Content area
Full Text
Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Dru C. Gladney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 414 pp.
Dru Gladney has probably done more than any other anthropologist to convey the importance of China's ethnic diversity to non-China specialists. Although not the first to puncture the myth of a homogeneous China, he took the lead in explaining that myth-and what it concealed-to anthropologists and other social scientists beginning in the late 1980s. He was also among the first scholars to introduce poststructuralist concepts to the study of Chinese culture. His work has thus helped integrate the study of Chinese society into larger theoretical debates within anthropology.
This book is a fine introduction to Gladney's work, as it ranges more widely than any single article or monograph he has previously produced. It collects many of his shorter works originally published as journal articles or book chapters, most originally written between 1987 and 1999. Individual chapters consider topics ranging from economics to education, sex to cinematography, Sufism to cyber-separatism, fieldwork to foreign affairs, always with an eye to broad theoretical currents. As a group the chapters reflect Gladney's extraordinary accomplishments as a...