Foreword by Stevan Harrell

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Maoist Shaman and the Madman

2. Dongba Culture and the Authenticization of Marginality

3. Ethnicizing Myth, Bride Abduction, and Elopement

4. Biopolitics: Fox Stench, Gender Boundaries, and the Moral Economy of Postsocialism

5. Marketing Difference: Dog Meat, Court Cases, and Ethnopreneurs

Conclusion | Forgetting the Madman and Remembering the Ancient Tea Horse Road

Notes

References

Index

Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the essentialization of difference shape the ways in which Naxi residents represent and interpret their social world.

The vignettes presented here are lively examples of the cultural reverberations that have occurred throughout contemporary China in the wake of its emergence as a global giant. With particular attention to the politics of gender, ethnicity, and historical representation, Chao reveals how citizens strategically imagine, produce, and critique a new moral economy in which the market and neoliberal logic are preeminent.

Emily Chao is professor of anthropology at Pitzer College, Claremont, California.