Publications
Now showing items 1-40 of 107
The Power of the Brush
(2020)
The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an “epistolary revolution” in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women ...
Miscellany of the South Seas
(2023)
In 1835 young Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan was caught in a typhoon while sailing across the Taiwan Strait. He and his shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central Vietnam. With an escort ...
Doing Business in Rural China
(2012)
Longlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book AwardMountainous Liangshan Prefecture, on the southern border of Sichuan Province, is one of China's most remote regions. Although Liangshan's majority ethnic group, the Nuosu (now classified ...
On the Margins of Tibet
(2011)
The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. But what is Tibetan culture and how should it be developed or preserved? The Chinese authorities ...
Lessons in Being Chinese
(2011)
Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this comparative ...
Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China
(2012)
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 ...
Governing China's Multiethnic Frontiers
(2004)
Upon coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist government proclaimed that its stance toward ethnic minorities--who comprise approximatelyeight percent of China’s population--differed from that of previous regimes and ...
Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers
(2011)
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 the less ...
China's New Socialist Countryside
(2013)
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, ...
Empire and Identity in Guizhou
(2013)
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 ...
In the Land of the Eastern Queendom
(2013)
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 ...
Fir and Empire
(2020)
The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is ...
Footprints of War
(2018)
When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics ...
Jesuits and Matriarchs
(2018)
In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite of Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. ...
Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India
(2021)
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of ...
The Objectionable Li Zhi
(2021)
Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward ...
Medicine and Memory in Tibet
(2018)
Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet ...
The Nuosu Book of Origins
(2019)
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. Their creation ...
The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code
(2011)
After overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), proclaimed that he had obtained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), enabling establishment of a spiritual orientation ...
The Story of Han Xiangzi
(2011)
In this seventeenth-century Chinese novel, Han Xiangzi, best known as one of the Eight Immortals, seeks and achieves immortality and then devotes himself to converting his materialistic, politically ambitious Confucian ...
Healing with Poisons
(2021)
Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically employed as healing agents ...
Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands
(2011)
Revival of religious practices of all sorts in China, after decades of systematic government suppression, is a topic of considerable interest to scholars in disciplines ranging from religious studies to anthropology to ...
A Ming Confucian’s World
(2022)
A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty's (1368–1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official ...
Familiar Strangers
(1998)
The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government ...
Communist Multiculturalism
(2009)
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 goals. In ...
Perpetual Happiness
(2011)
The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness,” was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City, the completion ...
Vignettes from the Late Ming
(2011)
This anthology presents seventy translated and annotated short essays, or hsiao-p’in, by fourteen well-known sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chinese writers. Hsiao-p’in, characterized by spontaneity and brevity, were a ...
Mapping Shangrila
(2014)
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 ...
Manchus and Han
(2000)
China�s 1911�12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty ...
The Han
(2015)
This ethnography explores contemporary narratives of “Han-ness,” revealing the nuances of what Han identity means today in relation to that of the fifty-five officially recognized minority ethnic groups in China, as well ...
Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State
(2016)
Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz, ...
Confucian Image Politics
(2016)
During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative ...
The Scholar and the State
(2015)
In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred ...
Novel Medicine
(2016)
By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. ...
Guest People
(2014)
The essays in this volume analyze and compare what it means to be Hakka in a variety of sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Taiwan, and contemporary China.
A Landscape of Travel
(2014)
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The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön
(2022)
The amazing life of a historical woman who embodied Buddhist divinity Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged ...
Upland Geopolitics
(2022)
Cold War legacies in Southeast Asia enable new geographies of enclosure In the twenty-first century, land deals in the Global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Transnational access to arable land ...
Three Early Mahāyāna Treatises from Gandhāra
(2022)
Buddhist texts on the path to liberation The Gandhāran birch-bark scrolls preserve the earliest remains of Buddhist literature known today and provide unprecedented insights into the history of Buddhism. This volume presents ...
Governing Water in India
(2022)
The challenges of managing resource use in the world's largest democracy Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. ...