Download or read book China and Postsocialist Anthropology written by Andrew B. Kipnis and published by Tate Publishing & Enterprises. This book was released on 2008 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sophisticated and insightful analysis of post-socialist regimes seen through the prism of the Chinese case. Author Andrew Kipnis is solidly versed in social theory and conceptual anthropology building on his in-depth, on-the-ground knowledge of today's China. Kipnis is Senior Fellow in the Contemporary China Centre of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University and co-editor of The China Journal.
Download or read book Appetites written by Judith Farquhar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-26 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn experimental ethnography of food, sex, and health in post-socialist China/div
Download or read book Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China written by Deborah Davis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an up-to-date look at the social processes and consequences of China's rapid economic growth.
Download or read book Exhibiting the Past written by Kirk A. Denton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.
Download or read book Creativity Class written by Lily Chumley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation. Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.
Download or read book God Aboveground written by Eriberto P. Lozada and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ethnographic study of a Chinese Catholic village reveals how the rapid penetration of transnational processes into the Peoples Republic of China during the post-Mao period has redefined and created new social and cultural structures in rural communities. In examining the resurfacing of a Catholic community in a Hakka village in Jiaoling county, Guangdong, the book shows what it means to be part of a global and modern rural village. The Hakka are members of a Chinese diasporic group that in the past few decades have mobilized international campaigns to strengthen ethnic solidarity. After surviving campaigns of persecution in the Maoist era, Catholic villagers incorporated their village church into the state religious administrative structure while remaining faithful to Catholic traditions. They managed this transformation despite a multiplicity of national and transnational processes that might have deterred them: the privatization of local sectors of the socialist economy; the global movement of people as workers, students, and tourists; and the swift modernization of Chinese production and consumption. Through a close examination of life-cycle rituals such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals, and community-wide events such as the building of a new church and a celebration of Christmas, the author shows how Catholic villagers pursued strategies to make their imagined futures a reality. For these villagers, Chinese Catholicism has defined a deterritorialized communitys boundaries while simultaneously connecting them to the rest of the world through an international religious tradition.
Download or read book Class And Class Conflict In Post socialist China written by Alvin Y So and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class and Class Conflict in Post-Socialist China traces the origins and the profound changes of the patterns of class conflict in post-socialist China since 1978.The first of its kind in the field of China Studies that offers comprehensive overviews and traces the historical evolutions of different patterns of class conflict (among workers, peasants, capitalists, and the middle class) in post-socialist China, the book provides comprehensive overviews of different patterns of class conflict. It uses a state-centered approach to study class conflict, i.e., study how the communist party-state restructures the patterns of class conflict in Chinese society, and brings in a historical dimension by tracing the origins and developments of class conflict in socialist and post-socialist China.
Download or read book Creating Market Socialism written by Carolyn L. Hsu and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of China’s post-Mao market reforms, the old status hierarchy is collapsing. Who will determine what will take its place? In Creating Market Socialism, the sociologist Carolyn L. Hsu demonstrates the central role of ordinary people—rather than state or market elites—in creating new institutions for determining status in China. Hsu explores the emerging hierarchy, which is based on the concept of suzhi, or quality. In suzhi ideology, human capital and educational credentials are the most important measures of status and class position. Hsu reveals how, through their words and actions, ordinary citizens decide what jobs or roles within society mark individuals with suzhi, designating them “quality people.” Hsu’s ethnographic research, conducted in the city of Harbin in northwestern China, included participant observation at twenty workplaces and interviews with working adults from a range of professions. By analyzing the shared stories about status and class, jobs and careers, and aspirations and hopes that circulate among Harbiners from all walks of life, Hsu reveals the logic underlying the emerging stratification system. In the post-socialist era, Harbiners must confront a fast-changing and bewildering institutional landscape. Their collective narratives serve to create meaning and order in the midst of this confusion. Harbiners collectively agree that “intellectuals” (scientists, educators, and professionals) are the most respected within the new social order, because they contribute the most to Chinese society, whether that contribution is understood in terms of traditional morality, socialist service, or technological and economic progress. Harbiners understand human capital as an accurate measure of a person’s status. Their collective narratives about suzhi shape their career choices, judgments, and child-rearing practices, and therefore the new practices and institutions developing in post-socialist China.
Download or read book Postsocialism written by C.M. Hann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientist did not predict the collapse of the socialist system in 1989-91. Their attempts to explain postsocialism have not been comprehensive. This book examines why, for the first time from an anthropological standpoint.
Download or read book Anxious China written by Li Zhang and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.
Download or read book Minority Rules written by Louisa Schein and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender, ethnicity, and nation in China, as seen through an ethnography of the changing cultural production of the Miao, a minority population.
Download or read book Anxious Wealth written by John Osburg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnographic study of China’s new elites and their rarified world of debauchery and corruption: “A must have book for China studies” (Choice). This pioneering investigation reveals the private lives—and the nightlives—of the powerful entrepreneurs and managers redefining success and status in the Chinese city of Chengdu. For more than three years, anthropologist John Osburg accompanied wealthy Chinese businessmen as they courted clients, partners, and government officials. Now he invites readers along on his journey through the highly gendered world of luxury karaoke clubs, saunas, and massage parlors—places designed to cater to the desires of elite men. Within these spaces, a masculinization of business is taking place. Osburg details the complex code of behavior that governs businessmen as they go about banqueting, drinking, gambling, bribing, exchanging gifts, and obtaining sexual services. These intricate social networks play a key role in generating business, performing social status, and reconfiguring gender roles. Yet underneath the façade, many entrepreneurs feel trapped by their obligations and moral compromises in this evolving environment. Osburg examines their deep ambivalence about China’s future and their own complicity in the major issues of post-Mao Chinese society—corruption, inequality, materialism, and loss of trust.
Download or read book Anthropology Of China The China As Ethnographic And Theoretical Critique written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by World Scientific Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-07-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putting China into the context of general anthropology offers novel insights into its history, culture and society. Studies in the anthropology of China need to look outwards, to other anthropological areas, while at the same time, anthropologists specialised elsewhere cannot afford to ignore contributions from China. This book introduces a number of key themes and in each case describes how the anthropology and ethnography of China relates to the surrounding theories and issues. The themes chosen include the anthropology of intimacy, of morality, of food and of feasting, as well as the anthropology of civilisation, modernity and the state.The Anthropology of China covers both long historical perspectives and ethnographies of the twenty-first century. For the first time, ethnographic perspectives on China are contextualised in comparison with general anthropological debates. Readers are invited to engage in and rethink China's place within the wider world, making it perfect for professional researchers and teachers of anthropology and Chinese history and society, and for advanced undergraduate and graduate study.
Download or read book Red Lights written by Tiantian Zheng and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the phenomenon of rural-urban migration, the entertainment industry, and state power. In Red Lights, Tiantian Zheng highlights the urban karaoke bar as the locus at which these three factors intersect and provides a rich account of the lives of karaoke hostesses--a career whose name disguises the sex work and minimizes the surprising influence these women often have as power brokers.
Download or read book Boundaries and Categories written by Feng Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic and in-depth analysis and explanation of China's rapid increase in inequality in the last two decades.
Download or read book Postsocialist Modernity written by Jason McGrath and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Chinese culture under the age of market reforms. Beginning in the early 1990s and on into the new century, fields such as literature and film have been fundamentally transformed by the forces of the market as China is integrated ever more closely into the world economic system. As a result, the formerly unified revolutionary culture has been changed into a pluralized state that reflects the diversity of individual experience in the reform era. New autonomous forms of culture that have arisen include avant-garde as well as commercial literature, and independent film as well as a new entertainment cinema. Chinese people find their experiences of postsocialist modernity reflected in all kinds of new cultural forms as well as critical debates that often question the direction of Chinese society in the midst of comprehensive and rapid change.
Download or read book China Urban written by Nancy N. Chen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-21 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China Urban is an ethnographic account of China’s cities and the place that urban space holds in China’s imagination. In addition to investigating this nation’s rapidly changing urban landscape, its contributors emphasize the need to rethink the very meaning of the “urban” and the utility of urban-focused anthropological critiques during a period of unprecedented change on local, regional, national, and global levels. 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
