Stephan Feuchtwang

Two of the most destructive moments of state violence in the twentieth century occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine). This is the first book to bring the two histories together in order to examine their differences and to understand if there are any similar processes of transmission at work. The author expertly ties in the Taiwanese civil war between Nationalists and Communists, which included the White Terror from 1947 to 1987, a less well-known but equally revealing part of twentieth-century history. Personal and family stories are told, often in the individual's own words, and then compared with the public accounts of the same events as found in official histories, commemorations, school textbooks and other forms of public memory. The author presents innovative and constructive criticisms of social memory theories in order to make sense both of what happened and how what happened is transmitted.

The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan

After the Event

To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures. Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state. In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption. The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China

Making Place

Charlotte Bruckermann

Putting China into the context of general anthropology offers novel insights into its history, culture and society. Studies in the anthropology of China need to look outwards, to other anthropological areas, while at the same time, anthropologists specialised elsewhere cannot afford to ignore contributions from China. This book introduces a number of key themes and in each case describes how the anthropology and ethnography of China relates to the surrounding theories and issues. The themes chosen include the anthropology of intimacy, of morality, of food and of feasting, as well as the anthropology of civilisation, modernity and the state.The Anthropology of China covers both long historical perspectives and ethnographies of the twenty-first century. For the first time, ethnographic perspectives on China are contextualised in comparison with general anthropological debates. Readers are invited to engage in and rethink China's place within the wider world, making it perfect for professional researchers and teachers of anthropology and Chinese history and society, and for advanced undergraduate and graduate study.

Anthropology Of China, The: China As Ethnographic And Theoretical Critique

Georg Elwert

Dieter Neubert

Based on two conference held in Berlin and Mainz in 1995 and 1996 with the title: "Feud, war and genocide."

Processes of Escalation and De-escalation in Violent Group Conflicts

Dynamics of Violence

Wang Mingming

This book relates the stories of four leaders under very different political regimes: Colonial, Nationalist and Communist. The authors compare Chinese notions of respect and inspiration with their equivalents in other religious and political histories of colonial and post-colonial modernity, thereby producing a thorough re-working of the idea of charisma. The result is an intriguing study of the relationship between religious and political authority in a changing world.

Four Local Leaders in China

Grassroots Charisma

Hans Steinmüller

China in comparative perspective -- Empire and bureaucracy -- The great divergence; industrial revolution -- Demographic transition -- Religion and civilisation -- Statehood and national independence -- Revolution and Maoism -- Socialism -- Post-socialism -- Property relations and China's contemporary economy -- The countryside and migration -- The city -- The family and gender -- Schooling -- Civil society -- Rule of law -- Democracy

China in Comparative Perspective

China has many religions. But rituals of local temples are none of these. They celebrate many gods and their powers to respond. Gods are invited as welcome guests by appropriate rituals of welcome and communication. Other rituals pacify ghosts and harmful powers. These rituals are rich with their own poetry, a poetry of performance, not just of contemplation. Interpreting this poetry demands revision of theories of ritual and religion. The author has spent over four decades studying Chinese ritual and religion through observation in contemporary China and Taiwan, constantly revising and rethinking theories of religion, ritual and their role in different political regimes."

Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory

The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma, and Ghosts

Eva Neurath

Eva Neurath, co-founder of Thames & Hudson, wrote this memoir for her granddaughters, and it is a private story of a remarkable 20th-century life. The youngest child of a principled and avant-garde mother and a Jewish father, she was born in Berlin and grew up there in the Twenties, in the world of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, when anything was possible. Her wide knowledge of the fine arts was the result not of any formal education but of her work for art dealers, at a time when great collections were changing hands. Her mother for a time had a gallery for contemporary artists, and through other relatives she knew the world of music. But this was a world in the grip of traumatic change. Pursued by the Gestapo, Eva, her second husband Wilhelm Feuchtwang and their baby son Stephan left Berlin in1938, first for Rotterdam, then London. Wilhelm was interned in the Isle of Man, and Eva was at her wits end. Then came another change: she was visited with a message from her husband by Walter Neurath, an Austrian art historian and publisher who had come to England earlier and also been interned, but was soon released to continue his publishing of books for Adprint, where he had created the Britain in Pictures series. Offered a job by Walter, Eva grasped the opportunity to re-create herself in her own right as picture researcher, layout designer and art director. In 1949 they founded a new publishing house, Thames & Hudson, and married in 1953. Her life with Walter moved in circles of art, archaeology and history, among friends including Henry Moore, Harold Acton, John Julius Norwich and Roy Strong. The memoir ends in 1981, but Evas work continued until 1999, the year she died, and the story is filled out by her son, Stephan Feuchtwang.

Stephan Feuchtwang

About

Books

Join the club