To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures.

Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state.

In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption.

The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION -- Theorising place / Stephan Feuchtwang -- PART 1 : URBAN PLACES -- Mapping 'chaos': the Dong Xi Fo feuds of Quanzhou, 1644-1839 / Wang Mingming -- Breathing new life into Beijing culture: new 'traditional' public spaces and the Chaoyang neighbourhood Yangge associations / Florence Graezer -- Establishing 'home' away from home: Chinese migrants in the industrial transformation of Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong / Graham Johnson -- Traditional territories in a contemporary city: agency and policy in the preservation of hereditary rights / Elizabeth Lominska Johnson -- PART 2 : RURAL PLACES -- 'The place where the age wouldn't go' and 'the place where the sage was born': mutual definitions of place in Shandong and Heilongjiang / Zhao Bingxiang -- Hmong places and locality / Nicholas Tapp -- Senses of local place and the temples of West Hunan / Mary Rack -- Curves and the urbanisation of Meifa village / Stephan Feuchtwang -- AFTERWORD -- Space and time / Laurie Kain Hart.