Hill Gates

Background

Gates was born in the United States, though neither the year nor the date is known.

Education

Gates received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1973.

Career

Gates has written an important, engaging, and readable book about China that will be of interest to historians. She proffers a theoretical dynamic that is rich with explanatory power and possibilities even when her historical application of it is not always convincing on some key issues. Readers may find themselves repeatedly at odds with Gates's thesis, yet still provoked and engaged by her book. This is a deliberately interdisciplinary work, although its main thrust is anthropological. It is unquestionably the product of meticulous work and wide-ranging reading and thinking.

In China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism, Gates argues that two primary economic production models, the petty capitalist mode of Production (PCMP) and the tributary mode of production (TMP), have driven the Chinese economy for more than a thousand years - specifically, since the Song dynasty of 960 to 1279. The interplay of these two modes of production is, according to Gates, the "engine" that drives the Chinese economy.

The effects of the Chinese economy on the individuals who live within it are explored in Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan. In this work, Gates gives the reader a comprehensive picture of working-class life in Taiwan in the 1980's. The book consists of the life stories of nine working-class people in modern Taiwan and the means they use to eke out a living in a difficult economic environment. Shopkeepers, clerks, factory workers, manual laborers, service workers, and ex-soldiers - most of them elderly - all tell their stories. Some talk freely; others still exhibit a caution learned from years under Japanese colonial rule. Their stories are largely transcriptions of their free-flowing observations and recollections. Other chapters in the book offer detailed discussion by Gates on topics such as family, age, economics, folk religion, and education.

Gates has provided us with an informative anthropological portrait of the lives of ordinary people in Taiwan. The book is intended as an introduction to 'ordinary' Taiwanese society and is aimed especially at new students of things Chinese. This is not an audience for an academic social anthropologist, yet Gates has done a first-class job.

Gates has also served as editor, with Emily Martin Ahern, and contributor to The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society. Based on papers delivered at a 1976 conference of the Social Science Research Council, the book provides a summary and overview of the anthropological work on Taiwanese society extant to that date. Essays cover six main topics: ethnicity, the family, religion and ritual, local organization, economic organization, and political organization.

Achievements

• Gates is best known as a noted anthropologist and scholar of China and Taiwan. She applies her intellectual analysis to both broad, abstract issues, such as the economics of China, and to smaller, more personal topics, such as the means by which individuals manage to make a living in Taiwan.

Works

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• book

  • Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China

    (For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an ...)

    1999
  • China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism

    (This monumental work reveals the continuities that underl...)

    1996
  • Footbinding and Women's Labor in Sichuan

    (When Chinese women bound their daughters’ feet, many cons...)

    2014
  • Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan

    (Taiwan’s working class has been shaped by Chinese traditi...)

    1987
  • The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society 1981

References

• Contemporary Authors Volume 221
  2004