《道出真我:黑衣壮的人观与认同表征》是对壮族传统文化与民族认同重构过程的翔实的民族志记录，对从事人类学研究、大众文化研究、族群认同研究和壮族研究的读者有所裨益。在民族—国家的建设以及现代化和全球化浪潮的冲击下，黑衣壮人不断对本族群文化传统加以改造、再阐释甚至重新发明，以确立文化自我的核心，划分“我群／他群”的认同边界，从而形成了独特的“差序格局”的自我意识和族群认同观念。 族群认同是一个动态的文化实践过程，黑衣壮族群文化表征过程中所体现的“复调”色彩，正说明族群认同既受到外在的时代主流“话语型”和现实功利的影响，也受到族群的人观、宇宙观等文化认知体系的制约，从而揭示了认同建构与自我塑造的微妙关联。

Anthropologist Susan Brownell, heptathlon gold medallist in the 1986 National College Games of the People's Republic of China, draws on her direct experience of Chinese athletics to provide an insight into the culture of sports and the body in China. The book introduces the notion of "body culture" to analyze Olympic sports as one element in a whole set of Chinese body practices: the "old people's disco dancing" craze; the popularity of bodybuilding (following reluctant official acceptance of the bikini); mass calisthenics; martial arts; military discipline; and more. Translating official and dissident materials into English and drawing on performance theory and histories of the body, the text uses the culture of the body as a focal point to explore the tensions between local and global organizations, the traditional and the modern, and men and women. The author's intimate knowledge of Chinese social and cultural life and the wide range of historic examples utilized aim to provide a novel perspective on how gender, the body and the nation are interlinked in Chinese culture.

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface, Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.

Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of pre-modern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theatre.