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A long history of migration, trade, and shared interests links
China to Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past twenty
years, China has increased direct investment and restructured trade
relations in the region. In addition, Chinese public sector
enterprises, private companies, and various branches of the central
government have planned, developed, and built a large number of
infrastructure projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as
dams, roads, railways, energy grids, security systems,
telecommunication networks, hospitals, and schools. These projects
have had a profound impact on local environments and economies and
help shape the lived experiences of individuals. Each chapter in
this volume examines how the impact of these infrastructure
projects varies in different countries, focusing on how they
produce new forms of global connectivity between various sectors of
the economy and the resulting economic and cultural links that
permeate everyday life.
""Gandhi's Body" introduces Gandhi in a fresh way. . . . This book
respects and at the same time revises our understandings of Indian
culture, and it connects politics and culture with health,
bio-discipline, and governmentality in a manner that is accessible
and useful."--David Ludden, editor of "Contesting the Nation"
"Interesting, provocative, and highly recommended."--"Choice" "This
brilliant and infuriating book is the latest intriguing offering
from one of the most original anthropologists working. . . . It
offers us unpredictable and illuminating interpretations of
classical material."--"Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute" No single person is more directly associated with India
and India's struggle for independence than Mahatma Gandhi. His name
has equally become synonymous with the highest principles of global
equality, human dignity, and freedom. Joseph Alter argues, however,
that Gandhi has not been completely understood by biographers and
political scholars, and in "Gandhi's Body" he undertakes a
reevaluation of the Mahatma's life and thought. In his revisionist
and iconoclastic approach, Alter moves away from the usual focus on
nonviolence, peace, and social reform and takes seriously what most
scholars who have studied Gandhi tend to ignore: Gandhi's
preoccupation with sex, his obsession with diet reform, and his
vehement advocacy for naturopathy. Alter concludes that a
distinction cannot be made between Gandhi's concern with health,
faith in nonviolence, and his sociopolitical agenda. In this
original and provocative study, Joseph Alter demonstrates that
these seemingly idiosyncratic aspects of Gandhi's personal life are
of central importance to understanding his politics--and not only
Gandhi's politics but Indian nationalism in general. Using the
Mahatma's own writings, Alter places Gandhi's bodily practices in
the context of his philosophy; for example, he explores the
relationship between Gandhi's fasting and his ideas about the
metaphysics of emptiness and that between his celibacy and his
beliefs about nonviolence. Alter also places Gandhi's ideas and
practices in their national and transnational contexts. He
discusses how and why nature cure became extremely popular in India
during the early part of the twentieth century, tracing the
influence of two German naturopaths on Gandhi's thinking and on the
practice of yoga in India. More important, he argues that the
reconstruction of yoga in terms of European naturopathy was brought
about deliberately by a number of activists in India--of whom
Gandhi was only the most visible--interested in creating a
"scientific" health regimen, distinct from Western precedents, that
would make the Indian people fit for self-rule. Gandhi's Body
counters established arguments that Indian nationalism was either a
completely indigenous Hindu-based movement or simply a derivative
of Western ideals. Joseph S. Alter teaches anthropology at the
University of Pittsburgh and is the author of "Knowing Dil Das:
Stories of a Himalayan Hunter," also available from the University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Asian Medicine and Globalization Edited by Joseph S. Alter "An
important collection of studies on a significant group of topics. .
. . It deserves to be widely read."--"Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute" Medical systems function in specific
cultural contexts. It is common to speak of the medicine of China,
Japan, India, and other nation-states. Yet almost all formalized
medical systems claim universal applicability and, thus, are ready
to cross the cultural boundaries that contain them. There is a
critical tension, in theory and practice, in the ways regional
medical systems are conceptualized as "nationalistic" or inherently
transnational. This volume is concerned with questions and problems
created by the friction between nationalism and transnationalism at
a time when globalization has greatly complicated the notion of
cultural, political, and economic boundedness. Offering a range of
perspectives, the contributors address questions such as: How do
states concern themselves with the modernization of "traditional"
medicine? How does the global hegemony of science enable the
nationalist articulation of alternative medicine? How do global
discourses of science and "new age" spirituality facilitate the
transnationalization of "Asian" medicine? As more and more Asian
medical practices cross boundaries into Western culture through the
popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its
way east, these systems of meaning become inextricably
interrelated. These essays consider the larger implications of
transmissions between cultures. Joseph S. Alter is Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of
"Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism" and
"Knowing Dil Das: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter," both available
from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Encounters with Asia
2005 200 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3866-2 Cloth $49.95s 32.50
ISBN 978-0-8122-0525-1 Ebook $49.95s 32.50 World Rights
Anthropology, Asian Studies Short copy: As more and more Asian
medical practices cross into Western culture through the popularity
of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east
in the form of plastic surgery, these systems of meaning become
inextricably interrelated. The essays in this volume consider the
larger implications of transmissions between cultures.
"This rich and complex book is often moving, frequently
thought-provoking."--"Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute" "This book will become a classic. It has passion,
compelling stories, sober reflection, and an incredibly artful
structure that carries the reader along. Most important, like all
great anthropology, the story speaks to the issue of what
constitutes the human spirit. There is wisdom in this book, and for
that rare gift I am grateful to Dil Das and Joseph Alter."--Paul
Stoller, author of "Sensuous Scholarship" Dil Das was a poor
farmer--an untouchable--living near Mussoorie, a colonial hill
station in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted with a
number of American missionary children attending a boarding school
in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with them
and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships
was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships
it made possible came to dominate Dil Das's life. When Joseph S.
Alter, one of the boys who had hunted with Dil Das, became an adult
and a scholar, he set out to write the life history of Dil Das as a
way of exploring Garhwali peasant culture. But Alter found his
friend uninterested in talking about traditional ethnographic
subjects, such as community life, family, or work. Instead, Dil Das
spoke almost exclusively about hunting with his American
friends--telling endless tales about friendship and hunting that
seemed to have nothing to do with peasant culture. When Dil Das
died in 1986, Alter put the project away. Years later, he began
rereading Dil Das's stories, this time from a completely new
perspective. Instead of looking for information about peasant
culture, he was able to see that Dil Das was talking against
culture. From this viewpoint Dil Das's narrative made sense for
precisely those reasons that had earlier seemed to render it
useless--his apparent indifference toward details of everyday life,
his obsession with hunting, and, above all, his celebration of
friendship. To a degree in fact, but most significantly in Dil
Das's memory, hunting served to merge his and the missionary boys'
identities and, thereby, to supersede and render irrelevant all
differences of class, caste, and nationality. For Dil Das the
intimate experience of hunting together radically decentered the
prevailing structure of power and enabled him to redefine himself
outside the framework of normal social classification. Thus,
"Knowing Dil Das" is not about peasant culture but about the limits
of culture and history. And it is about the moral ambiguity of
writing and living in a field of power where, despite intimacy,
self and other are unequal. Joseph Alter teaches anthropology at
the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of "The Wrestler's
Body: Identity and Ideology in North India."
Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization,
and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based
on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient
and modern texts, "Yoga in Modern India" challenges this popular
view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in
modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in
the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's
transformation into a popular activity idolized for its health
value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine.
Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal
work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the
Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of
orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and
considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine
the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of
metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power.
The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India,
this fluently written book is must reading not only for students
and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding
of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular
phenomenon it is today.
Grounded in ethnographic case studies that examine experiences from
which wisdom emerges, Capturing the Ineffable provides a rigorous
analysis of the sociocultural context of wisdom in the contemporary
world. Each chapter in the volume deals with different aspects and
showcases how communities in different contexts - nursing homes,
religious organizations, corporations, and monastic institutions,
for example - engage with the ineffability of wisdom. Contributors
draw from a range of disciplines and cross-cultural and historical
data in order to interpret the meaning and value of wisdom as a
human endeavour. This book also represents an anthropological
method for evaluating various philosophical and scientific
approaches to understanding wisdom, including how wisdom is learned
and taught. Readers will be able to appreciate how action, emotion,
uncertainty, and cultural systems come to bear on wisdom as a value
in human life and expression. In the end, Capturing the Ineffable
reveals how the conception and paradoxical nature of wisdom dispels
the dichotomies of self/other, structure/agency, known/unknown,
nature/culture, and the like. What is at stake is a recasting of
wisdom as a particular kind of anthropological endeavour and, thus,
a return to and modification of philosophical anthropology.
By 1907, staff at the Tianjin YMCA were rallying their Chinese
charges with the cry: When will China be able to send a winning
athlete to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to invite
all the world to Peking for an International Olympic contest?
Nearly a century later, on the eve of China's first-ever Olympic
games, this innovative book shows for the first time how sporting
culture and ideology played a crucial role in the making of the
modern nation-state in Republican China. A landmark work on the
history of sport in China, Marrow of the Nation tells the dramatic
story of how Olympic-style competitions and ball games, as well as
militarized forms of training associated with the West and Japan,
were adapted to become an integral part of the modern Chinese
experience.
"The Wrestler's Body" tells the story of a way of life organized in
terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are
competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose
conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the
insights of anthropology, Joseph Alter writes an ethnography of the
wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of the
wrestler's identity and ideology.
Young men in North India may choose to join an "akhara, " or
gymnasium, where they subject themselves to a complex program of
physical and moral fitness. Alter's first-hand description of each
detail of the wrestler's regimen offers a unique perspective on
South Asian culture and society. Wrestlers feel that moral reform
of Indian national character is essential and advocate their way of
life as an ideology of national health. Everyone is called on to
become a wrestler and build collective strength through
self-discipline.
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