Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.

Focuses on how certain constructs are bound up with ideas of tradition, power, and conformity and have become privileged over other constructs. Provides examples of the experiences of certain marginalized groups within rural areas, explores the activities of a number of groups that have attempted to challenge mainstream perceptions and usage, and considers changing rural power structures and some key confrontations between new rural residents and traditional elites. Among the topics are re-negotiating the boundaries of race and citizenship, rural pollution and environmental others, hunt followers, diverging voices in a rural Welsh community, and gendered experiences of community in village life. Distributed in the US by Books International. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The outbreak of organised, violent peasant protests across the Chinese countryside from the late 1990s to the early 2000s has attracted much scholarly interest. In this study, An Chen endeavours to understand from these protests the question of the Chinese government's control in the countryside and the impact of this violent resistance on China's rural governance in the context of market liberalisation. Utilising extensive field research and data collected from surveys across rural China, the book provides an in-depth exploration of how rural governance in China has been transformed following two major tax reforms: the tax-for-fee reform of 2002–4, and the abolition of agricultural taxes (AAT) in 2005–6. In a multidimensional analysis which combines approaches from political science, economics, finance and sociology, Chen argues that private economic power has merged with political power in a way that has reshaped village governance in China, threatening to fundamentally change its political structure.

The Frailty of Authority explores the social, economic, cultural, and historical forces that shape and constrain the common worldviews that give ideological legitimacy to collectivities ranging from dynastic American families to Communist party cadres in China. The Frailty of Authority is the fifth consecutive volume in the series, Political Anthropology. It offers original analyses in a pioneering, multidisciplinary field concerned with understanding political man. Articles cover a wide range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches in exploring the complex inter-relationships among socioeconomic, cultural, and political phenomena.