Asia Studies

A Brief History

Mike Parker Pearson, University College London, UK Stonehenge is one of the world’s most famous monuments, and questions of who built it, how and why have endured for at least 900 years. In this book Mike Parker Pearson draws on two decades of research, the results of recent excavations and cutting-edge scientific analyses to uncover many of the secrets of this iconic stone circle. In doing so, he paints the most comprehensive picture yet of the history of Stonehenge, and reveals how in some ways trying to explain its power of attraction in the present is harder than explaining its purpose in the ancient past.

UK May 2023 • US May 2023 • 224 pages • 50 bw illus PB 9781350192225 • £19.99 / $26.95 • HB 9781350192232 • £65.00 / $90.00 ePub 9781350192256 • £17.99 / $24.72 ePdf 9781350192249 • £17.99 / $24.72 Series: Archaeological Histories • Bloomsbury Academic Religion, Culture and New Materialism

José C. Carvajal López, University of Leicester, UK This fresh approach to the study of Islamization proposes an innovative conceptual framework that treats the subject as a particular case of cultural change. The aim of the volume is to make Islamization amenable to archaeological and historical analyses of changes in material conditions of life without forsaking the specific history of Islam. A hermeneutical approach and New Materialist theory are adopted in order to ensure that Islam and Islamization are understood in their particular social context, but also in relation to the conditions that hold them together over large geographical and chronological expanses.

UK June 2023 • US June 2023 • 176 pages • 6 bw illus HB 9781350006669 • £70.00 / $95.00 ePub 9781350006676 • £63.00 / $87.92 ePdf 9781350006683 • £63.00 / $87.92 Series: Debates in Archaeology • Bloomsbury Academic

Love Troubles

Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences

Wanning Sun, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Love Troubles is the first book to examine the emotional cost of this inequality to the intimate and emotional lives of China’s people. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research among rural migrant factory workers in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, Wanning Sun critically analyzes narratives about love, romance, and intimacy in contemporary Chinese public discourses. Examining the impact of economic and cultural inequality on private life, this book both embodies and facilitates an intimate turn in the study of China’s social change, and presents a significant intellectual intervention into worldwide debates on inequality.

UK May 2023 • US May 2023 • 224 pages HB 9781350329607 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350329614 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350329621 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic

Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam

Public Health and the State

Martha Lincoln, San Francisco State University, USA This book presents an anthropological analysis of the political, economic, and infrastructural inputs to the series of cholera outbreaks that spread through Northern Vietnam in 2007-2010, and suggests how the most commonly repeated accounts of disease spread misdirected public attention and suppressed awareness of risk factors in Vietnam’s capital. Drawing a parallel to the experience of novel coronavirus in Asia and beyond, this book reflects on how political priorities, economic forces, and cultural struggles influence the experience and the epidemiology of infectious disease.

UK June 2023 • US June 2023 • 232 pages • 7 bw illus PB 9780755636211 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9780755636174 ePub 9780755636181 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9780755636198 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic

Southeast Asia’s Multipolar Future

Averting a New Cold War

Thomas Parks, Independent Scholar By strengthening partnerships with other powers such as Japan, Australia, and India, and deepening inclusive regionalism through ASEAN, South East Asia will be able to shape its own future. Southeast Asia’s Multi-Polar Future argues that it is possible to preserve Southeast Asia as an open, independent region, because the geopolitical dynamics are changing. Despite new superpower pressures, the region is moving towards a multi-polar, rules-based order.

UK July 2023 • US July 2023 • 224 pages HB 9781350270787 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350270794 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350270800 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic