With the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, the regime of Chairman Mao Zedong launched a propaganda campaign aimed at disseminating inspiring images of the chairman to a skeptical populace. Thus was born the "Mao badge," a political icon in the form of a pin that was widely distributed to create, sustain, and inflate the Mao personality cult during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Scholars estimate that over two billion Mao badges, featuring over fifty thousand different designs and themes, were produced.

As China now enters an era in which people can more openly express their views about the Cultural Revolution, these icons have taken on new meanings, and people are wearing and talking about them in subversive ways. Melissa Schrift suggests that the badges developed "lives" that far surpass the intentions of their creators, as the Chinese ironically commodified them, both during the Cultural Revolution and today. During the Mao years, people wore the objects to symbolize their unquestioned loyalty to Mao. Yet even then many Chinese subverted the badges' symbolic meaning. Using them in socially approved rituals, they gained a measure of political credibility that masked their practice of prohibited customary rites.

Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge is a work of cultural history that contributes to our understanding not only of Chinese society but, more generally, of strategies people employ in responding to and transforming the meaning of propaganda campaigns and symbols.

How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American South

W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves.
 
The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically “Solid South.” Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich “creole” of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism.
This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.