Böcker av Allen Chun

This book began as a year-long ethnography of a school in Taiwan in 1991 then evolved more into a historical sociology of national formation and its cultural mindset. Cultural nationalism is a widely debated but poorly understood process. Contrary to prevailing perceptions, the Cold War may have given way to a more progressive open society, but the politicization of ethnicity hardened a more deeply entrenched cultural frame of mind. Instead of liberating an indigenous reality, Taiwanese consciousness has ironically polarized the political dead ends of reunification and independence. In the final analysis, the ethnography can serve as a paradigmatic case study for critical cultural studies. There are clear ramifications also for a comparative study of the cultural politics of other Chinese speaking or Asian societies and their histories.

The effects of globalization have led to accentuated social inequality in most first-world countries, above all the U.S. and U.K. International trade and capital flows have tended to redistribute income in ways that aggravate inequality in advanced industrialized nations where relative income levels of the salaried middle class and the working class are being eroded, resulting in a downward mobility of these classes. At the same time, unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery, in poorer regions more and more replace wage labor in developed countries. Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, the contributors in this provocative volume offer critical analyses and alternative visions.

Unstructuring Chinese Society puts forth a fresh perspective in the field of historical anthropology, while addressing ongoing critical concerns in postcolonial theory and our understanding of tradition and modernity.