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This is a deeply important book for all scholars of China, and it is a timely one as well. It is timely in a number of ways that in 2019 not even the author (nor any of us) could have foreseen. Sin...

This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the motion: ‘Justice for people must come before justice for the environment’. The introduction is followed by an edited transcript of John Gledhill’s welcome and introduction, the texts of the arguments made by each speaker for and against the motion (with the exception of Veronica Strang, whose presentation is being published elsewhere a summary of the comments and questions subsequently invited from the floor of the hall, and then a transcript of the responses of the presenters.

This article proposes that the Emergency counterinsurgency campaign of the British colonial state should be viewed as a conjunctural episode of dispossession of Malayan laboring people. Conjunctural episodes of dispossession of working people through state violence and racialized rhetoric emerge as a response to crises in capitalist accumulation occurring at multiple and overlapping scales of capitalist systems – the imperial, the national/colonial, and the local/regional. During these episodes state and capitalist strategies destroy political organizations and solidarities among laboring people and demoralize them over long periods of time, through processes simultaneously material and semiotic. Employing new theorizations of the global anthropology of labor, this article first examines the postwar and Emergency years when the multiethnic and industry-wide bases of Malayan trade unions were destroyed while an estimated half a million working people were forcibly concentrated in so-called New Vil...

Ethnographic and historical data on Chinese in a West Malaysian market town are employed in a critique of conventional views of ‘entrepreneurship’. On the basis of an analysis of operation of family firms and relations between employers and employees in the town's truck transport industry, and in view of the contemporary political economy of Malaysia, it is argued that the reigning concept of ‘entrepreneurship’ should be deconstructed into its constituent elements ‐ risk‐taking, innovation, property ownership, etc. It is concluded that past generalizations about Chinese ‘entrepreneurship’ are anachronous, given the present dominance of oligopoly capitalism in Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.