Intimate Encounters

Lieba Faier investigates the processes by which Filipina women who emigrated to work in rural Japan in hostess bars have overcome initial hostilities to become regarded as 'ideal, traditional Japanese brides'. 'Intimate Encounters' shows how changes to culture & identity come about through ordinary interpersonal exchanges.

This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.

This book was written so that I could share with my family, friends and those interested in China the stories and experiences of 10 years travelling and working in China and the impact it had on me. In the words of my friend and a colleague, Professor Wang, "From the book we can see how his life was in China: What he encountered, experienced, what he liked and disliked, what he expected and what was unexpected. His life in Tianjin made a big difference to him. To some degree I can confidently say his life in Tianjin and China changed him. He is now a different Doctor Ross Colquhoun from the time before he ever came to China." This book is divided into four parts. Each part reflects on aspects of my journeys throughout China and the intimate encounters I had with the people, society, culture and history. I say intimate, as I feel that the people of China opened their hearts to me and generously shared their knowledge, wisdom, aspirations and their lives. The 20 chapters cover many aspects of Chinese, life., including observations and insights into Chinese food, customs, philosophy, painting, poetry, music and much more.

When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

We enjoy being lost--or perhaps found--in wildness and the grandness of Nature. TreeGirl invites us into intimate contact with fifty magnificent tree species from her wild adventures in thirteen countries on four continents. Using a remote-control timer and a tripod, she photographs herself and others in sensual connection with the trees of the world. There has never been any other book like this. Weaving fine art photography, natural history, and personal essays on nature connection, conservation, and the ecopsychology of the human-tree relationship, this book is an invitation to cultivate our own intimate relationship with Nature as a refuge from the madness of modern civilization. Thoroughly researched and stunningly illustrated with over 150 color photographs, this interdisciplinary coffee table book is an inspiration and a resource for any tree lover.

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

Romantic Encounters focuses on literary periodicals of the 1830s to describe the destabilization of readerly and writerly identities which occurs when Romantic irony meets an apparently rising literary marketplace.