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Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes

Glimpses of China's Hidden Past
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History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes the author provides glimpses into China's hidden past through the native's point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in people's everyday lives and as expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions, language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences. The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the underworld of "rivers and lakes" (jianghu), a sociocultural category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes. To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely used unconventional sources-folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and hearsay-that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics write history by offering alternative possibilities for China's past.
Robert J. Antony is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Institute of Cultural Heritage at Shandong University and Associate in Research at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His current research focuses on the history of everyday life and folk culture in China. He is the author of Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (2003), Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (2016), and The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810: A Short History with Documents (2022).
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