China and Postsocialist Anthropology applies lessons learned from socialist governance, especially in China, to the realm of social theory. Socialist governance explicitly draws on various aspects of Marxist theory and thus directly illuminates issues as varied as theorizing power, imagining the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in historical process, utilizing the category of "the political" when writing about culture and society, and conceptualizing categories like class, the state, the market, and citizenship. Many of the most destructive episodes of socialist...

China and Postsocialist Anthropology applies lessons learned from socialist governance, especially in China, to the realm of social theory. Socialist governance explicitly draws on various aspects of Marxist theory and thus directly illuminates issues as varied as theorizing power, imagining the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in historical process, utilizing the category of "the political" when writing about culture and society, and conceptualizing categories like class, the state, the market, and citizenship. Many of the most destructive episodes of socialist...