Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China

2021-10-06 Social Science

Author : Harriet Evans
Release : 2021-10-06
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 74X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China by : Harriet Evans

Download or read book Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China written by Harriet Evans. This book was released on 2021-10-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.

Cultural China 2020

2021-11-29 Social Science

Author : Séagh Kehoe
Release : 2021-11-29
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 221/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Cultural China 2020 by : Séagh Kehoe

Download or read book Cultural China 2020 written by Séagh Kehoe. This book was released on 2021-11-29. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed, and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the eight chapters. The articles in this Review speak to the turbulent year that was 2020 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, to religion and spirituality, via language politics, heritage, and music. Pieces on representations of China in Britain and the Westminster Chinese Visual Arts Project reflect our particular location and home. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders. The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.

Seeking a Future for the Past

2024-02-19 Social Science

Author : Philipp Demgenski
Release : 2024-02-19
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 764/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Seeking a Future for the Past by : Philipp Demgenski

Download or read book Seeking a Future for the Past written by Philipp Demgenski. This book was released on 2024-02-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials—foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.

Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes

2023 Criminal anthropology

Author : Robert J. Antony
Release : 2023
Genre : Criminal anthropology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 347/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes by : Robert J. Antony

Download or read book Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes written by Robert J. Antony. This book was released on 2023. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes reveals China's history and culture through the eyes of ordinary men and women using an interdisciplinary perspective that incorporates history, anthropology, folk studies, and literature to examine the sociocultural and symbolic worlds of gangsters, sorcerers, and prostitutes in late imperial and modern China.

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