This landmark study of Zengbu, a Cantonese community, is the first comprehensive analysis of a rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution in 1949. Jack and Sulamith Potter examine the revolutionary experiences of Zengbu's peasant villagers and document the rapid changeover from Maoist to post-Maoist China. In particular, they seek to explain the persistence of the deep structure of Chinese culture through thirty years of revolutionary praxis. The authors assess the continuities and changes in rural China, moving from the traditional social organization and cultural life of the pre-revolutionary period through the series of large-scale efforts to implement planned social change which characterized Maoism - land reform, collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. They examine in detail late Maoist society in 1979-80 and go on to describe and analyse the extraordinary changes of the post-Mao years, during which Zengbu was decollectivized, and traditional customs and religious practices reappeared.

This landmark study of Zengbu, a Cantonese community, is the first comprehensive analysis of a rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution of 1949. The authors examine the revolutionary experiences of Zengbu's peasant villagers and document the rapid changeover from Maoist to post-Maoist China. In particular, they seek to explain the persistence of the deep structure of Chinese culture through thirty years of revolutionary praxis. A video documentary, produced by the Potters and Tom Luehrsen, Zengbu After Mao, is available from New Dimension Media. For video purchase or rental information contact New Dimension Media, 85895 Lorane Highway, Eugene, Oregon 97405.

"Potter's 'humanistic narrative' probes family social structure and social organization in Chiangmai, a Northern Thai village ...a solid, informative, and very interesting and alive picture."--Library Journal "Gives us a rare inside view of daily life in a northern Thai village ...The reader gets a feeling of life, pleasure,jealously,anger, pain, and death that is seldom discussed in the anthropological literature."--Asia "Rejecting the traditional 'loosely structured' theory of the Thai family, Potter suggests a system that is female--centered with structurally significant consanguineal ties between women rather than men. This alternative not only explains the data presented but offers a new way of looking at comparative kinship." --Intercom "The dynamic interplay between the structural dominance of women and the ideological dominance of men is vividly brought out, challenging earlier, and possibly male-biased, perspectives on Northern Thai family structure."--Population and Development Review "Potter succeeds in presenting ethnographic material in a lively, humanistically oriented manner. By the time we have encountered three generations of Plenitudes at home in their courtyard ...we know them as individuals as we as representatives of an exotic culture. ..Potter presents individual portraits alongside this vivid picture of family and social structure, communal and individual economic activity, political factionalism, and religious observance ...this book stands as a challenge to cross-cultural psychology."--Contemporary Psychology "Dr. Potter's study is highly readable and will be of interest to the general public as well as to scholars."--Asian Student