Modernity is both global and plural, now as much a phenomenon of the countryside and indigenous peoples as it is of urban residents. In Africa, South Asia and South America, for example, religion is an important conduit through which indigenous people adopt modernity (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Kapferer 2002; Taussig 1980). For other indigenous peoples, secular, everyday life experiences provide such a conduit. This chapter explores modernity as experienced by indigenous Tibetans in a rural community in Sichuan Province in the People’s Republic of China. Here secular experience is the means through which modernity is realized, and the state plays...

The Qiang, numbering about three hundred thousand, are one of the fifty-five officially designated ‘national minorities’ in the People’s Republic of China; they speak a Tibeto-Burman language.¹ This chapter presents thecoufang(族房), lineage, or ‘people under the feet of one ancestor’, as the central social category and pivotal social grouping in Qiang social life.² Examination of thecoufanggraveyards uncovers the historical process whereby the village was incorporated into the imperial military network, as well as aspects of the transition to Han literacy. This chapter argues that thecoufangplayed, and continues to play, an important role helping villagers...

Clothing is a cultural medium through which people speak: it is a complex phenomenon deeply involved in identity and cross-cultural boundary setting. Examining the concept of ‘style’ contributes to our understanding of material culture. So how is the making of clothes significant for cultural and social reproduction? McCracken suggests we rethink the relationship between culture and consumption. He argues that the social sciences have been slow to see the relationship between these, and slower still to take seriously the idea that consumption can contribute to cultural and social reproduction (1990: xi). The clothing examined in this chapter is not merely...

Pierre Clastres notes that primitive societies are not ‘incomplete’, even without a state, literacy or written historical records (Clastres 1987). In line with this way of viewing and understanding non-modern or non-Western society, this chapter focuses on a peripheral society that has retained its autonomy by performing individuality within its own cultural contexts. This, however, does not imply an approach towards the morally autonomous individualism found in modern Euro-American societies.

This chapter explores the local expression of individuality in the love-song performance of an upland Miao society in eastern Guizhou in south-west China, illustrated using extracts from a song of...

During 1979 and 1980, the one-child-per-couple policy of the People’s Republic of China became a fundamental national policy and was enforced nationwide through the mobilization of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the party-state (White 1990, 1994; Scharping 2003).¹ Afterwards, birth planning was written into the PRC Constitution as the obligation of each married couple.²

Almost simultaneously, the leaders of the party-state launched an economic reform programme, vowing to lead the country in the direction of the policy goal of becoming a relatively well-off society (xiaokang shehui) based on ‘socialist construction’ in the next millennium. In the context of economic...

While the notion of culture may have been invented in Western academic circles, those circles no longer have monopoly over its usage. Even in academic circles, such as in the field of cultural anthropology itself, there has never been a single, standardized definition that holds the discipline together. The result of the notion’s entry into popular discourse has been a diversification of ‘culture’ as a concept so that its usage has been stretched to encompass the material and the immaterial, abstract notions as well as concrete practice, so much so that the term ‘culture’ seems to have become a catch-all...

In this chapter, I employ hip-hop as a metaphor and model in order to interpret the bodily expressions of Amis young men in A’tolan village, eastern Taiwan.¹ I argue first that the way mainstream Taiwanese people and some scholars misinterpret contemporary Amis dances as representing a loss of ‘cultural traditions’ is based on an imaginary of ‘ nature’, of the ‘pure’, ‘simple’ and ‘marginal’ bodies of indigenous people. Secondly, however, the bodily expressions of Amis young men represent a complicated social and cultural context, within which they create an alternative style and form of ‘hip-hop’.

Public stereotypes regarding indigenous peoples...

When I began my fieldwork in a Paiwan village in southern Taiwan several years ago, I was greatly intrigued by the lack of correspondence between various historical documents and local oral history. It is hardly surprising to anthropologists to find written text and social history in contention with one another. It becomes more interesting, however, when they are intertwined with ‘social reality’, that is, with what is presently happening around us in a village.

Rightly or wrongly, while researchers often attempt to draw a line between a historian’s or an anthropologist’s own written texts and the lives of those in...

Studies of ethnicity in multi-ethnic societies have been one of the central issues in anthropology and sociology since the 1960s. This has stimulated studies of indigenous people in Taiwan, which have been popular both academically and politically.

The Thao were officially recognized as a discrete indigenous group in September 2001. Before then they were regarded as being part of the Tsou, another indigenous group in central Taiwan. The Taiwanese government had classified indigenous populations into nine groups, so the ‘newly’ recognized Thao people became the tenth. This was a welcome event for the Thao, and it also represented an important...

This chapter describes thesham-ne(literally ‘third morning’) rite, a ritual observance of the Nung people celebrating the birth of a couple’s newly born first child. This observance is ideally held on the third day after the birth, from which the name ‘third morning’ comes, but the exact day may be modified to accommodate people’s work schedules and holidays, which follow the state calendar. Nevertheless, indispensable aspects of this ritual, such as who brings what and who hangs up thevawhere, have remained constant, generation after generation. I argue that this practice, carried on for at least a hundred...