Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China PDF Download

Author: Stevan Harrell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520219892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This is a varied and wide-ranging collection of essays by Yi and foreign scholars on the history, traditional society, and modern social changes among the 7 million Yi people of Southwest China.

Author: Stevan Harrell
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804076
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Sichuan, this pathbreaking study examines the nature of ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations among local communities, focusing on the Nuosu (classified as Yi by the Chinese government), Prmi, Naze, and Han. It argues that even within the same regional social system, ethnic identity is formulated, perceived, and promoted differently by different communities at different times. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China exemplifies a model in which ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations consist of drawing boundaries between one�s own group and others, crossing those boundaries, and promoting internal unity within a group. Leaders and members of ethnic groups use commonalties and differences in history, culture, and kinship to promote internal unity and to strengthen or cross external boundaries. Superimposed on the structure of competing and cooperating local groups is a state system of ethnic classification and administration; members and leaders of local groups incorporate this system into their own ethnic consciousness, co-opting or resisting it situationally. The heart of the book consists of detailed case studies of three Nuosu village communities, along with studies of Prmi and Naze communities, smaller groups such as the Yala and Nasu, and Han Chinese who live in minority areas. These are followed by a synthesis that compares different configurations of ethnic identity in different communities and discusses the implications of these examples for our understanding of ethnicity and for the near future of China. This lively description and analysis of the region�s complex ethnic identities and relationships constitutes an original and important contribution to the study of ethnic identity. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China will be of interest to social scientists concerned with issues of ethnicity and state-building.

Author: Victor H. Mair
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231526733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's recognized ethnic groups including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak and the selections include a variety of genres. Chapters cover folk stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as well as epic traditions and professional storytelling, and feature both familiar and little-known texts, from the story of the woman warrior Hua Mulan to the love stories of urban storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the shaman rituals of the Manchu, and a trickster tale of the Daur people from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and other strange creatures and characters unsettle accepted notions of Chinese fable and literary form. Readers are introduced to antiphonal songs of the Zhuang and the Dong, who live among the fantastic limestone hills of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region; work and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and saltwater songs of the Cantonese-speaking boat people of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Mongolian epic poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the sad tale of the Qeo family girl, from the Tu people of Gansu and Qinghai provinces; and local plays known as "rice sprouts" from Hebei province. These fascinating juxtapositions invite comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and expert translations preserve the individual character of each thrillingly imaginative work.

Author: Howard Chiang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004397620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present.

Author: S. Frederick Starr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317451376
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
Eastern Turkestan, now known as Xinjiang or the New Territory, makes up a sixth of China's land mass. Absorbed by the Qing in the 1880s and reconquered by Mao in 1949, this Turkic-Muslim region of China's remote northwest borders on formerly Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Mongolia, and Tibet, Will Xinjiang participate in twenty-first century ascendancy, or will nascent Islamic radicalism in Xinjiang expand the orbit of instability in a dangerous part of the world? This comprehensive survey of contemporary Xinjiang is the result of a major collaborative research project begun in 1998. The authors have combined their fieldwork experience, linguistic skills, and disciplinary expertise to assemble the first multifaceted introduction to Xinjiang. The volume surveys the region's geography; its history of military and political subjugation to China; economic, social, and commercial conditions; demography, public health, and ecology; and patterns of adaption, resistance, opposition, and evolving identities.

Author: Diana Espírito Santo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350299332
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This edited volume applies the analytic notions of paradox and play to the ethnographic manifestation of spirits, angels, and demons in different locations around the world. The 10 case studies conceptualize the co-presence of humans and entities with terms that do not exclude spiritual reasoning on the one hand, and social explanations on the other. Through in-depth descriptions of localized possession cosmologies, the different chapters collectively propose path-breaking methodological directions in this field, which incorporate ethnographic theories of simultaneity into anthropological theories of religion, kinship, and ritual. Framed by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword by Michael Lambek, a leading authority in possessions studies, the volume contains cutting edge analyses that will provide readers with new tools to evaluate previously unstudied aspects of spirit possession; all of which stem from the fantastic forms of human movement that accompany the phenomenality of paradoxes in mundane reality.

Author: Erik Mueggler
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520935549
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

Author: Peter Glasner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134162588
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
New genetic technologies cut across a range of public regulatory domains and private lifeworlds, often appearing to generate an institutional void in response to the complex challenges they pose. As a result, a number of new social formations are being developed to legitimate public engagement and avoid the perceived democratic deficit that may result. Papers in this volume discuss a variety of these manifestations in a global context, including: genetic data banks committees of inquiry non-governmental organisations (NGOs) national research laboratories. These institutions, across both health and agriculture, are explored in such diverse locations as Amazonia, China, Finland, Israel, the UK and the USA. This volume exhibits a clear thematic coherence around the impact of the new genetics and their associated technologies on new social formations, and the case studies included have a significant international focus, showing a balance between theoretical and empirical approaches in this rapidly changing field. This innovative new volume will be of interest to postgraduates and professionals in the fields of sociology, social anthropology, science and technology studies, and environmental studies.

Author: Poonam Trivedi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135272247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 695

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Book Description
In this critical volume, leading scholars in the field examine the performance of Shakespeare in Asia. Emerging out of the view that it is in "play" or performance, and particularly in intercultural / multicultural performance, that the cutting edge of Shakespeare studies is to be found, the essays in this volume pay close attention to the modes of transference of the language of the text into the alternative languages of Asian theatres; to the history and politics of the performance of Shakespeare in key locations in Asia; to the new Asian experimentation with indigenous forms via Shakespeare and the consequent revitalizing and revising of the traditional boundaries of genre and gender; and to Shakespeare as a cultural capital world wide. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia – Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines - the chapters in this volume encompass a broader and more representative swath of Asian performances and locations in one book than has been attempted till now.

Author: Gulbahar H. Beckett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136638083
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
China has huge ethnic minorities – over 40 different groups with a total population of over 100 million. Over time China’s policies towards minority languages have varied, changing from policies which have accommodated minority languages to policies which have encouraged integration. At present integrationist policies predominate, notably in the education system, where instruction in minority languages is being edged out in favour of instruction in Mandarin Chinese. This book assesses the current state of indigenous and minority language policy in China. It considers especially language policy in the education system, including in higher education, and provides detailed case studies of how particular ethnic minorities are being affected by the integrationist, or assimilationist, approach.