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Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

The Yunnanese from southwestern China have for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in particular has served as a “back door” to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers. Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have fled to Burma. This book is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Since the 1960s, Yunnanese migrants of Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily consumption goods. The book details the trade's organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use of modern transportation, and reconstructs trading routes while examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants' mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further afield by land, sea, and air.

Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The wide-spread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity poses an intense moral problem; in the “land of dust,” disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. This book considers the results of several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, time spent with the “ninjas,” as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. As such, the book is a well-structured read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. It provides a uniquely up-close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice, and ways of envisioning and experiencing what counts as “value” in the Mongolian gold rush today.

How do specific secular and religious ideologies—such as nationalism, neoliberalism, atheism, Pentecostalism, Tablighi Islam, and shamanism—gain popularity and when do they lose traction? To answer these questions, this book critically examines the trajectories of a range of ideologies as they move into the post-Soviet frontier in Central Asia. Ethnographically rooted in the everyday life of a former mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan, this book shows how residents have dealt with the existential and epistemic crises that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Residents became enchanted by the truths of Muslim and Christian missionaries, embraced the teachings of neoliberal and nationalist ideologues, and were riveted by the visions of shamanic healers. But no matter how much enthusiasm and hope these ideas first engendered, the commitment to any of them rarely lasted very long. The book finds that there is an inverse relationship between the tenacity and the effervescence of collective ideas, between their strength to persist and their ability to trigger committed action. Introducing the concept of pulsation, the book argues that ideational power must be understood in relation to three aspects: the voicing of the idea, its tension with everyday reality, and its reverberation within groups of listeners. The conclusion that the power of conviction is rooted in the instability of sociocultural contexts is a message that has relevance far beyond urban Central Asia.

For many Muslims throughout the world, oral preaching provides the most accessible and enjoyable medium for learning about Islam and its meanings for everyday life. This is true in Indonesia’s West Java province, where almost 98% of the population of around forty-three million practices Islam. Despite its popularity, Indonesia’s Islamic elites are concerned about the value of preaching. They see that Islam provides directives and motivations towards progress in areas of social and political concern, but argue that this progress will not be achieved if Muslims are satisfied with the pleasing artifice of clever preachers. Millie spent fourteen months in the company of some of West Java’s most successful Islamic preachers, but also spent time with critics of listening. He described and explores a dichotomy between Islamic speech which succeeds because it is shaped to suit listeners’ social realities, and discourses about Muslim subjectivity that connect media consumption with aspirations for social and political progress, and which portray listening as anachronistic and inefficacious. This detailed analysis sheds light on a question that is increasingly important in efforts to understand contemporary Muslim societies: What is the place of pious listening in the complex societies of today?

This book examines novel ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. At the center of the book are rival groups of Indonesian student activists in Indonesia who are behaving in similarly experimental ways. Progressive Muslim activists are reading humanistic and social scientific books and engaging in satire to formulate an inclusive understanding of the religion, while conservative Islamists are using Western techniques of accounting and self-help to develop religious puritanism. These religious practices have been made possible by deposal of President Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998 and the subsequent adoption of democratic systems. At the same time, the Indonesian case study, which occurs in a heightened political context, brings into sharper relief processes happening in Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on not only their scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those that originate in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as adversarial to the West, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell.

India and the Patent Wars examines struggles over patents and access to medicine among pharmaceutical producers, activists and others under a new global intellectual property regime. India, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical exporters, has been at the center of these struggles, and this book explores multiple perspectives in these controversies including those of Indian pharmaceutical companies, which have long offered low-cost medicines to customers around the world, multinational pharmaceutical companies, which pursue patent claims in Indian courts and license drugs to Indian producers, and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, who are concerned about how their knowledge and practices relate to the new patent system.

Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics. This book argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness, and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes. Security concerns often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. The book situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. This book highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The book is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster.

In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosŏnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation. This book shows that the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea's transnational kin-making project. Unlike migrant brides who could acquire citizenship, migrant workers were denied the rights of long-term settlement, and stringent quotas restricted their entry. As a result, many Chosŏnjok migrants arranged paper marriages and fabricated familial ties to South Korean citizens to bypass the state apparatus of border control. The book depicts acts of “counterfeit kinship,” false documents, and the leaving behind of spouses and children as strategies implemented by disenfranchised people to gain mobility within the region's changing political economy.

Grounded in extensive ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery and self-defence, this book explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of ‘the living letter’ may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. One of the book’s central aims is to theorize the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory sensibilities, with an eye to its wider significance for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Remembering the Present examines the contemporary meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness in the countries of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar (Burma), which together make up a large part of what is known as the “Pali imaginaire” that spawned today’s global mindfulness movement. Drawing from the experiences of over 600 monks, psychiatrists, students, and villagers in the Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Remembering the Present shows how an attention to memory informs how people live today, and how mindfulness, as understood through its Buddhist Pāli-language term of sati, is intimately tied to local constructions of time, affect, power, emotion, and selfhood. With a focus on lived experience and the practical matters of people for whom mindfulness is a central part of everyday life, the book offers an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to ‘remember the present’ in the meditative practices, interpersonal worlds, and psychiatric hospitals for people in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought. The book will speak to an increasingly global network of psychological scientists, anthropologists, Buddhist studies scholars, and religious practitioners interested in contemporary Buddhist thought and the cultural phenomenology of religious experience.

Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic (SLM) examines global inequality beyond familiar discussions of exploitative relationships that divide the world between the “Third/First World” or “Global South/North”. SLM traces how women’s mobility is fundamentally reshaping their emotional worlds and social ties: with men, children, work, households of origin and destination communities. Since the early 1990s, post-Soviet women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey as labor migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning over a decade primarily in Istanbul, but also in Russia and southern Moldova, SLM portrays the lives of post-Soviet migrant women often employed for years on end in three distinct spheres: sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. It considers how they negotiate emotion, intimate relationships, and unpredictable state powers shaping their lives. SLM challenges us to reconsider assumptions about mobile women being solely defined by danger, victimization, and trafficking, and instead, turns our attention to the stories that speak to the myriad aspirations and complex lives of people engaged in transnational mobility. Above all, SLM portrays women migrants as people who foster intimate ties as they move between hubs of global capitalism and their home communities.

Despite massive changes to its economic policies, China continues to define itself as socialist; since 1949 and into the present, the Maoist slogan “Serve the People” has been a central point of moral and political orientation. Yet several decades of market-based reforms have resulted in high urban unemployment, transforming the proletariat vanguard into a new urban poor. How do unemployed workers come to terms with their split status, economically marginalized but still rhetorically central to the way China claims to understand itself? How does a state dedicated to serving “the people” manage the poverty of its citizens? This book addresses these questions in a book based on more than two years of fieldwork in a decaying residential area of Harbin in the northeast province of Heilongjiang. It analyzes the different experiences of poverty among laid-off urban workers and recent rural-to-urban migrants, two groups that share a common economic duress in China's Rustbelt cities but who rarely unite as one class owed protection by the state. Impoverished workers seek protection and recognition by making claims about “the people” and what they deserve. They redeploy the very language that the party-state had once used to venerate them, although their claim often contradicts government directives regarding how “the people” should be reborn as self-managing subjects. The slogan Serve the People is no longer a promise of the party-state but rather a demand made by the unemployed and the poor.

Markets and traders in Vietnam are on the move, literally and figuratively. The chapters in this volume offer rich ethnographic exploration of daily interactions among small-scale traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials within contemporary Vietnam and across its borders. These quotidian encounters occur within contested spaces, through expanding and contracting circuits of mobility, and across physical and conceptual boundaries that are fixed, yet porous. As they ply their wares and negotiate state regulations, traders shape notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, morality, and ethnicity. Taken together, the diverse contributions to this collection demonstrate that markets form and transform through uneven interplay among global processes, state regulatory regimes, individual identities, and local trajectories of economic and social development. Rather than impede market function, these trading frictions shape the necessary ground on which new forms of political economy emerge.

Offering the first long-term ethnographic study of Angola since the end of its decades-long internal conflict, this book offers an empirically and analytically innovative perspective that balances the ‘Africa rising’ narrative pervading mainstream media reports of post-war Angola, and complicates the clientelist account of Angolan politics that predominates in academic literature. It does so by privileging an ethnographic approach rooted in urban life to capture the radical social and spatial dynamics of everyday life in its capital, Luanda. By working through the emic notion of the system (o sistema), this study pays attention to both the material practices and the symbolic repertoires mobilized in the co-production of the political. Examining the functioning of the system through the eyes of its users, the book therefore builds upon, and extends anthropology’s critique of dominance as something produced by a group of select individuals, and investigates instead what it means and how it feels to live in and be part of such a polity.