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By elucidating the historic continuities of diverse, malleable, ambiguous, and fluid sexual imaginations in China, chapter 1 critiques the postsocialist construction of heteronormativity and the portrayal of homosexuality as a representation of a decadent lifestyle imported from the West. It argues that recasting the past and linking the past to the present can enrich our understanding of the present and challenge the current discourse. During the ancient and imperial periods in China, same-sex desires were deemed normal and were enjoyed by many emperors and upper-class scholars and bureaucrats. There was never a fixed or reified sexual identity linked to a certain sexual preference. Sexual fantasies during these many centuries in China were fluid, diverse, and in constant flux. At the turn of the twentieth century, the onslaught of Western medical knowledge changed this cultural tradition and indoctrinated in society heteronormativity and a pathologized and vilified vision of homosexuality. This inaugurated the repression of same-sex-attracted people during the Communist era. The normalizing of heterosexuality and disavowing of China’s past continued in the postsocialist era.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus. This book explores what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political ruptures, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. It focuses on how various postsocialist and postwar materialities and fabrics of social life are understood and infused with Islam, and vice versa. It does so in three ways. First, it challenges the reductive analyses of Islam and Muslim lives in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina as being solely matter of ethnonational struggles and politics. Instead, the introduction develops the interlocked conceptual frames of “everyday historical work” and “vital exchange” to ethnographically elucidate how living a Muslim life in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina is ordered and inscribed by deep relations of obligation and care with the living, the dead, and the divine over a long period of time that spans generations. Finally, it provides an overview of the author's fieldwork as well as of the chapters that follow.

This book has examined the representations of personal memories of the Cultural Revolution in films and television dramas in mainland China after 2001. It aimed to elucidate that personal memories are far from solid and spontaneous; rather, they are constantly constructed and articulated in relation to social, political, and economic contexts. Moreover, film-makers employ divergent personalized narrative modes and construct various versions of personal memories on screen, to address their particular concerns. These disparate micro-narratives across screens (or even on one screen) reveal the contesting memories of and discourses on socialism in contemporary China. In this sense, personal memories also articulate contending Chinese modernities in the postsocialist era.

This chapter continues the theme of bodies and gender, as the author joins Buryat pilgrims on a journey from the Drepung Monastery to Dharamsala, which some Buryats have recently made their home. The chapter discusses their engagement with the ritual of chöd. Asking why this practice has become a contested issue in the Buryat Buddhist self-fashioning, three reasons for this development are identified. First, it provides an outlet for lay Buddhists, particularly women, to engage in a meaningful Buddhist practice, simultaneously indigenous and cosmopolitan, traditional and modernist, from which they had been excluded by the monastic establishment. Second, chöd evidences a certain kind of necropolitics, as the dead are being re-theorized. Through entering into a ritual economy with the deceased, Buryat adepts reconfigure entire universes of meaning, as the living and the dead become linked into one interrelated chain of causality. Finally, considered through the lens of a gift exchange, chöd might reflect the changing notions of reciprocity, morality, and the market, characteristic for postsocialist societies. In other words, it is suggested that the prominence of this particular ritual is related to the three broad shifts essential to postsocialism: the transformations of the ideas of gender, the dead, and exchange.

This chapter locates the importance of the anthropology of road and infrastructures at this stage of European history in order to understand the phenomena that are ongoing in the region and the importance of studying roads but also postsocialist migration and flows in the case of Albanian-Greek borders.

The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the socialist past and understand postsocialism on a personal scale. The introduction then introduces the concept of the Forsaken Generation and explicates its peculiar historical consciousness as embodied in a much more personal and critical approach to history when compared with their older siblings found in the “educated youth” or the Fifth Generation. The Introduction concludes with an explication of the methodology used and a chapter outline.