Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China

by Feuchtwang,Stephan

• ISBN13: 9781844720101
• ISBN10: 1844720101
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-06-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures. Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state. In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption. The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments	v
Notes on the contributors	vii
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 Theorising Place	3	(30)
Stephan Feuchtwang
Part 1: URBAN PLACES
Chapter 2 Mapping 'Chaos': The Dong Xi Fo Feuds of Quanzhou, 1644-1839	33	(28)
Wang Mingming
Chapter 3 Breathing New Life into Beijing Culture: New 'Traditional' Public Spaces and the Chaoyang Neighbourhood Yangge Associations	61	(18)
Florence Graezer
Chapter 4 Establishing 'Home' Away From Home: Chinese Migrants in the Industrial Transformation of Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong	79	(14)
Graham Johnson
Chapter 5 Traditional Territories in a Contemporary City: Agency and Policy in the Preservation of Hereditary Rights	93	(24)
Elizabeth Lominska Johnson
Part 2: RURAL PLACES
Chapter 6 'The Place Where the Sage Wouldn't Go' and 'The Place Where the Sage was Born': Mutual Definitions of Place in Shandong and Heilongjiang	117	(16)
Zhao Bingxiang
Chapter 7 Hmong Places and Locality	133	(16)
Nicholas Tapp
Chapter 8 Senses of Local Place and the Temples of West Hunan	149	(14)
Mary Rack
Chapter 9 Curves and the Urbanisation of Meifa Village	163	(20)
Stephan Feuchtwang
AFTERWORD
Chapter 10 Space and Place	183	(14)
Laurie Kain Hart
Index	197