Asian Anthropologies Series
By Friederike Fleischer, Geng Li, Kirsten W. Endres and
()
About this series
The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.
Titles in the series (11)
- Globalization in Southeast Asia: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives
1
The rapid postwar economic growth in the Southeast Asia region has led to a transformation of many of the societies there, together with the development of new types of anthropological research in the region. Local societies with originally quite different cultures have been incorporated into multi-ethnic states with their own projects of nation-building based on the creation of "national cultures" using these indigenous elements. At the same time, the expansion of international capitalism has led to increasing flows of money, people, languages and cultures across national boundaries, resulting in new hybrid social structures and cultural forms. This book examines the nature of these processes in contemporary Southeast Asia with detailed case studies drawn from countries across the region, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At the macro-level these include studies of nation-building and the incorporation of minorities. At the micro-level they range from studies of popular cultural forms, such as music and textiles to the impact of new sects and the world religions on local religious practice. Moving between the global and the local are the various streams of migrants within the region, including labor migrants responding to the changing distribution of economic opportunities and ethnic minorities moving in response to natural disaster.
- Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China
8
Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research among several different types of communities in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as the related issues of reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China. With an emphasis on the subjective experience, Fleischer’s research carefully explores people’s ideas about moral obligations, social expectations, and visions of urban Chinese society.
- Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia
5
In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the “spirited modernities” that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.
- Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China
9
Having long been stigmatized as an immoral and even illegal “superstition”, the popular practice of divination is experiencing a revival in contemporary China. Fate Calculation Experts explores how diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality. As well as associating with modern knowledge production systems, diviners build a positive social image for their occupation via claims to moral authority and appeals to “tradition”. Beyond matters of image management, diviners’ efforts towards legitimation also figure in the social relationships and fundamental cultural values they develop in their practice.
- Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia
10
At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.
- Aspirations of Young Adults in Urban Asia: Values, Family, and Identity
11
Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations. Delving into topical issues such as education, social inequality, family pressures, changing values, precarious employment, and political discontent, the book explores how young people are pushing boundaries and imagining their future. In this way, they explore and create the identities of their local and global surroundings.
- Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture
12
The Wa people have a rich civilization of their own, and a deep history in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Their mythology suggests their land is the first place inhabited by humans, which they care for on behalf of the world. This book introduces aspects of Wa culture, including their approach to the world’s troubles and the lessons others might learn from it. It also presents a new interpretation of Wa headhunting, questioning explanations that see it as a primitive custom, and instead placing it within the fraught history of the last few centuries.
- The Art of Fate Calculation: Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng
14
From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.
- Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination
13
Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference.
- Visions of Marriage: Politics and Family on Kinmen, 1920-2020
15
Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.
- Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia
16
The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.
Friederike Fleischer
Friederike Fleischer is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. She is the author of Surburban Beijing (2010), and co-editor of Ethnographies of Support (2013).
Related to Asian Anthropologies
Related ebooks
Grit Book I: The Voices You Form Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRuth & Freddy #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMicroguardians explain HIV and AIDS Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSecret Lives of Julie Newmar #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFAME: Lady Gaga: Giant-Sized Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStyx & Stone #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom the Heart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMud Pups’ Adventures vol. 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegend of Isis: The First Flight of Horus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDelightful Questions for Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGlobo Arte July 2022 Issue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVincent Price Presents: Tales from the Darkness #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaparazzi #0 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegend of Isis #6: Volume 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTom Corbett: Space Cadet: Danger in Deep Space #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBreaking Down the Wall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlying Saucers Vs. the Earth #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur Dream House Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Man in the Mirror Journal: Everything Begins and Ends with You Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Runaway Knight Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Day in the Life of Bentley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Accidental Warriors: The Accidental Warriors, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFemale Force: Hillary Clinton: Road to Secretary of State Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLogan's Run: Aftermath #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConfessions for the Narrow Road: It's Within You! Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLazar & Jingles and Bunson in Holiday Gifts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRock and Roll Comics: Joan Jett Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOdyssey Presents: Anthology #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFemale Force: Anne Rice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Monster’s Among Us: A War of Witches Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Anthropology For You
The Way of the Shaman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad---and Surprising Good---About Feeling Special Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of the American People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Body Language Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bruce Lee Wisdom for the Way Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRegarding the Pain of Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Survive in Ancient Egypt Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Serpent and the Rainbow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future---Updated With a New Epilogue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Asian Anthropologies
0 ratings0 reviews