The "Ben Cao Gang Mu" brings together ancient medicine, wisdom, and culture. German scholar and translator Paul U. Unschuld explains why it remains a crucial text — revealing the culture that underlies Chinese health care and politics.
Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage do
By Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila's Resource FrontierCities around the world are learning to live with the challenges of increasing urban ecological precarity. In watery Manila, the metropolitan population of around 25 million is constantly expose
When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in
By Kartik Nair, author of Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay HorrorWhat makes a vampire burn in the light? We don’t quite know. But in her stylish short film, Suicide by Sunlight (2018), the filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu gives us a vampire who isn’t afraid of the day. With her protagonist,
By Cheryl Narumi Naruse, author of Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in SingaporeBecoming Global Asia is part of the UC Press Transpacific SeriesThough once widely regarded as a punitive, culturally sterile island-nation, or what William Gibson deemed “Disn
Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century wes
In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future gen