Posts tagged asia

What's interesting here—aside from the story itself, which sounds hopeful indeed—is the way the moringa tree is being passed between different (though surprisingly overlapping) cultural worlds: Africa and Asia and America, rich and poor, traditional and modern, folk and scientific. My ears prick up at the words that accompany (often in necessary quotation-marks) these handoffs: "discovered," "miracle," "awaits validation."

re: africa, agriculture, asia, cultural worlds, development, food and drink, horizons of the possible, migration

Nate:

As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as “drumsticks.” Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this backyard tree as a possible solution to malnutrition in tropical countries – he called it a “miracle tree,” no less.

Ounce for ounce, says Lamine Diakite, a Red Cross official from French Guinea in West Africa, moringa leaves contain more beta carotene than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges, and more potassium than bananas. Its protein content is comparable to that of milk and eggs, and its leaves are still available for harvest at the end of the dry season, when other food may be scarce. Malnourished children gained weight when put on a timely dietary supplement made from the leaves, Mr. Diakite says. He passed around pouches of the green, hennalike powder at a recent international summit in Boston.

Until a decade ago, moringa was not widely known in Africa. Its leaves (boiled like spinach) were an occasional vegetable. Immigrant Indians prized the long, slender seedpods (stewed or cooked like green beans) as a delicacy. “But its nutritional value, newly ‘discovered,’ has been known for a long time,” says Lowell Fuglie, an international development administrator who has been instrumental in popularizing the moringa in Africa for the past 10 years. Laboratory analysis has corroborated traditional knowledge about the plant. It now awaits further validation by western science.

I guess the transcontinental vintage clothing trade counts as a form of cultivating culture: pruning, honing, preserving (and, oh yeah, marking up the price). It's nice to know Westerners can go to Tokyo to experience a version of both our near-future (technology-wise) and the not-too-distant past.

re: asia, clothing, cultivation and creation, cultural worlds, fashion, japan

Nate:

The story about vintage clothes in Tokyo goes like this: A Hollywood actress, after a successful crash diet, sold her size 6 wardrobe to a thrift shop in Santa Monica. Three months later she came to Tokyo to promote her latest movie and one afternoon wandered into one of the city’s landmark vintage clothing shops, called Santa Monica. What should she find there but her own shorts and several party dresses, unobtrusively displayed under a sign that read: “Santa Monica Style.”

The story is credible for the simple reason that Tokyo has now reached a point where it’s safe to call it Planet Vintage. Among the 400-plus shops scattered over the city, myths like this abound.

The good news is that it’s not all rumor and folklore - according to a fashion stylist, Keiko Okura, “the quality of Tokyo vintage products are unmatched.”

I've been so mesmerized by the online coverage of archery and weightlifting (no joke!) that I've yet to delve much into the table tennis archive at nbcolympics.com Though the action's a bit too quick to show up well on my broadband, alas.

re: asia, china, horizons of the possible, olympics, sport, teams

Nate:

Doubles table tennis is so entertaining because it defies the laws of geometry. As anyone who’s played in a rec room fully understands, a Ping-Pong table simply isn’t big enough to accommodate four people. The key skill that every doubles team must master has nothing to do with shot-making or defense. Rather, it’s having the agility to get the hell out of the way of your partner.

In doubles table tennis, partners must alternate shots. That means the goal of any team is to sow confusion in the enemy—to make it so the player whose turn it is to hit has to get through his or her partner to do so. The highlight of a doubles match is when partners kick, trip, or smash into one another. I once saw a Malaysian duo knock heads so hard the match was delayed nearly half an hour. Also fun: when one player swings for the ball and hits his or her partner instead.

Sadly, at the Olympic level, the players are too accomplished for this to happen. Maybe it’s just as well, then, that doubles has been eliminated as an Olympic event.

There is a real danger that Christians' enthusiasm for God's work in human cultures will lead to simply baptizing whatever the culture is doing. Rarely has this been seen so clearly as in this communiqué from the Lutheran World Federation in 1975. As Sanneh describes it, "The communiqué insisted that the time had passed when Christianity could raise questions for China, pointing out that these questions were already settled for Chinese Christians who had long ago reached the conclusion that Christianity was, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, inimical to China's interests." Thirty years later, of course, we would never be so uncritical about culture. Of course not.

re: asia, china, copying, gestures and postures, lamin sanneh, mission

Andy:

“Love your neighbour to the point of denying yourself” is the ethical core of the Gospel. “Fight selfishness; serve the people” is the ethical core of Mao Tse-Tung Thought. “By their fruits you shall know them” is the decisive criterion of the Gospel. Marxism has sworn by the same test of “fruits” or “practice,” and in the case of China at least has both preached and practiced “continuing revolution” in its name. . . .

The social and political transformations brought about in China through the application of the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung have unified and consolidated a quarter of the world population into a form of society and life-style at once pointing to some of the basic characteristics of the kingdom of God. . . .

Christians . . . have to free themselves from the parochial Western context in which many of their Churches have developed and realize that the Gospel might be more powerfully expressed and fulfilled in the new type of society which is promoted in China.

Of course, as the second half of the article notes, conversion is not always so easy -- as the passage of recent anti-conversion laws (and an uptick in persecution) in many regions of India make clear. I've always found it interesting how the English-language press in India invariably uses the passive voice to describe it -- "he was converted to Christianity" -- rather than the perky individualist western-style active: "he converted." One can find echoes to this in different attitudes towards western-individualist choises about marriage, career, etc.

re: asia, conversion, cultural worlds, europe, hinduism, horizons of the possible, islam, pentecost and beyond

Nate:

Sometimes conversion is gradual, but quite commonly things come to a head in a single instant, which can be triggered by a text, an image, a ceremony or some private realisation. A religious person would call such a moment a summons from God; a psychologist might speak of an instant when the walls between the conscious and unconscious break down, perhaps because an external stimulus—words, a picture, a rite—connects with something very deep inside.

For people of an artistic bent, the catalyst is often a religious image which serves as a window into a new reality. One recurring theme in conversion stories is that cultural forms which are, on the face of it, foreign to the convert somehow feel familiar, like a homecoming. That, the convert feels, “is what I have always believed without being fully aware of it.”

Take Jennie Baker, an ethnic Chinese nurse who moved from Malaysia to England. She was an evangelical, practising but not quite satisfied with a Christianity that eschews aids to worship such as pictures, incense or elaborate rites. When she first walked into an Orthodox church, and took in the icons that occupied every inch of wall-space, everything in this “new” world made sense to her, and some teachings, like the idea that every home should have a corner for icons and prayer, resonated with her Asian heritage. Soon she and her English husband helped establish a Greek Orthodox parish in Lancashire.