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.

Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world. Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice. China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.

Although most studies of rural society in China deal with land villages, in fact very substantial numbers of Chinese people lived by the sea, on the rivers and the lakes. In land villages, mostly given to farming, people lived in permanent houses, whereas on the margins of the waterways many people lived in boats and sheds, and developed their own marked features, often being viewed as pariahs by the rest of Chinese society. This book examines these boat and shed living people. It takes an "historical anthropological" approach, combining research in official records with investigations among surviving boat and shed living people, their oral traditions and their personal records. Besides outlining the special features of the boat and shed living people, the book considers why pressures over time drove many to move to land villages, and how boat and shed living people were gradually marginalised, often losing their fishing rights to those who claimed imperial connections. The book covers the subject from Ming and Qing times up to the present.

This book previously published in 2015 as vol. 20, no. 4 and vol. 21, no. 1 of Chinese sociology and anthropology". Seventh section of Chinese Studies on China series.

In a path-breaking series of essays the contributors to this collection explore the development of anthropological research in Asia. The volume includes writings on Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

This volume presents contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, and documents in rich ethnographic detail its historical complexity and regional diversity. The collection's analytical emphasis is on the modern 'metamorphoses' of kinship in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but the essays also offer ample historical documentation and comparison.

Asian Anthropology raises important questions regarding the nature of anthropology and particularly the production and consumption of anthropological knowledge in Asia. Instead of assuming a universal standard or trajectory for the development of anthropology in Asia, the contributors to this volume begin with the appropriate premise that anthropologies in different Asian countries have developed and continue to develop according to their own internal dynamics. With chapters written by an international group of experts in the field, Asian Anthropology will be a useful teaching tool and a valuable resource for scholars working in Asian anthropology.

Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference.