Editorial Reviews From the Back Cover "In terms of its richness of data, this is one of the best ethnographies I have read about any locale anywhere. It is also exemplary in its novel and creative synthesis of literary analysis and more conventional social scien ce-oriented anthropology. . . . The book has a consistent focus, both dist urbing and riveting, on the ways that pain, loss, and social upheaval are woven into people's attempts to reconstitute new lives over some fifty yea rs of rapid social change." (P. Steven Sangren, author of Chinese Socio-lo gics ) "Mueggler writes with uncommon grace, elegance, and charm. . . . Readers w ill come away from this book with lasting memories of various aspects of t hese peoples' lives (death, hunger, fear, sex, humor (and with an understa nding of their all-too-powerful humanity as well as their genius for adapt ing their lives to the often-changing demands of the communist state.") (R obert B. Edgerton, author of Death or Glory) "A rare work that really gives us a new way of thinking about what moderni ty (or one version of it, anyway) means to people who have had it thrust upon them involuntarily.") (Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Diverge nce) --This text refers to the Paperback edition. About the Author Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Book Description In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority comm unity 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, peop le 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 syst em that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive unde rstanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region , Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and po etics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To ex orcise "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 recon ciliation. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. --

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