The scientists and explorers profiled in this engaging study of pioneering Euro-American exploration of late imperial and Republican China range from botanists to ethnographers to missionaries. Although a diverse lot, all believed in objective, progressive, and universally valid science; a close association between scientific and humanistic knowledge; a lack of conflict between science and faith; and the union of the natural world and the world of "nature people." Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands examines their cultural and personal assumptions while emphasizing their remarkable lives, and considers their contributions to a body of knowledge that has important contemporary significance. Essays are devoted to D. C. Graham, Joseph Rock, Reginald Farrer and George Forrest, Ernest Henry Wilson, Paul Vial, Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang, and Friedrich Weiss and Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg. Richly illustrated with historic photographs, this collection reveals the extraordinary lives and times of these remarkable people.

This book explores Sino-Indian tensions from the angle of state-building, showing how they stem from their competition for the Himalayan people's allegiance.

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.

No detailed description available for "Stories from an Ancient Land".

Dwelling in the highland areas of Northeast India, Bangladesh, Southwest China, Taiwan, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Peninsular Malaysia are hundreds of “peoples”. Together their population adds up to 100 million, more than most of the countries they live in. Yet in each of these countries, they are regarded as minorities. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on about 300 groups, the ten countries they live in, their historical figures, and their salient political, economic, social, cultural and religious aspects. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more.

This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present. Organized around four themes—“Parameters of Human Life,” “Formations of the Human Subject,” “Disciplining Knowledge,” and “Deciphering Health”—it scrutinizes the development of scientific knowledge and technical interest in human organization within an evolving Chinese society. Spanning the Ming-Qing, Republican, and contemporary periods, its twenty-four original, synthetic chapters ground the mutual construction of “China” and “the human” in concrete historical contexts. As a state-of-the-field survey, a definitive textbook for teaching, and an authoritative reference that guides future research, this book pushes Sinology, comparative cultural studies, and the history of science in new directions.

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.

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.

The Burlington Fine Arts Club was founded in London in 1866 as a gentlemen’s club with a singular remit – to exhibit members’ art collections. Exhibitions were proposed, organized, and furnished by a group of prominent members of British society who included aristocrats, artists, bankers, politicians, and museum curators. Exhibitions at their grand house in Mayfair brought many private collections and collectors to light, using members’ social connections to draw upon the finest and most diverse objects available. Through their unique mode of presentation, which brought museum-style display and interpretation to a grand domestic-style gallery space, they also brought two forms of curatorial and art historical practice together in one unusual setting, enabling an unrestricted form of connoisseurship, where new categories of art were defined and old ones expanded. The history of this remarkable group of people has yet to be presented and is explored here for the first time. Through a framework of exhibition themes ranging from Florentine painting to Ancient Egyptian art, a study of lenders, objects, and their interpretation paints a picture of private collecting activities, connoisseurship, and art world practice that is surprisingly diverse and interconnected.