This is an anthropological exploration of the roots of China's modernity in the country's own tradition, as seen especially in economic and kinship patterns.

This book examines major areas of late imperial Chinese culture, and their relation to Chinese culture today, focusing on the competence and sophistication of ordinary people. The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's fieldwork. Kinship beyond the family is treated through comparisons of the author's fieldwork sites in China and Taiwan. In dealing with the use of contracts and commodification within one community setting, it illuminates the broader economic culture of late imperial China. This book powerfully confirms that China's modernity has deep roots in its own tradition, and in doing so offers an excellent introduction to the anthropological view of China.

Presenting a new approach to the history of Chinese kinship, this book attempts to bridge the gap between anthropological and historical scholarship on the Chinese lineage. It explores the historical development of kinship in the villages of the Fuzhou region of southeastern Fujian province.

Includes bibliographical references.

Ten international academics explore heterodoxy dissent challenging the beliefs and meanings of the established norm in late Imperial China. In this process, they trace the origins of the cultural and intellectual protests to aspects of Daoism and Buddhism in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911)

Based on case files, this study explores the social significance of the traditional Chinese legal system, and investigates how people utilized the courts during the course of criminal and civil disputes. The author emphasizes the ways in which law shaped social and economic change and how in turn the legal code and court system were adapted to local realities.

The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenship's relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored--despite the globally pervasive denial of citizenship to women, historically and in many places, ongoing today. This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish women's citizenship in various parts of the world.