Stephan Feuchtwang – författare

This book, first published in 1983, examines the significant economic reforms undergone by China following the death of Mao and the downfall of the Gang of Four. It looks at Chinese economists’ conceptions of the necessity for change and compares China’s reforms with similar ones carried out by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There is a detailed analysis of the different sectors of the economy which shows how the reforms were carried out in practice.

This book, first published in 1983, examines the significant economic reforms undergone by China following the death of Mao and the downfall of the Gang of Four. It looks at Chinese economists’ conceptions of the necessity for change and compares China’s reforms with similar ones carried out by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There is a detailed analysis of the different sectors of the economy which shows how the reforms were carried out in practice.

Two of the most destructive moments of state violence in the twentieth century occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine). This is the first book to bring the two histories together in order to examine their differences and to understand if there are any similar processes of transmission at work. The author expertly ties in the Taiwanese civil war between Nationalists and Communists, which included the White Terror from 1947 to 1987, a less well-known but equally revealing part of twentieth-century history. Personal and family stories are told, often in the individual’s own words, and then compared with the public accounts of the same events as found in official histories, commemorations, school textbooks and other forms of public memory. The author presents innovative and constructive criticisms of social memory theories in order to make sense both of what happened and how what happened is transmitted.

First published in 2001, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor was written to bring together both the previously unpublished and published results of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and to put them into an historical, political, and theoretical context.

The book presents Chinese popular religion as a distinctive institution and describes its content as an ‘imperial metaphor’. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including both official and local cults, local festivals, Daoism, Ang Gong, the politics of religion, and political ritual.

First published in 2001, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor was written to bring together both the previously unpublished and published results of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and to put them into an historical, political, and theoretical context.

The book presents Chinese popular religion as a distinctive institution and describes its content as an ‘imperial metaphor’. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including both official and local cults, local festivals, Daoism, Ang Gong, the politics of religion, and political ritual.

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.

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.

Utilising a historical focus to emphasize developments and highlight the transformations of ritual practices, festivals, divination and traditions, this Handbook deals with the emergence of new attitudes to selfhood and the great diversity of civic and other rituals. Traditional ways of forming relationships and conducting life-cycle rituals are also considered. This comprehensive Handbook investigates the ways in which all of these changes are affected by governmental controls that have intriguing unintended consequences.

Providing a solid introduction for both newcomers and informed readers, this Handbook will be a key resource for sociologists and anthropologists of ritual and religion as well as students of religious studies, contemporary Chinese studies and the sociology of religion. With extensive references to assist readers wishing to further deepen their understanding this Handbook will also be of interest to historians and individuals interested in contemporary China.

Contributors include: I. Beller-Hann, S. Billioud, D. Campo, A.Y. Chau, B. Chen, S. Feuchtwang, G. Ha, A. Iskra, S. Jones, J. Kang, R. Madsen, W. Matthews, E. Oxfeld, D.A. Palmer, P.G. Ran, M. Schumann, R.G. Tiedemann, R.P. Weller, F. Winiger, K. Wu, Y. Zhu