“[A] rich and nuanced account . . . . Litzinger’s book a welcome addition to current anthropological work on Chinese minority groups. . . . [T]his book covers a great deal of ground and a broad range of topics, which makes it useful to those interested in national imaginings, ethnicity, history, place, memory and ritual.” — Robert Snyder , Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology
“[A] theoretically sophisticated and wonderfully informed book based on extensive fieldwork in Quangzi Province during the early 1990s.” — V. J. Symons , Choice
“[I]ntrinsically interesting . . . .[A] significant contribution and a rare and welcome quality addition to minority studies in southwest China . . . . [B]ased on substantial fieldwork in China, and the author is thus in a position to provide his readership with a significant amount of original material. Such material is much needed, as research conducted on China’s minorities in one or another of the Chinese languages has rarely been translated. In addition, few ‘western’ anthropologists, to this day, have been able to spend substantial periods of time in remote Southwest China—let alone with non-Han minority groups there. beyond the undeniable sophistication of his argumentation, there lies perhaps Litzinger’s chief contribution to the study of minorities in Southwest China.” — Jean Michaud , The Journal of Asian Studies
“[S]ure to become an instant classic of ethnographic China studies . . . . [R]emarkable for its deft and intricate interweaving of national history with the personal histories of local leaders and with the anthropologist’s encounters with these competing accounts during the late 1980s and early 1990s.” — Nicholas Tapp , The China Journal
"Other Chinas is a brilliant read: one of a handful of new books that have made it impossible to continue writing about cultural or intellectual politics in China without taking account of the struggles and histories of minority peoples." — Erik Mueggler, Anthropological Quarterly
"Litzinger’s new approach yields an inspiring and worthwhile book."
— Susan Hangen , American Ethnologist
“Other Chinas is a brilliantly executed study of the politics of ethnography in contemporary China. Litzinger engages theories of power, identity, and modernity in a nuanced and sensitive manner, with strategically deployed ethnographic examples on everything from the writing of minority histories, to the longing for ethnic places, to the staging of minority difference. Chinese socialism, and its aftermath, may never look the same.” — Ted Swedenburg, co-editor of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity
“Other Chinas is a theoretically rich and multi-sited ethnography that challenges the dominant notion that the Han subject is always the face of Chinese nationalism. Litzinger demonstrates, with brilliant liveliness, how the paths to and from indigenism have long been at the center of the cultural politics of the socialist state. This book should be read by anyone interested in debates about subaltern agency, the writing of national histories, and the critique of post-socialist modernities.” — Bruce Grant, Swarthmore College
“A masterful work of ethnography and history that sheds new light on politico-intellectual elites and teaches us a great deal about how to think minority politics in any society. Litzinger elegantly reveals the imbrication of Yao identities with Chinese state practice and the writing of selves that takes place even at the margins.” — Louisa Schein, author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural