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Communities of Complicity
Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.
Popular Politics and the Quest for Justice in Contemporary China
This book examines facets of popular politics that are, above all, animated by a quest for justice as law, fairness and public virtue. The aim is to better understand how "the political" emerges in the interstices of state law and local moralities. The contributors to the book focus on the interplay between private and public spaces, between morality and law, and between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage,’ to explore how the common quest for justice, which takes on state slogans but cannot be absorbed by state institutions, changes Chinese society from the bottom-up by creating self-reflective new publics.
Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State
Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary people. In everyday life, people find themselves caught between official and popular discourses, encounter radically different representations of China's past and its future, and draw on widely diverse moral frameworks. This volume explores irony and cynicism as part of the social life of local communities in China, and specifically in relation to the contemporary Chinese state. It collects ethnographies of irony and cynicism in social action, written by a group of anthropologists who specialise in China. They use the lenses of irony and cynicism - broadly defined to include resignation, resistance, hum...
China in Comparative Perspective
China in comparative perspective -- Empire and bureaucracy -- The great divergence; industrial revolution -- Demographic transition -- Religion and civilisation -- Statehood and national independence -- Revolution and Maoism -- Socialism -- Post-socialism -- Property relations and China's contemporary economy -- The countryside and migration -- The city -- The family and gender -- Schooling -- Civil society -- Rule of law -- Democracy
China In Comparative Perspective
China in Comparative Perspective provides an overview of China based on empirical observation by field workers, as well as on historical documents, Chinese literary and philosophical texts and core theoretical frameworks in the social sciences. It enables readers to develop ways of putting the modern history, politics, economy and society of China into a framework in which China can be compared and contrasted with other countries.Topics covered include the rise of capitalism, post-socialist transformations, family and gender, nationalism, democracy, and civil society. Each chapter offers a comparison with other countries in East and South-Asia, Europe and the rest of the world, showing how a...
India's Near East
Celebrated as a theatre of geo-economic connectivity typified by the ‘Act East’ policy, India’s near east is key not only to its great-power rivalry with China, which first boiled over in the 1962 war, but to the idea(s) of India itself. It is also one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on Earth. Rent by communal and class violence, the region has birthed extreme forms of religious and ethnic nationalisms and communist movements. The Indian state’s survival instinct and pursuit of regional hegemony have only accentuated such extremes. This book scripts a new history of India’s eastward-looking diplomacy and statecraft. Narrated against the backdrop of separatist resistance within India’s own northeastern states, as well as rivalry with Beijing and Islamabad in Myanmar and Bangladesh, it offers a simple but compelling argument. The aspirations of ‘Act East’ mask an uncomfortable truth: India privileges political stability over economic opportunity in this region. In his chronicle of a state’s struggle to overcome war, displacement and interventionism, Avinash Paliwal lays bare the limits of independent India’s influence in its near east.
Society Building
In China’s future social development, there is likely to be an interest in “society building” with interactions between top-down and bottom-up approaches, along with a deepened level of social reform and the construction of a harmonious or “symbiotic” society. This represents one of China’s social development models, and is reflected in the Communist Party of China (CPC) and state policy. The term “society building” was proposed by Chinese thinkers nearly one century ago, and has been used by Chinese sociologists to study Chinese society since the 1930s. In the 21st century, “society building” has been approached as an interdisciplinary concept by Chinese social scientist...
Queer Women in Urban China
Lala (lesbian) and gay communities in mainland China have emerged rapidly in the 21st century. Alongside new freedoms and modernizing reforms, and with mainstream media and society increasingly tolerant, lalas still experience immense family and social pressures to a degree that this book argues is deeply gendered. The first anthropological study to examine everyday lala lives, intimacies, and communities in China, the chapters explore changing articulations of sexual subjectivity, gendered T-P (tomboy-wife) roles, family and kinship, same-sex weddings, lala-gay contract marriages, and community activism. Engebretsen analyzes lala strategies of complicit transgressions to balance surface res...
Democracy as Death
The revolution that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa was fractured by internal conflict. Migrant workers from rural Zululand rejected many of the egalitarian values and policies fundamental to the ANC’s liberal democratic platform and organized themselves in an attempt to sabotage the movement. This anti-democracy stance, which persists today as a direct critique of “freedom” in neoliberal South Africa, hinges on an idealized vision of the rural home and a hierarchical social order crafted in part by the technologies of colonial governance over the past century. In analyzing this conflict, Jason Hickel contributes to broad theoretical debates about liberalism and democratization in the postcolonial world. Democracy as Death interrogates the Western ideals of individual freedom and agency from the perspective of those who oppose such ideals, and questions the assumptions underpinning theories of anti-liberal movements. The book argues that both democracy and the political science that attempts to explain resistance to it presuppose a model of personhood native to Western capitalism, which may not operate cross-culturally.
