Asia

While most people would not consider sponsoring an orphan's education to be in the same category as international humanitarian aid, both acts are linked by the desire to give. Many studies focus on the outcomes of humanitarian work, but the impulses that inspire people to engage in the first place receive less attention. Disquieting Gifts takes a close look at people working on humanitarian projects in New Delhi to explore why they engage in philanthropic work, what humanitarianism looks like to them, and the ethical and political tangles they encounter.

What if development agencies and researchers are not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimizes and mobilizes political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology’s most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp--a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime.

The Missing Picture is filmmaker Rithy Panh’s personal quest to reimagine his childhood memories. From the time when the repressive Khmer Rouge ruled over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the only recorded artifacts that remain are propaganda footage. Using beautifully detailed clay figurines and elaborate dioramas, Panh poignantly and poetically recreates the missing images from his past, giving new life to his recollections of his friends and family both before and after the regime’s rule.

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing is a journey into the memories and imaginations of perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. The Act of Killing is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike aging Nazis or Rwandan génocidaires, they have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries.

In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "comfort women" system -- those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the war -- lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. Hearts of Pine brings us into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of eight years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women, smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, trying to understand and document their worlds of song.

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is--decades after its first publication--one of the most important books written about our divided world.