The Age of Wild Ghosts

Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-0-520-22631-9
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 375 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 612 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mueggler, Erik

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnographie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Physische Anthropologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Umwelt und Kultur, Kulturökologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Sozialpsychologie Kulturpsychologie, Ethnopsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Politische Ethnologie, Recht, Organisation, Identität
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Materielle Kultur, Wirtschaftsethnologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Orthography and Transcription

1. Introduction
2. An Intimate Immensity
3. An Empty Frame
4. The Valley House
5. Digested Words
6. A Spectral State
7. A Geography of Pain
8. The Age of Wild Ghosts
9. A Shattered Gourd

Notes
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.