Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China�political, cultural, and economic�has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years have altered and even reversed long-held expectations. Transforming Patriarchy explores the private and public dimensions of these changes in present-day China. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is no longer the default arrangement for Chinese families: Daughters-in-law openly berate their fathers-in-law. Companies sell filial-piety insurance. Many couples live together before marriage, and in some parts of rural China, almost all brides are pregnant.Drawing on a multitude of sources and perspectives, this volume turns to the intimate territory of the family to challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions about gender and generational hierarchies in Chinese society. Case studies examine factors such as social class, geography, and globalization as they relate to patriarchal practice and resistance to it. The contributors bring the concept of patriarchy back to the heart of China studies while rethinking its significance in dominant Western-centric theories of modernity.
In 1949, G. William Skinner, a Cornell University graduate student, set off for southwest China to conduct field research on rural social structure. He settled near the market town of Gaodianzi, Sichuan, and lived there for two and a half months, until the newly arrived Communists asked him to leave. During his time in Sichuan, Skinner kept detailed field notes and took scores of photos of rural life and unfolding events. Skinner went on to become a giant in his field�his obituary in American Anthropologist called him �the world�s most influential anthropologist of China.� A key portion of his legacy arose from his Sichuan fieldwork, contained in his classic monograph Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China. Although the People�s Liberation Army confiscated Skinner�s research materials, some had been sent out in advance and were discovered among the files donated to the University of Washington Libraries after his death. Skinner�s notes and photos bring to life this rare glimpse of rural China on the brink of momentous change.
Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are�contrary to state policy and media portrayals�heterogeneous in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, rural-born workers change China�s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that, over thirty years after the Open Door Reform, class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.
The Edge of Knowing explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The writers� attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation-building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People�s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity.By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.�
The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium, and natural resources, such as copper. At the edges of three empires (the Qing empire in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and, eventually, French Colonial Vietnam), the Black Flags and their rivals sustained networks of power and dominance through the framework of political regimes. This lively history demonstrates the plasticity of borderlines, the limits of imposed boundaries, and the flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam.Imperial Bandits contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries.
An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface on which texts and images are carved. As such, the inkstone has been entangled with elite masculinity and the values of wen (culture, literature, civility) in China, Korea, and Japan for more than a millennium. However, for such a ubiquitous object in East Asia, it is virtually unknown in the Western world.Examining imperial workshops in the Forbidden City, the Duan quarries in Guangdong, the commercial workshops in Suzhou, and collectors� homes in Fujian, The Social Life of Inkstones traces inkstones between court and society and shows how collaboration between craftsmen and scholars created a new social order in which the traditional hierarchy of �head over hand� no longer predominated. Dorothy Ko also highlights the craftswoman Gu Erniang, through whose work the artistry of inkstone-making achieved unprecedented refinement between the 1680s and 1730s.The Social Life of Inkstones explores the hidden history and cultural significance of the inkstone and puts the stonecutters and artisans on center stage.
This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China�s rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers interact throughout Southeast Asia. The contributors use case studies to show the scale of Chinese influence in the region and the ways in which various countries mitigate their unequal relationship with China by negotiating asymmetry, circumventing hegemony, and embracing, resisting, or manipulating the terms dictated by Chinese capital. ��
During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative images of their rivals. The rise of print culture, the dynastic change, and the proliferating approaches to Confucian moral cultivation together gave shape to this new political culture. Confucian Image Politics considers the moral images of officials�as fathers, sons, husbands, and friends�circulated in a variety of media inside and outside the court. It shows how power negotiations took place through participants� invocations of Confucian ethical ideals in political attacks, self-expression, self-defense, discussion of politically sensitive issues, and literati community rebuilding after the dynastic change. This first book-length study of early modern Chinese politics from the perspective of critical men�s history shows how images�the Donglin official, the Fushe scholar, the turncoat figure�were created, circulated, and contested to serve political purposes.
What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today?Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address these difficult questions, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal.The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Am�ry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations�the children and grandchildren of survivors�are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors� lives, faiths, and ethics.In an age of continuing atrocities, this volume provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.
This narrative of subsistence on the Tibetan plateau describes the life-worlds of people in a region traditionally known as Kham who move with their yaks from pasture to pasture, depending on the milk production of their herd for sustenance. Gillian Tan�s story, based on her own experience of living through seasonal cycles with the people of Dora Karmo between 2006 and 2013, examines the community�s powerful relationship with a Buddhist lama and their interactions with external agents of change. In showing how they perceive their environment and dwell in their world, Tan conveys a spare beauty that honors the stillness and rhythms of nomadic life.