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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251120T180000
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SUMMARY:(Japan Series) Dr Michelle Damian – Networks of Violence and Trade: Premodern Piracy in Japanese Waters
DESCRIPTION:Third Thursday lecture – Sainsbury Institute\n\n\nThursday 20 November\, 2025\n6:00pm GMT – 7:00pm GMT\nOnline lecture via Zoom.\n50 min lecture followed by Q&A.\nFree and open to all\, booking essential.\nTo check your time zone conversion if you are joining from outside the UK\, click here. \nIf you have limited access to the internet but would still like to view the lecture\, please email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or call us on +44 (0) 1603 597507 to book to attend our livestream from 64 The Close.  \nSpeaker\nDr Michelle Damian (Associate Professor of History\, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) \nAbout the Talk\nPiracy was a constant\, looming threat in premodern Japan. Yet the role of the “pirates” themselves shifted depending upon who was being impacted by their actions. For some\, they were threatening figures\, intimidating travelers and disrupting trade. To others\, they functioned more as “sea lords\,” mimicking terrestrial daimyō (samurai lords) in their control of sea lanes instead of land routes.  In nearly every case\, however\, piratical activities demanded some kind of response from central authorities. Through these actions and reactions we can see the development of different types of networks in premodern Japan. The threat of piracy resulted in forces being mobilized against them\, or in strategies to actively work with them\, or sometimes simply complying with them in order to avoid rousing their ire. From the tenth-century royal court’s mobilization of forces to combat the “first pirate\,” Fujiwara no Sumitomo\, to the fifteenth-century Murakami pirate group’s impact on domestic trade patterns\, this presentation will consider written and archaeological evidence to explore those networks of violence and trade. \nAbout the Speaker\nMichelle Damian is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She specializes in Japanese maritime history and archaeology\, and has authored chapters in the volumes Land\, Power and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan (University of Hawaii Press) and Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Early Modern Colonialism in Asia-Pacific (University of Florida Press)\, among other publications. Michelle has worked and studied in Japan for over nine years. Her current research focuses on 14th– to 16th– century Japanese maritime-based trade networks\, tracing the movements of both people and commodities in the Seto Inland Sea region. \nImage: The swirling currents offshore Taizaki Island\, Ehime Prefecture\, part of the stronghold of the Nōshima Murakami pirates. Photo by Michelle Damian\, 2013. \nRegister here
URL:https://royalasiaticsociety.org/event/japan-series-dr-michelle-damian-networks-of-violence-and-trade-premodern-piracy-in-japanese-waters-online-lecture/
CATEGORIES:RAS Lectures & Events
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251120T183000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251120T203000
DTSTAMP:20260417T125947
CREATED:20250811T161713Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250925T151554Z
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SUMMARY:Dr Vayu Naidu - The Evergreen Epic:  Ramayana as Forest Literature and its Reinventions
DESCRIPTION:Ramayana was told and sung in regional dialects and languages by itinerant storytellers travelling across India. Festivals created infrastructures for pageants\,  at rituals in temples and in  homes for celebrating Diwali\, and this story spread with interpolations. It also travelled across the seas with tradesmen and craftsmen across to south east Asia. Ramayana offers a complex matrix of statecraft\, relationships between parents\, siblings\, men and women through its predominantly linear narrative. More than any other epic\, the relationship between humans\, animals\, and plants in the forest is very marked in this exploration of Ramayana. It is the epic that travelled across land and sea\, as metaphor and with migrants. The Living Legend  draws  every being is connected\, sustaining the equilibrium of love as life between conflicting forces. \nDr Vayu Naidu has followed the different tellings of Ramayana in rural and urban location. Her transposition of the epic as Storytelling in English for theatre audiences began in 1988\, and her research methods experiment with Indian aesthetics and British Contemporary performance with the AHRC. She has completed more than 2000 performances of telling Ramayana. Sita’s Ascent is the sequel to this\, also published by Penguin. The Sari of Surya Vilas (Speaking Tiger books/Affirm Press: India – Australia) features the importance of oral tales in pre-independent India. Manimekalai is a new composition that the Chettinad Heritage Festival commissioned her to compose and perform in 2025\, featuring the Sangam Tamil literary epic. \nThis evening she will talk on her discovery of what makes the forest so significant in the epic and how oral traditions are the swiftest technology of keeping the philosophy alive and why it means so much now. Combining performance practice with a source from the Yoga Vasistha Sara for sadhana on Advaita philosophy\, The Living Legend is part of the oral tradition about the flora and the flaming spirit of this epic. It endeavours to bridge the original context of an epic age with the contemporary listener’s daily reality in the 21st century. \nShe was Founder and Artistic Director of Vayu Naidu Intercultural Storytelling Theatre funded by Arts Council England. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and an Editorial Member of Writers Mosaic. She is Professor of Practice at SOAS. She teaches Indian Theatre Influences at RADA. On the Advisory Committee of the Chelsea Physic Garden\, and as a volunteer\, her research on plant life is owed to her work there. www.vayunaidu.com. As a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society\, this is her first talk. \n  \nFree and open to all at 14 Stephenson Way\, NW1 2HD \nTo join us online email: mb@royalasiaticsociety.org
URL:https://royalasiaticsociety.org/event/dr-vayu-naidu-the-evergreen-epic-ramayana-as-forest-literature-and-its-reinventions/
LOCATION:Royal Asiatic Society Lecture Theatre\, 14 Stephenson Way\, London\, NW1 2HD\, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:RAS Lectures & Events
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