Commonality and Regionality
in the Cultural Heritage of East Asia
東アジアの文化遺産—その普遍性と独自性

May 9-10, 2009

Julius Held Auditorium
304 Barnard Hall
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

Sponsors

International Shinto Foundation (New York); Kansai University, Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies (Osaka, Japan); Institute for Japanese Culture Studies (Hangzhou, China); Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University; Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Columbia University; Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures (Barnard College)

Hosts

Barnard College, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures
Columbia University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Kansai University, Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies

Organizers

WANG Yong (Professor and Director, Institute for Japanese Culture Studies, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China)

Wiebke DENECKE (Assistant Professor, Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures Department, Barnard College)

Registration & Contact

The conference is open to the public. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Rachael McGuinness (rm2370@gmail.com). Any other questions can also be directed to rm2370@gmail.com. Conference presentations and discussions will be conducted in English and Japanese.

Conference Description

In today’s globalizing world, the question of commonality and regionality, of shared and distinct legacies of local cultures becomes increasingly pressing. Since antiquity various polities in East Asia came to create their distinctive cultural spheres both geographically and historically. These cultural spheres changed over time, taking different shapes depending on the region, so that their inner and outer boundaries always remained fluid.

For the ancient period concepts like “Sinographic cultural sphere,” “Confucian cultural sphere,” “Chinese-language Buddhist sphere,” “enfeoffment system” and “tributary system” dominate the debate over the common East Asian heritage, highlighting commonality between East Asia’s various local cultures and polities. In contrast, research on the early modern and modern periods seems to split along national lines and tends to emphasize local characteristics and regionality.

In the light of this tendency, this conference examines the shared cultural heritage that emerged from the interaction of various peoples in East Asia from the perspective of “commonality” and “regionality” from antiquity to the modern period. Our particular focus will be on the cultural interaction between China and Japan and we hope that the broad temporal frame of the conference will allow us to see distinct patterns of cultural interaction through the case studies that the speakers will be proposing on political, scholarly, linguistic, literary, artistic, and religious aspects of that interaction.

True to the topic of “commonality and regionality,” this conference brings together scholars from China, Japan, Korea, the US and Europe. In its ideal intent it should trigger frank debates about the differences and commonalities in our scholarly work and about how they might relate to differences in academic culture and institutional structures, which in our various home countries inform our everyday and professional lives.