Yunxiang Yan
Chinese society has seen phenomenal change in the last 30 years. Two of the most profound changes have been the rise of the individual in both public and private spheres and the consequent individualization of Chinese society itself. Yet, despite China's recent dramatic entrance into global politics and economics, neither of these significant shifts has been fully analyzed. China presents an alternative model of social transformation in the age of globalization; therefore, its path to development may have particular implications for the developing world.
The Individualization of Chinese Society reveals how individual agency has been on the rise since the 1970s and how this has affected everyday life and Chinese society more broadly. The book presents a wide range of detailed case studies focusing on the impact of economic policy, patterns of kinship, changes in marriage relations and the socio-economic position of women, the development of youth culture, the politics of consumerism, and shifting power relations in everyday life.
Exploring the rise of the individual in both rural and urban settings, The Individualization of Chinese Society provides a detailed overview of this major social phenomenon and its wider implications.
Mathijs Pelkmans|
The large and sudden influx of missionaries into the former Soviet Union after seventy years of militant secularism has been controversial, and the widespread occurrence of conversion has led to anxiety about social and national disintegration. Although these concerns have been vigorously discussed in national arenas, social scientists have remained remarkably silent about the subject. This volume's focus on conversion offers a novel approach to the dislocations of the postsocialist experience. In eight wellresearched ethnographic accounts the authors analyse a range of missionary encounters as well as aspects of conversion and 'anti-conversion' in different parts of the region, thus challenging the problematic idea that religious life after socialism involved a simple 'revival' of repressed religious traditions. Instead, they unravel the unexpected twists and turns of religious dynamics, and the processes that have challenged popular ideas about religion and culture. The contributions show how conversion is rooted in the disruptive qualities of the new 'capitalist experience' and document its unsettling effects on the individual and social level.
Publisher's page: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=PelkmansConversion |
Peter Loïzos|
In his vivid, lively account of how Greek Cypriot villagers coped with a thirty-year displacement, Peter Loïzos follows a group of people whom he encountered as prosperous farmers in 1968, yet found as disoriented refugees when revisiting in 1975. By providing a forty year in-depth perspective unusual in the social sciences, this study yields unconventional insights into the deeper meanings of displacement. It focuses on reconstruction of livelihoods, conservation of family, community, social capital, health (both physical and mental), religious and political perceptions. The author argues for a closer collaboration between anthropology and the life sciences, particularly medicine and social epidemiology, but suggests that qualitative life-history data have an important role to play in the understanding of how people cope with collective stress. Publisher's Page| Download PDF flyer/order form|
Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, globalization and middle-class identity in contemporary India (Ashgate, September 2008)
Henrike Donner|
Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world. Publisher's Page|
Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives (Routledge, September 2008)
Eds. Susanne Brandtstädter and Gonçalo D. Santos|
The essays in this volume present contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, its historical complexity and its modern metamorphoses. The collection draws particular attention to the reverberations of larger socio-cultural and politico-economic processes in the formation of sociality, intimate relations, family histories, reproductive strategies and gender relations - and vice-versa.Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic material from the late imperial period and from contemporary Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, from northern and southern regions as well as from rural and urban settings, the volume provides unique insights into the historical and spatial diversities of the Chinese kinship experience. This emphasis on diversity challenges the classic 'lineage paradigm' of Chinese kinship and establishes a dialogue with contemporary anthropological debates about human kinship reflecting on the emergence of radically new family formations in the Euro-American context. Chinese Kinship will be of interest to anthropologists and sinologists, as to historians and social scientists in general. Publisher's Page|
The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: 'Restoring What Was Ours' (Routledge, July 2008)
Eds. Derick Fay and Deborah James|
The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: 'Restoring What Was Ours' offers a critical, comparative ethnographic, examination of land restitution programs. Drawing on memories and histories of past dispossession, governments, NGOs, informal movements and individual claimants worldwide have attempted to restore and reclaim rights in land. Land restitution programs link the past and the present, and may allow former landholders to reclaim lands which provided the basis of earlier identities and livelihoods. Restitution also has a moral weight that holds broad appeal; it is represented as righting injustice and healing the injuries of colonialism. Restitution may have unofficial purposes, like establishing the legitimacy of a new regime, quelling popular discontent, or attracting donor funds. It may produce unintended consequences, transforming notions of property and ownership, entrenching local bureaucracies, or replicating segregated patterns of land use. It may also constitute new relations between states and their subjects. Land-claiming communities may make new claims on the state, but they may also find the state making unexpected claims on their land and livelihoods. Restitution may be a route to citizenship, but it may engender new or neo-traditional forms of subjection. This volume explores these possibilities and pitfalls by examining cases from the Americas, Eastern Europe, Australia and South Africa. Addressing the practical and theoretical questions that arise, The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution thereby offers a critical rethinking of the links between land restitution and property, social transition, injustice, citizenship, the state and the market. Publisher's Page|
Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford University Press, June 2008)
Veronique Bénéï|
Schooling Passions explores an important, yet often overlooked dimension of nationalism-its embodied and emotional components. It does so by focusing on another oft-neglected area, that of elementary education in the modern state. Through an ethnographic study of schools in western India, Véronique Benei examines the idioms through which teachers, students, and parents make meaning of their political world. She articulates how urban middle- and lower-class citizens negotiate the processes of self-making through the minutiae of daily life at school and extracurricular activities, ranging from school trips to competitions and parent gatherings. To document how processes of identity formation are embodied, Benei draws upon cultural repertoires of emotionality. This book shifts the typical focus of attention away from communal violence onto everyday "banal nationalism." Paying due attention to the formulation of "senses of belonging," this book explores the sensory production and daily manufacture of nationhood and citizenship and how nationalism is nurtured in a nation's youth. Publisher's Page| Download PDF flyer/order form|
Lucia Michelutti
During the 1990s, Indian democracy witnessed an upsurge in the political participation of lower castes/communities and the emergence of political leaders from humble social backgrounds who presented themselves as promoters of social justice for underprivileged communities. This book is a vivid account of how Indian popular democracy works on the ground. Setting itself against conventional theories of democratisation, the book shows how the political upsurge of one of the most assertive and politically powerful communities in north India - the Yadavs - is situated within a wider process of the vernacularisation of democratic politics, referring to the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices, and in the process become entrenched in the consciousness of common people.Drawing on a large body of archival research and combining ethnographic material with colonial and post-colonial history, the study shows how the analysis of local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, popular religion, 'the past' and politics ('the vernacular') inform popular perceptions of the political world, and of how the democratic process, in turn shapes ideas and practices of 'the vernacular'. This line of enquiry provides a novel framework to understand the unique experience of Indian democracy as well as the rise of popular politics and its meaning in different parts of the world. Scholars of comparative politics, development politics, religious studies, urban studies, anthropology and social history will find this book especially interesting. Publisher's Page|
Questions of Anthropology (Berg, July 2007)
Eds. Rita Astuti|, Jonathan Parry|, Charles Stafford|
Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns. Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's 'true' identity to the fear of being alone.
Each essay starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Questions of Anthropology presents an exciting introduction to the purpose and value of Anthropology today. Publisher's Page|
Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia University Press, June 2007)
Laura Bear|
Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics.Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today.The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.
The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (Carolina Academic Press, March 2007)
Michael W. Scott|
Examining the secretive dynamics of competing land claims among the Arosi of the island of Makira (Solomon Islands), Michael W. Scott demonstrates the explanatory power of ethnographic attention to the nexus between practice and indigenous theories of being. His focus on the ways in which Arosi understand their matrilineages to be the bearers of discrete categorical essences exclusively emplaced in ancestral territories forms the basis for a timely and accessible rethink of current anthropological representations of Melanesian sociality and opens up new lines of inquiry into the transformative relationships among gendered metaphors of descent, processes of place making, and the indigenization of Christianity. Informed by original historical research and newly documented variants of regionally important mythic traditions, The Severed Snake is a work of multidisciplinary scope that proposes critical and methodological shifts relevant to historians, development professionals, folklorists, and scholars of religion as well as anthropologists. Publisher's Page|
Essays on Cultural Transmission (Berg, July 2005)
Maurice Bloch|
This book brings together recent work by Maurice Bloch which explores the highly controversial territory between the cognitive and social sciences. The essays are of broad, theoretical interest and aim to combine naturalistic approaches to cognition with a recognition and respect for the cultural and historical specificity of ethnography. All the essays illustrate Bloch's characteristic approach to the relation between anthropology and cognitive science, where cognitive science is used to criticize anthropological assumptions concerning such key topics as religion, kinship, belief, ritual, symbolism and art.