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Author: Göran Aijmer
Publisher: Chinese University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9789622018327
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: James Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2006-04-03
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1851096310
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A comprehensive introduction to the resurgence of religion in China and Taiwan since the end of the Cultural Revolution and a wide-ranging examination of the impact of religious traditions on Euro-Americans and Chinese immigrants in present-day North America. Chinese Religions in Contemporary Societies is an accessible, multidimensional introduction to religions in present-day China and Taiwan as well as an in-depth exploration of how religious traditions and practices have been adopted by Americans and Chinese immigrants in North America. The work covers the period since the Cultural Revolution but places its focus on the contemporary global context. Written by religious studies expert James Miller and eight acclaimed scholars, this handy one-volume reference answers the demand for a comprehensive yet highly readable work on Chinese religions and their various forms. The work breaks down the complexities of religious traditions, highlighting key issues, themes, and movements, such as the legacy of shamanism in popular Chinese and Taiwanese religion, qigong in contemporary China, and the interpretations and practices of Chinese traditions and rituals in North America. Filling a significant gap in the literature, the handbook demonstrates the impact of social, political, and cultural factors on Chinese religion and identifies the forces behind the prevalence, adaptation, and transformation of Chinese religious practices from a global perspective.
Author: Lars Trägårdh
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-05-01
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 0857457578
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Since the emergence of the dissident “parallel polis” in Eastern Europe, civil society has become a “new superpower,” influencing democratic transformations, human rights, and international co-operation; co-designing economic trends, security and defense; reshaping the information society; and generating new ideas on the environment, health, and the “good life.” This volume seeks to compare and reassess the role of civil society in the rich West, the poorer South, and the quickly expanding East in the context of the twenty-first century’s challenges. It presents a novel perspective on civic movements testing John Keane’s notion of “monitory democracy”: an emerging order of public scrutiny and monitoring of power.
Author: Kwok-shing Chan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 0739166875
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Hong Kong has undergone rapid and substantial social, economic, political and demographic changes since the 1970s. This book examines critically the real impact of these changes on a single surname village in rural Hong Kong. It draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted during the late 1990s and the early 2000s. This ethnographic study demonstrates that kinship, particularly agnatic kinship, has remained a valuable resource for Pang villagers, enabling them to acquire key welfare entitlements, and to secure a good measure of economic and social well-being. Kinship affiliation has provided and still provides (admittedly differential) access to political patronage and legal entitlements, financial assistance and the substantial benefits of corporate property-holding, physical protection and political leadership, employment, care-giving and support networks, housing needs, old age security, a ritually-imagined community, with a sense of spiritual well-being. Agnatic kinship has been organized as a corporate institution and as a quasi-religious community through which substantial support, protection, and privileged access is provided for villagers. At the same time, reliance on this elaborate "localized culture of welfare" has maintained or reinforced the contours of stratification and inequality among Pang villagers, even as lineage identity has remained largely intact in the face of changing external circumstances.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2012-11-09
Total Pages: 540
ISBN-13: 900423375X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How does China project its image in the world? Why and how has the world come to form certain impressions of the Chinese and their way of life? These are issues that preoccupy Chinese citizens in the globalizing 21st century as they travel overseas, riding on the capacity of the country’s newly acquired economic power. In Visualizing China, the authors join forces to launch a broader inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the larger story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s, and devote special attention to modern Chinese practices in the visualization of things Chinese.
Author: Susanne Brandtstädter
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-09-25
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 1134105886
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume presents contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, and documents in rich ethnographic detail its historical complexity and regional diversity. The collection's analytical emphasis is on the modern 'metamorphoses' of kinship in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but the essays also offer ample historical documentation and comparison.
Author:
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Published:
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 3643999313
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Göran Aijmer
Publisher: Chinese University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9789629961039
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Keenly attuned to the play of symbols, this anthropological study explores one of the major manifestations of Chinese popular tradition: the celebration of lunar the New Year. It analyzes a multitude of folk practices within a holistic perspective on Chinese traditional society, crafting a new picture of a world in which the social rhetoric of gender, lineage continuity, and ancestry were challenged by ritual manifestations of iconic symbolism. Viewed through the lens of Chinese imagery, the traditional calendar reveals new stories about the social organization of time as an expression of existential concerns in late imperial Chinese social life.
Author: Virgil Ho
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-12-22
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 0191536091
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this period indulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impact on the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some major misconceptions of the socio-cultural realities as seen in official rhetoric or academic discourse on the matters of patriotism and anti-foreignism, gambling, prostitution, and opium consumption. Contemporary non-official and folk materials reveal that the common people were much more pro-Western than xenophobic in attitude, and the alleged social and political "calamities" of gambling, opium consumption and prostitution were more rhetorical than real. Understanding Canton provides us with, not only a fuller and more comprehensive picture of city life and popular mentalities, but also an important clue to understand how and why the social history of this city was distorted and constructed in ways that suited the political ideology and nation-building agenda of the ruling regimes.
Author: Jon Abbink
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-20
Total Pages: 171
ISBN-13: 1000323994
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →There are good reasons to look at violence from new perspectives. In its endless manifestations violence is part and parcel of human existence, and is very probably a constituting element of human society. And yet violent action - warfare, penalties, insults, feuding, assault, murder, rape, suicide, sports - remains in all its complexity one of the least understood fields of human social life.The book's contributors identify the symbolic and ritualized aspects of violence, and suggest ways of 'reading' violence as it occurs in the world, whether as violent duelling and age-group violence in Southern Ethiopia, bullfighting in Iberia, cattle rustling in Kenya, guerrilla and militia wars in Colombia, or public executions in China.These case studies suggest that 'violence' is not a simple, universal urge, but is contingent and context-dependent, shaped by social relations of power, force and dominance. To be the victim of violence is a humiliating and frightening experience. But the many ambiguities that occur in the use of violence must be considered, to understand why peace seems only to exist as a contrast to the violation of peace.
