Download or read book State and Court Ritual in China written by Joseph P. McDermott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This broad-ranging examination of Chinese court and state ritual from 1000 BC to AD 1750 represents the first modern comprehensive account of the subject in any language. The essays demonstrate how and why ritual has played such a fundamental and often controversial role in the practice of Chinese politics. By tracing the political and social development of particular rituals, such as imperial funerals and popular religious practices or Buddhist ordination ceremonies and court audiences, the authors set out to convey their historical significance. Further discussion of the role of ritual in relation to language, and elite and popular concepts of emperorhood is included in the volume. The book will be of interest to students of Chinese history, anthropology and religion, as well as those seeking to understand the legacy of that history in modern China.
Download or read book Religion and Religious Practices in Rural China written by Mu Peng and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how, unlike in the West, the daily religious life of most Chinese people spreads without institutional propagation. Based upon more than a decade of field research in rural China, the book demonstrates the decisive role of rites of passage and yearly festival rituals held in every household in shaping people’s religious dispositions. It focuses on the family, the unit most central to Chinese culture and society, and reveals the repertoire embodied in daily life in a world envisioned as comprising both the “yin” world of ancestors, spirits, and ghosts, and the “yang” world of the living. It discusses especially the concept of bai, which refers to both concrete bodily movements that express respect and awe, such as bowing, kneeling, or holding up ritual offerings, and to people’s religious inclinations and dispositions, which indicate that they are aware of a spiritual realm that is separate from yet close to the world of the living. Overall, the book shows that the daily practices of religion are not a separate sphere, but rather belief and ritual integrated into a way of dwelling in a world envisaged as consisting of both the “yin” and the “yang” worlds that regularly communicate with each other.
Download or read book How People Compare written by Mathijs Pelkmans and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on comparison in anthropology, turning an ethnographic lens onto the diversity of comparative practice. It seeks to understand how, why and with what consequences diversely situated groups of people – many of whom operate on radically different premises to professional anthropologists – make comparisons, above all, between themselves and real or imagined others. What motivates people to compare, what techniques or logics do they employ, and what are the most likely outcomes – both intended and unintended? How do comparative practices reflect, reinforce or refuse uneven relations of power? And finally, what can a rejuvenated comparative anthropology learn from the anthropology of comparison? The volume develops a dialogue between scholars with long- term ethnographic engagement in a variety of contexts around the world and is particularly valuable reading for those interested in anthropological methodology and theory.
Download or read book Popular Religion in China written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor was written to bring together both the previously unpublished and published results of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and to put them into an historical, political, and theoretical context. The book presents Chinese popular religion as a distinctive institution and describes its content as an ‘imperial metaphor’. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including both official and local cults, local festivals, Daoism, Ang Gong, the politics of religion, and political ritual.
Download or read book On the Margins of Religion written by Frances Pine and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on places, objects, bodies, narratives and ritual spaces where religion may be found or inscribed, the authors reveal the role of religion in contesting rights to places, to knowledge and to property, as well as access to resources. Through analyses of specific historical processes in terms of responses to socio-economic and political change, the chapters consider implicitly or explicitly the problematic relation between science (including social sciences and anthropology in particular) and religion, and how this connects to the new religious globalisation of the twenty-first century. Their ethnographies highlight the embodiment of religion and its location in landscapes, built spaces and religious sites which may be contested, physically or ideologically, or encased in memory and often in silence. Taken together, they show the importance of religion as a resource to the believers: a source of solace, spiritual comfort and self-willed submission.
Download or read book Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China written by Thomas Jansen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China, co-edited by Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer, investigates the transformation of China’s religious landscape under the impact of global influences since 1800. The interdisciplinary case studies analyze the ways in which processes of globalization are interlinked with localizing tendencies, thereby forging transnational relationships between individuals, the state and religious as well as non-religious groups at the same time that the global concept ‘religion’ embeds itself in the emerging Chinese ‘religious field’ and within the new academic disciplines of Religious Studies and Theology. The contributions unravel the intellectual, social, political and economic forces that shaped and were themselves shaped by the emergence of what has remained a highly contested category. The contributors are: Hildegard Diemberger, Vincent Goossaert, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, Dirk Kuhlmann, LAI Pan-chiu, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Christian Meyer, Lauren Pfister, Chloë Starr, Xiaobing Wang-Riese, and Robert P. Weller.
Download or read book Cantonese Society in a Time of Change written by Göran Aijmer and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a longitudinal fieldwork study in the Pearl River Delta, which is the heartland of the Cantonese-speaking world, the book explores how the ordinary people and their society evolved in a period of time characterized by drastic change.
Download or read book Reluctant Exiles written by Ronald Skeldon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents an assessment of the migration from Hong Kong that has occurred since the second half of the 1980s. This pronounced outflow of highly educated people (a "brain drain") is having a profound impact on destination areas, as well as on Hong Kong itself.
Download or read book China s Quest for National Identity written by Lowell Dittmer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to define a Chinese national identity remains as hotly contested a question among today's Chinese citizens as it has been among foreign observers. This volume brings together ten new essays by an interdisciplinary group of leading sinologists and offers a comprehensive framework for understanding the nature of Chinese national identity in past and contemporary settings.
Download or read book Chinese Kinship written by Susanne Brandtstädter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience written by Everett Zhang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last 30 years in China have witnessed tremendous changes, primarily as a result of the shift in focus by the state from class struggle to economic development. China soon eliminated the threat of famine and the rationing of food in the first decade of the reform era and increased its GDP per capita by 41% between 1978 and 2006. The average annual GDP growth rate during the same period is about three times the world average. Between 1981 and 2004 China had the largest poverty reduction in human history. Along with the fast economic development, there has been great change to the ethos of Chinese society from sacrificing life for the revolutionary cause to valuing life itself. This change, which is perhaps among the most significant in the transformation of contemporary China, has enormous bearings on the question of what is an adequate life in China now.
Download or read book Area Bibliography of China written by Richard T. Wang and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A combination of scholarly, commercial, and popular interests has generated a large quantity of literature on every aspect of Chinese life during the past two decades. This bibliography reflects these combined interests; it is broken up into sections by subject headings, and cross-references refer the researcher to related topics.
Download or read book The Formation of Regional Religious Systems in Greater China written by Jiang Wu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Spatial Humanities has spurred a digital revolution in the field of Chinese studies, especially in the study of religion. Based on years of data compilation and analysis of religious sites, this book explores the formation of Regional Religious Systems (RRS) in Greater China in unprecedented scope and depth. It addresses quantitatively the enduring historical and contemporary issues of China’s deep-rooted regionalism and spatially variegated cultural and religious landscape. A range of topics are explored: theoretical discussions of the concept of RRS; case studies of regional and local religious institutions; the formation of local cults and pilgrimage network; and the spread of religious networks to overseas Chinese communities and the Bon religion in Tibet. The book also considers long-standing challenges of researching with spatial data for humanities and social science research, such as data collection, integration, spatial analysis, and map creation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Chinese Studies, Digital Humanities, Human Geography and Sociology.
Download or read book Paternity Progeny and Perpetuation written by Steffan Mathias and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh perspective on the importance of progeny and perpetuation of the family line in the Hebrew tradition. Steffan Matthias argues that the Hebrew bible depicts failing to protect the transmission of the family line as both a failure in the social order, a threat to the afterlife, and a failure in masculinity, leading to the eradication of the name and memory of the man and the destruction of the household. Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as anthropological and gender-critical insights, Matthias reassess pertinent texts which respond to the threat of men dying without children, such as levirate marriage (Deut 22:5-10) or the erection of monuments (Isa 56:5-8). Themes such as death, burial and memorial, identity, covenant, name, genealogy, property, seed and sexuality, rather than being treated as separate parts of social or family life, are critically assessed in light of each other. Matthias instead illustrates how they form part of the same discourse of social reproduction, in which the integrity of the family is protected and passed down from father to son in generations of descendants. Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation raises profound questions regarding the subtle ways texts that respond to this threat of social annihilation – the destruction of the father and his line - reinforce social boundaries and construct men as transmitters of identity and women as submissive counterparts.
Download or read book Peasants without the Party written by Lucien Bianco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century when peasant-based conflict, ranging from tax and food protests to secret society conflicts, opium struggles, inter-communal conflicts, and tenant protests over rent, was central to nationwide revolutionary processes.
Download or read book Fragile Elite written by Susanne Bregnbaek and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's One Child Policy and its rigorous national focus on educational testing are well known. But what happens to those "lucky" few at the very top of the pyramid: elite university students in China who grew up under the One Child Policy and now attend the nation's most prestigious universities? How do they feel about having made it to the top of an extremely competitive educational system—as their parents' only child? What pressures do they face, and how do they cope with the expectations associated with being the best? Fragile Elite explores the contradictions and perplexities of being an elite student through immersive ethnographic research conducted at two top universities in China. Susanne Bregnbæk uncovers the intimate psychological strains students suffer under the pressure imposed on them by parents and state, where the state acts as a parent and the parents reinforce the state. Fragile Elite offers fascinating insights into the intergenerational tensions at work in relation to the ongoing shift in educational policy and definition of what a "quality" student, child, and citizen is in contemporary China.
Download or read book Telling Stories written by B. J. ter Haar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the role of oral stories in Chinese witch-hunts. Of interest to historians of oral traditions, folklore and witch-hunts, but also to those working on anti-Christian movements and the intersection of popular fears and political history in China.
