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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative
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December, 1999
 
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Book Review

Asia



Gregory A. Ruf. Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921–1991. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 249. $49.50.

This brief but thoughtful book argues that the village that it studies is a twentieth-century creation. As Gregory A. Ruf sees it, the early twentieth-century landscape in this part of Sichuan was one of dispersed homesteads, loosely tied together by kin groupings (themselves mostly post-1850 creations in the area under study), market towns, and a few significant buildings, most of them temples. A succession of modernizing, revenue-hungry states created administrative townships and later villages in the first half of this century, but as late as 1950, people still thought of the area—and themselves—primarily in terms of kin groups (thus place names like Big Hao Hill) and temple associations. It is in the Communist era, for better and worse, that the village has been created. . . .


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