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How Things Count as the Same
What counts as the same? This simple question forms the core of how we constitute ourselves as groups and as individuals. This book suggests that different ways of constructing sameness foster different group dynamics and different benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies.
Religion and Charity
This book challenges our assumptions about morality by explaining how industrialized philanthropy and universalized goodness came to dominate Chinese religious engagement.
Discovering Nature
Robert P. Weller's richly documented account describes the extraordinary transformations which have taken place in Chinese and Taiwanese responses to the environment across the twentieth century. Indeed, both places can be said to have 'discovered' a new concept of nature. The book focuses on nature tourism, anti-pollution movements, and policy implementation to show how the global spread of western ideas about nature has interacted with Chinese traditions. Inevitably differences of understanding across groups have caused problems in administering environmental reforms. They will have to be resolved if the dynamic transformations of the 1980s are to be maintained in the twenty-first century. In spite of a century of independent political development, a comparison between China and Taiwan reveals surprising similarities, showing how globalization and shared cultural traditions have outweighed political differences in shaping their environments. The book will appeal to a broad readership from scholars of Asia, to environmentalists, and anthropologists.
Ritual and Its Consequences
This pioneering, interdisciplinary work shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. Drawing on a variety of cultural settings, the authors utilize psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives to describe how ritual--like play--creates "as if" worlds, rooted in the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. The ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. Ritual, they claim, defines the boundaries of these imagined worlds, including those of empathy and other realms of human creativity, such as music, architecture and literature. The authors juxtapose this ritual orientation to a "sincere" search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint at the expense of ritual, dismissing ritual as mere convention. In response, the authors show how the conventions of ritual allow us to live together in a broken world. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.
Resistance, Chaos and Control in China
Compares those active resistance movements which burst into public view in China and "cultural resistance", which instead lies unspoken in everyday action. This book argues that certain areas of life defuse attempts at cultural domination by resisting and dissolving all unified interpretation.
Alternate Civilities
Alternate Civilities is an anthropologist's answer to the argument that China's cultural tradition renders it incapable of achieving an open political system. Robert Weller draws on his knowledge of both China and Taiwan to show how such sweeping claims fail to take account of potential democratic stimuli among local-level associations such as business organizations, religious groups, environmental movements, and women's networks. These groups were pivotal in Taiwan's democratic transition, and they are thriving in the new free space that has opened up in China. They do not promise a clone of Western civil society, but they do show the possibility of an alternate civility.
Rethinking Pluralism
'Rethinking Pluralism' suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference.
Unruly Gods
The first study in English to offer a systematic introduction to the Chinese pantheon of divinities. It challenges received wisdom about Chinese popular religion, which, until now, presented all Chinese deities as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume eloquently document the existence of other metaphors that allowed Chinese gods to challenge the traditional power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of gods and goddesses surveyed demonstrates that these deities did not reflect China's socio-political order but rather expressed and negotiated tensions within it. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as such, their work offers fresh perspectives on the relations between divinity and society in China.
Religion and the Formation of Taiwanese Identities
This volume centres on the creation of varied forms of individual and group identity in Taiwan, and the relationship between these forms of identity, both individual and collective, and patterns of Taiwanese religion, politics, and culture. The contributors explore the Taiwanese people's sense of who they are, attempting to discern how they identify themselves as individuals and as collectives and then try to determine the identity/roles individuals and groups construct for themselves. Ranging from the local essays to the national level and within the larger Chinese cultural/religious universe, these essays explore the complex nature of identity/role and the processes of identity formation which have shaped Taiwan's multileveled past and its many faceted present.
Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism
DIVA special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this collection of essays forms an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion that posits global millennial capitalism as a historical formation./div
