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BOOK SERIES


Anthropology of Asia


About the Series

Asia today is one of the most dynamic regions of the world. The previously predominant image of ‘timeless peasants’ has given way to the image of fast-paced business people, mass consumerism and high-rise urban conglomerations. Yet much discourse remains entrenched in the polarities of East versus West’, ‘Tradition versus Change’. This series hopes to provide a forum for anthropological studies which break with such polarities. It will publish titles dealing with cosmopolitanism, cultural identity, representations, arts and performance. The complexities of urban Asia, its elites, its political rituals, and its families will also be explored.

17 Series Titles

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The Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders A Historical Contextualization 1850-1990

The Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization 1850-1990

1st Edition

By Oscar Salemink
July 13, 2017

This book looks at ethnographic discourses concerning the indigenous population of Vietnam's Central Highlands during periods of christianization, colonization, war and socialist transformation, and analyses these in their relation to tribal, ethnic, territorial, governmental and gendered ...

Building Temples in China Memories, Tourism and Identities

Building Temples in China: Memories, Tourism and Identities

1st Edition

By Selina Ching Chan, Graeme Lang
May 24, 2017

Much has been written on how temples are constructed or reconstructed for reviving local religious and communal life or for recycling tradition after the market reforms in China. The dynamics between the state and society that lie behind the revival of temples and religious practices initiated by ...

Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers Power and Control in a Hongkong Megastore

Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers: Power and Control in a Hongkong Megastore

1st Edition

By Wong Heung Wah Wong
June 01, 2016

Examines the ways in of organising work, rank, compensation, and promotion inside a large Japanese company in Hong Kong, and its spiritual training, to reveal the socio-economic base of managerial control. A must for anthropologists and Japanologists....

Cultural Crisis and Social Memory Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos

Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos

1st Edition

Edited By Charles F. Keyes, Shigeharu Tanabe
May 31, 2016

This book explores social memory in the context of cultural crises of modernity in Thailand and Laos. It explicates the ways in which social memory constructed by the people enters modernity, and how this in turn causes fundamental ruptures with their past, as well as the various ways cultural ...

Buddhism Observed Travellers, Exiles and Tibetan Dharma in Kathmandu

Buddhism Observed: Travellers, Exiles and Tibetan Dharma in Kathmandu

1st Edition

By Peter Moran
July 20, 2015

How do contemporary Westerners and Tibetans understand not only what it means to be 'Buddhist', but what it means to be hailed as one from 'the West' or from 'Tibet'? This anthropological study examines the encounter between Western travellers and Tibetan exiles in Bodhanath, on the outskirts of ...

The Globalisation of Chinese Food

The Globalisation of Chinese Food

1st Edition

Edited By Sidney Cheung, David Y. H. Wu
March 04, 2015

By considering the practice of globalisation, these essays describe changes, variations and innovations to Chinese food in many parts of the world. The book reviews and broadens classic theories about ethnic and social identity formation through the examination of Chinese food, providing a powerful...

Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society

Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society

1st Edition

By Yuehping Yen
August 15, 2014

This unusual and interesting book is a fascinating account of the world of Chinese writing. It examines Chinese space and the political and social use of writing as propaganda, a publicity booster and as a ladder for social climbing....

Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia Comparative and Historical Colonialism

Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia: Comparative and Historical Colonialism

1st Edition

By Jan van Bremen, Akitoshi Shimizu
May 19, 2014

For a time it was almost a cliche to say that anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism - by which was usually meant 'Western' colonialism. And this insinuation was assumed to somehow weaken the theoretical claims of anthropology and its fieldwork achievements.What this collection demonstrates ...

Varieties of Secularism in Asia Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual

Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual

1st Edition

Edited By Nils Ole Bubandt, Martijn Van Beek
March 21, 2014

Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectually coherent volume which builds off the work of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and others who have engaged the issue of secularism(s) and in socio-political life. The volume seeks to examine theories of ...

Folk Art Potters of Japan Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics

Folk Art Potters of Japan: Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics

1st Edition

By Brian Moeran
August 27, 1997

This is a study of a group of potters living in a small community in the south of Japan, and about the problems they face in the production, marketing and aesthetic appraisal of a kind of stoneware pottery generally referred to as mingei, or folk art. It shows how different people in an art world ...

Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West Exploring the Dark Side of Life

Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life

1st Edition

Edited By Lodewijk Brunt, Brigitte Steger
December 12, 2013

Ideas and practices concerning sleep and night-time are constantly changing and widely varied in different cultures and societies. What we do during the day and night is the result of much political struggle. Trade unions, political parties, entrepreneurs, leaders and schools boards, all have an ...

Hong Kong Anthropological Essays on a Chinese Metropolis

Hong Kong: Anthropological Essays on a Chinese Metropolis

1st Edition

By Grant Evans, Maria Tam
June 25, 1997

Hong Kong has become a by-word for all that is modern and sparkling in Asia today.Yet tourist brochures still play with the old cliche of Hong Kong as a place where 'East meets West'. Images of so-called 'traditional' China, junks sailing Victoria Harbour or old women praying to gods in smoky ...

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