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"Charts the development of domestic tourism and the maturation of a nationalist travel culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources including unpublished business archives, organization newsletters, bulletins from transportation companies, popular newspapers and magazines, and guidebooks, this book puts tourism and popular travel culture at the center of China's transition from empire to nation-state"--
This volume treats "China" first and foremost as an evolving and imagined geographical entity. The contributors explore China's last five hundred years of history using geography as a lens through which to approach such issues as sports, ethnography, cartography, religion, elite and popular culture, transnational networking, urban planning, and politics.
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessor...
German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost...
Emphasizes time between 1950s and 1970s in rural southern and central Shanxi province.
The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, and missionaries who took to the field in China’s southwest at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population. Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which placed China’s margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.
Singing on the River by Igor Chabrowski, based on Sichuan boatmen’s work songs (haozi), explores the little known world of mentality and self-representation of Chinese workers from the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937). Chabrowski demonstrates how river workers constructed and interpreted their world, work, and gender in context of the dissolving social, cultural, and political orders. Boatmen asserted their own values, bemoaned exploitation, and imagined their sexuality largely in order to cope with their low social status. Through studying the Sichuan boatmen we gain an insight into the ways in which twentieth-century nonindustrial Chinese workers imagined their place in the society and appropriated, without challenging them, the traditional values.
"Among the biggest challenges facing leaders of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) was how much they did not know. In 1949, at the end of a long sequence of wars, the government of one of the largest states in the world committed to fundamentally re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no hard, reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is a history of attempts made to resolve this "crisis in counting." Drawing on a wealth of official, institutional, and private sources culled from China, India, and the United States, the author explores the choices made and the effects they engendered through a series of vivid e...
Exploring the fundamental question of how a new discipline comes into being, this groundbreaking book tells the story of the emergence of native ethnology in Imperial Japan, a “one nation” social science devoted to the study of the Japanese people. Roughly corresponding to folklore studies or ethnography in the West, this social science was developed outside the academy over the first half of the twentieth century by a diverse group of intellectuals, local dignitaries, and hobbyists. Alan Christy traces the paths of the distinctive individuals who founded minzokugaku, how theory and practice developed, and how many previously unknown figures contributed to the growth of the discipline. Despite its humble beginnings, native ethnology today is a fixture in Japanese intellectual life, offering arguments and evidence about the popular, as opposed to elite, foundations of Japanese culture. Speaking directly to fundamental questions in anthropology, this authoritative and engaging book will become a standard not only for the field of native ethnology but also as a major work in broader modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history.
“Clear, coherent, richly documented, and highly persuasive. I know of no other source devoted exclusively to the topic of Chinese women’s biographies, and I am confident that this book will have a ready audience in the China field and beyond.” -Paul Ropp, Clark University “In addition to Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan, the Urtext of Chinese women’s biography, this rich trove of essays explores previously unexamined biographical genres and mines literary texts for their biographical potential. It will be of great value to scholars interested in women’s history, life-writing, and biography, both in the China field and in comparative contexts.” -Grace S. Fong, McGill University