China's Economic Development: The Interplay of Scarcity and Ideology by Alexander Eckstein provides a comprehensive analysis of China's economic growth and transformation from a socialist economy. Eckstein examines the unique challenges China faced in addressing its economic backwardness, such as scarcity of resources and ideological constraints, and compares its industrialization to other countries. The book explores how Maoist ideology and policy initiatives impacted the country's economic strategies, leading to a fluctuating development pattern characterized by rapid expansion in the 1950s and stagnation in the 1960s. Key themes include the dichotomy between scarcity and ideology, the influence of historical factors on economic structures, and the adaptation to Soviet models. Eckstein sheds light on how China navigated its unique size, population pressures, and low per capita income, arguing that understanding these dynamics is crucial for both development theory and policy design. This volume, part of the Michigan Studies on China series, compiles essays and research that contribute to a nuanced understanding of China's economic systems, with particular focus on the tensions between ideological aspirations and economic realities.

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things, and he traces how pop art and readymades point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens's performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means by which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things.

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

Gregory Rocca's nuanced discussion prevents Aquinas's thought from being capsulized in familiar slogans and is an antidote to unilateralist or monochrome views about God-talk.