Bajpaee, C. (2022). China in India's post-cold war engagement with Southeast Asia. Routledge.
This book examines the role of China in driving and sustaining India’s post-cold War engagement with Southeast Asia. In doing so, it provides a unique insight into the regional dimensions of the Sino-Indian relationship.India launched its Look East Policy in the early 1990s as part of a concerted effort to revive the importance of Southeast Asia in the country’s foreign policy agenda.
Gould, H. & McClelland, G. (2023). Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, histories, threats. Penn State University Press.
The transformation of global olfactory experience is one of the less remarkedupon effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that spread rapidly across the globe from its first identification in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. By May 2020, the medical condition of anosmia, or loss of a sense of smell, was recognized as a key clinical indicator of infection with COVID-19 (the SARS-CoV-2 virus), sometimes independent of other symptoms. The condition is estimated to affect nearly half of all diagnosed patients.1 Although most patients regain their sense of smell within a month, for some, a condition of anosmia, or even paranosmia (phantom smells), lingers. Walker et al. quote one patient with this condition: “Anosmia is like experiencing the world in two dimensions. I dearly miss the energising aroma of strong morning coffee and the soothing effect of spring scents.
History of east Asia: A captivating guide to the history of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. (2020). [sn].
It has long been said that history repeats itself. However, that is a convenient and hasty dismissal of the stark differences that characterize the histories of the Far Eastern countries: China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Each of these countries is utterly unique. And each of these countries treasures its own past. Among the gleaming glassy skyscrapers are ancient shrines, which grow in well-manicured gardens where water trickles over small stones, dancing in dappled sunlight.
Mukherjee, S. (2024). Religion, mysticism, and transcultural entanglements in modern South Asia: Towards a global religious gistory. Palgrave Macmillan.
This book explores aspects of a relatively understudied side of religiocultural processes in modern India, viz. the location of spirituality and mysticism in the evolution of modern religious subjectivity. The present intervention seeks to provide a critical corrective. It studies the development of an Indic religio-cultural discourse (as opposed to abstract ideas) since the early twentieth century. It draws upon select case studies and brings to the forefront the heightened interest in Indic spirituality, mysticism, and metaphysics, as well as the occasionally ‘Eastern’ esoteric traditions. The case studies demonstrate how hegemonic narratives were often defed, older Indic concepts were recast in the changing historical context, and in the upshot the very concept of religion came to be critically commented upon and reformulated. This entailed two related processes. At one level, it found expression in the burgeoning scholarship on religion, fnding much value in the realm of the inner conviction that it sought to understand in a refgured ‘science of religion’ contra ‘history of religion’.
Suzuki, T. (2024). Comparative population history of Eastern Asia. Springer.
This book aims at an extensive comparative population history of Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan starting from the origin of each ethnic group. In addition to highlighting different demographic trajectories, this book examines demographic impacts of interactions such as wars, migrations, and transmission of infectious diseases. One purpose is to review works on historical demography in each country written in local language and introduce in English. After I retired from the IPSS in 2020, I could stay at the Seoul National University as a guest professor and collected Korean literatures. I gave up my plan to stay in Taiwan or China to collect Chinese literatures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, I’m afraid of missing some important works in Chinese.