Robert P. Weller

Millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism

The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the millennium? Is it a singular or polythetic creature? What are we to make of the culture of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in world history as an “age of revolution,” one not unlike 1789–1848 in its transformative potential? In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism, the contributors interrogate the so-called crisis of the nation-state, how the triumph of the free market obscures rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of new forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to produce a world of increasing differences in wealth, environmental catastrophes, heightened flows of people and value across space and time, moral panics and social impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, invisible class distinction, and “pariah” forms of economic activity. In the process, the volume opens up an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly momentous historical time—when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media. In addition to its crossdisciplinary essays, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism— originally the third installment of the journal Public Culture ’s “Millennial Quartet”—features several photographic essays. The book will interest anthropologists, political geographers, economists, sociologists, and political theorists. Contributors. Scott Bradwell, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Fernando Coronil, Peter Geschiere, David Harvey, Luiz Paulo Lima, Caitrin Lynch, Rosalind C. Morris, David G. Nicholls, Francis Nyamnjoh, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Paul Ryer, Allan Sekula, Irene Stengs, Michael Storper, Seamus Walsh, Robert P. Weller, Hylton White, Melissa W. Wright, Jeffrey A. Zimmerman

Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen

This is an out of print book, the rights for which have reverted to the author. The version presented here was digitized from a paper copy provided by the author.

Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism

This is a publishers version of an article published in The Journal of Asian Studies in 1998. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence.

Civil life, globalization, and political change in Asia : organizing between family and state

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Civil Institutions and the State 2. Development of NGOs under a Post-Totalitarian Regime: The Case of China 3. NGOs, the State, and Democracy under Globalization: The Case of Taiwan 4. Friends and Critics of the State: The Case of Hong Kong 5. Civil Associations and Autonomy under Three Regimes: The Boundaries of State and Society in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China 6. From State-Centric to Negotiated Governance: NGOs as Policy Entrepreneurs in South Korea 7. The Development of NGO Activities in Japan: A New Civil Culture and Institutionalization in Civic Action 8. The State, Local Associations, and Alternate Civilities in Rural Northern Vietnam 9. Non-Government Organizations and Democratic Transition in Indonesia 10. Constrained NGOs and Arrested Democratization in Singapore Index Notes on Contributors

Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan

This is a preprint (authors original) version of an article published in the journal Public Culture in 2000. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-2-477 (login may be required).

The Human Dimensions of Pollution Policy Implementation: Air quality in rural China

The Peoples Republic of China is experiencing severe air pollution with very serious public health and economic consequences. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has sought to utilize bureaucratic, political, legal and educational vehicles to address these problems. This paper examines the ways in which those policy measures have been communicated to, understood by, and acted upon by the citizenry, drawing in important part on household and epidemiological surveys conducted in Anhui. Our study suggests that the central governments message has yet to be absorbed to the degree intended and then considers both why this has been the case and how the effectiveness of policy mechanisms might be enhanced.

The Politics of Ritual Disguise: Repression and Response in Taiwanese Popular Religion

(Pho To), a major annual ritual held to propitiate the spirits of forlorn ghosts. Ghosts in general represent anomic, isolated individuals-the antithesis of the strong political and kinship communities that other rituals elaborate. The Universal Salvation serves to protect the local social community from the marginal ghosts, often represented at the ritual by really marginal people. In unusual performances under the Japanese, however, organized village community teams suddenly began to play the role of the supposedly isolated, asocial ghosts. This article explores the reasons behind this apparent abandonment of the normal meaning of the ceremony. Why did these performances sacrifice the symbolic sense of the Universal Salvation? What is the significance of this sacrifice for our usual theories of religious symbolism?

Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in China

This is a publishers version of an article published in Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs in 1995. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence.

Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies: An Introduction

The scale and duration of late imperial China (conventionally dating from 1368 A.D. to the 1911 dynastic collapse) created conditions under which the secular effect of relatively consistent state structures and policies, and of an economy increasingly penetrated by capitalism, evoked well-integrated patterns of both cultural compliance and resistance from the population. Sometimes actively dependent on elite categories, sometimes creatively evasive of them, people’s perceptions of these processes constitute a vast mosaic of folk ideologies that owe their sophistication and brcad geographic spread to their position in this enduring civilization. In this collection of articles, we hope to attain two intellectual goals: to examine the operation of folk ideologies in the continuous creation and recreation of Chinese culture; and to expand the theoretical reach of the concepts of hegemony and ideology, which have thus far not been much tested in the literature on China.

Power and protest in the countryside : studies of rural unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America

List of Figures vii 1. Introduction: Moral Economy, Capitalism, and State Power in Rural Protest / Scott E. Guggenheim and Robert P. Weller 3 2. Routine Conflicts and Peasant Rebellions in Seventeenth-Century France / Charles Tilly 13 3. Indian Uprisings under Spanish Colonialism: Southern Mexico in 1712 / Robert Wasserstrom 42 4. Capitalist Penetration in the Nineteenth Century: Creating Conditions for New Patterns of Social Control / Joel S. Migdal 57 5. Bandits, Monks, and Pretender Kings: Patterns of Peasant Resistance and Protest in Colonial Burma, 1826-1941 / Michael Adas 75 6. Peasants, Proletarians, and Politics in Venezuela, 1875-1975 / William Roseberry 106 7. Mao Zedong, Red Miseables, and the Moral Economy of Peasant Rebellion in Modern China / Ralph Thaxton 132 8. What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? / Theda Skocpol 157 9. Afterword: Peasantries and the Rural Sector-Notes on a Discovery / Sidney W. Mintz 180 Notes 189 References 195 Index 207