China Books

[Indent] One of the first anthropological studies based on extensive fieldwork in Vietnam in decades, Embodying Morality examines child-rearing in a rural Red River delta commune. It is a sophisticated and intriguing exploration of the ways in which a family system based on principles of male descent influences the moral upbringing and learning of girls and boys. In Vietnamese culture boys alone perpetuate the patrilineal family line; they incorporate the past, present, and future morality, honour, and reputation of their father's lineage. Within this patrilineal universe, girls are viewed as blank sheets of paper and must compensate for this deficiency by embodying tinh cam (sensitivity, sense). Such attitudes play a significant role in the upbringing of girls and boys and in how they learn to use and understand their bodies. Helle Rydstrøm offers fresh data - from audiotapes, videotapes, textbooks, observations in the home and at school - for identifying the transformation of local and educational constructions of females, males, and morality into body styles of girls, boys, women, and men. She highlights the extent to which body performances in daily life produce, reproduce, and challenge widespread northern Vietnamese ideals of femininity and masculinity. The author's highly original application of post-structuralist theory to Vietnam blends epistemology, practice, body, and socialisation theories with feminist analysis and relates these to children's learning. By proposing the body as an analytic category that can move feminist theory beyond the impasse of the well - established opposition between sex and gender, Embodying Morality demonstrates vividly how specific cultural elaborations of corporeality are learned, lived, and experienced in contemporary rural Vietnam. Helle Rydstrøm is assistant professor of social anthropology at the Department of Child Studies, Institute of Thematic Research, Linköping University, Sweden. (For this item please quote stock ID 20729) ISBN: 9780824825249

[Indent] In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anti-colonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or Communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousness. Print and Power begins with an overview of Vietnam's lively public spheres, bringing debates from Europe and the rest of Asia to Vietnamese studies with nuance and sophistication. It examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. Popular taste, rather than revolutionary or national ideology, determined to a large extent what was published, with limited intervention by the French authorities. A vibrant but hierarchical public realm of debate existed in Vietnam under authoritarian colonial rule. The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on premodern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945. Novel interpretations of the Nghe Tinh soviets (1930-1931), the first major communist uprising in Vietnam, and Vietnamese communist successes in World War II reveal the process by which communists built an audience for their views and made an extremely alien ideology comprehensible to growing numbers of Vietnamese. In what is by far the most thorough examination in English of modern Vietnamese Buddhism and its transformations, McHale argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Buddhism was not in decline during the 1920-1945 period; in fact more Buddhist texts were produced in Vietnam at that time than at any other in its history. This finding suggests that the heritage of the Vietnamese past played a crucial role in the late colonial period. Power & Print makes a significant contribution to Vietnamese and Asian studies and will be of compelling interest to those in the fields of comparative religion and European colonialism. Shawn McHale is professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. (For this item please quote stock ID 21228) ISBN: 9780824826659

[Indent] 'This fresh and discerning book is indispensable for our historical understanding of art and modernity in postcolonial Southeast Asia' - Kenneth George, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Painting has played a significant role in modern Vietnam. Postage stamps, billboards, and annual national exhibitions attest to its fundamental place in a country where painters may be hailed as national heroes and include among their number fervent nationalists, propagandists, even dissidents. As Vietnamese painting has gained prominence in the contemporary transnational art circuits of Southeast Asia, many artists have become millionaires, yet Vietnamese painting is generally overlooked in art history surveys of the region. Nora Taylor sets out here to change that. Painters in Hanoi engages with 20th-century Vietnam through its artists and their works, providing a new angle on a country most often portrayed through the lens of war and politics. Drawing on interviews with artists, cultural officers, curators, art critics, and others in Hanoi, Taylor surveys the impact artists have had on intellectual life in Vietnam. The book shows them within their own complex community, one fraught with tensions, politicking, and favouritism, yet also a sense of belonging. It describes their education, the role of the government in the arts, the rise and fall of individual artists, their influence as active players in the politics of place and gender, the audience for their work, and how tourism and the international art market have influenced it. Nora Annesley Taylor is associate professor of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian art and culture in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University. (For this item please quote stock ID 22627) ISBN: 9780824826130

Since the early 1990s, the shrine of Ba Chua Xu, the Lady of the Realm, has become the most visited religious site in southern Vietnam, receiving more than a million visitors annually. Mother, benevolent creditor, healer, relationship advisor, business consultant, the Lady of the Realm is one of a group of goddesses whose shrines attract devotees from all corners of rural and urban society. Goddess on the Rise follows these pilgrims' pathways, taking readers on a journey through a cultural landscape of popular rites, beliefs, and exegesis into a world where female deities reign supreme. Philip Taylor's in-depth study of pilgrimage introduces readers to the practical expectations, passions, and controversies that surround the goddesses, bringing to life the effervescence, creativity, and flux of modern Vietnamese religion. He offers important insights into people's everyday experience of the profound economic, cultural, and social transformations underway in this socialist country. 'Philip Taylor's engagingly written study of pilgrimages to the "Lady of the Realm" continues his unique investigations into social and cultural changes in the south since the communist revolution ... This work is vital for understanding southern Vietnam today' - Grant Evans, University of Hong Kong. Philip Taylor is research fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. (For this item please quote stock ID 22689) ISBN: 9780824828011

'Liam Kelley has given us a rich and excellent portrayal of Vietnamese literati in the early modern era, how they formed part of East Asian culture, and their literary responses to visiting China and its emperor. He well shows the thoughts, concerns, and knowledge of these 'Southern' scholars through their poetry as they proceeded to and from Beijing' - John Whitmore, University of Michigan. Beyond the Bronze Pillars is an innovative and iconoclastic look at the politico-cultural relationship between Vietnam and China in the 16th to 19th centuries. Overturning the established view that historically the Vietnamese sought to maintain a separate cultural identity and engaged in tributary relations with the Middle Kingdom solely to avoid invasion, Liam Kelley shows how Vietnamese literati sought to unify their cultural practices with those in China while fully recognising their country's political subservience. He does so by examining a body of writings known as Vietnamese 'envoy poetry'. Far from advocating their own cultural distinctiveness, Vietnamese envoy poets expressed a profound identification with what we would now call the Sinitic world and their political status as vassals in it. In mining a body of rich primary sources that no Western historian has previously employed, Kelley provides startling insights into the pre-modern Vietnamese view of their world and its politico-cultural relationship with China. Liam Kelley is assistant professor of history at the University of Hawai`i. (For this item please quote stock ID 24207) ISBN: 9780824828479

This concise guide to one of the world's hottest new markets provides a quick, comprehensive snapshot of the country. It identifies the key variables and provides practical information on the business environment, forms of foreign investment, laws, taxes, investment regulations, and includes contact addresses and advice on how to get started. (For this item please quote stock ID 11984) ISBN: 9781881896104

[Indent] One of the first medical ethnographies to be written on contemporary Vietnam, Familiar Medicine examines the practical ways in which people of the Red River Delta make sense of their bodies, illness, and medicine. Traditional knowledge and practices have persisted but are now expressed through and alongside global medical knowledge and commodities. Western medicine has been eagerly adopted and incorporated into everyday life in Vietnam, but not entirely on its own terms. Familiar Medicine takes a conjectural, interdisciplinary approach to its subject, weaving together history, ethnography, cultural geography, and survey materials to provide a rich and readable account of local practices in the context of an increasingly globalised world and growing microbial resistance to antibiotics. Theoretically, it draws on current critical and cultural theory (in particular applying Pierre Bourdieu's work on habitus and practical logics) in innovative but approachable ways. David Craig addresses a range of contemporary fascinations in medical anthropology and the sociology of health and illness: from the trafficking of medical commodities and ideas under globalisation to the hybridisation of local cultural formations, knowledge, and practices. His book will be required reading for international workers in health and development in Vietnam and a rich resource for courses in cultural geography, anthropology, medical sociology, regional studies, and public and international health. David Craig teaches the sociology of health and medicine and international social policy at the University of Auckland. (For this item please quote stock ID 18082) ISBN: 9780824824747

For centuries, Vietnamese have sustained the history of their nation, both actual and mythic, through their folklore. These stories, passed from generation to generation, contain not only the national saga, but also fundamental cultural values that Vietnamese hold dear. Some stories, like A Daughter's Love, are imaginative accounts of early Vietnamese history. Others, like The Anger of the Waters and the title story, Two Cakes Fit for a King, provide colourful explanations of the world and how it works. The Story of Watermelon Island offers readers a glimpse of the traditional agrarian values and way of life that are the foundation of Vietnamese society. Imaginative and captivating, funny and sometimes tragic, these tales have remained popular and culturally significant for Vietnamese, young and old, for hundreds of years. The intricate illustrations draw on centuries-old painting styles and on natural imagery and everyday life in Vietnam. (For this item please quote stock ID 21222) ISBN: 9780824826680

(For this item please quote stock ID 16752) ISBN: 9780824815530