Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China
Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China

Author: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0429748965

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This book focuses on Shenzhen, one of China’s most globalized metropolises, a leading centre of high-tech industries and, as a melting pot of migrants from all over China, a place of vibrant cultural creativity. While in the early stages of Shenzhen’s development this vibrant cultural creativity was associated with the resilience of traditional social structures in Shenzhen’s migrant ‘urban villages’, today these structures undergird dynamic entrepreneurship and urban self-organization throughout Shenzhen, and have gradually merged with the formal structures of urban governance and politics. This book examines these developments, showing how important traditional social structures and traditional Chinese culture have been for China’s economic modernization. The book goes on to draw out the implications of this for the future of Chinese culture and Chinese economic engagement in a globalized world.

Ritual and Economy in East Asia
Ritual and Economy in East Asia

Author: Rowan Flad

Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1950446417

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In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausens 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia. The contributions are clustered into four themes: Ritual Economy, Ritual and Sacrifice, Technology, Community, Interaction, and Objects and Meaning, which collectively reflect the theoretical, methodological, and historical questions that Falkenhausen has been examining via his scholarship, research, and teaching throughout his career. Most of the chapters work with archaeological and textual data from China, but there are also studies of materials from Mongolia, Korea, Southeast Asia and even Egypt, showing the global impact of Falkenhausens work. The chronological range of studies extends from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age in China, into the early imperial, medieval, and early modern periods. The authors discuss art, economy, ritual, interaction, and technology in the broad context of East Asian archaeology and its connection to the world beyond.

Economy and Ritual
Economy and Ritual

Author: Stephen Gudeman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-02-01

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1782385703

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According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.

The Political Economy of East Asia
The Political Economy of East Asia

Author: Ming Wan

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2007-10-17

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 1483305325

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For students of international political economy, it is hard to ignore the growth, dynamism, and global impact of East Asia. Japan and China are two of the largest economies in the world, in a region now accounting for almost 30 percent more trade than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined. What explains this increasing wealth and burgeoning power? In his new text, Ming Wan illustrates the diverse ways that the domestic politics and policies of countries within East Asia affect the region’s production, trade, exchange rates, and development, and are in turn affected by global market forces and international institutions. Unlike most other texts on East Asian political economy that are essentially comparisons of major individual countries, Wan effectively integrates key thematic issues and country-specific examples to present a comprehensive overview of East Asia’s role in the world economy. The text first takes a comparative look at the region’s economic systems and institutions to explore their evolution—a rich and complex story that looks beyond the response to Western pressures. Later chapters are organized around close examination of production, trade, finance, and monetary relations. While featuring extended discussion of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Wan is inclusive in his analysis, with coverage including Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. The text is richly illustrated with more than fifty tables, figures, and maps that present the latest economic and political data to help students better visualize trends and demographics. Each chapter ends with extensive lists of suggested readings.

Re-enchanting Modernity
Re-enchanting Modernity

Author: Mayfair Yang

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1478009241

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In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.

Essential Outsiders
Essential Outsiders

Author: Daniel Chirot

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780295976136

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Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation.

Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia
Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia

Author: Karl L. Hutterer

Publisher: U OF M CENTER FOR SOUTH EAST ASIAN STUDI

Published: 1978-01-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0891480137

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Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization on the other hand. Indeed, social scientists are often particularly interested in the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. Economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations that themselves may transcend the economic realm and that otherwise are often difficult to trace. Yet in social science research in Southeast Asia, the area of economic studies has lagged behind, despite the great study potential represented by the tremendous diversity of its physical and human environment. Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia attempts to take advantage of that opportunity. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, many if not most of the systems organized on very different levels of integration interact with each other. Taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the incredible diversity of economic and social systems that may be investigated in Southeast Asia.

Colonial Legacies
Colonial Legacies

Author: Anne E. Booth

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2007-09-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0824831616

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It is well known that Taiwan and South Korea, both former Japanese colonies, achieved rapid growth and industrialization after 1960. The performance of former European and American colonies (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has been less impressive. Some scholars have attributed the difference to better infrastructure and greater access to education in Japan’s colonies. Anne Booth examines and critiques such arguments in this ambitious comparative study of economic development in East and Southeast Asia from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s. Booth takes an in-depth look at the nature and consequences of colonial policies for a wide range of factors, including the growth of export-oriented agriculture and the development of manufacturing industry. She evaluates the impact of colonial policies on the growth and diversification of the market economy and on the welfare of indigenous populations. Indicators such as educational enrollments, infant mortality rates, and crude death rates are used to compare living standards across East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Her analysis of the impact that Japan’s Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and later invasion and conquest had on the region and the living standards of its people leads to a discussion of the painful and protracted transition to independence following Japan’s defeat. Throughout Booth emphasizes the great variety of economic and social policies pursued by the various colonial governments and the diversity of outcomes. Lucidly and accessibly written, Colonial Legacies offers a balanced and elegantly nuanced exploration of a complex historical reality. It will be a lasting contribution to scholarship on the modern economic history of East and Southeast Asia and of special interest to those concerned with the dynamics of development and the history of colonial regimes.

The Evolution of Human Co-operation
The Evolution of Human Co-operation

Author: Charles Stanish

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-08-03

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1107180554

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This book explains the evolution of human cooperation in tribal societies using insights from game theory, ethnography and archaeology.

Filial Piety
Filial Piety

Author: Charlotte Ikels

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0804747911

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How have rapid industrial development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analyzing contemporary behavior, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Each chapter presents rich ethnographic data on how filial piety shapes the decisions and daily lives of adult children and their elderly parents. The authors’ ability to speak the local languages and their long-term, direct contact with the villagers and city dwellers they studied lend an immediacy and authenticity lacking in more abstract treatments of the topic. This book is an ideal text for social science and humanities courses on East Asia because it focuses on shared cultural practices while analyzing the ways these practices vary with local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and with personal circumstances of income, gender, and family configuration.