For the past two decades, the Field Museum of Natural History has been a leader in the analysis, conservation, and preservation of archaeological and museum collections. There are an immeasurable number of researchers who have walked the museum’s halls, collaborated with museum scientists and curators, and advanced our understanding o…
The traditional long-form novel, as devel-oped in late Ming China, could be endlessly reshaped and repackaged. Its text could be freely altered. Commentaries could be added to its chapters, whether at their beginnings, at their ends, or even interpo-lated into the text itself, in order to assist less-experienced readers or to provide interpretations. Prefaces could be…
The slowing down of international movement caused by the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic clearly reveals the ethical dilemma travel represents. Research shows that travel has demonstrable positive effects on human beings: It brings new per-spectives and knowledge, and gives a sense of freedom and pleasure that enhances the subjective quality of life and well-being.1 However, the sheer volume of tra…
Trees can also be tied to the idea of domination. I have long argued that the process of ecological restoration, in which a kind of environ-mental engineering attempts the re-creation of previously degraded or destroyed natural environments, is an example of the human project to assert our technological mastery over the autonomous processes of the natural world.1 The management of forests for h…
h e war altered the business of fashion on a national and international scale. Th e authors writing in this volume argue that the changes that occurred in the fashionable silhouette, while set in motion in the 1910s, were fi xed into place during the war. Th eir essays highlight how the war restructured the international couture industry—not by decentering the axis away from Paris…
This is how László Cs. Szabó, a leading Hungarian intellectual of the mid- twentieth century,2 starts his article ‘Milton or Czuczor’. Cs. Szabó refused the request to write only of ‘Hungarian things’, but the suggestion that he should give preference to the works of Gergely Czuczor, a Hungarian lexi-cographer and minor poet of the nineteenth century, to those of Milton and ‘the …
The original idea for this volume arose from a conference on entangled East-West histories that was held in February 2019 at the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence. Scholars from Chinese, Korean and Japanese universi-ties participated alongside colleagues from Western universities. To comple-ment the revised versions of some of those conference papers, several chapters explo…
Although they constantly shape behavior and nudge people to act in certain ways, norms tend to be taken for granted. Taking off shoes or removing a hat when entering a sacred space are not merely the result of individual decisions made upon crossing the threshold of a temple; they are appropriate ways of acting in that specific context and they signal conformity with a norm. This can also be no…
Globalization may be considered a process in which the network of human interaction gradually widens and takes on new and more complex forms. We would venture to say that each step of these deeper and more inclusive interconnections has unique characteristics. For instance, during the time of the great empires at the beginning of the Common Era (CE), the flow of materials and intellectual influ…
By the end of the first millennium CE, a vast portion of Central Eurasia was con-trolled by nomadic powers: the Sinicized Khitans (907–1125), who were later replaced by the Jurchens (1115–1234) and the Tanguts (1038–1227) in North and Northwest China; and the Turko-Islamic dynasties such as the Qarakhanids (840–1212), the Ghaznavids (977–1163) and the Saljuqs (1037–1194, and 1077–…