Despite living in a state that honours science and debases `superstition', and despite making substantial use of the multiple medical resources available to them, Akha villagers in Yunnan still put their greatest trust for health and wellbeing into healing rituals, especially when it comes to their children. The book delves into these apparent contradictions. What is this Akha way of childcare that continues in twenty-first-century China? It is generally believed that children fall sick from soul loss or attack by spirits. Accordingly, parents frequently invite ritual experts to perform sacrificial rituals for the diagnosis and healing of their children. Relatives (kin and affines), big men, ancestors and spirits all play indispensable roles in these protective rituals. As the process of a healing ritual unfolds, a network of social organisation, kinship, and cosmology is woven.

This book investigates the moral dimensions of petty capitalism in Russia. Drawing on an ethnographic enquiry into the small-scale, family-based private sector of the city of Smolensk, it examines the values, moral ideas and sentiments that are entangled in the everyday workings of small businesses. The book situates the realm of values within the broader dynamics of Russia's political economy and the global circuits of capital. The moral frameworks of entrepreneurs incorporate conflicting values, such that moralities associated with the Soviet order are intertwined with market orientations and neoliberal ideologies. Daria Tereshina is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

This book engages critically with mainstream accounts of ‘Anatolian Tigers’ in contemporary Turkey. Based on her fieldwork in Çorum, Deniz explores the dynamics of medium-size businesses with a dual optic of political economy and moral economy. She demonstrates that the formation of the entrepreneurial stratum is a multifaceted process and zooms into a range of workplaces to show the entanglements of market and non-market dynamics in everyday life. This innovative work sheds original light on the role of kinship, religion and social values in shaping the everyday politics of labour. Ceren Deniz taught 'Economic Anthropology' at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2020-2021.

China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations. Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.

Cultural heritage and national identity have been significant themes in debates concerning Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not only in academic circles, but more importantly among the general public in the newly independent Central Asian states. Inspired by insights from a popular form of traditional cultural performance in Kyrgyzstan, this book goes beyond cultural revival discourse to explore these themes from a historically informed anthropological perspective. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork and archival research in Kyrgyzstan, this historical ethnography analyses the ways in which political elite in Central Asia attempts to exercise power over its citizens through cultural production from early twentieth century to the present.