Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
"In terms of its richness of data, this is one of the best ethnographies I
have read about any locale anywhere. It is also exemplary in its novel and
creative synthesis of literary analysis and more conventional social scien
ce-oriented anthropology. . . . The book has a consistent focus, both dist
urbing and riveting, on the ways that pain, loss, and social upheaval are
woven into people's attempts to reconstitute new lives over some fifty yea
rs of rapid social change." (P. Steven Sangren, author of Chinese Socio-lo
gics )
"Mueggler writes with uncommon grace, elegance, and charm. . . . Readers w
ill come away from this book with lasting memories of various aspects of t
hese peoples' lives (death, hunger, fear, sex, humor (and with an understa
nding of their all-too-powerful humanity as well as their genius for adapt
ing their lives to the often-changing demands of the communist state.") (R
obert B. Edgerton, author of Death or Glory)
"A rare work that really gives us a new way of thinking about what moderni
ty (or one version of it, anyway) means to people who have had it thrust
upon them involuntarily.") (Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Diverge
nce) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Michigan.
Book Description
In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority comm
unity 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, peop
le 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 syst
em that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive unde
rstanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region
, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and po
etics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To ex
orcise "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 recon
ciliation. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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