South Vietnam's plotting against Sihanouk, whose neutralist tint was deemed less pertinent to U.S. interests, was in agreement with Washington's desire to maintain Saigon as “a strong anti-Communist bastion in Southeast Asia” (p. 200). Therefore, Cambodia and United States seemed to have reached an impasse in which visions of neutrality and independence from below clashed with the seemingly all-engulfing zero-sum calculus from above.Rust's book is a valuable, well-researched, and lucidly written case study demonstrating the pitfalls that can develop in diplomatic relations between a superpower and a small state when local imperatives and global interests are mismatched. The added value Rust provides to our understanding of the Cold War's spread into locales hitherto thought of as insignificant is that it puts similar experiences in perspective. As I read Rust's findings with rapt interest, I could not help but draw parallels with my earlier study of the Soviet Union's involvement in the Horn of Africa. The Soviet Union, like the United States, had to deal with rival local actors that almost invariably put their own narrowly defined interests above and before vague and broadly drawn global prerogatives, more often than not managing to elevate the status of their localized cleavages into international crises. Although Rust's new book may not add much in the way of novel interpretations of the studied period—for that, see Kenton Clymer's The United States and Cambodia 1870–1969: From Curiosity to Confrontation (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000: A Troubled Relationship (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)—it undoubtedly enriches our knowledge by offering clear and concise analysis of primary material that will interest not only students of Indochina but also those who seek to develop a wider understanding of center-periphery relations during the Cold War.

Luman Wang

This chapter focuses on the relations between the Qing dynasty and Shanxi piaohao before 1895. It replaces the state-market dichotomy with a trichotomy of Shanxi piaohao as private financiers, provincial bureaucrats, and the central government as the chapter’s analytical framework. The year 1895 marked a watershed in the Qing government’s shift from decentralized to centralized fiscal governance, which also served as a historical divider between this and the following chapters. The significance of applying a three-level system to the political economy of the Chinese hinterland capitalism is threefold. First, it affirms the crucial role of a liberal market in the independent emergence and development of piaohao . Second, the growing inconsistency between the Qing’s centralized political governance versus decentralized fiscal management reflected through the complex roles played by provincial bureaucrats better explains the reason for the economic divergence between China and the West. Third, it demonstrates the decisive role played by the state’s fiscal governance in shaping and reshaping private finance. Overall, the chapter serves as a critique of economic and business histories, which often reduced the study of capitalist development in non-Western countries to a static dichotomy of the state as a monolithic whole and an abstract market immune to state intervention.

Tammy Wahpeconiah

How is God in the world? Is He, according to Christian theology, both transcendent and immanent? In other words, is He distant and separate from the world and humanity while at the same time working within both? Or, did He create the universe and then remove Himself from it? Are we able to comprehend certain aspects of God through our understanding of the order and beauty of the universe? Or, do humans seek a God who is no longer interested? Many science fiction writers have asked and responded to such questions including Ted Chiang in his collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. Several of his stories deal directly with these questions and we can read them as a critique of faith, religion, belief, and the nature of God. Chiang questions whether God has a role in our lives, what that role may look like, and the ability of religion to provide meaning. Furthermore, these stories are apocalyptic in nature, especially if we think of apocalypse as revelation, the Greek definition. Frederick Krueziger further defines apocalypse as “an unfolding; hence a revelation through unfolding” (5). Such unfolding always takes place within a story; thus, we must consider the inherent connection between apocalypse and story. As Krueziger says, “Apocalypse as story first of all reveals story as that which shapes our search for meaning” (5). The revelation, the unfolding, therefore is the story itself as well as what the story means. We can read Chiang's stories as apocalyptic because they reveal our disillusionment with our world and our inability to find meaning in religion alone. For Krueziger, science fiction as apocalypse illustrates our disillusionment with “the failure of the promise of technology and science to deliver the world from poverty, ignorance, disease, war, famine, plague, and death. &”(6). Although I agree that many science fiction works address these particular disillusionments, Chiang's stories, I would argue, have a certain similarity to the apocalyptic writings of John. People disappointed at the failure of the Second Coming to occur during their lifetime lost faith in the promise of God. John's writings deal with crises of both history and faith. Thus, Chiang's stories are similar to John's writings in that they deal with the disillusionment and failure of faith and religion. Before discussing the stories, it may behoove us to consider the definitions of faith, religion, and belief. Although we may feel we know what these words mean, and may even think they are synonymous, the distinctions among them are of importance to this essay. As John Bishop states, “& at its most general, ‘faith’ means the same as ‘trust‘.” Greg Popcak defines faith more narrowly, asserting that faith “is merely the innate drive to search for meaning, purpose and significance.” Religion, at its most basic, can be defined as a specific form of human activity as a means of achieving spiritual or material improvement. However, this form of human activity is often cultural because it is a system of behaviors and praxes uniting a community. Belief, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, refers “to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true.” Interestingly, many define faith as belief without proof. Although many use these three terms interchangeably, Chiang employs them in specific ways in his stories. In the “Tower of Babylon,” Chiang uses the biblical story of the tower of Babel as his premise. His focus is not on God's creation of various languages as punishment for defying Him, but on humanity's desire “to see what lay beyond [the earth's] borders, all the rest of Yahweh's creation” (5-6). This story juxtaposes science with faith and religion as the Babylonians are building the tower so they can break into the vault of heaven. They desire knowledge about their world, but also desire knowledge about God, believing that the tower will enable them “to ascend to see the works of Yahweh” while allowing Yahweh to “descend to see the works of man” (6). In this story, Ted Chiang combines the above definitions of religion as a “search for meaning, purpose and significance” as well as the desire for material and spiritual improvement (Popcak). The envisaged structure is simple: Earth was seen as being situated in the middle of a great volume of water, with water both above and below Earth. A great dome was thought to be set above Earth (like an inverted glass bowl), maintaining the water above Earth in its place. Earth was pictured as resting on foundations that go down into the deep. These foundations secured the stability of the land as something that is not floating on the water and so could not be tossed about by wind and wave. The waters surrounding Earth were thought to have been gathered together in their place. The stars, sun, moon, and planets moved in their allotted paths across the great dome above Earth, with their movements defining the months, seasons, and year. (60) Chiang brilliantly describes the geocentric worldview through the protagonist of the story, Hillalum, who is an Elamite miner contracted to dig into the vault of heaven. He, along with other Elamite miners, spends four months climbing to the top of the tower. Along the way, he discovers how his world and his universe functions. He comes to know that night is “the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky” (“Tower” 11). He and the others reach a point on the tower where they see “storms from above and from below” and where people “[harvest] crops from the air” (14). After climbing a number of weeks, the miners find themselves “at precisely the same level as the moon when it passed; they had reached the height of the first of the celestial bodies” (14). When they reach the level of the sun, the intense heat forces them to travel at night. Passing this level, Hillalum finds that the sun shines “upward, which [seems] unnatural to the utmost” (15, emphasis in original). When they are level with the stars, the miners discover that a star has hit the tower, leaving “a knotted mass of black heaven-metal, as large as a man could wrap his arms around” (16). Finally, they reach the vault of heaven itself, “a solid carapace enclosing all the sky (16) that ”[seems] to be made of fine-grained white granite, unmarred and utterly featureless“ (18-19). Hillalum's travels to the top of the tower allows him to discover both the meaning and significance of the physical world, not through religion or faith, but through his own observation. Since, in the geocentric view, the Earth is “situated in the middle of a great volume of water,” the Babylonians and the Elamite miners fear that breaking into the vault of heaven will release another Great Flood (Robishaw 60). They believe Yahweh caused the Great Flood, or the “Deluge,” by releasing “the waters of the Abyss & from the springs of the earth, and & [from] the sluice gates in the vault” (19). Concerned that they may hit one of these reservoirs, the Babylonians enlist Egyptian masons who design a system using large blocks of granite that will “slide down until [they] rest in the recess of the floor” and will completely block any opening (22). Using this design, they are able to safeguard the world from another flood when their worst fear is realized and the miners accidently dig into a reservoir. Hillalum and two others are trapped within the vault, but only Hillalum survives. The rising water forces him upward and the current of water carries him until “the walls [open] out away from him” (25). He awakens in a tunnel, but is able to see light ahead. He comes out of what he discovers is a cave and finds himself in the land of Shinnar, which is south of Babylon. Hillalum's return to earth from the vault of heaven forces him to realize that the world is shaped like a seal cylinder, “wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth [touch]” (28). Thus, Hillalum's journey is in itself apocalyptic—as his story unfolds, the world reveals itself through his experience. The scientific worldview Chiang incorporates is fascinating; yet, what is even more fascinating is the way the inhabitants view God and their attempts to connect with Him. The people fear God's displeasure and Hillalum feels uneasy at the thought of breaking open the vault of heaven (4). Standing at the base of the tower even Hillalum's senses rebel, “insisting that nothing should stand so high” (6). He and the others continually wait for a sign from God “to let men know that their venture was approved,” yet God is silent (14). When the star mentioned above first hit the tower, “everyone descended &, waiting for retribution from Yahweh for disturbing the workings of Creation. They waited for months, but no sign came” (16). God never acknowledges their efforts, either blessing or damning them for their attempts. Their overwhelming desire for knowledge of God's workings cause them to give “thanks that they [are] permitted to see so much” while at the same time they “beg forgiveness for their desire to see more” (18). Their reactions show lack of surety regarding their purpose as Yahweh fails to respond. The inhabitants debate how God may perceive their attempts to reach Him. Qurdusa, one of the tower's bricklayers argues that “if the tower were sacrilege, Yahweh would have destroyed it earlier” causing one of the Elamites to counter: “If Yahweh looked upon this venture with such favor there would already be a stairway ready-made for us to use in the vault” (19). Hillalum, however, takes a more Deistic viewpoint, saying, “Yahweh may not punish us, but Yahweh may allow us to bring our judgment upon ourselves” (19). The God in this story creates the world but does not actively intervene. When Hillalum and the others hit a reservoir, he believes “his fate had come at last. Yahweh had not asked men to build the tower or to pierce the vault; the decision to build it belonged to men alone, and they would die in this endeavor just as they did in any of their earthbound tasks. Their righteousness could not save them from the consequences of their actions” (24). In this world, the focus is on the choices one makes and the consequences one must pay for those choices. Yes, God exists, but He does not intervene in human lives, nor does He care if they are virtuous or sinful, or if they worship or ignore Him. It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they'd come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed. Thus men would know their place. (28). Hillalum comes to understand that faith does not provide meaning or significance to his life. He glimpses “the unimaginable artistry” of the world through human endeavor, not through worship or religious ritual. As Alan Gregory states, while all “apocalyptic texts reveal human life in its precarious contingency,” apocalyptic “science fiction finds the contingency of life before immanent powers” (161). The inhabitants of this world find “a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation” that comes from their own exploration of the world (Smith). Yahweh does not open their minds or increase their understanding of their world and their place in it, only an individual's desire for knowledge does so. Chiang's story is apocalyptic in that it is the story itself that reveals our search for meaning. We do not need religion to achieve spiritual or material improvement; what we need is our continuing desire to discover and understand the physical world. The “Tower of Babylon” is a story illustrating the existence of God through the reasoning and observation of its characters, but not by supernatural manifestations. Such is not the case in “Hell Is the Absence of God.” In the world of the story, the idea of faith as belief without proof is not an issue. Angels make frequent appearances and inhabitants witness the dead ascending into Heaven or descending into Hell. Hell itself becomes visible on occasion, allowing the living to see a place very similar to their world as going to Hell means “permanent exile from God, no more and no less” (“Hell” 208). Angelic manifestations can lead to miracles but can also lead to indiscriminate death and birth defects because of the destructive power of their visitations. Furthermore, anyone caught in “Heaven's light,” which appears “only when an angel [enters] or [leaves] the mortal plain,” go to Heaven, even if they are wicked or evil (226). The protagonist of the story, Neil Fisk, believes in God (as do all in this world since there is no question of God's existence), but he does not love God. Neil in the believing that were of unfolding, or without from Neil is of either or about God, he to go to Hell people like Hell was where when exile from God no fear for Neil as it means without His however, is a that Neil since many of such as he in “the for God that he had love of God had to the then it did make The together even view of God and Neil would have reached the point where he was to However, he is not that is one of during a from the angel is by glass when the of the of the in which was see to Heaven, and while Neil have seen death as a he becomes of He to be with and the only way to achieve this is for Neil to to love God. However, he finds himself in a had been the blessing of his and God had he was to love for it? For it was like a love as a for his he have but was a he He a of those who the but is by the that he should his role as one of God's those who have a to Neil is to his and make with God to find a way to love God, Neil finds a when a and while of the of his an and his was seen ascending to Heaven, to the of his Neil to a one of those who go to where either or the mortal When the angel Neil attempts to him but his into a However, a of light that “the light to Neil all the he should love As he now God an beyond what humans can for one he that he will go to Heaven since of him to Hell In is and he has a he than was when he was but his only is to love God. & He his being to Hell was not a of he he there was no for it, no His love for God, the us, “is the nature of In “Hell Is the Absence of Chiang brilliantly a of those who a religious that God those who love Him. Chiang forces the to with a why would a God on the Chiang believes this “is one of the of and with the that in the this story as of an world in which the is a directly the of the religious that miracles are always I do not agree that it is just the religious who believe miracles are always I do agree that many who would define themselves as religious have such In the world of the story, supernatural can have both and on However, we see on these have no at a witness to the angel believes God has a purpose for him and for “an with the to provide him However, does not either or He Neil death and to which to a of God's people that they can no more in the than in the mortal while them to worship God, just not a one God or not to have no on whether one in heaven or the is to question the of religious faith. In many “Hell Is the Absence of is a on In the world of the story, the inhabitants know God there is no or in to believe or not to The or is situated in the love one has or does not have for God. one God and to then one However, if one God and to as does Neil Fisk, then one is no in this world as one God to the argues that is us to take a religious belief and make it a and by so he forces us to think about ways religion can be so and in our Many of us feel certain as either a blessing or a from God, yet of us would feel a birth for as one or the Chiang us into a world where the inhabitants do not have such a world where is not God is not God is not (“Hell” This God is the God for those who do not see religion as a means of achieving any of spiritual improvement. Chiang the and the of God's We never know why God Neil to Hell and to “Hell Is the Absence of is an apocalyptic story that reveals a of faith, the disillusionment of those who no longer believe in the promise of God to the The disillusionment of faith those who do not see God as a way of their belief as Eric defines it, something we regard as what when one that something return to what if one can that God does not what when the one to it is the one for religious belief In by and what when the seek and find to the questions surrounding religious belief. understanding of and the universe on of the of For “is the of the the and the As a & is and of being & think and the of is to think and the has always with a of discovers this when is a and the understanding of the universe However, to a that is and discovers “a that any number with any other that any two are which of in the same sense of that has world to this but this sense of to that the of is nor with apocalypse reveals that can no longer provide meaning or structure to life and attempts understanding of himself and the universe on his that a of his allows him to a who “the between and and he finds his in his ability to in similar as to world, in the other and the other to world is to discover he has no for was it was something he In he feels more than a sense of to a when faith and religion no longer provide structure and meaning, both and their when they discover that what they have always as the of themselves and their world can no longer be Chiang's structure of by further to the of of faith. The story is out in with the of the which only two and The first is one through and a the other two are on either or a in and we can read one as a for faith and belief. For in the us that two The first one in that that may be but are & His that a of the of is just such a it be by any means using the of In other words, and proof are not the same we can know certain to be while not the ability to they are Such is one of the definitions of belief without proof. Chiang us with an look at what when what we believe meaning the is and the proof not from the but from As the that this is to a that there was no God. just it, but it for a For was something and is “the one who that it is not the same discovers his ability to his belief that meaning his understanding of the does not to for feel He feels as that has the of something he which is why the of the story is However, this this feels for than and their faith and both do so through their and Ted Chiang's apocalyptic stories are on our own search for meaning. Many science fiction writers often consider religion may however, creates and where religion and faith are while at the same time to the As the stories we our own disillusionment and many of us, the in the “Tower of Babylon” are to themselves whether they in knowledge or and Hillalum's and understanding of the world reveals to him that meaning is in scientific not or faith. Fisk, on the other in a world where proof of God is a yet he comes to know that God and may question why God, like the God in “Hell is the Absence of the and the without or In by religion for and “the to of the universe as yet, they find their universe not only but Chiang's story to those belief structure has intense and search for meaning them not to a and but only them further into As with all science Ted Chiang's stories reveal more of our than our reveals to We are not to God's role in our his stories us to question our own Chiang's apocalyptic is out of our own disillusionment that is on the world, but on the promise of God & which has and for some 11). these stories do not us or lead us and Ted Chiang's apocalypse reveals and that meaning and come out of death of

Thomas Kelly

PUTTING ON A PLAY IN AN UNDERWORLD COURTROOM: THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ (INFERNAL JUDGMENT) SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING (PEONY PAVILION) THOMAS KELLY University of Chicago This article is an attempt to present a new way of thinking about courtroom trials in traditional Chinese theater. I look at how one playwright, Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616), used meta-theatrical devices to comically deflate and satirize judicial authority. At the same time, however, I argue that he used the scaffolding of the courtroom trial to experiment with theatrical scene composition in the chuanqi 傳奇 drama form. Tang not only used a theatrical idiom to parody the procedures of the courtroom, he looked to the format of the trial to stretch the representational possibilities of the dramatic medium. Questions of what constitutes juridical authority and what grounds an act of adjudication are equally pertinent to the role-playing of the courtroom and the illusionary domain of the stage in his most famous play, Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (The peony pavilion; preface dated 1598). I focus specifically on how these themes are treated in the complex courtroom scene in the twenty-third scene of the play, ‘‘Mingpan’’ 冥判 (Infernal judgment). The scene as Tang wrote it, I suggest, displays a heightened awareness of how dramatic representations of the law in both the world of the living and the dead can call into question the nature and artifice of the theater itself. THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING Tang Xianzu’s Mudan ting returns time and again to question the verifiability of characters’ testimonies and the disputed status of actions taken within the world of the play.1 The burden of proof falls on the two lovers, Du Liniang 杜麗娘 and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅, who each must justify and corroborate their testimony before juridical authorities and also prove to family and friends who they are from Scene 16 on. Liu not only has to prove his credentials as a promising scholar to Miao Shunbin 苗舜賓 when the latter is inspecting jewels (Scene 21) and metropolitan 1 As Tina Lu has argued at length, questions of personal identity are at stake throughout the play: Are characters who they claim to be? Can we trust their outward appearances? These questions assume an added urgency in the underworld trial scene, which Lu only discusses in relation to issues of counterfeiting and slippage between material and nominal worth in the determination of monetary value (see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], pp. 106–13). CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 32.2 (December 2013): 132–155 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2013 DOI: 10.1179/0193777413Z.00000000010 civil service examination candidates (Scene 41), he also has to prove that he is not guilty of robbing the grave of Liniang, the daughter of (the play’s chief patriarch) Du Bao 杜寶. Liu is arrested (Scene 50) and undergoes harsh interrogation and physical torture by Du Bao (Scene 53). It is not until the final scene (Scene 55) that Du Bao’s charges against him are finally dismissed by the emperor, even if this does not lead to Du Bao recognizing Liu as his son-in-law. Du Liniang never suffers judicial torture,2 but she also is required to repeatedly prove that she is who she claims to be and that her love—a love that both kills and resurrects her—is genuine. Although the final scene is initially presented as a contest between the counterclaims of Du Bao and Liu Mengmei, and it seems that Du Liniang only attends as a witness (she even arrives unescorted), after her arrival the key question becomes whether she is presently a ghost or not.3 Prior to that, however, Liniang is the main ‘‘defendant’’ in ‘‘Mingpan,’’ the play’s most elaborate and complex courtroom scene, a scene that appears almost half-way through the drama and marks an important turning point in the narrative.4 Earlier, Du Liniang encountered her lover in a dream (Scene 10), was unable to repeat the experience (Scene 12), became love-sick enough that she felt the need to paint and leave...

Authors unavailable

Programme Financing Agreement (Decentralized Programme for Rural Poverty Reduction in Ha Giang and Quang Binh Provinces) between the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (with schedules and General Conditions for Agricultural Development Financing dated 2 December 1998). Rome, 15 February 2005

Andrew S. Moore

In October 1976, political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset studied recent polls and predicted that “if present trends continue,” the upcoming presidential election would be the first “in which Catholics have not been considerably more supportive of the Democratic nominee than Protestants.” Just a few weeks earlier, former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter had enjoyed a comfortable lead over Republican President Gerald Ford in national public opinion surveys. But several different polls now revealed that no longer was the case. Lipset blamed the “Catholic defection” from Democratic ranks that he believed had come, at least in part, because of Carter's perceived shift to the left on a variety of issues; he appeared to many voters to be more liberal than he had been during the primary campaign. In addition, Carter's “cultural and religious style,” combined with a media fixation on abortion and his relationship with Catholics, had undermined his support among the nation's largest Christian denomination.1 This came at an inopportune time for Democrats, whose identity and relationship to the nation's religious people were in flux. As William Prendergast has written about the post–civil rights period: “Lost to the Democratic Party were millions of Catholics who would have enlisted under its banner in earlier times. Most had not become Republicans. They were adrift in a state of independence awaiting a candidate, a cause, a party more congenial to their values than the party of their fathers had become by the dawn of the decade of the seventies.”2 There were those who believed that Carter could have been that candidate. It was not to be. In short, Carter had what observers at the time labeled a “Catholic problem.” As it turned out, he also had a Protestant problem, as he represented the ways that the Democratic Party coalition was unraveling along religious lines. Both Catholic and Protestant problems resulted from the convergence of several interrelated forces. First, the civil rights movement that peaked in the mid-1960s had drawn its moral energy from a particular religious vision for America. The black freedom struggle legitimated religious activism to achieve a desirable liberal political end.3 After much internal struggle, Catholics and many Protestants accepted that vision—at least rhetorically—and reaffirmed America's Christian heritage. Protestants had long marginalized Catholics and neglected their place in that heritage. Now, however, Catholics demanded acceptance on their own terms. Carter's Catholic problem, then, came at a time when the nation's largest Christian denomination believed that they had finally been embraced as part of the nation's Christian heritage. At the same time, however, other events of the 1960s accelerated trends toward secularization. For some people, Carter—the most openly devout presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan—represented the possibility to reclaim a moral and religious vision for America and to encourage Protestant and Catholic cooperation to achieve that vision. He symbolized a postracial, more inclusive South, the antithesis of a nation that had become increasingly secular. His religious vision for the nation, however, and his ideas about the separation of church and state meant that his candidacy threatened the avenue through which Catholics had participated in public life since the nineteenth century. In a bit of historic irony, the nation's perceived secularization had roots in Carter's Southern Baptist theology and ideas about church and state and religious liberty. In a sense, of course, Carter's Catholic problem was not new. Catholics and Protestants had long viewed each other with at least suspicion, if not outright hostility. What was different now was that Catholics' position in public life had changed since the 1960s. For the first time, Catholics qua Catholics were part of the public debate. That is, in 1960, John F. Kennedy had been elected president only after assuring American Protestants that he could govern in a secular manner, that his being Catholic in effect would not matter.4 Now, however, the civil rights movement had changed the nation's political and religious landscape and created new opportunities for religion in public life. At its best, the civil rights movement reflected Catholic inclusion and they now expected to be a part of the new religious and political dialogue. Despite Catholic misgivings, the fact that Carter was a man of faith encouraged them that a shared religious vision for America could give them common ground. Carter's problem with Catholics—or their problem with him, to be more accurate—revolved around several issues. In one way or another, all the issues touched on Carter's stance on the separation of church and state. The potentially most explosive issue was abortion and where the candidate stood on the need for a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. Second was the possibility of state support for parochial schools. Finally, Carter's being an outspoken and active Southern Baptist layman aroused general suspicion among the nation's voting Catholics. In the 1970s, these were interwoven, a complex web of issues that were difficult to separate from each other. Together they pointed to the paradox of Catholic involvement in politics. On the one hand, Catholics now expected to be taken seriously on their own terms in public life. On the other hand, they continued to suffer (at least in their own minds) marginalization. One unnamed Milwaukee, Wisconsin, priest summed up the problem succinctly. He wrote Congressman Clement J. Zablocki about the “very real danger that Catholics are being alienated by the seeming indifference of these Democratic Leaders to the problems of American Catholics.” His parishioners were no longer solidly Democratic and were skeptical of Carter. “They seem to think that [Carter] and the Party is [sic] not concerned about a deterioration of respect for life, eg. [sic] abortion, about the deterioration of the cities, about those constitutional aids to parochial education.” Indeed, “Mr. Carter seems to favor secularization of all education.” This priest recalled “the anti-Catholic attitudes of the Baptists in Bay View,” and his and his parishioners' allegiance to the Democratic Party was shaken.5 For him and others, abortion, the separation of church and state, and secularization of society all were of a piece. Sociologist, Catholic priest, and Carter supporter Andrew Greeley was one of the most public observers of Carter's Catholic problem. The worst part of it for Greeley was that the problem was one that Carter could have addressed and alleviated, with only a little effort. In fact, “it took a lot of effort on his part to get into trouble on a number of ‘Catholic’ issues.” On abortion, according to Greeley, Carter's personal position resembled that of Catholics. Carter should have simply said nothing; however, he, was “under pressure from feminist militants who wanted another symbolic victory over Catholics.” Feminists would not suddenly favor Ford over Carter, Greeley reasoned, but Catholics might.6 The 1976 Democratic plank amounted to two sentences in a lengthy document that covered the full range of issues expected to face a president—from taxes and health care to foreign policy. Democrats acknowledged “the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion.” Nevertheless, a constitutional amendment was “undesirable.” Roe v. Wade should be allowed to stand.7 Blaming Carter for the platform was not entirely fair, since the platform did not meet all of the standard bearer's demands. To be sure, his would not have many Catholics His would have neglected to it would have simply to health care and with their own In to abortion, and former and first pointed to Catholic in the Baptist a that had since the 1960s but was perceived Carter and its for for Catholic about Carter's President Ford an to Catholic that the Carter to the Catholic to the of but to the and of by Catholics.” Carter should his personal to abortion and the fact that he had with Catholics, to his by the to the of on the Catholic John F. Kennedy for Catholics Protestants for their and it was time to the the of religious and Jimmy Carter as a a Southern and to as as a former candidate for the Carter that the problem was not the of or Greeley or Jimmy Indeed, it was and it would Carter on election Catholics were in and most of them were For they could not be or taken for For a to he Catholics to as a when they would be more to Catholics would not a way Americans would a with and on of the would they would for in a voting and give it to the The problem could be but not by with or of Catholic it first that Carter the nature of the problem and the to which Catholics the American and the Democratic the were two Democratic one of William Jennings and the other of The former is the was Catholic two had been at since the nineteenth but each to the party that did one The party of its roots to and was for most of the of American The with and was for most of the of as and of and As and other observers Catholics had been Democratic since the nineteenth century. At the same time, as a coalition of the Democratic Party Protestants as much of the liberal or Protestant to support for the time of Carter's however, that had to liberal Protestant support for and many of them their support to Democratic That liberal Protestant toward the Democrats to be the most of the political party in the of the to Carter could not the in his own party in the same way that he the and roots of the relationship and in the The the two Catholics and their of and the those Catholic “They were the most of people, as than his was Catholic of in the and political to were This parochial symbolic what the parochial if not that they were in to public that openly for the Protestant and for and all its and There were that Carter The first and problem was the 1976 Democratic Carter the with the support of and black with no active Catholic It was of to the of American Carter had Martin to on the platform at the But it was a not a Catholic to the for what be the first time in Carter's Democratic coalition be than and black Protestants a few In to a general it Catholics. What was that Catholics believed that Carter in to liberal on after the be to get was not a of Catholics. Indeed, in his of the problem, at they as of than with the political Nevertheless, the problem was more than one of perceived and It was real for many more for it had political Catholic revealed the of in the Democratic Party in the 1960s. As liberal and had taken of the party from and the of those Catholics. that by the 1960s Catholics had enjoyed opportunities that and movement up the In fact, were than the whose was the of during Nevertheless, they the of that and the and real of of and their the of by Greeley and that They marginalized and Greeley with that Martin a of the and to on the platform with Carter. of a of the an at left from a of anti-Catholic and Catholic of their place in the public Carter's acceptance the of a who have and had to for or to suffer from the public are or by their to For Greeley, that was a that “the fact that most of those who to Catholic are who are not Catholic but a for their that Carter people who were is, who had or This would be more than It would Carter who could problems and the candidate into and from of anti-Catholic The most of what could came with Carter's of the issue of to parochial the Catholic is its to What Carter did not seem to was that of church and state is an anti-Catholic It is to to parochial because it is the of all the and Protestant that to to to parochial and to their over To to would be political to parochial was one of two issues that as abortion other was that Carter could about a that would the first to in to with to be a to the of the This would parochial which were and to Catholics that Carter had their in they did not in Carter's not as as would have the had to Catholic One revealed the difficult position Carter was as he to these political with Democratic secular to his own personal That concerned the relationship church and state in It Carter's position as being one of a in the for the separation of church and state. a position reflected the “in that religious freedom be threatened by a from in the “the public to parochial The candidate continued to however, to to public schools. to religious at the of America's and it is also a the has Nevertheless, that a some to some from public could in the of that was to all and and of the they had as a public than a to The did an of “the of to freedom of at the same time, the public or to a After the is one way Americans achieve desirable the of and in 1976, the Carter a to the Catholic The Carter's a and for for to whose It that a parochial had a long and a and in the of What was at however, was “the of millions of and Americans to a religious for their This at the of America's and It is a not by Carter a on a Georgia that would give to and schools. In Carter that as be to that the freedom of and that parochial have in the in the Carter's in the separation of church and state was in his ideas about personal and should be from to his own and about moral issues on that to and moral to were the state should The American Protestant was that Catholics, who their allegiance to the in were not to their own is no that Carter shared the that threatened religious he did his about the of to the issue of This to the that was a Catholic As Catholic and political observers it threatened the political on the of the who had long up their In October 1976, a presidential among its President Gerald Ford of the Carter with by revealed abortion as according to a was no that those to the of the the more issue was the Democratic Party which a constitutional amendment Roe v. Carter's own position on abortion was He his personal to the but was to support to Roe v. long he had been to the is He the governor of Georgia after v. was in state and he had been governor for a of when it was with Roe v. the Carter's and that Carter to the in That is not in the but was a in that that to abortion What was Carter wrote the to a in by and an of and a of all of which for the need for of and The would be the of of In his Carter his in with him now the of each and to many they would to have and when they would to have them as an for and as an for and Carter was that it was now to these issues more it was the of each to what he or to the of to wanted into on a Carter's to in a problem for him in the but that after the appeared Carter's on abortion a bit and he his to This came in to in a public and to the of As a by the time he was a presidential candidate, Carter to a personal to abortion, but an to effort that would Roe v. He did the Carter as he would support a to national and that Carter had acknowledged that “under he would support a constitutional amendment on a Georgia state Despite the fact that of Carter's position on a constitutional amendment from in and appeared on to the that was to Catholic support for Carter over the only Catholic candidate in the After the Carter that the took his of and was in fact, a of his to a constitutional After he the he and his did to up his Catholic At the of on a in he with Catholic of of of the of Catholic John of John J. of and of were of the of the Catholic The Catholic were that Carter in his support of Roe v. but they were encouraged that he, according to a with not an effort to a constitutional to to Carter, he his own it that Catholics, or have a to an would to an At least one of people, Catholics for a that Carter was on the of his position on abortion in to Catholic on the Catholics for a had in a with Carter, a fact that to the was in of recent with the of Catholic Catholics for a was that Carter continued to a constitutional amendment and the to which most Catholic were to Indeed, the that that a of Catholics that abortion should be a a and in a of the in was At least one priest, his that the Carter and the Catholic would to President Ford and Catholic support for Jimmy The wrote in The was that on abortion threatened to the to a In fact, he the Democrats had long been more in with the of the church on issues than the stance of the Republicans. Both Democrats and Catholics are by a common for the of and the people of society and Catholics to the abortion issue to become a in the from Wisconsin, where the of Catholic believed that their own could be to the Carter campaign. The had for in wanted Democrats to a Catholic on life from abortion to to As to the life issues on the with if Life is the only one that the to would have a problem To that Carter could be to a constitutional “the Catholic and the political be to to a of the problem. Democratic Catholics are to a to In his that Carter should not his own position on abortion, which was as it and be in in the What was Carter should not be concerned about the in since the are more to than to lead Carter should that the movement at the and those have their own Carter should to and he did be all was that was the and who did not in to all that the or them to But abortion was to Catholics. It could not be as as to a of in fact, as out, the were in effort. in the revealed that abortion was the issue on which was of among The same could not be said for the nation's Indeed, if was on abortion it was that it was a Catholic issue that threatened to of religious liberty. In Protestant Catholics were to the separation church and state. This was the opinion of the of the Southern Baptist Christian Life was a of the of a in the in an effort to amendment that would have Roe v. The acknowledged among the nation's religious people about The issue for them was religious which “the freedom to abortion in of his or own and religious and in with Most Southern Baptists had the issue much in 1976, and Carter's position was with most of those who Nevertheless, as a political issue was After Roe v. Wade abortion a national voters who were their own of those Carter They that abortion would not most of Carter not to on the It was more that he his position and and former candidate for the Democratic presidential a Carter that is being up by the in the on abortion.” Nevertheless, Carter's position was the that fact, the what the Carter political should be. to Carter's was to to on the abortion than two left in the and with Ford that was of the has to be on to those Carter should the of the of to to to them only a of voters who were more concerned about Carter's to with the political Democratic William the of abortion as an issue that could In he a election when his him with the issue in the of their campaign. first Carter, not Carter's personal to abortion and to the as as his that should to encourage were general and become and a of voters in an effort to an few Carter and those for him on the on the the position on position should be as of political of about the of Carter should also Ford and personal about they would for abortion in their position no more than The to Carter's was to the The that Carter's Catholic problem did not him in In fact, he of the Catholic to along with of the Protestant That of the Catholic was considerably than the that had in it also was than Carter would in when he of the Catholic in he did little to his Catholic He did to the of to for This an among his and those who had him during the campaign. In a of Carter's in the of the the to the president for public the outspoken and addressed the president in a to be for and and over Carter's about for concerned among that Carter would position and support the of for when in the of the They also that Carter's to and and in a in an Carter's of that his position potentially of of the the an most these Carter the his would in he had much on state would have in his he that his was to during campaign. is more liberal than Despite pressure from his own Carter stood his that his own stance on the relationship church and state his in he to Southern Baptist and but with other In fact, the problem had the the of the polls that Carter to have the election all but he to a of with in an to up his The was that Carter's religious faith would lead him to a new state that would the of his In a on in the face of own however, Carter that he had on a lot of with have in many of was for a Southern Baptist Carter, and particular was a of on the But it came in the at the time for Carter. were by his of the and by the fact that his came the of a of and In a sense, Carter's to his and to to his was with his The support for separation of church and state was in the that and personal would This was most in an in which most people were with the of a that was at least in In the was not and Carter was not a But events of the 1960s had drawn the into the nation and the nation into the South, a that had to its by the Carter continued to that personal and but his to new religious revealed the to which position in national society had He a relationship with several of the Southern Baptist the Jimmy president of the from to As Carter encouraged the of a by the and Baptist to the for what appeared to be The of the Georgia Baptist The Christian his in a through the Carter's with Baptist in some The president should be for a with those religious the same as he would be with that the to the into the and to of and for the President to which become in and Southern Baptists to some Carter's of what Baptists that John F. Kennedy would have he their at in during the campaign. to for other Georgia Baptist In his to Carter by the personal and The as his and he with during his Carter had from but a As governor of Georgia and as president of the Carter had and to religious of all in the separation of church and state and would not to in at Carter's of a was from where Baptists believed their primary Nevertheless, Carter and he to be in the be that Baptists have no to be concerned about Carter's relationship with other religious the that expected from the in his Carter an effort to to religious then, however, it was In fact, his own denomination in The that of the denomination that with Carter on the nature of religious and the of the in a particular moral vision on the The new of the denomination was more concerned with they believed that Carter's of religious had encouraged the nation's secularization. This the for abortion to become a political issue for Southern Baptists in the and for them and Catholics to a shared religious vision of America that had in the of the civil rights Carter's had drawn into the political if Carter turned not to be their candidate. Carter had to from to his faith for political not an active a vision that to Carter's Southern As a most Southern Baptists their way into the Republican Carter's ideas about religious and about the separation of church and state. in the they the need to abortion as a moral and religious issue than a Catholic It an issue in the nation's religious heritage. One Baptist the to abortion a Catholic issue was a which the of the millions of who are not changed and in the a of Southern Baptists for Life acknowledged that Southern Baptists have the to to the of They to and they with over the the Christian Life should abortion in the They that but only after in Most Catholics and came to on Nevertheless, many Catholics continued to however, they now did the of a party that Carter's on the of religious The among many observers was that the Democrats had become the secular the one to religious In fact, Carter's position would be the one by Catholic Democratic in the a position that them at with of the

Qingwen Min

In 2002,the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations initiated the international project named Conservation and Adaptive Management of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS).Up to now,six different systems have been selected as pilot sites including China’s Qingtian Traditional Rice Fish Culture.The criteria of GIAHS pilot sites include three parts: System criteria,contextual criteria and project implementation criteria.System criteria cover outstanding characteristics (indicators include food and livelihood security,benefits maximization,social cohesion,resource endowments and knowledge systems,social and cultural diversity,public goods,traditional knowledge,and relation to the land),proved history of sustainability (indicators include economic viability and sustainability,adaptive capacity,and human ecological sustainability),and global significance (indicators include public goods and value-added).Contextual criteria cover representation (indicators include geography,eco-regions ecosystems,systemic,scalar impacts,demonstration effect,and outstanding examples),external threats (indicators include external threats),and policy and development relevance (indicators to be developed).Project implementation criteria cover project integration (indicators include project integration,partnerships,and international conventions),co-finance potential and project approach (indicators include indicators include international conventions,incremental approach,community empowerment,respect,decentralization,ecosystems approach,programmatic approach,and value-added).Considering the implementation of the project in China,the author suggested Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (NIAHS) and their conservation should be paid much attention to and the criteria should cover some aspects like bio-cultural diversity,cultural-ecological-social sustainability,regional and typical representativeness,contribution to international conventions,importance to local socio-economic development and eco-environmental protection,demonstration and positivity of local governments.

Jean-Philippe Fontenelle, François Molle, Hugh Turral

The political changes which induced the technical and institutional evolution of the Red River Delta's (Vietnam) water control systems are described. The management framework and financial organization of the delta's water control systems are also described. The financing of the different operators, the amount and use of the water fees paid by farmers, and the process of water management decentralization and privatization in the delta, are analysed.

Jean-Philippe Fontenelle

Is the Decentralisation of Water Management for Agriculture in Vietnam’s Red River Delta a Break a Break from Tradition? Decisions taken in the 1980s to establish decentralised local pumping stations in the Red River Delta continue to influence the transformation of its water management system to this day. These technical changes resulted in the fragmentary decision making, financing and regulation of water management in the delta region as a whole. The current intensification of agriculture in the Red River Delta has benefited from these changes, although further decentralisation is limited by the size and the hierarchical organisation of large scale water management works and by the State’s desire to maintain its power over the population through the control of water resources. Today, cooperatives and hydraulics companies are competing for financial resources, which creates differences amongst farmers depending on the availability and price of water. The State appears to sway on a fine political line, facing contradictory pressure from international investors and from internal rivalries within the Vietnamese Communist Party, which rules the country. The example of the Red River Delta demonstrates that water management is typified by the fluctuation of its institutions, which are under constant alteration, as is the society they stem from.

Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. 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