Hans Steinmüller
Biographic Data
| ID | 78132 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hans Steinmüller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hans |
| FAMILY NAME | Steinmüller |
| SIGNATURE | STEINMÜLLER H |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5921-421X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 154 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Ethnographic Complicity: Mutual Surveillance in Central China and in the Wa State of Myanmar
The method of participant observation often generates mistrust and suspicion; sometimes participation and observation also result in complicity between fieldworkers and interlocutors. Such ethnographic complicity, however, takes different forms and is expressed differently according to the co-ordinates of local knowledge and social institutions. This article compares ethnographic complicities in central China and in the Wa State of Burma. Accusat…
Nightmare egalitarianism: Commensuration, autonomy, and imagination
Egalitarianism is often idealized, but many anthropologists have noted its potential for nightmare scenarios involving envy, mistrust, and violence. This introduction outlines a framework for understanding the negative emotions and violence associated with the forces of commensuration that are necessary to make people equal. The levelling effect of commensuration stands in tension with autonomy and mutuality; and may be contained through imaginat…
No egalitarianism in the Wa hills: Relative Commensuration in Kinship, Sacrifice, and War
The autonomy of the United Wa State Army of Myanmar today is said to be based on the egalitarianism of Wa communities in the past. The analysis of commensuration in kinship, sacrifice, and war challenges these portrayals of autonomy and egalitarianism. In the past, the making and taking of lives could not be measured in absolute terms but required situationally specific and relational commensuration. Since the 1960s, commensuration has intensifie…
Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility
The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to 'read' the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive fo…
State, Mind, and Legibility Without Writing in the Wa State of Myanmar
State legibility is an extended metaphor of writing, but does not have to be based on writing itself. In the Wa State of Myanmar - a de-facto state with high levels of illiteracy - state legibility is produced through a centralisation of information in military government and a grid-like re-organisation of settlement patterns. This article explores two correlations between projects of state legibility and ways of addressing others' intentions: Fi…
Leadership Programmes: Success, Self-improvement, and Relationship Management Among New Middle-class Chinese
In the last decade, business and life coaching programmes have rapidly proliferated in the People's Republic of China. Such programmes promise radical self-transformations aiming at individual success and social responsibility. The methods of most coaching programmes popular in China today are characterised by strict discipline and emotional expressivity, which are enacted in personal bonds between participants and coaches. This article describes…
Shanzhai: Creative Imitation of China in Highland Myanmar
The Wa State of Myanmar is often called “shanzhai China,” that is, a lesser imitation of China. This essay unpacks the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation at the Chinese periphery, embodied in shanzhai 山寨 practices. Literally “mountain fortress,” shanzhai refers to the provenience of cheap brand imitations, made by mountain dwellers who cannot afford the original. The term is commonly used to describe creative and ironic bran…
The Aura of the Local in Chinese Anthropology: Grammars, Media and Institutions of Attention Management
Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become 'Chinese'? This article deals with a series of Chinese 'native anthropologies', from Republican-era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the m…
Grace Is Incommensurability in Commensuration: The Semantics of Bwan among Three Generations of Wa and Lahu Prophets
Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be unde…
Sovereignty as Care: Acquaintances, Mutuality, and Scale in the Wa State of Myanmar
Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes ignore the importance of care for the exer…
Pioneers of the plantation economy: Militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar
The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and ag…
Para‐nationalism: Sovereignty and authenticity in the Wa State of Myanmar
If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para‐nationalism is nationalism in the state of war: urgent, yet ultimately futile. Modern warfare makes it particularly urgent for historical latecomers to national unity to claim their national sovereignty. Those claims, however, sometimes have to be postponed for the very same reason of military pragmatism. The double bind of nationalism at war is illustrated with the c…
State Legibility and Mind Legibility in the Original Political Society
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society' as a society where supposedly 'egalitarian' relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is 'a state', but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political stat…
Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar
If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance allows for ethnographic attention to emerg…
The moral economy of militarism: Peasant economy, military state and Chinese capitalism in the Wa State of Myanmar
If the moral economies of underprivileged communities are defined in opposition to the rationality of political economy, it is easy to overlook the moral justifications of market and state. War economies and military states, however, force us to look at the nodes of moral and economic action that connect the powerful and the powerless. The Wa State of Myanmar, a de‐facto state governed by an insurgent army, represents the making of such a moral e…
Les fins de l'égalitarisme: Introduction
Les collectifs humains vivant de maniere libre et autonome, ignorant tout du commandement et de l'obeissance, et valorisant le partage spontane et la mutualite peuvent-ils etre qualifies d'« egalitaires » ? La ou il n'y a pas d'Etat, de legislation ou de sanctions sociales pour garantir l'egalite entre tous, peut-on parler d'« egalitarisme » comme pratique sociale vecue sachant, qu'en ces lieux, cette notion n'existe pas ? La realite de ce type d…
Conscription by Capture in the Wa State of Myanmar: Acquaintances, Anonymity, Patronage, and the Rejection of Mutuality
Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on …
China in Comparative Perspective
Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Komplizenschaft. Alltagsethik im ländlichen China
Im Zuge der enormen politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Vernderungen in der Volksrepublik China seit dem Ende
Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State
Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary people in everyday life. They may find themselves drawing on a number of different moral frameworks, being caught between official and popular discourses, and encountering radically different representations of China's past and its future. This volume deals with irony and cynicism in social life and local communities in China, and specifically in relation to…
'Father Mao' and the Country-Family
What does it mean when Mao Zedong is called 'Father Mao' and when ordinary people in central China put a poster of Mao in the place of their ancestors and the emperor? This article analyzes ordinary affection for the Chinese state and explores changing ideas of the leader as a father and the country as a family. The first part deals with the historical transformation of these metaphors from the late Qing dynasty to the Communist Revolution and Ma…
Like a virgin? Hymen restoration operations in contemporary China (Respond to this article at https: (Www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)
In this article, the authors use the example of hymen repair surgeries to discuss the reconfigurations of patriarchal practices in the People's Republic of China. Following a brief overview of concepts of virginity and the importance of the hymen in China, they describe the spread of hymen restorations in the reform era. These surgeries link up traditionalist and ‘patriarchal’ practices and relationships with particular expressions of sexual libe…
Moskowitz, Marc L: Go Nation. Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China
Anthropos , Seite 646 - 647
Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China
Le savoir-rire en Chine
In China, the proper use of smiles and laughter is the subject of detailed manuals, conferences, and courses, which expressly recommend always taking into account the social situation in which laughter occurs, as its learning cannot be done out of context. Laughter and smiles create "communities of connivance", characterized by a shared implicit understanding of the "incongruity" of certain social forms or discourses. This article particularly ad…
Communities of complicity: Notes on state formation and local sociality in rural China
In this article, I deal with the tension in rural China between vernacular practice in local sociality and official representations related to processes of state formation and with the ways in which this tension is revealed and concealed through gestures of embarrassment, irony, and cynicism. Such gestures point toward a space of intimate self‐knowledge that I call a “community of complicity,” a concept derived from Michael Herzfeld's outline of …
The moving boundaries of social heat: Gambling in rural China
Whilst gambling for money was prohibited during the Maoist era, since the 1980s it has become very common in many rural areas of central China. It is often the major communal activity in many villages, a focus point of daily gossip and an object of government campaigns. I describe several forms of gambling common in Bashan township, Eastern Hubei province, and relate them to local discourses on capability/skill and luck/fate. Gambling reproduces …
The state of irony in China
In everyday life, people in China as elsewhere have to confront large-scale incongruities between different representations of history and state. They do so frequently by way of indirection, that is, by taking ironic, cynical or embarrassed positions. Those who understand such indirect expressions based on a shared experiential horizon form what I call a 'community of complicity'. In examples drawn from everyday politics of memory, the representa…
Les fins de l'égalitarisme: Introduction
Les collectifs humains vivant de maniere libre et autonome, ignorant tout du commandement et de l'obeissance, et valorisant le partage spontane et la mutualite peuvent-ils etre qualifies d'« egalitaires » ? La ou il n'y a pas d'Etat, de legislation ou de sanctions sociales pour garantir l'egalite entre tous, peut-on parler d'« egalitarisme » comme pratique sociale vecue sachant, qu'en ces lieux, cette notion n'existe pas ? La realite de ce type d…
Conscription by Capture in the Wa State of Myanmar: Acquaintances, Anonymity, Patronage, and the Rejection of Mutuality
Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on …
Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar
If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance allows for ethnographic attention to emerg…
Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility
The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to 'read' the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive fo…
Sovereignty as Care: Acquaintances, Mutuality, and Scale in the Wa State of Myanmar
Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes ignore the importance of care for the exer…
State Legibility and Mind Legibility in the Original Political Society
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society' as a society where supposedly 'egalitarian' relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is 'a state', but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political stat…
The reflective peephole method: Ruralism and awkwardness in the ethnography of rural China
Starting with Arthur Smith’s metaphor of the ‘peephole method’, this article explores the issues of ruralism and awkwardness which underlie much ethnographic fieldwork in rural China. In the first part, the continuing influence of ruralism—the idea that the Chinese countryside represents the ‘real’ China—is discussed. This idea is based on a radical conceptual separation of the countryside and the city, which denies modern everydayness to the cou…
State, Mind, and Legibility Without Writing in the Wa State of Myanmar
State legibility is an extended metaphor of writing, but does not have to be based on writing itself. In the Wa State of Myanmar - a de-facto state with high levels of illiteracy - state legibility is produced through a centralisation of information in military government and a grid-like re-organisation of settlement patterns. This article explores two correlations between projects of state legibility and ways of addressing others' intentions: Fi…
Grace Is Incommensurability in Commensuration: The Semantics of Bwan among Three Generations of Wa and Lahu Prophets
Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be unde…
Para‐nationalism: Sovereignty and authenticity in the Wa State of Myanmar
If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para‐nationalism is nationalism in the state of war: urgent, yet ultimately futile. Modern warfare makes it particularly urgent for historical latecomers to national unity to claim their national sovereignty. Those claims, however, sometimes have to be postponed for the very same reason of military pragmatism. The double bind of nationalism at war is illustrated with the c…
Le savoir-rire en Chine
In China, the proper use of smiles and laughter is the subject of detailed manuals, conferences, and courses, which expressly recommend always taking into account the social situation in which laughter occurs, as its learning cannot be done out of context. Laughter and smiles create "communities of connivance", characterized by a shared implicit understanding of the "incongruity" of certain social forms or discourses. This article particularly ad…
Leadership Programmes: Success, Self-improvement, and Relationship Management Among New Middle-class Chinese
In the last decade, business and life coaching programmes have rapidly proliferated in the People's Republic of China. Such programmes promise radical self-transformations aiming at individual success and social responsibility. The methods of most coaching programmes popular in China today are characterised by strict discipline and emotional expressivity, which are enacted in personal bonds between participants and coaches. This article describes…
The Aura of the Local in Chinese Anthropology: Grammars, Media and Institutions of Attention Management
Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become 'Chinese'? This article deals with a series of Chinese 'native anthropologies', from Republican-era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the m…
Like a virgin? Hymen restoration operations in contemporary China (Respond to this article at https: (Www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)
In this article, the authors use the example of hymen repair surgeries to discuss the reconfigurations of patriarchal practices in the People's Republic of China. Following a brief overview of concepts of virginity and the importance of the hymen in China, they describe the spread of hymen restorations in the reform era. These surgeries link up traditionalist and ‘patriarchal’ practices and relationships with particular expressions of sexual libe…
School killings in China: Society or wilderness (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Between March and May 2010 a series of school killings took place in mainland China. This article explores media discourses on the school killings and examines three cases in detail. It connects the search for underlying reasons and responsible authorities in relation to the murders with the wider search for ‘society’ in contemporary China, and concludes by emphasizing the gap between the official promotion of the idea of ‘society’ as a cohesive …
Communities of complicity: Notes on state formation and local sociality in rural China
In this article, I deal with the tension in rural China between vernacular practice in local sociality and official representations related to processes of state formation and with the ways in which this tension is revealed and concealed through gestures of embarrassment, irony, and cynicism. Such gestures point toward a space of intimate self‐knowledge that I call a “community of complicity,” a concept derived from Michael Herzfeld's outline of …
How popular Confucianism became embarrassing
In the past, most farmhouses in central China had an ancestral shrine and a paper scroll with the Chinese letters for "heaven, earth, emperor, ancestors, and teachers" on the wall opposite the main entrance. The ancestral shrine and paper scroll were materializations of the central principles of popular Confucianism. This article deals with their past and present. It describes how in everyday action and in ritual this shrine marked a spatial and …
The reflective peephole method: Ruralism and awkwardness in the ethnography of rural China
Starting with Arthur Smith’s metaphor of the ‘peephole method’, this article explores the issues of ruralism and awkwardness which underlie much ethnographic fieldwork in rural China. In the first part, the continuing influence of ruralism—the idea that the Chinese countryside represents the ‘real’ China—is discussed. This idea is based on a radical conceptual separation of the countryside and the city, which denies modern everydayness to the cou…
School killings in China: Society or wilderness (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Between March and May 2010 a series of school killings took place in mainland China. This article explores media discourses on the school killings and examines three cases in detail. It connects the search for underlying reasons and responsible authorities in relation to the murders with the wider search for ‘society’ in contemporary China, and concludes by emphasizing the gap between the official promotion of the idea of ‘society’ as a cohesive …
The state of irony in China
In everyday life, people in China as elsewhere have to confront large-scale incongruities between different representations of history and state. They do so frequently by way of indirection, that is, by taking ironic, cynical or embarrassed positions. Those who understand such indirect expressions based on a shared experiential horizon form what I call a 'community of complicity'. In examples drawn from everyday politics of memory, the representa…
The moving boundaries of social heat: Gambling in rural China
Whilst gambling for money was prohibited during the Maoist era, since the 1980s it has become very common in many rural areas of central China. It is often the major communal activity in many villages, a focus point of daily gossip and an object of government campaigns. I describe several forms of gambling common in Bashan township, Eastern Hubei province, and relate them to local discourses on capability/skill and luck/fate. Gambling reproduces …
China and postsocialist anthropology: Theorizing power and society after Communism - By Andrew Kipnis
Le savoir-rire en Chine
In China, the proper use of smiles and laughter is the subject of detailed manuals, conferences, and courses, which expressly recommend always taking into account the social situation in which laughter occurs, as its learning cannot be done out of context. Laughter and smiles create "communities of connivance", characterized by a shared implicit understanding of the "incongruity" of certain social forms or discourses. This article particularly ad…
Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State
Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary people in everyday life. They may find themselves drawing on a number of different moral frameworks, being caught between official and popular discourses, and encountering radically different representations of China's past and its future. This volume deals with irony and cynicism in social life and local communities in China, and specifically in relation to…
'Father Mao' and the Country-Family
What does it mean when Mao Zedong is called 'Father Mao' and when ordinary people in central China put a poster of Mao in the place of their ancestors and the emperor? This article analyzes ordinary affection for the Chinese state and explores changing ideas of the leader as a father and the country as a family. The first part deals with the historical transformation of these metaphors from the late Qing dynasty to the Communist Revolution and Ma…
Like a virgin? Hymen restoration operations in contemporary China (Respond to this article at https: (Www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)
In this article, the authors use the example of hymen repair surgeries to discuss the reconfigurations of patriarchal practices in the People's Republic of China. Following a brief overview of concepts of virginity and the importance of the hymen in China, they describe the spread of hymen restorations in the reform era. These surgeries link up traditionalist and ‘patriarchal’ practices and relationships with particular expressions of sexual libe…
Moskowitz, Marc L: Go Nation. Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China
Anthropos , Seite 646 - 647
Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China
Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Komplizenschaft. Alltagsethik im ländlichen China
Im Zuge der enormen politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Vernderungen in der Volksrepublik China seit dem Ende
China in Comparative Perspective
Conscription by Capture in the Wa State of Myanmar: Acquaintances, Anonymity, Patronage, and the Rejection of Mutuality
Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on …
The moral economy of militarism: Peasant economy, military state and Chinese capitalism in the Wa State of Myanmar
If the moral economies of underprivileged communities are defined in opposition to the rationality of political economy, it is easy to overlook the moral justifications of market and state. War economies and military states, however, force us to look at the nodes of moral and economic action that connect the powerful and the powerless. The Wa State of Myanmar, a de‐facto state governed by an insurgent army, represents the making of such a moral e…
Les fins de l'égalitarisme: Introduction
Les collectifs humains vivant de maniere libre et autonome, ignorant tout du commandement et de l'obeissance, et valorisant le partage spontane et la mutualite peuvent-ils etre qualifies d'« egalitaires » ? La ou il n'y a pas d'Etat, de legislation ou de sanctions sociales pour garantir l'egalite entre tous, peut-on parler d'« egalitarisme » comme pratique sociale vecue sachant, qu'en ces lieux, cette notion n'existe pas ? La realite de ce type d…
Pioneers of the plantation economy: Militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar
The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and ag…
Para‐nationalism: Sovereignty and authenticity in the Wa State of Myanmar
If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para‐nationalism is nationalism in the state of war: urgent, yet ultimately futile. Modern warfare makes it particularly urgent for historical latecomers to national unity to claim their national sovereignty. Those claims, however, sometimes have to be postponed for the very same reason of military pragmatism. The double bind of nationalism at war is illustrated with the c…
State Legibility and Mind Legibility in the Original Political Society
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society' as a society where supposedly 'egalitarian' relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is 'a state', but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political stat…
Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar
If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance allows for ethnographic attention to emerg…
Shanzhai: Creative Imitation of China in Highland Myanmar
The Wa State of Myanmar is often called “shanzhai China,” that is, a lesser imitation of China. This essay unpacks the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation at the Chinese periphery, embodied in shanzhai 山寨 practices. Literally “mountain fortress,” shanzhai refers to the provenience of cheap brand imitations, made by mountain dwellers who cannot afford the original. The term is commonly used to describe creative and ironic bran…
The Aura of the Local in Chinese Anthropology: Grammars, Media and Institutions of Attention Management
Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become 'Chinese'? This article deals with a series of Chinese 'native anthropologies', from Republican-era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the m…
Grace Is Incommensurability in Commensuration: The Semantics of Bwan among Three Generations of Wa and Lahu Prophets
Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be unde…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (16 works) · China (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (11 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (10 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (9 works) · Psychology (8 works)