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Eating Spring Rice

The Cultural Politics of AIDS in Southwest China

Sandra Teresa Hyde author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:20th Feb '07

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Eating Spring Rice cover

"Eating Spring Rice" is the first major ethnographic study of HIV/AIDS in China. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research (1995-2005), primarily in Yunnan Province, Sandra Teresa Hyde chronicles the rise of the HIV epidemic from the years prior to the Chinese government's acknowledgment of this public health crisis to post-reform thinking about infectious-disease management. Hyde combines innovative public health research with in-depth ethnography on the ways minorities and sex workers were marked as the principle carriers of HIV, often despite evidence to the contrary. Hyde approaches HIV/AIDS as a study of the conceptualization and the circulation of a disease across boundaries that require different kinds of anthropological thinking and methods. She focuses on 'everyday AIDS practices' to examine the links between the material and the discursive representations of HIV/AIDS. This book illustrates how representatives of the Chinese government singled out a former kingdom of Thailand, Sipsongpanna, and its indigenous ethnic group, the Tai-Lue, as carriers of HIV due to a history of prejudice and stigma, and to the geography of the borderlands. Hyde poses questions about the cultural politics of epidemics, state-society relations, Han and non-Han ethnic dynamics, and the rise of an AIDS public health bureaucracy in the post-reform era.

"This book is a fabulous read - ethnographically rich, theoretically engaged, and emotionally and intellectually captivating. The first major ethnographic study of its kind, the text is very clearly written and accessible. Hyde does a majestic job of drawing the reader into the places and practices described, bringing to stunning life the politics of AIDS on a border region." - Ralph Litzinger, author of Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging"

ISBN: 9780520247154

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm

Weight: 408g

290 pages