Author: Stephan Feuchtwang
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 1783269855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Putting China into the context of general anthropology offers novel insights into its history, culture and society. Studies in the anthropology of China need to look outwards, to other anthropological areas, while at the same time, anthropologists specialised elsewhere cannot afford to ignore contributions from China. This book introduces a number of key themes and in each case describes how the anthropology and ethnography of China relates to the surrounding theories and issues. The themes chosen include the anthropology of intimacy, of morality, of food and of feasting, as well as the anthropology of civilisation, modernity and the state.The Anthropology of China covers both long historical perspectives and ethnographies of the twenty-first century. For the first time, ethnographic perspectives on China are contextualised in comparison with general anthropological debates. Readers are invited to engage in and rethink China's place within the wider world, making it perfect for professional researchers and teachers of anthropology and Chinese history and society, and for advanced undergraduate and graduate study.
Author: Jennifer Hubbert
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878531
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world. Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice. China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.
Author: William Matthews
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800732694
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference.
Author: Gregory Eliyu Guldin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004096202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
This book is based on the papers that were presented at the First International Urban Anthropology Conference, which was opened in Beijing on December 28, 1989. It contains twenty-two papers and six introductory contributions, dealing with the following subjects: 'Comparative Urbanism: Socialist and Asian Cities'; 'Chinese Urbanization'; 'Chinese Urban Ethnicity'; 'Chinese Urban Culture and Life Cycle'. These papers are written by Chinese and non-Chinese authors. The conference of 1989/1990 marked the beginning of urban anthropology in China. Before this, the objects of ethnological, sociological and anthropological research in China were rural, rather than urban. Besides, the attention of scholars was mostly directed towards the ethnic minorities in China. In the late 1970's however, contacts with Western anthropologists helped in redirecting part of Chinese anthropology towards the study of urban conglomerations. The congress of 1989/90 marked the acceptance of this new approach in China.
Author: Xi He
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317409655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Although most studies of rural society in China deal with land villages, in fact very substantial numbers of Chinese people lived by the sea, on the rivers and the lakes. In land villages, mostly given to farming, people lived in permanent houses, whereas on the margins of the waterways many people lived in boats and sheds, and developed their own marked features, often being viewed as pariahs by the rest of Chinese society. This book examines these boat and shed living people. It takes an "historical anthropological" approach, combining research in official records with investigations among surviving boat and shed living people, their oral traditions and their personal records. Besides outlining the special features of the boat and shed living people, the book considers why pressures over time drove many to move to land villages, and how boat and shed living people were gradually marginalised, often losing their fishing rights to those who claimed imperial connections. The book covers the subject from Ming and Qing times up to the present.
Author: Grant Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136796452
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Hong Kong has become a by-word for all that is modern and sparkling in Asia today. Yet tourist brochures still play with the old cliche of Hong Kong as a place where 'East meets West'. Images of so-called 'traditional' China, junks sailing Victoria Harbour or old women praying to gods in smoky temples, mingle with those portraying Hong Kong as a consumer and business paradise. This collection of essays attempts to transcend the old polarities. It looks at modern Hong Kong in all its splendour and diversity in the run-up to its re-absorption into Greater China in mid-97, through the mediums of film, food, architecture, rumours and slang. It explores the question of a distinct, modern Chinese identity in Hong Kong, and even when it explores the traditional stamping ground of the older anthropology in the New Territories it finds a dramatically changed context, in particular for women. This collection presents an intriguing insight into the process of transition from 'tradition' to 'modernity' in this Modern Chinese Metropolis.
Author: Sulamith Heins Potter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521357876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
The revolutionary experiences of Cantonese peasant villagers are documented in the first comprehensive analysis of rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution of 1949.
Author: Arif Dirlik
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9629964759
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Within this text, the contributors provide a historical perspective on the development of anthropology and sociology since their introduction to Chinese thought and education in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1980s. The authors offer different windows on theoretical and research agendas of anthropologists and sociologists of the PRC and Taiwan, shaped as much by their political context as by disciplinary training. In examining the careers of several individual scholars, they also make note not only of their creative contributions, but also of the resonance of their intellectual concerns with contemporary issues in sociology and anthropology (culturalism, frontiers, women). Finally, the volume is organized loosely around the problem of how to translate these disciplines into a Chinese context(s), the issues of "indigenization" (bentuhua) or "making Chinese" (Zhongguohua), which have haunted the two disciplines since their establishment in the 1930s because of the contradictory expectations that they generate. This is where the case of China resonates with similar concerns in other societies where the disciplines were imported from abroad as products of a Euro/American capitalist modernity, conflicting with aspirations to create their own localized alternative modernities.
Author: Emily Martin
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9780990505020
Category : Money
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Emily Martin’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, The meaning of money in China and the United States, inaugurates the Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative with the University of Rochester. Martin’s lectures—hitherto unedited—are an instant classic, not only for scholars of China and the United States, but for those working in the history and anthropology of money. As relevant and timely now as it was twenty-eight years ago, this lecture series highlights the vicissitudes of money beyond tired theoretical divides between global political economy and local symbolic relativism. In a time when economic forecasts show that China will soon pass the US as the world’s leading economic power, Martin’s lectures could not be more germane, more insightful, and more poised for an ethnographic critique of the economic present.
Author: Hill Gates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan—face to face, over an extended period of time. At last in the late 1980s she set out on an excursion to Sichuan Province. That visit was the first of many she would make there on a remarkable double adventure: to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese women and to complete a difficult passage in her own life. Looking for Chengdu is her memoir of these trips. By turns analytic, witty, and bittersweet, Gates's observations on contemporary China are enlivened by a keen eye for the oddities of human behavior, including her own.The vast, inland province of Sichuan was the birthplace of the Chinese economic reforms of the 1970s, and is now speeding from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Was its economic boom transforming women's lives, Gates wondered? After a generation of socialist rule, would women risk the challenge of entrepreneurship? A feminist, she was especially curious to learn what Chinese of both sexes defined as women's rights.Gates traveled—by boat, train, bus, car, bicycle, and foot (her preference)—across the spectacular countryside, gleaning insight into China's massive bureaucracies from her experiences on an obligatory vacation, in a Tibetan dance-hall, and at a shouting match in her Chengdu home. She met dozens of hard-working, stylish women running family firms, and crossed paths with scholars and sailors. Her book is rich in anecdotes and compelling moments, from her journey through mountain villages in search of five thousand women with bound feet to low-voiced conversations about the Chengdu equivalent of the events at Tiananmen Square.A fascinating glimpse into the deeply personal vocation of anthropology, Gates's memoir will change the way readers think about the Chinese people.
