On 12 November 2024, the Institute of Oriental Studies of NAS RA, with the support of the Bryusov State University (BSU), organized an international conference entitled “The Modernization of China: Armenia-China Relations.” The conference addressed China's modernization, Beijing's vision for current international relations, global security issues, universal human development, and welfare issues. Moreover, the conference aimed to examine the dynamics of Armenia-China relations, their weak and strong sides, and current tendencies. Researchers from the Institute of Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a major partner of the Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS), Renmin University of China, and Beijing University of Aviation and Astronautics, participated in the conference. From the Armenian side, researchers from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the NAS RA, BSU, the Armenian State University of Economics, and representatives of institutions cooperating with China participated in the conference.
Conducting fieldwork among middle-class families in Bhaktapur, Nepal in 2018-2019, I found that local parents are concerned with teaching their children the notion of ‘moral measure’. At the same time, a strategy of avoidance, rather than open negotiation, is preferred to maintain harmony and preserve kinship networks. Focusing on the case study of Dor Bahadur and his children Sita and Vishnu around a contested birthday celebration, in these visual works in gouache, acrylics, and oil colors, I explore and analyze the role that parent-child interactions play in the making of moral selves among middle-class people in Nepal. Through layers of colors, I convey the sense of the conflictual processes that the protagonists of this story experience, and the concomitant ‘opacity of minds’ established between their existential perspectives.
This article explores the complexities of colonial photography, archival ownership, and visual repatriation within the context of Arunachal Pradesh, India, focusing on historic Nyishi photographs from the Pitt Rivers Museum. By reconnecting the families of Nyishi interpreters Bath Heli and Kop Temi with photographs taken by colonial administrators Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Robert Stonor, the study examines the power dynamics embedded in the archival process. Using an autoethnographic approach, the research situates visual repatriation as a medium for restoring Nyishi cultural memory and examining tribal identity. The findings reveal how photographs, once decontextualized in the colonial archive, carry distinct meanings when reintegrated into their communities— challenging colonial narratives locked within museum spaces and enabling cultural resurgence.
Abstract Background As chromatographic techniques have advanced, many articles that analyze the constituting compounds of medicinal materials have been published in relation to Northeast Asian traditional medicine, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). TM-MC was launched in 2015, providing information about the chemical compounds in medicinal materials from chromatographic articles in PubMed. Since 2015, through continuous curation efforts, we have now released TM-MC 2.0 with significant improvements to the quantity and quality of the data (https://tm-mc.kr). Description TM-MC 2.0 contains 635 medicinal materials, 34,107 chemical compounds (21,306 identified and de-duplicated), 13,992 targets, 27,997 diseases, and 5,075 prescriptions (2,393 de-duplicated by name). The database provides the largest number of identified compounds for medicinal materials listed in the pharmacopoeia compared to all TCM databases. In particular, marker compounds of medicinal materials and many newly discovered compounds were added through the manual curation of recent chromatographic articles. Conclusion TM-MC 2.0 provides the largest collection of information about the chemical compounds of the medicinal materials listed in the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese pharmacopoeias. Our database can be utilized for network pharmacology in traditional medicine and for the compound screening of medicinal materials for modern drug discovery.
This paper investigates the manuscripts of Ludlul bēl nēmeqi from Ashurbanipal’s Library. It concludes that five types of tablets were included in the royal tablet collections, with at least three tablet sets marked with Ashurbanipal colophons. Moreover, the inventory tablets mentioning the poem are discussed to elucidate the possible original classification of the poem among other compositions about Marduk.
Oriental languages and literatures, Asian. Oriental
The manuscript Vienna, Cod. A. F. 26, Luġat-i Emīr Ḥüseyin al-Ayāsī is what we today would call a draft copy of a Persian-Turkish-Latin dictionary. The Viennese court librarian Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636) had access to a Turkish captive named Dervīş İbrāhīm and let him copy what was sent to Tengnagel by the Leiden librarian Daniel Heinsius (d. 1655), today part of the University Library of Leiden, Cod. Or. 227 and formerly in the possession of Joseph Justus Scaliger (d. 1609) but entitled Luġat-i Niʿmetullāh. In my article, I will take Tengnagel’s dictionary project as a case study to show how the combination of the tradition of Ottoman lexicography, together with the language skills of an Ottoman Turkish captive near Vienna, influenced further known lexicographical works of early modern European scholars.
Indo-Iranian languages and literature, Literature (General)
The Constitution of Bhutan of 2008 largely separates religion from the state. Nevertheless, the state authorities are obliged to protect certain Buddhist aspects as part of the country’s cultural heritage. The article shows that “Buddhism” becomes a legal term when the state authorities must interpret it in line with the state’s objectives. The court case concerning the film Hema Hema serves as an example of the conflicts that can arise between a religious and a state view of legitimate conduct.
Raden Ajeng Rizka Fiani Prabaningtyas, Tri Nuke Pudjiastuti, Athiqah Nur Alami
et al.
The protracted refugee situation in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased refugee children's vulnerability due to the non-fulfillment of their fundamental rights, including the right to education. Drawing on data collected through interviews and observation of refugee children during fieldwork in the cities of Batam and Makassar, this paper aims to investigate how and why their access to education has changed during the pandemic. This study finds that, shortly before the pandemic, the Indonesian government provided access to education for refugee children through the issuance of the Circular Letter from the Secretary General of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology Number 752553/A.A4/HK/2019 dated on 10 July 2019. However, the pandemic complicated the accessibility of education for refugee children suggested by the Circular Letter due to lockdown policy and mobility restrictions. The complication is apparent in four aspects of accessibility, namely: access to information, activities in the learning process, environmental support, and the motivation of refugee children. Notwithstanding, this study also finds that the pandemic has induced developments of adaptation strategies through the adoption of online learning among refugee communities to enable wider access to education for refugee children. Therefore, the pandemic may have revealed the urgency for a more rights-based policy on refugee treatment in Indonesia.
One of the most frequent cases in which vermin appear in Ottoman official correspondence is when they “attack” or “invade” human settlements, consuming or destroying food produced specifically for human consumption. Until effective ways and tools to manage them emerged in the late nineteenth century, communities withstood flies, locusts, and rats. Indeed, specific categories of animals subsumed within the category of vermin/haşarat seem to have become among the biggest troublemakers in rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These vermin caused not only short-term scarcity of food, especially concerning during famines, but also writ-large settlement abandonment, resulting in the temporary and even long-term problems of rural/regional economic systems. Yet very few Ottoman historians have reconstructed these stories within a critical animal history perspective. While it is true that these attacks and invasions of vermin created great burdens on human (and other animal) communities throughout history globally, the ways we historians have handled such cases tend to be anthropocentric. Here I argue for an ontological turn towards spatial aspects of vermin lives within human settlements and thus position my line of thinking about interaction from the ground-up, both literally and figuratively. From early-modern Ottoman discourses about vermin and the strategies used to cope with them from dictionaries/lexicons, literary and scientific texts, legal codices, and archival material, I develop a new analytical tool to understand interaction between humans and vermin as competition over perceived and actual space. I argue that we approach vermin behavior from the perspective of a spatial consciousness that constructed extended liminal configurations of space, which I call animalscapes. Human communities in Anatolia and Mesopotamia on the other hand, acknowledged the vermin perception of animalscapes and negotiated their place within, until the invention of chemical weapons against vermin at the end of the nineteenth century.
Indo-Iranian languages and literature, Literature (General)
Abstract More frequent cruisers prefer attractive cruising destinations, excellent geographical locations, diversified oriental cultures, local wildlife, rich tourism resource and exotic experiences in Asia for western travellers. Cruising in the Asian regions has considered as a potential growth in the transport and tourism industry. In this paper, we aim to provide suggestions to industrial practitioners on the development of the cruise port in Asia and identify the key elements of a regional leading cruise hub as desired by different users. Nevertheless, the majority of cruising-related studies were focused on tourism management in the North American and European regions. Relevant cruising studies on maritime transport management in the Asian region are under-researched. In doing so, we newly propose the CRUISE PORT framework by illustrating four representative countries in Asia (South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore) to look for common characteristics and unique features of cruise ship market in the Asian region. In order to give the valuable information and provide insight into the framework, we carried out semi-structured, in-depth interviews with different practitioners involved in the cruise industry. Through the framework, it fosters the industrial practitioners to implement cruise port strategies, cruise lines strategies and local government planning for the cruise destinations.
This article seeks to highlight the ambivalence inherent in Turkish diplomacy with reference to its attitude towards Jewish Turks living in Nazi occupied territories and thus being threatened by extermination policy. Embarking from a microhistoric approach, focussing on particular Jewish-Turkish citizens either helped or abandoned by Turkish diplomats, the study outlines a striking ambivalence and a lack of a common thread in attitudes and willingness to help. As this study touches on questions of citizenship and its underlying concepts determining membership to a state and a nation, particular attention is drawn to Turkey’s struggles for a new national identity shaped by Kemalism. Linking these concepts to the attempt to construct a new, homogenuous nation through social engineering, the study interprets the many-faced diplomatic attitude as a result of the ambivalence immanent in the new construct of the Turkish nation, exemplified by tensions between laiklik (laizism) and milliyetçilik (nationalism).
Indo-Iranian languages and literature, Literature (General)
Based on observations from personal participation in the 2014 Saga Dawa Kortsay at Swayambhunath Stupa complex located near Kathmandu, Nepal, my essay draws attention to the distinctive lay Buddhist community that is formed in such ritual performances. Using Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, I argue that the liminal experience of the pilgrimage enables the constitution of a distinctive lay Buddhist community in terms of the self-transformation usually reserved for monastic practitioners. In contrast to recent accounts of Nepali pilgrimage that emphasize the subordinate role of the lay community in the Buddhist sangha, I argue that lay participants in ritual performances like the Saga Dawa Kortsay cultivate individual and collective identities as members of the sangha in their own right, with their own responsibilities for practicing and preserving Buddhist teachings. Through discussions of the Swayambunath complex, pilgrims’ efforts toward self-transformation, and their practice of Buddhist perfections through donations to mendicants, I use the example of the Saga Dawa Kortsay to explain how a distinctive lay Buddhist community is formed by pilgrims through the situation of communitas.
This paper traces the insidious movement of tear gas shells from the site of jung (Kashmiri reference for stone-pelting, more directly referred to as Kanni Jung) to intimate spaces of homes, interrogating the world of unabated military violence in Downtown Srinagar. It delineates the sensate world of political conflict through the precarious social life of people and their multi-layered relationship with forms of military control, particularly tear gas shells1. In trying to capture the inbetween-ness of toxic tear gas—between striking protestors on the road and permeating inside homes, between explosion and diffusion— I ask: how does this “non-lethal” (Graham 2010: 244) chemical weapon affect the social world of people in Downtown? Can this gas, claiming to function specifically as a resistance-quelling weapon, differentiate neatly between ‘dangerous’ rioting bodies and bodies of civilians or between an azaadipasand2 (Kashmiri for pro-freedom) home and a non-azaadi3 pasand home? Borrowing from Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus (1990), the paper explicates that certain lived realities become embodiments and train the human body to preemptively act and respond in particular ways to everyday unfolding military violence. During the ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 in Downtown Srinagar, I attempted to un-layer this sensory landscape of tear gas by exploring narratives of daem (Kashmiri for suffocation) that have acquired a routine texture in this toxic geography.
Bactrocera dorsalis, the Oriental fruit fly, is one of the world's most destructive agricultural insect pests and a major impediment to international fresh commodity trade. The genetic structuring of the species across its entire geographic range has never been undertaken, because under a former taxonomy B. dorsalis was divided into four distinct taxonomic entities, each with their own, largely non‐overlapping, distributions. Based on the extensive sampling of six a priori groups from 63 locations, genetic and geometric morphometric datasets were generated to detect macrogeographic population structure, and to determine prior and current invasion pathways of this species. Weak population structure and high genetic diversity were detected among Asian populations. Invasive populations in Africa and Hawaii are inferred to be the result of separate, single invasions from South Asia, while South Asia is also the likely source of other Asian populations. The current northward invasion of B. dorsalis into Central China is the result of multiple, repeated dispersal events, most likely related to fruit trade. Results are discussed in the context of global quarantine, trade, and management of this pest. The recent expansion of the fly into temperate China, with very few associated genetic changes, clearly demonstrates the threat posed by this pest to ecologically similar areas in Europe and North America.