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What enables women to hold firm in their beliefs in the face of long years of hostile persecution by the Communist party/state? How do women withstand daily discrimination and prolonged hardship under a Communist regime which held rejection of religious beliefs and practices as a patriotic duty? Through the use of archival and ethnographic sources and of rich life testimonies, this book provides a rare glimpse into how women came to find solace and happiness in the flourishing, female-dominated traditions of local Islamic women's mosques, Daoist nunneries and Catholic convents in China. These

Women's mosques and female Ahong (religious leaders) and their 'Associational leadership' style have made great contributions to Islamic religious practices and more generally Muslim communities in central China for over 300 years. This article investigates these issues through understanding the biographies of two leading female Ahong and considering their modes of operation and the relationships that they have with their community. New religious trends and a more open political context has allowed these religious leaders to develop and re-shape their authority. Importantly, female Ahong operate in distinctive ways through the cooperation with women's mosque managers and committees to create and develop a unique female collective and ritual space for religious expression.

Our conversation stems from a collaborative, fieldwork-based project on Chinese Islam, and on Chinese Muslim women's rights, within a secular political ideology and legislative rights framework. Dialogue was a defining feature throughout the years of field investigation and research, fusing autobiographical and cultural trajectories in what the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup calls the 'betweenness' of intersubjectively created experience and knowledge. The premise for our conversation lies in the claim that insufficient attention has been paid to developments, which suggest alternatives to the near-axiomatic ethnographic relationship of outside researcher and native informant. In foregrounding the cross-cultural relationship between two researchers, we explore how in the course of fieldwork interaction, boundaries of self and familiar 'standpoints' are redrawn. We ask how the history of this collaborative relationship across cultures might question and redefine the classic ethnographic binary of inside and outside, the centre and the margin, the universal and the particular, the 'western feminist' and 'other women'.

Contrary to the negative assessments of the social order that have become prevalent in the media since 9/11, this wide-ranging collection of essays, mostly by social anthropologists, focuses instead on the enormous social creativity being invested as collective identities are reconfigured. Using fieldwork findings drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe, special emphasis is placed on the reformulation of ethnic and gender relationships and identities in the cultural, social, political, and religious realms of public life. Under what circumstances does trust arise, paving the way for friendship, collegiality, knowledge creation, national unity, or emergence of leadership? How is social life constructed as a collective endeavour? Does the means towards sociability become its end? And what can be said about the agency and collegiality of women? The inspiration for examining these conundrums is the work and persona of Shirley Ardener, to whom the volume is dedicated. Contributors: Jonathan Benthall, Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Gina Buijs, Sandra Burman, Hilary Callan, Gaynor Cohen, Janette Davies, Tamara Dragadze, Ronnie Frankenberg, Peter Geschiere, Kirsten Hastrup, Paula Heinonen, Maria Jaschok, Grazyna Kubica, Rhian Loudon, Sharon Macdonald, Zdzislaw Mach, Fiona Moore, Judith Okely, Lidia D. Sciama, Shui Jingjun, Cecillie Swaisland, Jacqueline Waldren, Jonathan Webber