Ethnic Distinctions, Local Meanings PDF Download

Author: Mary Rack
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The book explores what characterises a a ~good lifea (TM) and how this idea has been affected by globalisation and neoliberalism.

Author: Daniel Rueda Garrido
Publisher: Ethics International Press
ISBN: 1804412430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Working from the phenomenological tradition, the author takes the “form of life” as the central ontological unit. We are our form of life, but as a transcendental-immanent notion. This is not directly equivalent to culture or society, but to the realisation in the world of an image of the human being shared by a given community. The question explored is the following: If the form of life is what gives us being, what role does language play? Topics explored include the concepts of propaganda and ideology. and how these terms always refer to what others say and do, never to our own actions and discourses. The central part of the book is devoted to an analysis of language itself, including propaganda, emotions, dispositions, and racism and racist discourses. The book also analyses Vladimir Putin’s speeches on the occasion of the Russian war in Ukraine, the elements of their propaganda, and the justifying elements that are part of their ethical discourse, whereby actions taken or to be taken are justified as good because they are necessary from their ontological principle.

Author: Wendy James
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000325342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This book explores the relevance of classical ideas in the anthropology of time tothe way we understand history, participate in the events around us, and experienceour lives. Time is not just an abstract principle we live by or a local cultural construct: it is shaped, punctuated, organized, and suffered in complex ways by real people negotiating their lives and relations with others. Space may be opened up for politics, violence or revolutionary change within the framework of ceremonial markers of social time: holy days, festivals and carnivals. People create and recreate patterns in the way they imagine the past, present and future at such moments, through material objects, language, symbolic action and bodily experience. The rhythms of social life, including periodic episodes of sacred or special time, interact with 'historical events' in strange ways. They are fundamental not only to the human condition but to the making andremembering of history, as well as to what we recognize as the unexpected or abnormal. The Qualities of Time brings anthropologists and archaeologists together in a new conversation about the 'patterns' of our understanding and experience of time. The authors reflect on how we should interpret evidence about the distant past, andhow far the structuring of social time is a human universal. They also consider whether anthropology itself has been so oriented to the present it has still to develop ways of dealing with temporality. The interactions of time-structures, ceremonials, and specific historical events, including violence inspired by the millennium, are interrogated. The experience of individuals who feel the times are for them 'out of joint' is also examined. By combining socio-cultural, philosophical and historical approaches, thisthought-provoking book moves anthropological debates about time's qualities wellbeyond existing studies.This book explores the relevance of classical ideas in the anthropology of time toth

Author: Joanne N. Smith Finley
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004256784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Against the background of the Ürümchi riots (July 2009), this book provides a longitudinal study of contemporary Uyghur identities and Uyghur-Han relations. Previous studies considered China’s Uyghurs from the perspective of the majority Han (state or people). Conversely, The Art of Symbolic Resistance considers Uyghur identities from a local perspective, based on interviews conducted with group members over nearly twenty years. Smith Finley rejects assertions that the Uyghur ethnic group is a ‘creation of the Chinese state’, suggesting that contemporary Uyghur identities involve a complex interplay between long-standing intra-group socio-cultural commonalities and a more recently evolved sense of common enmity towards the Han. This book advances the discipline in three senses: from a focus on sporadic violent opposition to one on everyday symbolic resistance; from state to ‘local’ representations; and from a conceptualisation of Uyghurs as ‘victim’ to one of ‘creative agent’.

Author: Thomas Mullaney
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Constituting over ninety percent of China's population, Han is not only the largest ethnonational group in that country but also one of the largest categories of human identity in world history. In this pathbreaking volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examine this ambiguous identity, one that shares features with, but cannot be subsumed under, existing notions of ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and civilization.

Author: Stefan Berger
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 180073624X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on “a line in the sand” to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.

Author: Paul R. Katz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book explores how beliefs and practices have shaped the interactions between different ethnic groups in Western Hunan, as well as considering how religious life has adapted to the challenges of modern Chinese history. Combining historical and ethnographic methodologies, chapters in this book are structured around changes that occurred during the interaction between Miao ritual traditions and religions such as Daoism, with particular focus on the commonalities and differences seen between Western Hunan and other areas of Southwest China. In addition, investigation is made into how gender and ethnicity have shaped such processes, and what these phenomena can teach about larger questions of modern Chinese history. As such, this study transcends existing scholarship on Western Hunan – which has stressed the impact of state policies and elite agendas – by focusing instead on the roles played by ritual specialists. Such findings call into question conventional wisdom about the ‘standardization’ of Chinese culture, as well as the integration of local society into the state by means of written texts. Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Western Hunan during the Modern Era will prove valuable to students and scholars of history, ethnography, anthropology, ethnic studies, and Asian studies more broadly.

Author: Guo Wu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811360227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Based on fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, this book critically examines the building of modern Chinese discourse on a unified yet diverse Chinese nation on various sites of knowledge production. It argues that Chinese ideology on minority nationalities is rooted in modern China's quest for national integration and political authority. However, it also highlights the fact that the complex process of conceptualizing, investigating, classifying, curating, and writing minority history has been fraught with disputes and contradictions. As such, the book offers a timely contribution to the current debate in the fields of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism, minority policy, and anthropological practice.

Author: Jenny T. Chio
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805064
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor. A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for “exotic difference” on village social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.

Author: David Faure
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774823712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, largely ignoring the local histories that were preserved for generations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious ritual. Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture. Observing local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, it focuses on examples from the southwestern Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new history of China’s southwestern region – one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China’s nation-building process.