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Gifts, Favors, and Banquets
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.
Chinese Religiosities
"Extraordinarily timely and useful. As China emerges as an economic and political world power that seems to have done away with religion, in fact it is witnessing a religious revival. The thoughtful essays in this book show both the historical conflicts between state authorities and religious movements and the contemporary encounters that are shaping China's future. I am aware of no other book that covers so much ground and can be used so well as an introduction to this important field." —Peter van der Veer, University of Utrecht
Spaces of Their Own
How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women's consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would both emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West. The challenges of this project are taken up in essays on the legacy of state feminism on the Mainland as contrasted with a grassroots women's movement challenging the state in Taiwan; on the role of the capit...
Chinese Environmental Ethics
An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, this volume brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting,...
Cinema and Desire
Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhau's best work to date. In it she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyses the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s' urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.
Re-enchanting Modernity
In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.
Reclaiming the Wilderness
A syncretistic and millenarian religious movement, the Yiguandao (Way of Pervading Unity) was one of the major redemptive societies of Republican China. It developed rapidly in the 1930s and the 1940s, attracting millions of members. Sébastien Billioud offers an in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao., Repressed and forbidden after 1949, the group is one of the most influential religious movements of the Chinese world and at the same time one of the least known and understood. Reclaiming the Wilderness delves into a Yiguandao community in Hong Kong that serves as a node of circulations between Taiwan, Macau, China and elsewhere. It explores the expansionary dynamics of a group that now now reestablishinges itself in China and elsewhere in Asia. In I, Sébastien Billioud offers the first in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao, focusing on a community in Hong Kong that now plays a central role in the circulation and growth of the movement.
Gifts, Favors, and Banquets
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.
Redeemed by Fire
This text addresses the history and future of homegrown, mass Chinese Christianity. Drawing on a collection of sources, the author traces the transformation of Protestant Christianity in the 20th-century China from a small 'missionary' church buffeted by antiforeignism to an indigenous opular religion energized by nationalism.
Dialogue and Difference
Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.
