The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China - Softcover

Mueggler, Erik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520226313 ISBN 13: 9780520226319

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

The Age of Wild Ghosts This text examines contemporary Chinese history from the Great Leap Famine (1958-1960) to the 1990s. Stories from this period described as "the age of ghosts", convey aspects of pain, loss, and social upheaval and give an insight into the lives of the people who lived through them. Full description

About this title

Review:

"Mueggler has written a fascinating and disturbing tale of guilt and failure in a period of chaotic change, providing ethnographic data on a minority group previously almost unknown in Western language literature. The anguish of the Yi in a world out of control is well captured in chapters that alternate from actual tries to analysis."--Choice

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 science-oriented anthropology. . . . The book has a consistent focus, both disturbing and riveting, on the ways that pain, loss, and social upheaval are woven into people's attempts to reconstitute new lives over some fifty years of rapid social change."--P. Steven Sangren, author of "Chinese Sociologics"

"Mueggler writes with uncommon grace, elegance, and charm. . . . Readers will come away from this book with lasting memories of various aspects of these peoples' lives--death, hunger, fear, sex, humor--and with an understanding of their all-too-powerful humanity as well as their genius for adapting their lives to the often-changing demands of the communist state."

Robert B. Edgerton, author of "Death or Glory

"A rare work that really gives us a new way of thinking about what modernity (or one version of it, anyway) means to people who have had it thrust upon them involuntarily."

Kenneth Pomeranz, author of "The Great Divergence

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0520226313
• ISBN 13: 9780520226319
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376