Chieftains into Ancestors

This volume combines anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis to build a new regional history that documents the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations arising from imperial China’s nation-building process.

David Faure is Wei Lun Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Ho Ts'ui-p'ing is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica and an adjunct associate professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University. She is the co-editor of State, Market and Ethnic Groups Contextualized.

Contributors: Lian Ruizhi, Huang Shu-li, James Wilkerson, He Xi, Xie Xiaohui, Kao Ya-ning, and Zhang Yingqiang.

John E. Herman, author of Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200-1700:
We need to examine state expansion from the perspective of local societies and, with Chieftains into Ancestors, we now have the conceptual and methodological tools to do this. This is historical anthropology and micro-history at its best.