Now that you can watch my new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo, it’s worth reminding you of my book

• Plucking the winds: lives of village musicians in old and new China
  (Leiden: CHIME 2004, with CD).

Based on repeated sojourns in Gaoluo from 1989 to 2003, including some modest participant observation, it’s a detailed historical ethnography of the ritual association of South Gaoluo village in Laishui county, Hebei—from empire through Republican, Maoist, and reform eras, as they tenaciously maintained their ritual traditions “amidst massacre, invasion, civil war, famine, political campaigns, theft, destruction, banditry, and religious rivalry”.

Now I would change little about the book—but as I explain under The Hebei plain: village associations, and in My work on Gaoluo: recent Chinese attention, I would call this and similar groups “ritual associations” rather than “music associations”, a term which gives a misleadingly secular impression. Similarly, I would now avoid characterising the association members as “musicians”.