To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures. Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state. In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption. The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest. Table of contents INTRODUCTION -- Theorising place / Stephan Feuchtwang -- PART 1 : URBAN PLACES -- Mapping 'chaos': the Dong Xi Fo feuds of Quanzhou, 1644-1839 / Wang Mingming -- Breathing new life into Beijing culture: new 'traditional' public spaces and the Chaoyang neighbourhood Yangge associations / Florence Graezer -- Establishing 'home' away from home: Chinese migrants in the industrial transformation of Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong / Graham Johnson -- Traditional territories in a contemporary city: agency and policy in the preservation of hereditary rights / Elizabeth Lominska Johnson -- PART 2 : RURAL PLACES -- 'The place where the age wouldn't go' and 'the place where the sage was born': mutual definitions of place in Shandong and Heilongjiang / Zhao Bingxiang -- Hmong places and locality / Nicholas Tapp -- Senses of local place and the temples of West Hunan / Mary Rack -- Curves and the urbanisation of Meifa village / Stephan Feuchtwang -- AFTERWORD -- Space and time / Laurie Kain Hart.

This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. "Righteous Dopefiend" interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis.Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts' determination to hang on for one more day and one more 'fix' through a 'moral economy of sharing' that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.

While many have studied China’s recent rise as an economic power, China itself does not exist solely in the economic realm. Ordinary Chinese still place intense value on moral obligations and the nature of the social ties that connect them to others. This study explores the moral sphere as a key to understanding how rural Chinese experience and talk about their lives in this period of rapid economic transformation. Ellen Oxfeld, who spent time in a village in southeast China’s Guangdong Province over the course of a decade and a half, examines both continuities and changes in the local culture. Although some have suggested that the reform period in China has been characterized by moral cynicism, Oxfeld finds that villagers appeal to a vibrant array of moral discourses when choosing a path of personal action or evaluating the behavior of others.

关于汉人传统社会、空间、性别研究的文集。