Erik Mueggler's Books

Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

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Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

A community's rituals and practices surrounding death are one of its foremost ways of making sense of itself and its relationship to the passage of time. Historical time, in particular, with its attendant social and political shifts, is most directly experienced and reckoned with through those whom time leaves behind, the men and women whose lives come to form that community's past. In Songs for Dead Parents, distinguished anthropologist Erik Mueggler investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, which he studied over a period spanning two decades. Through evocative analyses of the community's rituals, exchanges, laments, and chants, Mueggler shows how their way of thinking and feeling the passage of time and the loss of life is rooted in the landscape surrounding them and the raw materials it provides. These materials give new substance to the dead, as they transform from body to effigy to stone to text in a cycle of degeneration and regeneration that gives shape to the ongoing life of the community. In the wake of the disappearance of the socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures with which to understand historical change, death rituals have become ways of coming to terms with that socialist past as well as ways of moving forward from it and creating new forms of meaning. What emerges from Mueggler's book is a powerful analysis of a praxis and poetics of grief, one whose personal and historical dimensions are profoundly intertwined. Written in an accessible language for multiple audiences, Songs for Dead Parents will appeal to anthropologists, historians, scholars of modern China, and any reader interested in how a community grieves, mourns, and endures.

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Page Count

347

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022648100X

ISBN 13

9780226481005

The Paper Road

Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet

By: Erik Mueggler

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The Paper Road

Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet

By: Erik Mueggler

This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest’s workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

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Page Count

376

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520950496

ISBN 13

9780520950498

The Paper Road

Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet

By: Erik Mueggler

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The Paper Road

Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet

By: Erik Mueggler

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Page Count

376

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520950496

ISBN 13

9780520950498

The Age of Wild Ghosts

Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

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The Age of Wild Ghosts

Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

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Page Count

380

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520935543

ISBN 13

9780520935549

Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

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Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

By: Erik Mueggler

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

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Page Count

347

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022648341X

ISBN 13

9780226483412

Book's by Erik Mueggler

Songs for Dead Parents

Songs for Dead Parents

The Paper Road

The Paper Road

The Paper Road

The Paper Road

The Age of Wild Ghosts

The Age of Wild Ghosts

Songs for Dead Parents

Songs for Dead Parents

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