In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today. Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference. Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

Politics & Social Sciences

Seligman, Adam B.

Weller, Robert P.

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today.\nNote that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference.\nCreating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

History

World

religious ideologies, social relations, ritual

Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion

Sociology

University of Washington Press

This study stakes out a new position on how and when potential resistance may be transformed into an actual social movement. Its three cases - the Taiping Rebellion in the 1840s and 1850s, ghost worship in modern Taiwan and the aftermath of the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square - contribute to ongoing debates among historians, social scientists and literary theorists on the relationship between culture and resistance. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China compares active resistance movements with everyday actions that imply unspoken resistance. It shows how certain areas of life defuse attempts at cultural domination by dissolving official interpretations. At the same time, these cultural "free spaces" nurture ambiguous and multiple alternatives of their own, including the possibility of erupting into open political resistance. The three cases demonstrate how attempts to push such ambiguous meaning into a single, explicit interpretation as resistance succeed or fail. The material on the Taiping Rebellion offers new views of the role of spirit possession in the movement, and the section on surging ghost worship in Taiwan addresses the reproportioning of religion as the island's economy and political structure have been transformed in the last two decades. The Tiananmen chapters examine the nature of cultural control and resistance in China and other socialist societies.

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

Americas

Univ of Washington Pr

Robert Weller's richly documented account describes the extraordinary transformations which have taken place in Chinese and Taiwanese responses to the environment across the twentieth century. The book focuses on nature tourism, anti-pollution movements, and policy implementation to show how the global spread of western ideas about nature has interacted with Chinese traditions. Inevitably differences of understanding across groups have caused problems in administering environmental reforms. They will have to be resolved if the dynamic transformations of the 1980s are to be maintained in the twenty-first century.

Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan

Business & Money

Economics

Cambridge University Press

Robert Weller's richly documented account describes the extraordinary transformations which have taken place in Chinese and Taiwanese responses to the environment across the twentieth century. The book focuses on nature tourism, anti-pollution movements, and policy implementation to show how the global spread of western ideas about nature has interacted with Chinese traditions. Inevitably differences of understanding across groups have caused problems in administering environmental reforms. They will have to be resolved if the dynamic transformations of the 1980s are to be maintained in the twenty-first century.

Testing the Margins of Leisure

Menegon, Eugenio

Yeh, Catherine V

Anthropology

Saint Philip Street Press

Free markets alone do not work effectively to solve certain kinds of human problems, such as education, old age care, or disaster relief. Nor have markets ever been the sole solution to the psychological challenges of death, suffering, or injustice. Instead, we find a major role for the non-market institutions of society - the family, the state, and social institutions. The first in-depth anthropological study of charities in contemporary Chinese societies, this book focuses on the unique ways that religious groups have helped to solve the problems of social well-being. Using comparative case studies in China, Taiwan and Malaysia during the 1980s and onwards, it identifies new forms of religious philanthropy as well as new ideas of social 'good', including different forms of political merit-making, new forms of civic selfhood, and the rise of innovative social forms, including increased leadership by women. The book finally argues that the spread of these ideas is an incomplete process, with many alternative notions of goodness continuing to be influential.

Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies

Huang, C. Julia

Wu, Keping

Fan, Lizhu

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weller, Robert P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weller, Robert P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weller, Robert P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity

Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion

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

Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan

Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan

Testing the Margins of Leisure

Testing the Margins of Leisure

Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies