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This volume presents contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, and documents in rich ethnographic detail its historical complexity and regional diversity. The collection's analytical emphasis is on the modern 'metamorphoses' of kinship in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but the essays also offer ample historical documentation and comparison.
China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field researc...
Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.
"Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China--political, cultural, and economic--has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years have altered and even reversed long-held expectations. Transforming Patriarchy explores the private and public dimensions of these changes in present-day China. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is no longer the default arrangement for Chinese families ... Drawing on a multitude of sources and perspectives, this volume turns to the intimate territory of the family to challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions about gender and generational hierarchies in Chinese society. Case studies examine factors such as social class, geography, and globalization as they relate to patriarchal practice and resistance to it."--Provided by publisher.
The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.
The concept of civilization has a long but checkered history in anthropology, and anthropological materials have been of great importance for the development of civilizational analysis in historical sociology. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis brings these diverse fields together and explores a wide range of topics pertaining to civilization, from classical theories to contemporary rhetorical discourses, including detailed case studies of concrete practices documented through archival and ethnographic research. While many scholars and the wider public still think of civilization in simplistic terms, viewing it in terms of Enlightenment notions of progress and evolution to higher stages, others have pluralized the term only to create essentialized units which are only tenuously linked to historical processes. In this book contributors use dynamic approaches, including those rooted in the seminal writings of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, opening up the dimension of civilization as an important complement to other key terms such as society and culture in social science and historical analysis.
This book springs from the compilation of papers and posters presented in 2013 and 2014 at the 2nd and 3rd Enardas Colloquia, entitled 'Living Places, Experienced Places'. The first part, in two chapters, is entitled 'Concepts and tools to study rock art'. The second part, 'From sub-naturalistic to Schematic rock art tradition', discusses various expressions of recorded art in the hinterland area of northwest Iberia, as well as expressions of the schematic art tradition from north-central Portugal. The third part, 'Atlantic tradition rock art' comprises four chapters. The fourth part, 'Other styles', includes five chapters focusing on depictions that the book editors consider distinct from the best-known regional styles. Edited by Ana M. S. Bettencourt, Manuel Santos Estevez, Hugo A. Sampaio and Daniela Cardoso
Flavonoids are abundant secondary metabolites found in plants and fungi that have various roles in these organisms, including pigmentation, cell signalling, plant defence and inter-organism communication. Due to their abundance in nature, flavonoids are also important components of the human diet, and the last four decades have seen an intense study focused on the structure characterization of flavonoids and on their roles in mammal metabolism. This book reviews most of the well-established activities of flavonoids, and we also present more recent research studies on the area of flavonoids, including the chemical aspects of structure characterization of flavonoids, the biosynthesis of flavonoids in model plants as well as their role in abiotic stress situations and in agriculture, the role of flavonoids in metabolism and health and their importance in foods, from consumption to their use as bioactive components.
"This study of the intimate connections between science and society in China shows that science and technology, far from saving China, as the country's leaders promise, are producing unanticipated, often deeply disturbing effects"--
This book presents a review of the state-of-the-art knowledge on the interactions between biodiversity and wind energy development, focused on the Portuguese reality. The volume addresses the particularities of the impact assessment procedures in Portugal, contrasting it with the international practices and presenting its main findings by covering the following broader themes: i) evaluation of spatial and temporal dynamics of wildlife affected by wind farms, including birds, bats and terrestrial mammals (in particularly Portuguese wolf population); ii) the methodologies used to assess impacts caused by this type of developments in biodiversity; iii) the best practice methodologies to impleme...