'Incidental' Ethnographers

'Incidental' Ethnographers PDF Author: Jean Michaud
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This book, connecting the fields of social anthropology and missiology, presents a body of colonial ethnographic writing applied to highland societies in the southern portion of the Mainland Southeast Asian massif. The writers under scrutiny are Catholic priests from the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. Their texts from the Upper-Tonkin vicariate, in today's northern Vietnam, are paid special attention, notably through its major contributor, F.M. Savina. The author locates this ethnographic heritage against its historical, political and intellectual background. A comparison is conducted with French missionaries-cum-ethnographers who worked among the 'natives' in New France (Canada) in the 17th century, yielding the unexpected conclusion that practically nothing from this early period of experimentation was remembered.

'Incidental' Ethnographers

'Incidental' Ethnographers PDF Author: Jean Michaud
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, connecting the fields of social anthropology and missiology, presents a body of colonial ethnographic writing applied to highland societies in the southern portion of the Mainland Southeast Asian massif. The writers under scrutiny are Catholic priests from the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. Their texts from the Upper-Tonkin vicariate, in today's northern Vietnam, are paid special attention, notably through its major contributor, F.M. Savina. The author locates this ethnographic heritage against its historical, political and intellectual background. A comparison is conducted with French missionaries-cum-ethnographers who worked among the 'natives' in New France (Canada) in the 17th century, yielding the unexpected conclusion that practically nothing from this early period of experimentation was remembered.

Chasing Traces

Chasing Traces PDF Author: Pierre Petit
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824897749
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.

Frontier Fieldwork

Frontier Fieldwork PDF Author: Andres Rodriguez
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774867582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, and missionaries who took to the field in China’s southwest at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population. Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which placed China’s margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.

Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif

Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif PDF Author: Jean Michaud
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442272791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
Dwelling in the highland areas of Northeast India, Bangladesh, Southwest China, Taiwan, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Peninsular Malaysia are hundreds of “peoples”. Together their population adds up to 100 million, more than most of the countries they live in. Yet in each of these countries, they are regarded as minorities. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on about 300 groups, the ten countries they live in, their historical figures, and their salient political, economic, social, cultural and religious aspects. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more.

The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia

The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia PDF Author: Paul Sidwell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110558149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 983

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Book Description
The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

How Christianity Came to China

How Christianity Came to China PDF Author: Kathleen L. Lodwick
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506410286
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
“The story of the foreign missionaries who served in China between 1809 and 1949 is one of fervent religious commitment and of the loss of faith, of determined perseverance and of angry frustration, of accepting people as they are and of cultural superiority . . . of human kindness and of narrow prejudice, of those who loved China and of those who refused to acknowledge the society in which they lived, of those who spent their entire adult lives in China and of those who fled home as soon as possible, and of those who admired China and of those who were driven insane by living in China. In short, it is a story of ordinary people with all their good qualities and all their shortcomings.” In all of its complexity, Kathleen L. Lodwick tells the story of Christianity in China. It’s essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the contemporary phenomena that is Christianity in China, which some people predict soon will be the country with the largest Christian population in the world.

Currencies of Imagination

Currencies of Imagination PDF Author: Ivan V. Small
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716891
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration. Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to.

Imperial Heights

Imperial Heights PDF Author: Eric T. Jennings
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520266595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
“By using both macro and micro lenses, Eric T. Jennings has written a book which is a model of global history under the guise of a monographic study. He convincingly demonstrates that throughout fifty years, Dalat as a climatic resort built by the French colonizers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, was upgraded to far more than a mere R&R place for white people. Jennings has kneaded together a huge and rich amount of primary and secondary sources that he masters perfectly due to his sound and balanced method of critical analysis. As we say in French: de la belle ouvrage.” —Pierre Brocheux, author of Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954 “Written in a vivid and engaging style, Imperial Heights is an exceptional piece of scholarship. It is impeccably researched, drawing on private, institutional, and national archives in at least five countries. Making wonderful use of ‘thick description,’ Jennings brilliantly recreates the story of one small town to capture the varied and complex history of French colonialism and its afterlives in Southeast Asia.” —J.P. Daughton, author of An Empire Divided

In God's Empire

In God's Empire PDF Author: Owen White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199875405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A collection of original essays by leading scholars in the field, In God's Empire examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France's secular "civilizing mission," it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries' interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions - from the Ottoman Empire and North America to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean - this book explores how France used missionaries' long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. In God's Empire offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, imperial, religious history, and world history.

Red Stamps and Gold Stars

Red Stamps and Gold Stars PDF Author: Sarah Turner
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774824964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
In the late 1970s and ’80s, socialist countries in Asia began reopening their borders to overseas scholars. Today, a growing number of social scientists are embarking on fieldwork in China, Vietnam, and Laos. Red Stamps and Gold Stars brings together all the messiness, compromise, and ethical dilemmas that underscore fieldwork in upland socialist Asia and elsewhere in the Global South. The volume’s contributors – accomplished geographers, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians – foreground the importance of questioning one’s subjective gaze and of debating representations of “the other.” Reflecting on the realities of fieldwork in socialist regimes and analyzing their positionality and subjectivity in the field, they debate a range of ethical quandaries and the rewards that can be gained from critical reflection. Together, these unique contributions will advance the study of the practice of international fieldwork.