In this original and readable book, Charles Stafford describes the Chinese fascination with separation and reunion. Drawing on his field studies in Taiwan and mainland China, he gives a vivid account of raucous festivals of reunion, elaborate rituals for the sending-off of gods (and daughters), poetic moments of leave-takings between friends, and bitter political rhetoric about Chinese national unity. The idioms and practices of separation and reunion - which are woven into the fabric of daily life - help people to explain the passions aroused by the possibility of national division. In this book, the discussion of everyday rituals leads into a unique and accessible general introduction to Chinese and Taiwanese society and culture.
Children in the Taiwanese fishing community of Angang have their attention drawn, consciously and unconsciously, to various forms of identification through their participation in schooling, family life and popular religion. They read texts about 'virtuous mothers', share 'meaningful foods' with other villagers, visit the altars of 'divining children' and participate in 'dangerous' god-strengthening rituals. In particular they learn about the family-based cycle of reciprocity, and the tension between this and commitment to the nation. Charles Stafford's 1995 study of childhood in this community (with additional material from north-eastern mainland China) explores absorbing issues related to nurturance, education, family, kinship and society in its analysis of how children learn, or do not learn, to identify themselves as both familial and Chinese.
This special issue of Social Anthropology places ethnography at its centre and considers how it is framed by the biographies of those involved. Probing some of the more unexpected connections that may arise between these parallel worlds, we discuss how collaborations between anthropologists and those they study inform the moral judgements and ethical practices that pervade the experience of fieldwork. What are the after-lives of such encounters? What role does the materialisation of experience -for example, in houses, photographs, files and fieldnotes -play in the biographical narratives of anthropologists and of those they study? We explore these moral, material and political resonances and set out a new agenda for the biographical as part of the anthropological project.
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