Dancing for Their Lives

"Dancing for Their Lives is a vivid and enchantingly resonant ethnography of how older women in Western China create purposeful aging through collective performance and engagement. A fascinating story of social and cultural production in today’s China. A real achievement, not just for China studies but for global aging as well!" ~Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology and director of the Social Technology for Global Aging program, Harvard University

"Dancing for their Lives is a gracefully written ethnography that is as readable as it is illuminating. Looking well beyond the spectacle of dancing dama with their colorful costumes and props, Huang strikes a skillful balance between examining the phenomenon’s conditions of possibility and attending to what is most at stake for her interlocuters, exemplifying anthropological holism at its best." ~Teresa Kuan, author of Love's Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China