The story underlying this ethnography began with the recent discovery and commercialization of the remnant of an ancient �queendom� on the Sichuan-Tibet border. Recorded in classical Chinese texts, this legendary matriarchal domain has attracted not only tourists but the vigilance of the Chinese state. Tenzin Jinba�s research examines the consequences of development of the queendom label for local ethnic, gender, ...
This historical investigation describes the Qing imperial authorities� attempts to consolidate control over the Zhongjia, a non-Han population, in eighteenth-century Guizhou, a poor, remote, and environmentally harsh province in Southwest China. Far from submitting peaceably to the state�s quest for hegemony, the locals clung steadfastly to livelihood choices�chiefly illegal activities such as robbery, raiding, a ...
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this case study examines the impact of economic development on ethnic minority people living along the upper-middle reaches of the Nu (Salween) River in Yunnan. In this highly mountainous, sparsely populated area live the Lisu, Nu, and Dulong (Drung) people, who until recently lived as subsistence farmers, relying on shifting cultivation, hunting, the collection of medicinal plants from surrounding forests, and s ...
In Tulalip, From My Heart , Harriette Shelton Dover describes her life on the Tulalip Reservation and recounts the myriad problems tribes faced after resettlement. Born in 1904, Dover grew up hearing the elders of her tribe tell of the hardships involved in moving from their villages to the reservation on Tulalip Bay: inadequate supplies of food and water, harsh economic conditions, and religious persecution outlawing potlatch houses and other ...
In this interdisciplinary narrative, the never-ending «completion» of China's most important street offers a broad view of the relationship between art and ideology in modern China. Chang'an Avenue, named after China's ancient capital (whose name means «Eternal Peace»), is supremely symbolic. Running east-west through the centuries-old heart of Beijing, it intersects the powerful north-south axis that links the traditional centers ...
Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the essentialization of difference shape the ways in which Naxi residents represent and interpret their social world.The vignettes presented here are lively examples of the cultural reverberations that have occurred t ...
During the Qing dynasty (1644�1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors – those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units – playing key roles. R. Kent Guy�s comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from ...
