New Book Announcement: “Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China” by Tamara Jacka

Ginkgo Village Trauma and Transformation in Rural China, Tamara Jacka (ANU Press, June 2024)
Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China, Tamara Jacka (ANU Press, June 2024)

Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the 20th and early 21st centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labor outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fueled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations.

At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

 

Trauma and Transformation in Rural China by Tamara Jacka
ANU Press, June 2024