Ginkgo Village
Trauma and Transformation in Rural China
Authored by: Tamara JackaPlease read Conditions of use before downloading the formats.
Description
Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labour outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fuelled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations.
At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.
Details
- ISBN (print):
- 9781760466411
- ISBN (online):
- 9781760466428
- Publication date:
- Jun 2024
- Imprint:
- ANU Press
- DOI:
- http://doi.org/10.22459/GV.2024
- Disciplines:
- Arts & Humanities: Cultural Studies, History; Social Sciences: Anthropology
- Countries:
- East Asia: China
PDF Chapters
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- Preliminary pages (PDF, 122 KB)
- List of illustrations (PDF, 66 KB)
- Language and naming conventions (PDF, 45 KB)
- Acknowledgements (PDF, 66 KB)
- Introduction (PDF, 359 KB)
- Ginkgo Village, Xin County (PDF, 1.8 MB) doi
- Ghosts (PDF, 132 KB) doi
- Weaving lives (PDF, 1.5 MB) doi
- The good earth (PDF, 1 MB) doi
- Two funerals (PDF, 1.1 MB) doi
- The road-concreting conflict (PDF, 845 KB) doi
- Yang Yurong’s house (PDF, 1.2 MB) doi
- Motherhood (PDF, 138 KB) doi
- New Year (PDF, 1.2 MB) doi
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