Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi’s The Chimera Principle breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a tradition that has long seen the memory of people “without writing”—which relies on such ephemeral records as ornaments, body painting, and masks—as fundamentally disordered or doomed to failure, he argues strenuously that ritual actions in these societies pragmatically produce religious meaning and that they demonstrate what he calls a “chimeric” imagination.
Deploying philosophical and ethnographic theory, Severi unfolds new approaches to research in the anthropology of ritual and memory, ultimately building a new theory of imagination and an original anthropology of thought. This English-language edition, beautifully translated by Janet Lloyd and complete with a foreword by David Graeber, will spark widespread debate and be heralded as an instant classic for anthropologists, historians, and philosophers.
Knowledge of chimpanzees in the wild has expanded dramatically in recent years. This comprehensive volume, edited by Martin Muller, Richard Wrangham, and David Pilbeam, brings together scientists who are leading a revolution to discover and explain what is unique about humans, by studying their closest living relatives. Their observations and conclusions have the potential to transform our understanding of human evolution.
Chimpanzees offer scientists an unmatched view of what distinguishes humanity from its apelike ancestors. Based on evidence from the hominin fossil record and extensive morphological, developmental, and genetic data, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution makes the case that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was chimpanzee-like. It most likely lived in African rainforests around eight million years ago, eating fruit and walking on its knuckles. Readers will learn why chimpanzees are a better model for the last common ancestor than bonobos, gorillas, or orangutans. A thorough chapter-by-chapter analysis reveals which key traits we share with chimpanzees and which appear to be distinctive to Homo sapiens, and shows how understanding chimpanzees helps us account for the evolution of human uniqueness. Traits surveyed include social behaviors and structures, mating systems, diet, hunting practices, tool use, culture, cognition, and communication.
Edited by three of primatology’s most renowned experts, with contributions from 32 scholars drawing on decades of field research, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution provides readers with detailed up-to-date information on what we can infer about our chimpanzee-like ancestors and points the way forward for the next generation of discoveries.
What will China look like in 2000? Tectonic forces are at work and its seeming stability has been largely lost after Tiananmen Square. Changing political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural conditions are transforming China and its neighbors with a majority Chinese population. The authors in this book, taking full advantage of the new freedom of inquiry, shed light on the Chinese experience, elaborating not only on the vast changes sweeping all sectors of Chinese society, but also on the tradition that has persisted. As communism did not erase the past, so new experiences build on the past and tease out newness with great resemblances. Modernity takes many forms, memory repressed for a time may reassert itself; myth, the invention of individuals and collectivities, may be more powerful than prosaic fact. Cultural factors as agents of change appear more important than ever.
This book demonstrates that today Confucian societies have salient features on a restless landscape. The authors confine themselves to enduring questions about today’s Sinic societies so that educated readers and scholars of modern China and the Chinese will better understand the more populous half of the world. Contributing authors include William P. Alford, David E. Apter, Myron L. Cohen, Edward Friedman, Tongqi Lin, Perry Link, Andrew J. Nathan, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Tianjian Shi, Helen F. Siu, Wang Gungwu, and Ying-shih Yü.
Following the success of The China Questions, a new volume of insights from top China specialists explains key issues shaping today’s US-China relationship.
For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the US-China relationship? For the global economy and international security? Seeking to clarify central issues, provide historical perspective, and demystify stereotypes, Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi and an exceptional group of China experts offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
Ranging across questions of security, economics, military development, climate change, public health, science and technology, education, and the worrying flashpoints of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, these concise essays provide an authoritative look at key sites of friction and potential collaboration, with an eye on where the US-China relationship may go in the future. Readers hear from leading thinkers such as James Millward on Xinjiang, Elizabeth Economy on diplomacy, Shelley Rigger on Taiwan, and Winnie Yip and William Hsiao on public health.
The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the US-China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both—we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms.
“Cuts through the cacophony of information, misinformation, and nonsense on China that circulates in our modern world to give us reliable answers to crucial questions… Should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand this fast-rising superpower.”
—Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China
After years of isolation, China is now center stage as an economic and global power, but its rise has triggered wildly divergent views. Is it a model of business efficiency or a threat to American prosperity and security? Thirty-six of the world’s leading China experts from Harvard University’s renowned Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies answer key questions about this new superpower, distilling a lifetime of scholarship into short and accessible essays about Chinese politics, culture, history, economy, approach to the environment, and foreign policy. Their contributions provide essential insight into the challenges China faces, the aspirations of its people and leaders, its business climate, and the consequences of its meteoric ascent. Many books offer information about China, but few make sense of what is truly at stake.
“Impressive… A highly informative, readable collection for scholars and nonscholars alike.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Provides a more nuanced and accessible perspective on the issues China is facing.”
—South China Morning Post
“Erudite yet accessible… The topical reach is impressive.”
—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century
Through close attention to everyday lives and narratives and with a particular focus on gender, market, and spatial practices, this collection stresses that, in the case of China, rural life and the impact of socialism must be considered in order to fully comprehend the urban. Individual essays note the impact of legal barriers to geographic mobility in China, the proliferation of different urban centers, the different distribution of resources among various regions, and the pervasive appeal of the urban, both in terms of living in cities and in acquiring products and conventions signaling urbanity. Others focus on the direct sales industry, the Chinese rock music market, the discursive production of femininity and motherhood in urban hospitals, and the transformations in access to healthcare.
China Urban will interest anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and those studying urban planning, China, East Asia, and globalization.
Contributors. Tad Ballew, Susan Brownell, Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Robert Efird, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Ellen Hertz, Lisa Hoffman, Sandra Hyde, Lyn Jeffery, Lida Junghans, Louisa Schein, Li Zhang
Between 1863 and 1910, a large number of Chinese immigrants resided in the Boise Basin to search for gold. As in many Rocky Mountain mining camps, they comprised a majority of the population. Unlike settlers in many other boom-and-bust western mining towns, the Chinese in the Boise Basin managed to stay there for more than half a century.
Thus, the Chinese portrayed all the stereotypical frontier roles-victors, victims, and villains. Their basic material needs were guaranteed, and many individuals were able to climb up the economic ladder. Frontier justice was used to settle disputes; Chinese-Americans frequently challenged white opponents in the various courts as well as in gun battles.
Interesting and provocative, A Chinaman's Chance not only offers general readers a narrative account of the Rocky Mountain mining frontier, but also introduces a fresh interpretation of the Chinese experience in nineteenth-century America to scholars interested in Asian American studies, immigration history, and ethnicity in the American West.
Today’s intellectuals in China inherit a mixed tradition in terms of their relationship to the state. Some follow the Confucian literati watchdog role of criticizing abuses of political power. Marxist intellectuals judge the state’s practices on the basis of Communist ideals. Others prefer the May Fourth spirit, dedicated to the principles of free scholarly and artistic expression. The Chinese government, for its part, has undulated in its treatment of intellectuals, applying restraints when free expression threatened to get “out of control,” relaxing controls when state policies required the cooperation, good will, and expertise of intellectuals.
In this stimulating work, twelve China scholars examine that troubled and changing relationship. They focus primarily on the post-Mao years when bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution and China’s renewed quest for modernization have at times allowed intellectuals increased leeway in expression and more influence in policy-making. Specialists examine the situation with respect to economists, lawyers, scientists and technocrats, writers, and humanist scholars in the climate of Deng Xiaoping’s policies, and speculate about future developments. This book will be a valuable source of information for anyone interested in the changing scene in contemporary China and in its relations with the outside world.
In February 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the American Society of International Law organized a study panel of legal scholars, social scientists, lawyers, and government officials to consider problems relating to “China and International Order.” The panel was founded in the belief that the turmoil in China would not endure and that the People's Republic might soon wish to participate fully in the world community. To prepare for this day, the panel commissioned and reviewed a number of studies of China's interpretation and application of international law.
The ten essays in this volume—written by twelve scholars including Jerome Alan Cohen, who has also written a substantial introduction—are the fruit of this effort. Four of the essays deal with basic problems relating to Peking's international conduct: recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations, the regulation of foreign diplomats serving in China, manipulation of the concept of “unequal treaties,” and the PRC's conditions for participation in international organizations. The other six essays focus on legal problems that have arisen in China's relations with a given country or international organization.
Lin Yutang (1895–1976), author of more than thirty-five books, was arguably the most distinguished Chinese American writer of the twentieth century. In Chinatown Family, he brings humor and wisdom to issues of culture, race, and religion as he tells the engrossing and heart-warming story of an immigrant, working-class Chinese American family that settled in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. Tracing their sometimes troubled and sometimes rewarding journey, Lin paints a vivid portrait of the wonder and the woe of settling into a new land. In an era when interracial marriages were frowned upon and it was forbidden for working-class Chinese men to bring their families to America, this story shows how one family struggled to become new Americans by applying their Taoist philosophy to resist peacefully the discriminatory laws and racism they encountered.
Beyond the quest for acceptance and economic success, Chinatown Family also probes deep into the heart of the immigration experience by presenting the perils of assimilation. The burgeoning tensionbetween the desire for material wealth and the traditional Chinese belief in the primary importance of family poses the question: Is it possible to attain the American dream without damaging these primary ties? For each family member, the answer to this question turns out to be different. Through the varied paths that each character takes, the novel dramatizes the ways that Chinese immigrants have negotiated between the competing interests of economic opportunity and traditional values.
Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Min Zhou examines how an ethnic enclave works to direct its members into American society, while at the same time shielding them from it. Focusing specifically on New York's Chinatown, a community established more than a century ago, Zhou offers a thorough and modern treatment of the enclave as a socioeconomic system, distinct form, but intrinsically linked with, the larger society.
Zhou's central theme is that Chinatown does not keep immigrant Chinese from assimilating into mainstream society, but instead provides an alternative means of incorporation into society that does not conflict with cultural distinctiveness. Concentrating on the past two decades, Zhou maintains that community networks and social capital are important resources for reaching socioeconomic goals and social positions in the United States; in Chinatown, ethnic employers use family ties and ethnic resources to advance socially. Relying on her family's networks in New York's Chinatown and her fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin, the author, who was born in the People's Republic of China, makes extensive use of personal interviews to present a rich picture of the daily work life in the community. She demonstrates that for many immigrants, low-paid menial jobs provide by the enclave are expected as a part of the time-honored path to upward social mobility of the family.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Lai was trained as an engineer but blazed a trail in the field of Asian American studies. Long before the field had any academic standing, he amassed an unparalleled body of source material on Chinese America and drew on his own transnational heritage and Chinese patriotism to explore the global Chinese experience.
In Chinese American Transnational Politics, Lai traces the shadowy history of Chinese leftism and the role of the Kuomintang of China in influencing affairs in America. With precision and insight, Lai penetrates the overly politicized portrayals of a history shaped by global alliances and enmities and the hard intolerance of the Cold War era. The result is a nuanced and singular account of how Chinese politics, migration to the United States, and Sino-U.S. relations were shaped by Chinese and Chinese American groups and organizations.
Lai revised and expanded his writings over more than thirty years as changing political climates allowed for greater acceptance of leftist activities and access to previously confidential documents. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources and echoing the strong loyalties and mobility of the activists and idealists he depicts, Lai delivers the most comprehensive treatment of Chinese transnational politics to date.
Sucheng Chan introduces this valuable new anthology with a commanding discussion of the field of Chinese American studies, in which she examines its history and points the way ahead. Here she and Madeline Y. Hsu have brought together leading-edge scholarship from a new generation of thinkers, as useful for scholars as it is for undergraduate readers.
The contributors address a broad range of issues, from the activism of left-wing and Communist Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the 1920s and early 1930s and humanitarian relief during the Sino-Japanese War to the construction of new Chinese regional identities in New York.
Chiang Yee’s Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique remains the classic introduction to Chinese calligraphy. In eleven richly illustrated chapters, Chiang explores the aesthetics and the technique of this art in which rhythm, line, and structure are perfectly embodied. He measures the slow change from pictograph to stroke to the style and shape of written characters by the great calligraphers.
In addition to aesthetic considerations, the text deals with more practical subjects such as the origin and construction of the Chinese characters, styles, technique, strokes, composition, training, and the relations between calligraphy and other forms of Chinese art.
Chinese Calligraphy is a superb appreciation of beauty in the movement of strokes and in the patterns of structure—and an inspiration to amateurs as well as professionals interested in the decorative arts.
Contributors. Leonard Blussé, Wen-Chin Chang, Lucille Chia, Bien Chiang, Nola Cooke, Jean DeBernardi, C. Patterson Giersch, Takeshi Hamashita, Kwee Hui Kian, Li Tana, Lin Man-houng, Masuda Erika, Adam McKeown, Anthony Reid , Sun Laichen, Heather Sutherland, Eric Tagliacozzo, Carl A. Trocki, Wang Gungwu, Kevin Woods, Wu Xiao
Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.
With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.
Contributors include: Grace An, Aaron Anderson, Chris Berry, Evans Chan, Li-Mei Chang, Frances Gateward, Andrew Grossman, Peter Hitchcock, Chuck Kleinhans, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Helen Leung, Aaron Magnan-Park, Gayle Wald, Esther C.M. Yau, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Xuelin Zhou and the editors.
The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens looks at the way in which issues of race and sexuality have become central concerns in cinema generated by and about Chinese communities in America after the mid-1990s. This companion volume to Marchetti's From Tian'anmen to Times Square looks specifically at the Chinese diaspora in relation to ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identity as depicted in the cinema.
Examining films from the United States and Canada, as well as transnational co-productions, The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens includes analyses of films such as The Wedding Banquet and Double Happiness in addition to interviews with celebrated filmmakers such as Wayne Wang.
Marchetti also reflects on how Chinese identity is presented in a multitude of media forms, including commercial cinema, documentaries, experimental films, and hybrid digital media to offer a textured look at representations of the Chinese diasporic experience after Tian'anmen.
China’s profound influence on the avant-garde in the 20th century was nowhere more apparent than in the work of Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian literary journal Tel quel. Chinese Dreams explores the complex, intricate relationship between various “Chinas”—as texts—and the nation/culture known simply as “China”—their context—within the work of these writers. Eric Hayot calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West and ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming. The latest edition of this critically acclaimed book includes a new preface by the author.
“Lucid and accessible . . . an important contribution to the field of East-West comparative studies, Asian studies, and modernism.”
—Comparative Literature Studies
“Instead of trying to decipher the indecipherable ‘China’ in Western literary texts and critical discourses, Hayot chose to show us why and how ‘China’ has remained, and will probably always be, an enchanting, ever-elusive dream. His approach is nuanced and refreshing, his analysis rigorous and illuminating.”
—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis
The “Chinese question” and the “Negro problem” were bound up with one another in nineteenth-century America. Indeed, the negative stereotypes, exclusionary laws, and incendiary rhetoric employed against both populations bore striking similarities.
Najia Aarim-Heriot forcefully demonstrates that the anti-Chinese sentiment behind the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is inseparable from the racial double standards applied by mainstream white society toward white and nonwhite groups during the same period. Aarim-Heriot argues that previous studies on American Sinophobia have overemphasized the resentment labor organizations felt toward incoming Chinese workers. As a result, scholars have overlooked the broader ways in which the growing nation sought to define and unify itself through the exclusion and oppression of nonwhite peoples.
A challenge to traditional approaches to Chinese American history, Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 offers a holistic examination of American Sinophobia and the racialization of national immigration policies.
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)— a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of California, Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.
Download the open access book here.
Chinese Medicine and Healing is a comprehensive introduction to a rich array of Chinese healing practices as they have developed through time and across cultures. Contributions from fifty-eight leading international scholars in such fields as Chinese archaeology, history, anthropology, religion, and medicine make this a collaborative work of uncommon intellectual synergy, and a vital new resource for anyone working in East Asian or world history, in medical history and anthropology, and in biomedicine and complementary healing arts.
This illustrated history explores the emergence and development of a wide range of health interventions, including propitiation of disease-inflicting spirits, divination, vitality-cultivating meditative disciplines, herbal remedies, pulse diagnosis, and acupuncture. The authors investigate processes that contribute to historical change, such as competition between different types of practitioner—shamans, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, scholar physicians, and even government officials. Accompanying vignettes and illustrations bring to life such diverse arenas of health care as childbirth in the Tang period, Yuan state-established medical schools, fertility control in the Qing, and the search for sexual potency in the People’s Republic.
The two final chapters illustrate Chinese healing modalities across the globe and address the challenges they have posed as alternatives to biomedical standards of training and licensure. The discussion includes such far-reaching examples as Chinese treatments for diphtheria in colonial Australia and malaria in Africa, the invention of ear acupuncture by the French and its worldwide dissemination, and the varying applications of acupuncture from Germany to Argentina and Iraq.
Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize
Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize
Winner of the Sally and Ken Owens Award
Winner of the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize
Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize
“A powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.”
—Richard White
“A riveting, beautifully written account…that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border.”
—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn
In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Must Go shows how American immigration policies incited this violence, and how this gave rise to the concept of the “alien” in America.
Our story begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens—and long before Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act, the nation’s first attempt to bar immigration based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment failed to slow Chinese migration, armed vigilante groups took the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, policymakers redoubled their efforts to seal the borders, overhauling immigration law and transforming America’s relationship with China in the process. By tracing the idea of the alien back to this violent era, Lew-Williams offers a troubling new origin story of today’s racialized border.
“The Chinese Must Go shows how a country that was moving, in a piecemeal and halting fashion, toward an expansion of citizenship for formerly enslaved people and Native Americans, came to deny other classes of people the right to naturalize altogether…The stories of racist violence and community shunning are brutal to read.”
—Rebecca Onion, Slate
The Chinese overseas now number 25 to 30 million, yet the 2,000-year history of Chinese attempts to venture abroad and the underlying values affecting that migration have never before been presented in a broad overview. Despite centuries of prohibition against leaving the land and traveling and settling overseas, the "earthbound" Chinese--first traders, then peasants and workers--eventually found new sources of livelihood abroad. The practice of sojourning, being always temporarily away from home, was the answer the Chinese overseas found to deal with imperial and orthodox concerns. Today their challenge is to find an alternative to either returning or assimilating by seeking a new kind of autonomy in a world that will come to acknowledge the ideal of multicultural states.
In pursuing this story, international scholar Wang Gungwu uncovers some major themes of global history: the coming together of Asian and European civilizations, the ambiguities of ethnicity and diasporic consciousness, and the tension between maintaining one's culture and assimilation.
Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Judith Farquhar, David S. G. Goodman, James L. Hevia, Li Hsiaoti, Ralph Litzinger, Eric Kit-Wa Ma, Jonathan Scott Noble, Jing Wang
During the centuries of its popularity, early Chinese vernacular fiction was never adequately preserved or even documented. The great popular appeal of the short stories saved them from oblivion, but it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were first collected and published.
Mr. Hanan's erudite study is the first thorough attempt to uncover the history of the Chinese short story. Using a variety of techniques, but principally that of stylistic analysis, the author solves the fundamental problem of dating the stories in terms of periods. He is able to place each story in one of three broad categories, early (ca. 1250-1450), middle (ca. 1400-1575), and late (ca. 1550-1627), and to assign some of them to,the earlier or later part of the time span. In many,cases he offers evidence of sources and influences, place of origin, and possible or probable authorship.
On the basis of the author's research, it is possible to see in minutely researched detail how the short story developed in China, what kind of men composed it, its relationship to other kinds of literature, and the main social preoccupations with which it deals.
The results of Mr. Hanan's study are vitally important to all scholars of Chinese literature. Historians and linguists will also find it valuable as a model of the innovative use of stylistic analysis.
By the late 1970s, state communism was everywhere in retreat. First in Eastern Europe, then in China and the Soviet Union, party leaders were compelled to devise fundamental departures from the economic procedures and structures they had confidently installed at the outset of their revolutionary victories. Perhaps no country departed more rapidly from communist economic structures than China.
Within five years of Mao Zedong’s death, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping had dismantled the people’s communes and created a range of markets that established the institutional foundations for a new form of socialism. But, unlike the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, the Chinese reformers refused to consider parallel changes in political institutions. The demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 made it clear that post-Mao economic policies had created unavoidable political consequences for the society and its leaders. In individual case studies, the twelve contributors to this volume document the uneven decollectivization and decentralization of China’s economy in the post-Mao years and the great diversity of the social and political consequences. They deal with the effects of the more materialistic and individualistic reward system on both public and private life in the countryside and in urban settings and the new expectations that economic changes engendered.
The huaben, or vernacular story, was one of the richest, most varied, and appealing genres in all Chinese literature, often reaching a larger audience than works in Classical Chinese. And yet, because of its very popularity, the huaben was almost entirely disregarded by official, learned society. Now, Patrick Hanan brings this intriguing half-buried literature to light, tracing its development from the thirteenth through the seventeenth century—when it became, indeed, the most vital form of Chinese fiction.
Hanan begins by explaining the position of vernacular language within Chinese language and literature as a whole. He then goes on to show how the huaben acquired a tremendous range of subjects and interests from the most serious moral and philosophical problems to crime stories, romances, and ribald satires. Hanan consistently relates the stories and their authors to China’s changing social and political life. At the same time, he carefully evaluates the best of the stories, giving fresh and detailed information about their composition, performance, and reception.
Sanchun (a pseudonym) is a small rural market center in Malaysia made up of predominantly Chinese shopkeepers, wage laborers, and rubber tappers and small holders. It is one of the so-called “new villages” originally set up during the communist insurgency as forced relocation camps to contain rural Chinese. Judith Strauch lived in Sanchun for eighteen months, conducting lengthy socioeconomic family surveys, examining local records, documents, and census data, and participating in community life.
This study offers detailed analysis of the manipulative strategies of local rivals active over several decades in the competition for local status and power. But significantly, it treats relevant aspects of the broader Malaysian political environment as well, situating local-level politics firmly in the larger context of national politics. Special attention is given to a rural mass-mobilization movement undertaken by the major Chinese-Malaysian political party in the early 1970s. The focus is on the interconnections between the various levels of a modern multi-ethnic political system, demonstrating the ways in which local political actors are both constrained and supported by power structures and resources that lie outside the local system.
The book draws together in an innovative manner important intellectual strands of both anthropology and political analysis. It should be of interest not only to Southeast Asia area specialists and students of contemporary ethnic Chinese society but also to those concerned with the problems of plural societies everywhere.
Drawing from literary, historical, dramatic, and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu conducts a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon.
Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She shows that various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.
Louie focuses on “In Search of Roots,” a program that takes young Chinese American adults of Cantonese descent to visit their ancestral villages in China’s Guangdong province. Through ethnographic interviews and observation, Louie examines the experiences of Chinese Americans both during village visits in China and following their participation in the program, which she herself took part in as an intern and researcher. She presents a vivid portrait of two populations who, though connected through family ties generations back, are meeting for the first time in the context of a rapidly changing contemporary China. Louie situates the participants’ and hosts’ shifting understandings of China and Chineseness within the context of transnational flows of people, media, goods, and money; China’s political and economic policies; and the racial and cultural politics of the United States.
Chippewa Lake is an idyllic waterfront community in north-central Michigan, popular with retirees and weekenders. The lake is surrounded by a rural farming community, but the area is facing a difficult transition as local demographics shift, and as it transforms from an agriculture-based economy to one that relies on wage labor. As farms have disappeared, local residents have employed a variety of strategies to adapt to a new economic structure. The community, meanwhile, has been indelibly affected by the advent of newcomers and retirees challenging the rural cultural values. An anthropologist with a background in sociology, Cindy L. Hull deftly weaves together oral accounts, historic documents, and participant surveys compiled from her nearly thirty years of living in the area to create a textured portrait of a community in flux.
Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, including community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness—as a way of identifying themselves and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.
In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era. Burtt spent six months on São Tomé and Príncipe and a year in Angola. His five-month march across Angola in 1906 took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism and ultimately helped change labor recruiting practices in colonial Africa.
This beautifully written and engaging travel narrative draws on collections in Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Africa to explore British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism. In a story still familiar a century after Burtt’s sojourn, Chocolate Islands reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Cadbury Bros. Ltd. was a successful, Quaker-owned chocolate manufacturer in Birmingham, England, celebrated for its model village, modern factory, and concern for employees. In 1901 the firm learned that its cocoa beans, purchased from Portuguese plantations on the island of São Tomé off West Africa, were produced by slave labor.
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business is a lively and highly readable account of the events surrounding the libel trial in which Cadbury Bros. sued the London Standard over the newspaper’s accusation that the firm was hypocritical in its use of slave-grown cocoa. Lowell J. Satre probes issues as compelling now as they were a century ago: globalization, corporate social responsibility, journalistic sensationalism, and devious diplomacy.
Satre illuminates the stubborn persistence of the institution of slavery and shows how Cadbury, a company with a well-regarded brand name from the nineteenth century, faced ethical dilemmas and challenges to its record for social responsibility. Chocolate on Trial brings to life the age-old conflict between economic interests and regard for the dignity of human life.
Explores the power and artistry of prophecy among the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who use predictions about the future to interpret the world around them
This book challenges the common assumption that American Indian prophecy was an anomaly of the 18th and 19th centuries that resulted from tribes across the continent reacting to the European invasion. Tom Mould’s study of the contemporary prophetic traditions of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians reveals a much larger system of prophecy that continues today as a vibrant part of the oral tradition.
Mould shows that Choctaw prophecy is more than a prediction of the future; it is a way to unite the past, present, and future in a moral dialogue about how one should live. Choctaw prophecy, he argues, is stable and continuous; it is shared in verbal discourse, inviting negotiation on the individual level; and, because it is a tradition of all the people, it manifests itself through myriad visions with many themes. In homes, casinos, restaurants, laundromats, day care centers, and grocery stores, as well as in ceremonial and political situations, people discuss current events and put them into context with traditional stories that govern the culture. In short, recitation is widely used in everyday life as a way to interpret, validate, challenge, and create the world of the Choctaw speaker.
Choctaw Prophecy stands as a sound model for further study into the prophetic traditions of not only other American Indian tribes but also communities throughout the world. Weaving folklore and oral tradition with ethnography, this book will be useful to academic and public libraries as well as to scholars and students of southern Indians and the modern South.
A young Lutheran girl grows up on Long Island, New York. She aspires to be a doctor, and is on the fast track to marriage and the conventional happily-ever-after. But, as the Yiddish saying goes, "Man plans, and God laughs." Meet Andrea Myers, whose coming-of-age at Brandeis, conversion to Judaism, and awakening sexual identity make for a rich and well-timed life in the rabbinate.
In The Choosing, Myers fuses heartwarming anecdotes with rabbinic insights and generous dollops of humor to describe what it means to survive and flourish on your own terms. Portioned around the cycle of the Jewish year, with stories connected to each of the holidays, Myers draws on her unique path to the rabbinate--leaving behind her Christian upbringing, coming out as a lesbian, discovering Judaism in college, moving to Israel, converting, and returning to New York to become a rabbi, partner, and parent.
Myers relates tales of new beginnings, of reinventing oneself, and finding oneself. Whether it's a Sicilian grandmother attempting to bake hamantaschen on Purim for her Jewish granddaughter, or an American in Jerusalem saving a chicken from slaughter during a Rosh Hashanah ritual, Myers keeps readers entertained as she reflects that spirituality, goodness, and morality can and do take many forms. Readers will enthusiastically embrace stories of doors closing and windows opening, of family and community, of integration and transformation. These captivating narratives will resonate and, in the author's words, "reach across coasts, continents, and generations."
The essays in Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea fill gaps in the existing food studies by revealing and contextualizing the hidden, local histories of Chinese and Japanese restaurants in the United States.
The writer of these essays show how the taste and presentation of Chinese and Japanese dishes have evolved in sweat and hardship over generations of immigrants who became restaurant owners, chefs, and laborers in the small towns and large cities of America. These vivid, detailed, and sometimes emotional portrayals reveal the survival strategies deployed in Asian restaurant kitchens over the past 150 years and the impact these restaurants have had on the culture, politics, and foodways of the United States.
Some of these authors are family members of restaurant owners or chefs, writing with a passion and richness that can only come from personal investment, while others are academic writers who have painstakingly mined decades of archival data to reconstruct the past. Still others offer a fresh look at the amazing continuity and domination of the “evil Chinaman” stereotype in the “foreign” world of American Chinatown restaurants. The essays include insights from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, economics, phenomenology, journalism, food studies, and film and literary criticism.
Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea not only complements the existing scholarship and exposes the work that still needs to be done in this field, but also underscores the unique and innovative approaches that can be taken in the field of American food studies.
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