Some refer to shojo animation as "girls' anime," but the figure of the shojo--an adolescent somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, has a complex role in Japanese storytelling and society. Who is the shojo? Is the shojo a "third gender?" Does the shojo hold a special role compared with other age and gender categories? Why is the shojo so often chosen as a figure who confronts social crises or bridges social gaps? This class will explore the age and gender category known as "shojo" primarily through the lens of animation, but occasionally making use of literature and manga as well. The class will focus on how adolescent girls in Japanese animation interact with social problems and crises such as gender role limitations, environmental crisis, natural disaster, and urbanization.

Horror films are a familiar pop-culture touchstone, and many Americans are somewhat familiar with horror films from Japan. To deepen their appreciation of such films, students consider Japanese horror films in the context of genre theory and cinematic, psychological, social, political, and artistic elements. Students have the opportunity to think critically about popular films: What intellectual and artistic value do we find in genre films? How do we evaluate the claims of film scholars? Students also explore theory related to both filmic expression and horror themes, including psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, film theory, and trauma theory. What does horror film say about the social, temporal, and cultural context from which it emerges? What does horror film say about filmmaking itself? How are formal filmic techniques used to express and induce fear and anxiety? No prior familiarity with Japan is required. Conducted in English.

An introduction to the major religious traditions of Asia, in both their historical and contemporary forms, with a focus on modern popular developments in Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions, and the ways in which racism has influenced popular perceptions of these religious traditions in North America and Europe. The course explores the foundational teachings of each tradition, examines their historical and social contexts, and seeks answers to questions such as: What is the nature of religious experience? What are the functions of myth and ritual? How have these religious traditions been adapted, adopted, and appropriated in "the West"?

This course starts with two questions: What is cultural history? Has there been just one culture in the history of the Japanese isles? The course considers cultural features of the prehistoric Japanese isles and then explores the development of aristocratic, warrior, and mercantile cultures in premodern and early modern Japan, focusing on literature, the arts, and religion. The course then considers culture in modern Japan. How have the premodern arts informed the cultural development of modern Japan? How does popular culture reflect earlier cultural concerns while reformulating them in novel ways? The aim of the course is to promote critical engagement with Japanese cultures. Readings are in English, and no previous familiarity with Japanese culture is required.

An overview of Chinese civilization from the god-kings of the second millennium and the emergence of the Confucian familial state in the first millennium B.C.E., through the expansion of the hybrid Sino-foreign empires, to the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society by internal and external pressures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What can premodern Chinese literature tell us about how to inhabit the world—about self and society, love and loss, beauty and time, truth and transcendence, and life’s manifold possibilities? This course explores these questions through a survey of its masterworks of poetry, drama, fiction and belles-lettres prose from ancient times to the nineteenth century. As we learn to appreciate these works, we will also investigate questions such as: how to approach a literary text? What is the role of translation in shaping our understanding? In what ways are the works we read products of their own times and places, and how do they speak to universal themes of human experience? All texts will be made available through English translation; no previous knowledge of Chinese language or literature is required.

A study of the various religious traditions of China in their independence and interaction. The course focuses on the history, doctrines, and practices of Daoism, Confucianism, and various schools of Mahayana Buddhism. Readings include basic texts and secondary sources.

From monster movies to abstract poetry, this course explores the diverse cultural currents running through Japan's era of high-speed growth during its dramatic economic recovery following the widespread destruction of World War II. Students examine some of the major literary, cinematic, and artistic movements of the period, their interrelationships, and their global reach and reception. Analysis of individual works considers broad thematic trends and choices made by postwar artists, including engagement with-or breaks from-the cultural and historical past; varying degrees of social engagement; and use of realism, experimentalism, or abstraction. Conducted in English.

A survey of Chinese literature since 1911, including a wide range of fiction, poetry, and drama from mainland China and texts from the Chinese diaspora as well. Students gain a greater understanding of China's history and literary culture in three major periods: the May Fourth shift from traditional language and forms to vernacular literature; Socialist Realism and the Marxist theory of the first three decades of the People's Republic; and China's Reform Era, including expatriate authors like Ha Jin and China's two controversial Nobel Prize winners, Gao Xingjian and Moyan. Recommended background: AS/CI 207.

This course examines major trends in Japanese literature and society from its beginnings to the modern period. Students consider well-known stories, plays, and novels from the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern periods, placing each text within its unique sociohistorical context. All readings are in English.

Many people conceive of Vietnam through images of war rather than through its culture. This course offers students an opportunity to study modern Vietnamese culture through documentary and feature films produced by westerners and Vietnamese during the last fifty years. The course helps students to gain insight into a traditional culture that, in part, shaped the modern course of Vietnam's history. The course challenges the old stereotypical views of Vietnam advanced by Hollywood movies with the new cultural images presented through Vietnamese eyes. Not open to students who have received credit for AVC s29 Modern Vietnamese Culture through Film.

This course surveys Chinese visual cultures, from the Neolithic period to the modern era, with a focus on exemplary artworks and monumental landmarks within cultural contexts. The course studies close interrelationships and related issues among the contemporaneous developments in religion, philosophy, and government and society. Topics studying, readings and discussions enrich students to gain a good understanding and knowledge of Chinese cultural issues, artistic developments, theories of arts, questions of patronage, and traditional indigenous art forms. Principal objects studied include pottery, bronze vessels, ceramics, porcelain, lacquer ware, architecture, sculptures, landscape and figure painting, and calligraphy.

This course surveys the history of Japanese art and visual culture focusing on the development of pictorial, sculptural, and architectural traditions from the Neolithic to the present time. The course explores the relationship between indigenous art forms and the foreign concepts, art forms and techniques that influenced Japanese culture, and social political and religious contexts as well as the role of patronage for artistic production. Topics include architecture, sculpture, painting, narrative handscrolls, the Zen arts, monochromatic ink painting, woodblock prints, decorative arts, contemporary architecture, photography, and fashion design.

Portraits have occupied preponderant places in East Asian cultures, depicting visual forms and revealing the subjects' spiritual essences. This course offers a cross-cultural study of portraitures in East Asian art. It introduces students to the physical likeness of a wide variety of subjects and explores underlying meanings and messages. It provides a comprehensive study of East Asian portraits, offers the current scholarship, and explores the core issues, including the relationship of portraitures, oral and written stories, the art of physiognomy, aesthetic principles and artistic styles, material cultures, and religious beliefs, social rituals, political ideologies, and underscored functions and meanings in the wide-ranging contexts. The course offers timely and astonishing transformations of the concepts of "self" examined via various aspects of social echelons, and reconsidering portraits as a thread to weave aspects of East Asian art together.

The course offers an introduction to the study of Buddhist art and architecture. It provides a broad spectrum emerging from the early development of Buddhist images and architecture to the modern artworks expressing Buddhist ideas; from images served as devotional objects and narrative telling stories to sacred sites and religious monuments served as pilgrimage centers. The course starts by surveying Buddhist art and architecture in India, and then traces its dissemination and transformation to other regions in Asia. It offers a complex picture of Buddhist art, reflecting cultural diversity and forms, the role of art and architecture, devotion and meditation.

This course examines the arts of Southeast Asia by focusing on significant monuments of the countries in the region. It examines the architecture, sculpture, and relief carvings on the ancient monuments and their relations to religious, cultural, political, and social contexts. Sites covered include Borobudur, Angkor, Pagan, Sukkhothai, and My-Son.

This course examines the important artistic tradition of narrative painting in China and Japan. Through study of visually narrative presentations of religious, historical, and popular stories, the course explores different contexts in which the works-tomb, wall, and scroll paintings-were produced. The course introduces various modes of visual analysis and art-historical contexts. Topics include narrative theory, text-image relationships, elite patronage, and gender representation.

The art of Zen (Chan) as the unique and unbounded expression of the liberated mind has attracted Westerners since the mid-twentieth century. But what is Zen, its art, and its culture? This course considers the historical development of Zen art and its use in several genres within monastic and lay settings. It also examines the underlying Buddhist concepts of Zen art. The course aims to help students understand the basic teachings of Zen and their expression in architecture, gardens, sculpture, painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Recommended background: AV/AS 243.

This course focuses on the doctrinal and social developments of Buddhism across a range of communities, from early Buddhism in India and the rise of various Buddhist schools of thought throughout Asia, up to modern Buddhist traditions as practiced in North America. The course considers how Buddhism has been (re)interpreted in each new location, and the role of rituals, meditation, and other forms of religious expression across the Buddhist world.

This course engages with a range of Tibetan religious practices, doctrine, and cultural contexts to better understand how Tibetan Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Indigenous traditions have developed over time. This course focuses on the history, doctrines, practices, literatures, major personalities, and communities of the different religious traditions that are expressed in the Tibetan Buddhist world, including monastic and tantric forms of Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religions practices. The relationships between religious and other social influence ethics also are explored.

This course provides an introduction to the theoretical perspectives and research findings of cultural psychology, with an emphasis on comparisons between North American and East Asian cultural groups. Topics include defining culture as a topic of psychological inquiry; the methods of conducting cross-cultural research; the debate between universality versus cultural specificity of psychological processes; acculturation and multiculturalism; and cultural influences on thought, emotion, motivation, personality, and social behavior. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 101.

Modern China's century of revolutions, from the disintegration of the traditional empire in the late nineteenth century, through the twentieth-century attempts at reconstruction, to the tenuous stability of the post-Maoist regime.

This course examines the sources of conflict and cooperation in international relations and assesses competing theoretical explanations for key events in East Asia after World War II. East Asia is home to one fifth of the global population and hosts three nuclear weapons states, three virtually nuclear powers, and two of the world’s largest economies. As it experiences a major shift in the balance of power, its trajectory and implications for the rest of the world remain uncertain, but this course helps students learn how to make use of existing theories and analytical tools to make predictions for the future of East Asia. Recommended background: PLTC 171.

This course investigates the deep historical roots of China's contemporary environmental dilemmas. From the Three Gorges Dam to persistent smog, a full understanding of the environment in China must reckon with millennia-old relationships between human and natural systems. In this course students explore the advent of grain agriculture, religious understandings of nature, the impact of bureaucratic states, and the environmental dimensions of imperial expansion as well as the nature of kinship and demographic change. The course concludes by turning to the socialist "conquest" of nature in the 1950s and 1960s and China's post-1980s fate.

This seminar involves the close reading and discussion of a number of texts representing a variety of Buddhist traditions. Emphasis is placed on reading across genres, which include canonical sutras, commentarial exegeses, modern-day texts for lay practitioners, philosophical treatises, and popular legends. Prerequisite(s): one course in religious studies.

What are scholars teaching us about Asia today? How do scholars in different fields of Asian Studies approach topics and present their research to an audience in distinct ways? What is Asian Studies, and what are the origins of this discipline? In this advanced seminar, students read recently published scholarship about Asia, representing a variety of scholarly fields and research methods (History, Literature, Religion, Art, Economics, and others). They discuss the subject matter and methodology behind that research with several guest professors. Students work through all the stages of writing their own original research project: generating ideas, narrowing to a topic, making initial inquiry research, evaluating sources, writing a formal proposal, drafting, editing, receiving comments from readers, and revising. This work helps students find the research methodology, writing style, and academic mentors at Bates best suit their research interests. Open to Juniors and Seniors only.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of United States as the sole superpower, scholars began foreseeing the emergence of a multipolar world in which rising powers would gain relative economic and political importance. This course analyzes the rise of the BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) within a global political economy framework. Topics include the BRICS institutions, differences among its members, antagonisms with Western coalitions, the new scramble for Africa, and frameworks for analyzing the coalition. Questions that motivate the course include: What does the BRICS group represent for US power at the global scale? In which areas may it be defying or complementing the US-led global liberal order (e.g., liberal trade regime, dollar hegemony, role of the IMF & World Bank)? Does the rise and expansion of the BRICS (now including Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia & the UAE) represent an authoritarian threat to a global order led by democracies? Prerequisite(s): PLTC 122, 125, 171, 213, 222, or 225.

This course considers the intersection of religion and society in Asia through the lens of popular Asian myths. Students examine how religious doctrine, ideals, and art have influenced the creation and interpretation of this unique narrative form, while also learning about specific Asian traditions. Close study of several tales, including narratives from India, China, and Tibet, include reading texts in translation as well as viewing cinematic and theatrical representations of myths intended for popular audiences. Students explore the dialogic process of myth by creating their own modern versions of one text.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

An extended research project on a topic relevant to East Asian society and culture that adopts one or more of the disciplinary approaches represented in the Asian studies curriculum. Students register for 457 in the fall semester or for 458 in the winter semester unless the Asian studies program committee gives approval for a two-semester project. Majors invited to pursue honors register for 457 and 458, contingent on the approval of the program committee.

An extended research project on a topic relevant to East Asian society and culture that adopts one or more of the disciplinary approaches represented in the Asian Studies curriculum. Students register for 457 in the fall semester or for 458 in the winter semester unless the Asian studies program committee gives approval for a two-semester project. Majors invited to pursue honors register for 457 and 458, contingent on the approval of the program committee.

In this course students consider a wide range of Vietnamese history and culture through a multidisciplinary lens. Students explore Vietnam within the framework and context of specific historical and visual culture, ranging from ancient monuments to contemporary sites. Students visit a variety of field sites including national museums, historical monuments, imperial palaces and tombs, and traditional craft villages as well as important sites of battles during the Vietnam War. Students discuss background texts and field trip experiences in light of their historical and cultural contexts. Recommended background: AVC 245 or s29.

What makes a "Chinese" meal? From dumplings in Shandong to chop suey in California, the meanings and flavors of “Chinese” food are hardly uniform. In this course, students explore-and taste their way through-the diverse ways of producing, preparing, and consuming "Chinese" foods. They focus especially on unique historical contexts and global patterns of migration, reflecting on what food and food culture might reveal about issues of authenticity, identity, gender, race, class, and memory. They consider these topics not only through textual and visual sources, but through oral interviews, hands-on cooking demonstrations, and taste tests.

The course will cover historical dress, (cross)gendered dressing, the levels of formality and seasonal patterns using a selection of vintage kimono. We will engage in kimono dressing, the visible mending technique sashiko, and the practice of preserving textiles with indigo dye. In addition, the course will address the issues related to Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and sustainability.

What is the relationship between mind, spirit, and body? What constitutes the boundaries between health and illness? Traditional Chinese philosophy and contemporary science and medicine have very different answers to these questions. In this course, students explore conceptions of the body in diverse contexts, with readings drawn from the fields of literature, philosophy, and the history of science. In the spirit of embodied practice, the course combines seminar discussions with weekly practicums in the Chinese martial arts tradition of xinyi (“heart and mind”).

This course studies the major collections of more than 200 pieces of Asian art in the Bates College Museum of Art. They represent cultural richness and diversity in medium, and artistic expression, from the seventeenth century to the present in Asia. The course focuses on the art of shaman ritual objects from Southern China and Vietnam, on the popular images of the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and the painting of flowers, birds, and water creatures from the Edo period, and on political propaganda posters from the mainland China. The course a) provides students with the first-hand experiences of viewing real objects in the museum; b) offers students the underpinned cultural contexts and original functions, meanings, purposes, and aesthetic concepts; c) helps students practice writing museum pamphlets and a short catalogue. Moreover, the museum’s director and curators assist in facilitating the course to achieve its goals and objectives.

In this course, students learn about religious practice through firsthand interaction with traditionally Buddhist communities in rural and urban Ladakh, India. Students conduct ethnographic fieldwork relating to modern Buddhist practice, and examine these practices from historical, archeological, and literary perspectives. They observe rituals, interview practitioners, and participate in the daily life of the Buddhist community. This course includes a significant community-engaged learning component. Prerequisite(s): one course focused on Buddhism.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

In this Short Term Innovative Pedagogy course, students contribute to the design of key activities for a new course: Critical Sociolinguistics of East Asian Languages. The course topics include the shared and distinct histories of writing systems in Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian cultures; the relationships between nation-states and named languages in modern times; the power and privileges associated with colonial and standardized languages; the dominance of English in post-war East Asia; and the history of Chinese and Japanese language study in the United States. Students will first engage with these topics through foundational readings and discussions, then explore various activity and assignment types from the literature on inclusive pedagogy, and design recommended activities for selected course topics that invite a wide variety of students into the study of East Asian languages. Recommended background: Any one course in ASIA, CHI, JPN, FYS 491, FYS 501, FYS 564, or FYS 543.