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The Age of Wild Ghosts
Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2001
About this book
In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Erik Mueggler
Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Illustrations
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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A Note on Orthography and Transcription
xiii -
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Chapter one. Introduction
1 -
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Chapter two. An Intimate Immensity
22 -
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Chapter three. An Empty Frame
51 -
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Chapter four. The Valley House
95 -
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Chapter five. Digested Words
127 -
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Chapter six. A Spectral State
159 -
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Chapter seven. A Geography of Pain
199 -
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Chapter eight. The Age of Wild Ghosts
250 -
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Chapter nine. A Shattered Gourd
285 -
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Notes
321 -
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References
337 -
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Index
353
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 9, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780520935549
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
375
eBook ISBN:
9780520935549
Keywords for this book
rural minority; southwest china; ethnography; nation state; great leap famine; rotating headman ship system; mao; maoist regime; tibeto burman language; state power; reconciliation; peoples republic of china; famine; great leap forward; man made disaster; china; wild ghosts; great chinese famine; community; mountains; violence; life and death; rituals; poetics; justice; humanities; memory; starvation; anti rightist campaign; sino soviet split; natural disasters; man made errors
