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KIRA VAN DEUSEN, The Flying Tiger: Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001, xvi + 260 p.
CHARLES STAFFORD, Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, viii + 202 p.
GREGORY A. RUF, Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-1991. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, xix + 249 p.
In the past decade, the opening of China to the outside world has provided expanded opportunities for social scientists and other researchers to investigate the nature of Chinese society and culture. As a result of this change, Chinese anthropology, both in the sense of anthropological studies in China and work carried out by Chinese anthropologists, is moving from the fringes of the discipline to the centre of anthropological inquiry. This has had a number of ramifications, including increased communication between Chinese and foreign anthropologists, as well as the opportunity for researchers to contribute to the broader questions of social inquiry within the discipline. In particular, the emergence of alternative approaches to understanding Chinese society in a region that has been dominated for decades by the kinship studies of Freedman (1958; 1966), Fried (1953), Watson (1975a; 1975b) and others is especially significant. Similar claims may be made about opportunities for investigation in the former Soviet Union. These parallel changes are of great interest to anthropologists concerned with transnational populations and culture areas that transcend national boundaries. The three works considered here all take different approaches while addressing the same (broadly defined) region.
In effect, the changes in Russia and China, as well as the consequent changes in opportunities for social research in those areas, may allow us to once again consider regions, rather than states. For example, investigators of the Tungusic peoples of northeastern China need to be apprised of the lives of peoples in Siberia and the Primorsk. At the same time, the social organization and interactions of the Han Chinese, who have been and still are of predominant interest in the anthropology of China, are also of particular relevance. It is perhaps most telling that the emergence of Chinese and Russian anthropology into the mainstream is allowing the association of regional interests in a way that was formerly impossible, due...