Tracing China [electronic resource] : A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey /
Siu, Helen F.,author.
Hong Kong [China] : Hong Kong University Press,
[2016]
Tracing China chronicles forty years of fieldwork. The journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China; it spans decades of persistent rural-urban divide and eventually uncovers China's global reach and Hong Kong's cross-border dynamics. Siu traverses both physical and cultural landscapes, examines how political tumults transform into everyday lives, and fathoms the depths of human drama amid China's frenetic momentum toward modernity. She highlights complicity, portraying how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals--laden with historical baggage--venture forward. The question is: Have they become victims of the circumstances created by their own actions? The essays are woven together by key themes in historical anthropology--culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation, informed by critical social theories, and characterized by a careful scrutiny of fieldwork encounters and archival texts. Stressing process and contingency, Siu argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. She challenges the perception that social/political changes are merely linear historical progressions. Instead, she traces layers of the past in present realities.
Specialized.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Specialized.
Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.
Introduction : China as process -- part 1. Tracing meaningful life-worlds -- 1. Reflections on historical anthropology -- 2. Cultural identity and the politics of difference in south China -- part 2. Moving targets -- 3. Images : prologue to agents and victims in south China -- 4. China's century : fast forward with historical baggage -- part 3. Structuring and human agency -- 5. Socialist peddlers and princes in a Chinese market town -- 6. Recycling rituals : politics and popular culture in contemporary rural China -- 7. Reconstituting dowry and brideprice in south China -- part 4. Culturing power -- 8. Recycling tradition : culture, history, and political economy in the chrysanthemum festivals of south China -- 9. Lineage, market, pirate, and Dan : ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of south China -- 10. The grounding of cosmopolitans : merchants and local cultures in south China -- part 5. History between the lines -- 11. Where were the women? Rethinking marriage resistance and regional culture in south China -- 12. Social responsibility and self-expression : introduction to furrows : peasants, intellectuals, and the state -- part 6. Place-making : locality and translocality -- 13. Subverting lineage power : local bosses and territorial control in the 1940s -- 14. The cultural landscape of luxury housing in south China : a regional history -- 15. Positioning "Hong Kongers" and "new immigrants" -- 16. Grounding displacement : uncivil urban spaces in post-reform south China -- part 7. Historical global and the Asian postmodern -- 17. Hong Kong : cultural kaleidoscope on a world landscape -- 18. Women of influence : gendered charisma -- 19. Retuning a provincialized middle class in Asia's urban postmodern : the case of Hong Kong.
Tracing China chronicles forty years of fieldwork. The journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China; it spans decades of persistent rural-urban divide and eventually uncovers China's global reach and Hong Kong's cross-border dynamics. Siu traverses both physical and cultural landscapes, examines how political tumults transform into everyday lives, and fathoms the depths of human drama amid China's frenetic momentum toward modernity. She highlights complicity, portraying how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals--laden with historical baggage--venture forward. The question is: Have they become victims of the circumstances created by their own actions? The essays are woven together by key themes in historical anthropology--culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation, informed by critical social theories, and characterized by a careful scrutiny of fieldwork encounters and archival texts. Stressing process and contingency, Siu argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. She challenges the perception that social/political changes are merely linear historical progressions. Instead, she traces layers of the past in present realities.
Description based on print version record.
Rural-urban relations
Rural-urban relations
Ethnology
Ethnology

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