Search results for ""Author David Faure""
Stanford University Press Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China
This book summarizes twenty years of the author's work in historical anthropology and documents his argument that in China, ritual provided the social glue that law provided in the West. The book offers a readable history of the special lineage institutions for which south China has been noted and argues that these institutions fostered the mechanisms that enabled south China to be absorbed into the imperial Chinese state—first, by introducing rituals that were acceptable to the state, and second, by providing mechanisms that made group ownership of property feasible and hence made it possible to pool capital for land reclamation projects important to the state. Just as taxation, defense, and recognition came together with the emergence of powerful lineages in the sixteenth century, their disintegration in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginnings of a new Chinese state.
£56.70
University of British Columbia Press Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China
Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint,largely ignoring the local histories that were preserved forgenerations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, andreligious ritual. Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection ofimperial 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 thecrucial question of how one can begin to write the history of aconquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combininganthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they digdeep for the indigenous voice as they build a new history ofChina’s southwestern region – one that recognizes theethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place inChina’s nation-building process.
£80.10
Stanford University Press Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China
Bringing local history to bear on major questions in Chinese social history and anthropology, this volume comprises a series of historical and ethnographic studies of the Pearl River Delta from late imperial times through the 1940's. The delta is a rich and socially complex area of south China, and the contributors - scholars from the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States - have long-standing ties to the region. The contributors argue that local society in the Delta was integrated into the Chinese state through a series of changes that involved constant redefinition of lineages, territories, and ethnic identities. The emergence of lineages in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the deployment of deities in local alliances, and the shrewd use of ethnic labels provided terms for a discourse that reified the criteria for membership in Chinese local society. The ideology produced by these developments continued to serve as the norm for the legitimization of power in local society through the Republican period. In reconstructing the 'civilizing process' in the Delta, whereby local inhabitants, both elites and commoners, used symbolic and instrumental means to become part of Chinese culture and polity, the book confronts a central question in history and anthropology: How do we conceptualize the historical development of a state agrarian society with hierarchies of power and authority, attachment to which is both unifying and diversifying?
£23.39
