The Age of Wild Ghosts

Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

514 Seiten

2023
Academic Studies Press (Verlag)
979-8-88719-132-4 (ISBN)

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In Erik Mueggler’s powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the “age of wild ghosts.” Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise “wild ghosts,” he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.

Erik Mueggler is an anthropologist and historian based at University of Michigan, who hasworked with Indigenous peoples in Southwest China for many years. The Age of Wild Ghosts was his first book; others include The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011) and Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He is currently finishing a book titled The Book of Cunning and Treachery: Writing, Sovereignty, and Bondage in a Qing Indigenous Domain. His work has received many honors and awards, including a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Erscheinungsdatum	17.10.2023
Übersetzer	Aleksei Kamenskii
Zusatzinfo	Illustrations
Verlagsort	Brighton
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 228 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	979-8-88719-132-4 / 9798887191324
Zustand	Neuware