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Less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine, which was particularly devastating in the countryside. As a result, older people in rural areas have experienced in their lifetimes both extreme deprivation and relative abundance of food. Young people, on the other hand, have a different relationship to food. Many young rural Chinese are migrating to rapidly industrializing cities for work, leaving behind backbreaking labor but also a connection to food through agriculture. Bitter and Sweet examines the role of food in one rural Chinese community as it has shaped everyday lives over the course of several tumultuous decades. In her superb ethnographic accounts, Ellen Oxfeld compels us to reexamine some of the dominant frameworks that have permeated recent scholarship on contemporary China and that describe increasing dislocation and individualism and a lack of moral centeredness. By using food as a lens, she shows a more complex picture, where connectedness and sense of place continue to play an important role, even in the context of rapid change.
"Drink Water, But Remember the Source is a lively and readable ethnography that will reshape our understanding of moral discourse in the Chinese countryside. Oxfeld greatly improves upon the usual claims that China is losing all forms of communal morality by illustrating the multiplicity of views refracted through concrete events."—Robert P. Weller, Boston University
The essays in Coming Home? examine the unique return migration experiences of refugees, migrants, and various others as they confront social pressures and sense of displacement.
Conviviality, care and creativity offer a powerful perspective on wellbeing as an intersubjective process that thrives in circulation.
Redefining self. Transnational Rio de Janeiro : (Re)visiting geographical experiences / Alan P. Marcus ; When Russia came to stay / Lea Povozhaev ; "Neither the end of the world nor the beginning" : transnational identity politics in Lisa Suhair Majaj's self-writing / Silvia Schultermandl ; Identity and belonging among second-generation Greek and Italian Canadian women / Noula Papayiannis ; Time and space in the life of Pierre S. Weiss : autoethnographic engagements with memory and trans/dis/location / Samuel Veissière -- Redefining nation. Contemporary Croatian film and the new social economy / Jelena Šesnić ; Identity, bodies, and second-generation returnees in West Africa / Erin Kenny ...
Immigrants from China started settling in Calcutta, the British capital of colonial India, from the late eighteenth century. Initially, the immigrant community comprised of male workers, many of whom sojourned between China and India. Only in the early twentieth century was there a large influx of women and children from China. To address the educational needs of the children - both immigrant and locally-born - several Chinese-medium primary and middle schools were established in Calcutta by the community in the 1920s and 1930s. Using many hitherto unexplored textual sources and interviews in India, China, and Canada, this detailed and unprecedented study examines the history and significanc...
Despite the mass dislocation and repatriation efforts of the last century, the study of return movements still sits on the periphery of anthropology and migration research. Homecomings explores the forces and motives that drive immigrants, war refugees, political exiles, and their descendants back to places of origin. By including a range of homecoming experiences, Markowitz and Stefansson destabilize the key oppositions and the key terminologies that have vexed migration studies for decades, analyzing migration and repatriation; home and homeland; and host, returnee, and newcomer through a comparative ethnographic lens. The volume provides rich answers to the following questions: _ Does gro...
"Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the experiences and contested meanings of home for people whose lives are characterized by migration related to varying forms of violence. Taking seriously the political implications and exploitation of discourses of home in the transnational processes that connect, yet differently affect, the movement of people and capital, it challenges the sedentarist assumption that territoriality and nation are necessarily the primary determinants of identification. However, it does not replace this sedentarism with a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of actual experiences of displacement an...
In Taiwan, small-scale subcontracting factories of thirty employees or less make items for export, like the wooden jewelry boxes that Ping-Chun Hsiung made when she worked in six such factories. These factories are found in rice fields and urban areas, front yards and living rooms, mostly employing married women in line with the government slogan that promotes work in the home—"Living Rooms as Factories." Hsiung studies the experiences of the married women who work in this satellite system of factories, and how their work and family lives have contributed to Taiwan's 9.1 percent GNP growth over the last three decades, the "economic miracle." This vivid portrayal of the dual lives of these ...