Tracing China: A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey

(《踏迹寻中：四十年华南田野之旅》)

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Language: English

PUB DATE: 2016/08

ISBN: 9789888083732

Hardcover: 560 pages

About the book

Tracing China chronicles forty years of fieldwork. The journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China; it spans decades of persistent rural-urban divide and eventually uncovers China's global reach and Hong Kong's cross-border dynamics. Siu traverses both physical and cultural landscapes, examines how political tumults transform into everyday lives, and fathoms the depths of human drama amid China's frenetic momentum toward modernity. She highlights complicity, portraying how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. The question is: Have they become victims of the circumstances created by their own actions?

The essays are woven together by key themes in historical anthropology—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation, informed by critical social theories, and characterized by a careful scrutiny of fieldwork encounters and archival texts. Stressing process and contingency, Siu argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. She challenges the perception that social/political changes are merely linear historical progressions. Instead, she traces layers of the past in present realities.

About the author

Helen F. Siu is professor of anthropology at Yale University and founding director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

Content

Acknowledgments

Introduction:  China as Process

Part 1:  Tracing Meaningful Life-Worlds

1.  Reflections on Historical Anthropology

2.  Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China

Part 2:  Moving Targets

3.  Images: Prologue to Agents and Victims in South China

4.  China’s Century: Fast Forward with Historical Baggage

Part 3:  Structuring and Human Agency

5.  Socialist Peddlers and Princes in a Chinese Market Town

6.  Recycling Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China

7.  Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China

Part 4:  Culturing Power

8.  Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China

9.  Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China

10. The Grounding of Cosmopolitans: Merchants and Local Cultures in South China

Part 5:  History between the Lines

11. Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China

12. Social Responsibility and Self-Expression: Introduction to Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State

Part 6:  Place-Making: Locality and Translocality

13. Subverting Lineage Power: Local Bosses and Territorial Control in the 1940s

14. The Cultural Landscape of Luxury Housing in South China: A Regional History

15. Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants”

16. Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Post-Reform South China

Part 7: Historical Global and the Asian Postmodern

17. Hong Kong: Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape

18. Women of Influence: Gendered Charisma

19. Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong

Glossary

Bibliography

Index