Cambridge University Press, 2006
This book describes the extraordinary transformations which have taken place in Chinese and Taiwanese responses to the environment across the twentieth century. Both places can be said to have "discovered"a new concept of nature during that time. The research focuses on nature tourism, anti-pollution movements, and policy implementation to show how the global spread of Western ideas about nature has interacted with Chinese traditions. Inevitably these interactions have been reworked and reconstituted within the local context, and differences of understanding across these groups have caused problems in administering environmental reforms. These differences will have to be resolved if the dynamic transformations of the 1980s and 1990s are to be maintained in the twenty-first century. In spite of more than a century of almost entirely independent political developments, a comparison between China and Taiwan reveals surprising similarities, showing how globalization and shared cultural traditions have outweighed political differences in shaping their environments.
Editor, London, Routledge, 2005
Academics and policy-makers have grown increasingly interested in the ways the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may encourage better governance, democratic politics, and perhaps ultimately a global civil society. However, critics of these organizations have pointed out that NGOs tend to be undemocratic in their internal politics, speak for groups of people to whom they are not accountable through elections or financial support, and often represent the interests of people in wealthy countries at the expense of indigenous people. The main questions revolve around whether and how NGOs actually lead to democratization, and the ways in which NGOs relate to broader global forces. This book brings together an international group of experts on the subject, whose chapters address these questions through a series of extensive case studies from East and Southeast Asia.
Contributors: Kin-man Chan, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Tai-lok Lui, Hsin-Chi Kuan, Sunny Chan, Robert P. Weller, Hyuk-Rae Kim, David K. McNeal, Koichi Hasegawa, Hy V. Luong, Philip Eldridge, and Beng-Huat Chua.
Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1999
Some Asian political leaders and Western academics have recently claimed that China is unlikely to produce an open political system. This claim rests on the idea that "Confucian culture" provides an alternative to Western civil values, and that China lacked the democratic traditions and even the horizontal institutions of trust that could build a civil society. An opposed school of thought is far more optimistic about democracy, because it sees market economies of the kind China has begun to foster as pushing inexorably against authoritarian political control and reproducing Western patterns of change.
Alernate Civilities argues for a different set of political possibilities. By comparing China with Taiwan's new and vibrant democracy, it shows how democracy can grow out of Chinese cultural roots and authoritarian institutions. The business organizations, religious groups, environmental movements, and women's networks it examines do not simply reproduce Western values and institutions. These cases point to the possibility of an alternate civility, neither the stubborn remnant of an ancient authoritarian culture, nor a reflex of market economics. They are instead the active creation of new solutions to the problems of modern life.
Edited by Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller
Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 1996
Chinese deities have often been presented as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume document other images that allowed Chinese gods to challenge, or reinforce, or just play with the prevailing power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. Here are deities who kill their parents, who refuse to marry, who depose their predecessors, who demand cigarettes instead of incense--in short, who challenge all preconceptions about Chinese divinity.
The authors draw on a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, literary studies) and methodologies to throw light on the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of eccentric gods and defiant goddesses surveyed--ruthless warriors, lascivious immortals, drunken clowns, patricidal sons, and unfilial daughters--demonstrates how these deities expressed and negotiated tensions within China's social and political order. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it. By examining the mechanisms that spread gods' cults throughout China and the media that shaped these gods' images, the book addresses the perennial questions of unity and diversity in China. The contributors emphasize the importance of fiction, drama, and visual arts in the spread of gods' cults and suggest that Chinese religion is inseparable from these popular media.
Contributors: Brigitte Baptandier, Robert Hymes, Paul R. Katz, Steven Sangren, Meir Shahar, Donald S. Sutton, and Robert P. Weller
Seattle, University of Washington Press, and London, Macmillan Press, 1994
This study stakes out a new position on how and when potential resistance may be transformed into an actual social movement. Its three cases--the Taiping Rebellion in the 1840s and 1850s, ghost worship in modern Taiwan and the aftermath of the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square--contribute to ongoing debates among historians, social scientists and literary theorists on the relationship between culture and resistance.
Resistance Chaos and Control in China compares active resistance movements with everyday actions that imply unspoken resistance. It shows how certain areas of life defuse attempts at cultural domination by dissolving official interpretations. At the same time, these cultural "free spaces" nurture ambiguous and multiple alternatives of their own, including the possibility of erupting into open political resistance. The three cases demonstrate how attempts to push such ambiguous meaning into a single, explicit interpretation as resistance succeed or fail.
The material on the Taiping Rebellion offers new views of the role of spirit possession in the movement, and the section on surging ghost worship in Taiwan addresses the reproportioning of religion as the island's economy and political structure have been transformed in the last two decades. The Tiananmen chapters examine the nature of cultural control and resistance in China and other socialist societies.
Seattle, University of Washington Press, and London, Macmillan Press, 1987
How far can we say that more than one religious tradition exists in Taiwan or prerevolutionary China? How do people reinterpret religion in different situations, and when do piecemeal interpretations become developed religious ideologies? What are the implications of religious unities and diversities for Chinese social and political life? This book addresses these questions by concentrating on a major annual ritual that provides salvation for the community's pitiful ghosts. It examines how people in different social positions have reinterpreted the ritual through the major social changes of the last century, and it emphasizes the importance of institutionalizing social relations to create and maintain religious ideologies.
Edited by Robert P. Weller and Scott E. Guggenheim
Durham, Duke University Press, 1982 (paperback, 1989)
This book is an interdisciplinary challenge to some of the traditional theories of peasant rebellions, in part because it is not limited to either peasants or rebellions. Full understanding of rural unrest means knowing how peasant interact with other classes and knowing how rebellion relates to other forms of protest. When do peasants rebel? When and how do they choose other forms of protest? When, in fact, to they act as a class?
In this volume scholars from anthropology, political science, history, and sociology examine the forms rural violence has taken through the past three centuries. These scholars have based their studies on concrete historical cases drawn from a cross-section of locations around the world. Though each study is independent, they all analyze the extent to which rural unrest is explained by three principal factors: the rights and obligations surrounding interpersonal and interclass relations (moral economy); the disruptions caused in class structure and other social institutions by the expansion of capitalism; and disruptions arising from the formation and operation of states themselves.
Contributors: Scott E. Guggenheim, Sidney Mintz, William Roseberry, Theda Skocpol, Ralph Thaxton, Charles Tilly, Robert Wasserstrom, and Robert P. Weller
For a short version of Robert Weller's curriculum vitae,
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