Empire and Local Worlds

A Chinese Model for Long-Term Historical Anthropology

By: Mingming Wang

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Paperback | 15 June 2009 | Edition Number 1

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344 Pages

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22.9 x 15.2 x 1.91

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Mingming Wang, one of the most prolific anthropologists in China, has produced a work both of long-term historical anthropology and of broad social theory. In it, he traces almost a millennium of history of the southern Chinese city of Quangzhou, a major international trading entrepot in the 13th century that declined to a peripheral regional center by the end of the 19th century. But the historical trajectory understates the complex set of interrelationships between local structures and imperial agendas that played out over the course of centuries and dynasties. Using urban structure, documentary analysis, and archaeological artifacts, Wang shows how the study of Quangzhou represents a Chinese template for civilizational studies, one distinctly different from Eurocentric models propounded by such theorists as Sahlins, Wolf, and Elias.

Industry Reviews

China's most prolific published writer of anthropological studies, essays, and histories,... Wang Mingming reverses the perspective of historical anthropologists who, even when they are as enlightened as Marshal Sahlins, still take European civilisation as a template. Wang Mingming takes Chinese civilisation as his template and comments on Sahlins, Norbert Elias, Eric Wolf and many others as he writes the city of Quanzhou into a history of China and its maritime trade... This is a pioneering work of urban and historical anthropology. It is the work of a highly accomplished and refreshingly non-Western anthropologist. - From the Foreword by Stephan Feuchtwang

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