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This book draws on research into a multinational corporation (MNC) in Qingdao, China, and delves deep into the power dynamics at play between Korean management, Chinese migrant workers, local-level Chinese government officials, and Chinese local gangs. Located within the chain of global garment production, the multinational corporation was under the incessant demand to cut production costs that continually destabilizes the factory regime of the corporation. The relentless demand of price cuts, the decreasing business profits, and the outmoded production facilities forced management to change the factory regime, which resluted in a relatively rapid transformation from despotic to paternalist regimes. The book demonstrates how a particular MNC struggled with the pressure to be increasingly profitable while negotiating a clash between Korean and Chinese cultures, traditions, and classes on the floor of a garment factory. Beyond a one-dimensional observation based on corporate greed or an exploitation model, it captures the daily struggles of management, mid-level personnel, and workers who struggle, each in their own way, to survive the pressures of laboring in a global market system. The book also pays particular attention to common features of post-socialist countries such as the greater importance of social connection and backroom influence in business. By analyzing the contentious collaboration between foreign management, factory workers, government officials, and gangs, it contributes not only to the research on the politics of resistance but also to our understanding of how global and local forces interact.

This book is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. The book offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of anthropological research and an engagement with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, and moves beyond previous studies of Southeast Asian cities by linking larger conceptual issues of ethics, belief, and experience to the concrete trajectories of everyday urban life in the region.

The Tibetan diaspora began fifty years ago when the current Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and established a government-in-exile in India. For those fifty years, the vast majority of Tibetans have kept their stateless refugee status in India and Nepal as a reminder to themselves and the world that Tibet is under Chinese occupation and that they are committed to returning someday. In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed 1,000 Tibetans and their families to immigrate to the United States; a decade later the total U.S. population includes some 10,000 Tibetans. Not only is the social fact of the migration—its historical and political contexts—of interest, but also how migration and resettlement in the U.S. reflect emergent identity formations among members of a stateless society. This book examines Tibetan identity at a critical juncture in the diaspora's expansion, and argues that increased migration to the West is both facilitated and marked by changing understandings of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Tibetan—deterritorialized, activist, and cosmopolitan.

This ethnography details the traditional social and cultural conditions of the Moso, a matrilineal group living on the border of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces in southwest China. Among the Moso, a majority of the adult population practice a visiting system called tisese instead of marriage as the normal sexual and reproductive institution. Until recently, tisese was noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive. Partners lived and worked in separate households. The only prerequisite for a tisese relationship was a mutual agreement between the man and the woman to allow sexual access to each other. In a comprehensive account, this book explores this unique practice specifically, and offers thorough documentation, fine-grained analysis, and an engaging discussion of the people, history, and structure of Moso society. This book draws on extensive fieldwork, conducted from 1987 to 2006.

Since 1999 South Korean films have drawn roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box office, matching or even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity. How did this Korean “film explosion” come about? This book examines the Korean film industry’s success story from the viewpoint of a group of unlikely social actors-Korean independent filmmakers. It investigates the unexpected alliances among independent filmmakers, the state, and the mainstream film industry practitioners under the postauthoritarian administrations of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and argues that these alliances were critical to the making of the Korean film sector as we know it. During this postauthoritarian/reform era, independent filmmakers with activist backgrounds who were part of the “democratic generation” or “3–8-6 generation” were able to mobilize the cultural repertoires and networks of their 1980s activism in turning themselves into important players in state cultural institutions. They also negotiated with the purveyors of capital and helped lead national protests against trade liberalization. Instead of simply labeling these alliances with the state, capitalists, and film industry practitioners as “selling out” or “co-optation,” the book explores how independent filmmakers transformed South Korea’s film institutions, policies, and narratives about film. This book is an ethnographic investigation of the political, social, and cultural contexts that created the Korean “film explosion.”