Deborah Davis

Helen F. Siu

Multidisciplinary in its approach, SARS explores the medical, social, and political challenges posed by the epidemic. Focusing on the political dimensions of historical geography, media communications, and popular culture, the case studies chronicle how residents of the three cities, whose fortunes are linked by uneasy historical memories and a vibrant global economy, find themselves abruptly drawing hard lines against porous borders. The volume raises issues pertaining to global politics and regional security, public health and democratic processes, civil society and public culture formation, the role of media in social crises, institutional integrity, and individual agency. Contributors drawn from anthropology, journalism, medicine, and sociology examine the SARS outbreak as representative of the multiple contradictions among contagion, connectivity, and disjuncture that characterize our contemporary world. With avian flu looming over the horizon, the volume focuses attention on diverse human responses, critical self-reflection, and possible steps to meet future challenges.

Reception and Interpretations in Three Chinese Cities

SARS

Stories and Histories from Modern China

Furrows, Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State

SARS (Acute Respiratory Syndrome) first presented itself to the global medical community as a case of atypical pneumonia in one small Chinese village in November 2002. Three months later the mysterious illness rapidly spread and appeared in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Toronto and then Singapore. The high fatality rate and sheer speed at which this disease spread prompted the World Health Organization to initiate a medieval practice of quarantine in the absence of any scientific knowledge of the disease. Now three years on from the initital outbreak, SARS poses no major threat and has vanished from the global media. Written by a team of contributors from a wide variety of disciplines, this book investigates the rise and subsequent decline of SARS in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Multidisciplinary in its approach, SARS explores the epidemic from the perspectives of cultural geography, media studies and popular culture, and raises a number of important issues such as the political fate of the new democracy, spatial governance and spatial security, public health policy making, public culture formation, the role the media play in social crisis, and above all the special relations between the three countries in the context of globalization and crisis. It provides new and profound insights into what is still a highly topical issue in today’s world.

Reception and Interpretation in Three Chinese Cities

Sars

Eric Tagliacozzo

Peter C. Perdue

(Continued). "Each author examines an unnoticed moment--a single year or decade--that redefined Asia in some important way. Heide Walcher explores the founding of the Safavid dynasty in the crucial battle of 1501, while Peter C. Perdue investigates New World silver's role in Sino-Portuguese and Sino-Mongolian relations after 1557. Victor Lieberman synthesizes imperial changes in Russia, Burma, Japan, and North India in the seventeenth century, Charles Wheeler focuses on Zen Buddhism in Vietnam to 1683, and Kerry Ward looks at trade in Pondicherry, India, in 1745. Nancy Um traces coffee exports from Yemen in 1636 and 1726, and Robert Hellyer follows tea exports from Japan to global markets in 1874. Anand Yang analyzes the diary of an Indian soldier who fought in China in 1900, and Eric Tagliacozzo portrays the fragility of Dutch colonialism in 1910. Andrew Willford delineates the erosion of cosmopolitan Bangalore in the mid-twentieth century, and Naomi Hosoda relates the problems faced by Filipino workers in Dubai in the twenty-first.

Changing Times

Asia Inside Out

The third and final volume of Asia Inside Out, Itinerant People focuses on the idea of "Diasporic Asia" - the meanings of the movement of people, past and present. Which specific groups and communities linked the trading empires of the South China Coast, South Asia, and the Middle East ? Who actually traveled in the ships, and who travels in our modern jumbo jets? The authors consider the varied experiences of important mobile ethnic groups and their modern descendants. It is no accident that many of the descendants of these traveling communities can still be found around the rim of the Indian Ocean - and that many have seeped up into the land- and sea-scapes of the South China coast. The book explores the transient histories of "people on the move," through voluntary or involuntary circulation, either part of chosen paths (such as migration) or the radials of coerced journeys (such as slavery, or the dislocations wrought by conflict). The fluidity of human movement has acted to render the evolution of "Asia" more complex, both reinforcing older connections across time and space and forging new connections.--

Asia Inside Out - Itinerant People

Annotation. Historians and anthropologists have long been interested in South China where powerful lineages and gendered hierarchies are juxtaposed with unorthodox trading cultures, multi-ethnic colonial encounters, and market-driven consumption. The divergent paths taken by women in Hong Kong and Guangdong during thirty years of Maoist closure, and the post-reform cross-border fluidities have also gained analytical attention.

Helen F. Siu

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