R E V I E W
I I A S N E W S L E T T E R # 4 7 S p r i n g 0 0 8
Bookmarked
B O O K M A R K E D / R E V I E W
After Alexander: Central Asia Before Islam
Edited by Joe Cribb & Georgina Herrmann
Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press. 2008
ISBN 978 0 19 726384 6
This is a new study of the history, archaeology and numismatics of Central Asia,
an area of great significance for our understanding of the ancient and early medi-
eval world. This vast, land-locked region, with its extreme continental climate, was a
centre of civilisation with great metropolises. Its cosmopolitan population followed
different religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism), and traded extensively
with China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. The millennium from the overthrow
of the first world empire of Achaemenian Persians by Alexander the Great to the
arrival of the Arabs and Islam was a period of considerable change and conflict.
The volume focuses on recent investigations in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It provides a complex analysis of the
symbiosis between the city life based on oases, and the nomadic peoples grazing their animals in the surrounding semi-
deserts. Other topics include the influence of the Greek colonists on military architecture, and the major impact of the
Great Kushans on the spread of Buddhism and on the development of the Central Asian metropolis. And although writ-
ten documents rarely survive, coinage has provided essential evidence for the political and cultural history of the region.
These essays will be of interest to the scholar, the student, and the armchair traveller.
The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the
Second Korean Nuclear Crisis
By Yoichi Funabashi
Brookings Institution Press. 2007.
ISBN 978 0 8157 3010 1
In October 2002 the United States confronted North Korea with suspicions that
Pyongyang was enriching uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework that the
nations had worked out during the Clinton administration. North Korea subsequent-
ly evicted international monitors and resumed its nuclear weapons program. The
Peninsula Question chronicles the resulting second Korean nuclear crisis.
Japanese journalist Yoichi Funabashi, informed by interviews with more than 160
diplomats and decision makers from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the
United States, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the negotiations to denuclearize
the peninsula. Between 2002 and 2006, a series of top level diplomats, including the prime minister of Japan, attempted
to engage with North Korea. Funabashi illustrates how the individual efforts of these major powers laid the groundwork
for multilateral negotiations, first as the trilateral meeting and then as the Six-Party Talks. The first four rounds of talks
(2003-2005) resulted in significant progress. Unfortunately, a lack of implementation after that breakthrough ultimately
led to North Korea’s missile tests in July and subsequent nuclear tests in October 2006.
The Peninsula Question provides a window of understanding on the historical, geopolitical, and security concerns at play
on the Korean peninsula since 2002. Offering multiple perspectives on the second Korean nuclear crisis, it describes
more than just the U.S. and North Korean points of view. It pays special attention to China’s dealings with North Korea,
providing rare insights to into the decision-making processes of Beijing. This is an important, authoritative resource for
understanding the crisis in Korea and diplomacy in Northeast Asia.
The Afterlife of Images: Translating the
Pathological Body between China and
the West.
By Larissa N. Heinrich
Duke University Press. 2008.
ISBN 978 0 8223 4113 0
In 1739 China’s emperor authorised the publication of a medical text that
included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treat-
ment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were
interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chi-
nese. In the mid-19th century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua col-
laborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the crea-
tion of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered
both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of
Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the develop-
ment of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Larissa N. Heinrich investigates the creation and circula-
tion of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the 18th century.
Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyses the rhetoric and iconog-
raphy through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” She also
examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of
Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over
time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings,
taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.
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Direct Traffic 6.24%
Referring Sites 6.38%
Search Engines 87.37%
Social sciences
52%
Humanities
48%
10
most popular regions
distribution of categories by popularity
Other 27%
Central
Asia 3%
Thailand 3%
Korea 3%
Pakistan 3%
East
Asia 3%
Vietnam 4%
South East
Asia 5%
Japan 12%
China 15%
India 22%