In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

Annotation. Contemporary Chinese history from the Great Leap Famine of the 1950s to the 1990s is traced in this text. This era saw great changes in the way that communities were run, including the reintroduction of the headman-ship system.

The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature’s Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane. A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

Seventeen tales of untamed spirits in the newly expanded edition of the Spur Award finalist from the “custodian of the twilight zone” (Southern Living). In these seventeen ghostly tales—including five new stories—Roberts expertly guides readers through eerie encounters and harrowing hauntings across Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the Dakotas. Along the way her accounts intersect with the lives (and afterlives) of legendary figures such as Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday. Roberts also justifies the fascination among ghost hunters, folklorists, and interested tourists with notoriously haunted locales such as Deadwood, Tombstone, and Abilene through her tales of paranormal legends linked to these gunslinger towns synonymous with violence and vice in Western lore. But not all of these encounters feature frightening specters or wandering souls. Roberts also details episodes of animal spirits, protective presences, and supernatural healings. Forever destined to be associated with adventure, romance, and risk taking, the Wild West of yore still haunts the American imagination. Roberts reminds us here that our imaginations aren’t the only places where restless ghosts still roam. “Tales of vaporous ghost lights, haunted mesas, phantom gunmen, and reanimated skeletons. It’s a book sure to please collectors of Western lore, fans of well-told, old-fashioned ghost tales and, it would seem to me, school librarians looking for just the right book to introduce middle school and high school readers to American folklore.” —Michael Norman, author of Haunted Heartland

From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing Vemeer an unforgettable story about an island haunted by the past . . . and the ghosts who must help with the present. Ghosts are alive on the island of Nantucket. You can hear them in the wind, and in the creaks of the old homes. They want to be remembered. And, even more, they want to protect what was once theirs. The ghosts seem to have chosen a few local kids to be their messengers -- and to help save the island. But in this mystery, the line between those who haunt and those who are haunted is a thin one -- and the past and the present must come to terms with one another in order to secure the future.

Rain of the Ghosts is the first in Greg Weisman's series about an adventurous young girl, Rain Cacique, who discovers she has a mystery to solve, a mission to complete and, oh, yes, the ability to see ghosts. Welcome to the Prospero Keys (or as the locals call them: the Ghost Keys), a beautiful chain of tropical islands on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle. Rain Cacique is water-skiing with her two best friends Charlie and Miranda when Rain sees her father waiting for her at the dock. Sebastian Bohique, her maternal grandfather, has passed away. He was the only person who ever made Rain feel special. The only one who believed she could do something important with her life. The only thing she has left to remember him by is the armband he used to wear: two gold snakes intertwined, clasping each other's tails in their mouths. Only the armband . . . and the gift it brings: Rain can see dead people. Starting with the Dark Man: a ghost determined to reveal the Ghost Keys' hidden world of mystery and mysticism, intrigue and adventure.

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.