Anthropology's Global Histories : The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935

The idea of eliminating undesirable elements from human nature to create a "new man" has been part of moral and political thinking worldwide for millennia. During the Enlightenment, European philosophers sought to construct an ideological framework for reshaping human nature. But it was only among the communist regimes of the twentieth century that such ideas were actually put into practice on a nationwide scale. In this book Yinghong Cheng examines three culturally diverse sociopolitical experiments-the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cuba under Castro-in an attempt to better understand the origins and development of the "new man." Book jacket.

Rainer F. Buschmann is associate professor of history and founding faculty member at: California State University, Channel Islands.