In addition to their individual research, members of the Institute organize long term projects incooperation with scholars from outside. The Institute is currently hosting the following projects.Human Flow and Creation of New Cultures in Southeast Asia(Coordinator: Miyazaki Koji)The aim of the project is to exchange views on the cultural process which has been and will becaused by the human flow in the past and present Southeast Asia. In the first place, the project will afford a forum for discussing current issues in Southeast Asiasuch as immigrants, national border, assimilation of peripheral groups, impact of commercializationand gender. As is typically shown in the process of creating a nation-state, the former unit of societyand culture was brought to challenge, either to incorporation into a wider unit or to fragmentation bythe creation of national borders. Immigrants who not only give multiplicity to the Southeast Asiansocieties but also form their constituent part, have been put in an ambivalent position by the policy ofnational integration and their international network. On the other hand, popular culture andcommercialism flow even into remote areas, regardless of any border, connecting people of differentcountries and raising controversy on traditional values one of which is related to gender. Putting it into a wider context, we can assume that these issues are caused by the process ofreorganization of communities into greater units and the resistance to it. The process of reorganizationis closely related with the move of people within a country as well as beyond a country. This is thesecond point of the project. We examine the possibility of a new perspective of Southeast Asia, takinginto consideration the relationship between cultural process and the flow of people. From this point ofview we will be able to reconsider the process of cultural formation in the past and present SoutheastAsia by focusing on the flow of people within and to the region.Within the framework of this project, an international symposium was held in December 1996funded bythe COE program of the Japanese Ministry of Education, inviting scholars from Southeast Asia.Cross-linguistic Studies of Tonal Phenomena(Coordinator: Kaji Shigeki)Tone and its related phenomena of the world's languages are studied from various angles. Thetopics studied include : Physiological and acoustic correlates of tone (pitch); Relation betweenconsonant types and tone; Tonal system of individual languages; Lexical and grammatical functions oftone; Difference between tone languages and pitch accent languages; Typology of the world's tonelanguages; Diachronic changes and comparative studies of tone; and Development of tone(tonogenesis) and tone loss.Studies on Linguistic and Cultural Contacts(Coordinator: Nakajima Motoki)This project addresses the question of what China is from the perspective of linguistics. China isnot an ethnic and cultural monolith. It examines the languages of China such as Manchu, Mongolian,Chinese, Uighur, Bai and so forth, the peoples who speak them, their social and geographicalcircumstances, their cultural and historical backgrounds, the structures of their languages and writingsystems, the range of their dialects and inter-relations with other languages.JOINTRESEARCHPROJECTS5
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