When Culture Goes to Market encompasses an ethnographic study of Washington, DC s Eastern Market, a popular weekend produce and flea market, and the people who constitute it: vendors, market supervisors, and customers. By analyzing how this marketplace, in contrast to theoretical notions of -The Market-, functions as a social institution embedded in a particular time, place, and series of social relationships, Shepherd examines how urban public space is produced, reproduced, and shaped by larger economic and social processes. In doing so, he explores the practical limits to formalized...

Using the example of China's Wutai Shan--recently designated both a UNESCO World Heritage site and a national park--Robert J. Shepherd analyzes Chinese applications of western notions of heritage management within a non-western framework. What does the concept of world heritage mean for a site practically unheard of outside of China, visited almost exclusively by Buddhist religious pilgrims? What does heritage preservation mean for a site whose intrinsic value isn't in its historic buildings or cultural significance, but for its sacredness within the Buddhist faith? How does a society...

Using the example of China's Wutai Shan--recently designated both a UNESCO World Heritage site and a national park--Robert J. Shepherd analyzes Chinese applications of western notions of heritage management within a non-western framework. What does the concept of world heritage mean for a site practically unheard of outside of China, visited almost exclusively by Buddhist religious pilgrims? What does heritage preservation mean for a site whose intrinsic value isn't in its historic buildings or cultural significance, but for its sacredness within the Buddhist faith? How does a society...

This monograph analyzes current cultural resource management, archeological heritage management, and exhibitionary practices and policies in the People's Republic of China. Academic researchers, preservationists, and other interested parties face a range of challenges for the preservation of the material past as rapid economic and social changes continue in China.On the one hand, state-supported development policies often threaten and in some cases lead to the destruction of archeological and cultural sites. Yet state cultural policies also encourage the cultivation of precisely such sites as...