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Exile from the Grasslands

Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

By Jarmila Ptáčková

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and...

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Qingchun Luo, Jjivot Zopqu

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group in southwest China....

Transforming Patriarchy

Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century

By Gonçalo Santos, Stevan Harrell

Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China—political, cultural, and economic—has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years have...

Rural China on the Eve of Revolution

Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950

By G. William Skinner. Edited by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely. Afterword by Zhijia Shen

In 1949, G. William Skinner, a Cornell University graduate student, set off for southwest China to conduct field research on rural social structure. He settled near the market town of Gaodianzi, Sichuan, and lived there...

In the Circle of White Stones

Moving through Seasons with Nomads of Eastern Tibet

By Gillian G. Tan

This narrative of subsistence on the Tibetan plateau describes the life-worlds of people in a region traditionally known as Kham who move with their yaks from pasture to pasture, depending on the milk production of...

Mapping Shangrila

Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

By Emily T. Yeh, Christopher R. Coggins, Stevan Harrell, Ralph A. Litzinger

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805023

In 2001 the Chinese government announced that the precise location of Shangrila—a place that previously had existed only in fiction—had been identified in Zhongdian County, Yunnan. Since then, Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Yunnan,...

Ploughshare Village

Culture and Context in Taiwan

By Stevan Harrell. With a new preface by the author

This anthropological study of a workers’ village in North Taiwan makes an important contribution to the comparative literature on Chinese and Taiwanese social organization. Based on fieldwork conducted in 1973 and 1978, the study is...

Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China

By Stevan Harrell

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804071

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Sichuan, this pathbreaking study examines the nature of ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations among local communities, focusing on the Nuosu...

Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers

By Stevan Harrell

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804088

China's exploitation by Western imperialism is well known, but the imperialist treatment within China of ethnic minorities has been little explored. Around the geographic periphery of China, as well as some of...

Fieldwork Connections

The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America

By Ayi Bamo, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy

Fieldwork Connections tells the story of the intertwined research histories of three anthropologists working in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China in the late twentieth century. Chapters are written alternately by a male American anthropologist,...

Lijiang Stories

Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-Era China

By Emily Chao. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

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...

Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880-1950

By Denise M. Glover, Stevan Harrell, Charles F. McKhann, Margaret Byrne Swain

The scientists and explorers profiled in this engaging study of pioneering Euro-American exploration of late imperial and Republican China range from botanists to ethnographers to missionaries. Although a diverse lot, all believed in objective, progressive,...

Communist Multiculturalism

Ethnic Revival in Southwest China

By Susan McCarthy. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295800417

The communist Chinese state promotes the distinctiveness of the many minorities within its borders. At the same time, it is vigilant in suppressing groups that threaten the nation's unity or its modernizing...