Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues, (Pap))

by Hill Gates

Release Date: November, 1999

Edition: Paperback

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on the absurdity of Amazon reviews

Yes, I have read some of Gates' work, but not this one - it doesn't matter in this system. I am merely balancing a double counting of a positive textual review that registers numerically as a zero, thus artificially generating a very low average.
On balance Amazon reviews are useful, but the lack of control leads to this sort of nonsense. Note also the lack of signature on the doubled review; presumably just an error but one wonders given the recent Canadian site boondoggle with these reviews.

Observing the transition from Maoism on the ground

Perhaps a third of the book is about traveling in China, mostly in southwestern China, where private enterprise blossomed during the 1980s. The other two thirds are about trying to do research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsored and administered by the Sichuan Fulian (Women's Federation--literally "Women United"). Anthropologists' fieldwork memoirs are published after more academic presentation of their research results--in Gates's case, a 1997 book _China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism_ (that compares what she observed in the 1970s in Taiwan, historical records, and her 1987-96 research in Sichuan). The discomforts, including sickness, depression, frustrations about transportation, food, lodging, access to information, and the misunderstanding by "the natives" of the anthropologist's wisdom and good-will may not be vented in public at all.

Although the author is the major character in the account of her research in the years before and after the crackdown of the PRC gernotacry on private consumption and the accumulation of riches by anyone other than the families of high-placed officials, unlike much contemporary postmodernist anthropology, Gates remains interested in the agency of people (particularly women) trying to prosper in changing and difficult conditions in societies organized differently than the anthropologists' own one. Gates is engagingly honest about her frustrations with Chinese life as well as her joys of solidarity with those she studied and the reader learns some things about living through rapid change in the Chinese interior from her insightful book.