This study examines a small group of highly educated Chinese who have exerted outsized influence on China's recent rise. They share one thing in common - they all left China to study in the US and subsequently returned to China to apply what they had learned. Their work has in some ways made China more like the US. But more importantly, in adapting overseas practices to the Chinese context, they have not simply imitated or duplicated that which already exists abroad. Instead, they have invented something entirely novel, something that resides at the very heart of China's contemporary developmental experience. Based on extensive interview data collected by the author, these personal accounts open a window on the day-to-day struggles - and step-by-step achievements - of China's most prominent social entrepreneurs and societal activists.

Social Stratification in Contemporary China raises and debates major sociological issues of modern and present-day China from a historical perspective. Such topics as "equality and inequality"and "acceptability of defined inequality" have been dealt with in a broad historical context since 1949 when the People's Republic was founded. The work is widely accepted as one of the most important studies trying to clarify the difficult perceptions of policy of reform and opening up that was formulated and implemented in the early 1980s in China. Professor Li Qiang is one of the leading sociologists in China.

Walter Edward Guinness (1880–1944), the first Lord Moyne, was an Anglo-Irish politician, businessman and explorer. Travelling across the globe in his private yacht in search for ethnographic material, Lord Moyne visited South Papua three times in 1929, 1935 and 1936. Unlike previous explorers of New Guinea, Lord Moyne and his group travelled along the rivers much further inland, and were able to make sustained contact with several groups of villages, engaging in performances and bartering for a range of objects that included shields and other carvings. Many of these objects were brought back to the British Museum as a means to address the severe lack of representation of South Papuan art and handicraft in the collection for which the area is renowned. Using the most advanced equipment to hand, Lord Moyne’s party took some of the first photographs of the indigenous Asmat people. The wide-ranging series of photographs taken by his companion Lady Vera Broughton provide a unique account of indigenous Asmat life and culture at the time immediately prior to colonisation. many of which are published here for the first time.

Some objects stand out as personal and important to us. A packed suitcase, an inherited vase, the remains from a humanitarian aid package - things can induce affects. In this book the authors focus on material culture and on practice - on what affect does. Some of them place the issue of sensitivity in a wider from of professional interest in innovation and culture-tourism. The volume is a contribution to the upcoming field of affect research that has so far has been mainly explored psychology and cultural studies. In their texts the ethnologists and anthropologists involved show how established ways of analysing culture benefit from achievements in this field. They use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects trigger affects. The editors hope that this book will be read across disciplines, not only to promote the value of ethnographic work, but also to encourage theoretically informed creative empirical approaches to affect and material culture.

Belle Brezing made a major career move when she stepped off the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill's bawdy house -- an upscale brothel run out of a former residence of Mary Todd Lincoln. At nineteen, Brezing was already infamous as a youth steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal. But it was in Miss Hill's "respectable" establishment that she began to acquire the skills, manners, and business contacts that allowed her to ascend to power and influence as an internationally known madam. In this revealing book, Maryjean Wall offers a tantalizing true story of vice and power in the Gilded Age South, as told through the life and times of the notorious Miss Belle. After years on the streets and working for Hill, Belle Brezing borrowed enough money to set up her own establishment -- her wealth and fame growing alongside the booming popularity of horse racing. Soon, her houses were known internationally, and powerful patrons from the industrial cities of the Northeast courted her in the lavish parlors of her gilt-and-mirror mansion.Secrecy was a moral code in the sequestered demimonde of prostitution in Victorian America, so little has been written about the Southern madam credited with inspiring the character Belle Watling in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Following Brezing from her birth amid the ruins of the Civil War to the height of her scarlet fame and beyond, Wall uses her story to explore a wider world of sex, business, politics, and power. The result is a scintillating tale that is as enthralling as any fiction.

This book is a theoretical essay that lays a few foundations on which to build an anthropology directly focusing on human units. In the first chapter, the author will attempt to show that the evolutionary specificity of humans constitutes an argument in favour of this perspective. The consciousness of existing in time and nuanced modalities of presence call for a detailed observation of humans. The second chapter is a critique of the abundant use of the notion of relations in social anthropology. It invites for the observation of individuals through successions of moments and situations. The third chapter concerns nonhumans, another major theme of contemporary anthropology. About this point, the author sees a certain debasement of the notion of existence and proposes a realist ontology, considering what does and does not exist, from the examples of divinities, animals and collective institutions.

Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days.In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds.Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution.My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.

This book brings together artists, curators, researchers and conservators to consider the significance of coconut fibre armour from the islands of Kiribati. Taking as its focus the armour found in museum collections, it investigates the historical context that led to these unique artefacts leaving the Pacific and entering the orbit of British collectors and institutions, as well the legacies of those practices in the present. As well as exploring the historical milieux surrounding its collection, the book includes essays from expert conservators that discuss the challenges of caring for coconut fibre armour. Other contributions include case studies focusing on the construction and variety of the armour and helmets, and the findings of a comprehensive survey which has tracked down and documented every piece of Kiribati armour held in UK museum collections. Finally, the book considers the significance of coconut fibre armour in the present, with particular reference to the work of a group of I-Kiribati artists whose creativity and innovative research has led to the production of a contemporary suit of armour inspired by the armour of the past.

Through time people have lived with darkness. Archaeology shows us that over the whole human journey people have sought out dark places, for burials, for votive deposition and sometimes for retreat or religious ritual away from the wider community. Thirteen papers explore Palaeolithic use of deep caves in Europe and the orientation of mortuary monuments in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It examines how the senses are affected in caves and monuments that were used for ritual activities, from Bronze Age miners in Wales working in dangerous subterranean settings, to initiands in Italian caves, to a modern caver’s experience of spending time in the one of the world’s deepest caves in Russia. We see how darkness was and is viewed at northern latitudes where parts of the year are spent in eternal night, and in Easter Island where darkness provided communal refuge from the pervasive sun. We know that spending extended periods in darkness and silence can affect one physically, emotionally and spiritually. How did interactions between people and darkness affect individuals in the past and how were regarded by their communities? And how did this interaction transform places in the landscape? As the ever-increasing electrification of the planet steadily minimises the amount of darkness in our lives, curiously, darkness is coming more into focus. This first collection of papers on the subject begins a conversation about the role of darkness in human experience through time.

With tourism becoming the largest single sector of the global economy it cannot but impact traditional societies in many ways, both detrimental and beneficial. Nowhere is the history of the tourist encounter between Native peoples and Euro-Americans as long and as intensive as in North America. From the 1870s transcontinental railroads and shipping routes along the Pacific coast opened up the North American West for travelers, wishing to get to know the spectacular country and its Native peoples. Leisure travelers came in rapidly increasing numbers, first from the United States and Canada, soon also from Europe, and more recently from Asia.This volume is the result of the “North American Indian Tourism” sessions organized during the 2014 (European) American Indian Workshop held in Leiden, the Netherlands, from May 21-25. The conference was hosted by the University of Leiden and the National Museum of Ethnology (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde; now: National Museum of World Cultures). Most contributions address developments from the late nineteenth century to the present. The majority of the articles focus on the Greater Southwest, but the Natives peoples of the Great Plains take central stage in several contributions. Topics include: travels by Native Americans to Europe, the variety of encounters between Dutch travelers and tourists and Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, the role of the Indian casino industry, the production and consumption of Indian arts and crafts, tribal tourism policy, and the role of museums and tourism in the staging of Indian exhibitions.ContentsCommunicating Across the Red Atlantic. Early Native American Tourism and the Question of AgencyBirgit DäwesNative American Detours and the Quest for Authenticity. Dutch Tourism, Collecting and Research in the American SouthwestPieter HovensCollecting Souvenirs. The Alphonse Pinart Collection of Pueblo CuriosEloïse J. GalliardGoing West. The Grand Tour of Ludolf Gratama and Johanna Schultz van Haegen (1928)Mette van der HooftCasino Tourism in Northern New Mexico. Pueblo Indian Casinos as Capitalist Ventures in a Traditional SettingSusanne Berthier-FoglarOne Type of Boundary[ies]. Native American Jewelry and Santa Fe Indian MarketBruce BernsteinEconomic Development and Self-Representation. An Example of Tribal Tourism on the Northern PlainsMarkus H. LindnerArtifacts, Museums and Tourism. A De-Reterritorialized ViewMaaike de Jong and Alexander Grit

How are Western, mostly secular, societies handling religion in its increasingly pluralistic and complex forms? Here, the authors study the interaction and negotiations between religious organizations and religious citizens on the one hand, and the state, the judicial system, the media, and secular citizens on the other. Religion has become more and more visible in contemporary society and is, more often than before, recognised as a public matter and not merely a private issue. As such it presents new challenges or opportunities to scholarly research and to society at large. The contributors to this volume shed light on what follows when expressions of religion meet different spheres of society. The authors explicitly point to the need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the roles played by religion in society today. By presenting case studies, fresh perspectives and new questions they suggest that deeper knowledge is best achieved by further, increasingly nuanced interdisciplinary research.

Malaita traces the history and culture of a Pacific island from the 19th to 21st centuries through over 600 images drawn from the archives of the British Museum and public and private photographic collections around the world. This book explores Malaita as it was represented to the wider world through photographs, artefacts, maps and drawings over a period of 150 years. Malaitans have been portrayed as exotic natives and migrant workers, as Christian converts and colonial subjects, and as ordinary people leading a distinctive way of life in a rapidly changing society. The colonisation of Malaita through the work of missions, government and business in the early twentieth century, the upheavals of the Second World War and the economic and political developments that followed were documented in thousands of photos. Thousands more were made by anthropologists researching detailed studies of local culture in the second half of the 20th century. As Malaitans migrated to neighbouring Guadalcanal to participate in the commercial development of Solomon Islands, a civil conflict in the early 21st century was followed by renewed efforts to build upon their ancestral culture for the peaceful development of their island. This book is an image-led and accessible narrative that provides fascinating new insights into the history of a Pacific island and will be an essential reference for researchers, students and general readers with an interest in the anthropology and history of Melanesia and the Pacific Islands.

It is commonly agreed that we live in an age of globalization, but the profound consequences of this development are rarely understood. Usually, globalization is equated with the expansion of economic and financial markets and the proliferation of global networks of communication. In truth, much more is at stake: Traditional concepts of individual and national identity as well as perceived relationships between the self and others are undergoing profound change. Every town has become a potential cosmopolis -- an international city -- affecting the way that people conceptualize the relationship between public order and political practice.In Being in the World, noted political theorist Fred Dallmayr explores the globe's transition from the traditional Westphalian system of states to today's interlocking cosmopolitan network. Drawing upon sacred scriptures as well as the work of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and more recent scholars such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Raimon Panikkar, this book delves into what Dallmayr calls "being in the world," seen as an aspect of ethical-political engagement. Rather than lamenting current problems, he suggests addressing them through civic education and cosmopolitan citizenship. Dallmayr advocates a politics of the common good, which requires the cultivation of public ethics, open dialogue, and civic responsibility.

In addition to war, terrorism, and unchecked military violence, modernity is also subject to less visible but no less venomous conflicts. Global in nature, these "culture wars" exacerbate the tensions between tradition and innovation, virtue and freedom. Internationally acclaimed scholar Fred Dallmayr charts a course beyond these persistent but curable dichotomies in Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars. Consulting diverse fields such as philosophy, literature, political science, and religious studies, Dallmayr equates modern history with a process of steady pluralization. This process, which Dallmayr calls "integral pluralism," requires new connections and creates ethical responsibilities.Dallmayr critically compares integral pluralism against the theories of Carl Schmitt, the Religious Right, international "realism," and so-called political Islam. Drawing on the works of James, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, Integral Pluralism offers sophisticated and carefully researched solutions for the conflicts of the modern world.

Scandinavian countries are generally associated with extensive public services and low levels of poverty. However, reality has changed dramatically over the last three decades, and Scandinavia's cities now share many of the problems and challenges familiar from other Western cities. How do the welfare states handle these global societal transformations? In Social Transformations in Scandinavian Cities, researchers highlight the changing face of social sustainability and social disintegration in Scandinavian cities. They offer theoretical and empirical analyses of how migration, inequality, and residential segregation intersect with shifting national and local policies, charting their impact on urban landscapes in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The authors challenge the standard view of Scandinavia as a haven of equality and peace. Unemployment, criminality, and poor school performance in ethnically and socio-economically segregated residential areas have finally been recognized and tackled through urban policies since the 1990s. In this book we learn why and in which ways progress is being made.

This volume maps the multilayered narratives created in cinema on and around Silvio Berlusconi as a means of exploring the age of Berlusconismo. The analysis crosses chronological and generic boundaries, stretching back to the comedy Italian style, which foreshadows the symbolic meanings incarnated by Berlusconi before he actually entered the public stage. The book delineates a comprehensive cinematic corpus and focuses on a selection of narrative and documentary films, from the proto-Berlusconi everyman of La più bella serata della mia vita (The Most Wonderful Evening of My Life, 1972) by Ettore Scola, to the Berlusconi pretext for political self-reflection of Arance e martello (Oranges and Hammer, 2014) by Diego Bianchi. The author argues that the Berlusconi in these films represents not only the historical persona, but also a pervasive semiotic category in which the recent history of thecountry is inscribed and Italian society mirrors itself.