Wrestling with ideas and practices of “modern” and “traditional” has animated scholarship for decades, and the many contributions in James Wilkerson and Robert Parkin's edited volume on the relationship of these two concepts to East Asia today show that this scholarly attention is alive and well. The editors arrange the volume to have contributions drawn from ethnographic work done with Tibetans and Qiang in Sichuan (Wang and Liu); Miao in Guizhou (Ho and Chien); a multi-sited analysis on migrants (Chang); Naxi in Yunnan (Bingaman); Amis, Paiwan, and Thao in Taiwan (Tsai, Hong, and Mitsuda); and Nung in Vietnam (Hsu). The chapters are bookended by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword by Wilkerson, both of which do the work of situating and narrating the chapters as being of a theme, which is largely successful given the “herding cats” element in editing such volumes. Other qualities found in the...

You do not currently have access to this content.